My cousin David is a beer man, the sort of guy who was early on sours, unmoved by IPA mania,Ìęand able to explain the contributions of lactose to the perfect hazy—not to mention his mental map of the best brews worldwide. So, when he visited me in Montana several years ago, I sipped the samples he’d brought from Brooklyn’s boutique breweries and asked what felt like an obvious question. Had he ever thought about brewing his own?

He swallowed a mouthful of gose.

“No,” he said. “I’d never be able to match the quality of craft beer today. So, what’s the point?”

I chewed on that for a few years. My wife, Hilly, tended to agree with David. What was the point? We are living in an era of peak beer. In my town we can bike down to the neighborhood grocery store and buy premium six-packs for $10 from half a dozen independent local breweries. We’ve learned our favorites and venture into other styles as our palates expand. New varieties show up almost weekly. At our favorite tap houses, the options are overwhelming. The quality of this beer is the culmination of 6,000 years of humanity perfecting the craft. I had about as much to contribute to it as I would to the ceiling frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

The only regular homebrewer I knew was my late father-in-law, who took up the hobby for two reasons: he liked to drink, and he was cheap. His recipe, scrawled out for my brother-in-law on the back of an envelope, called for amber malt, corn sugar, ale yeast, and honey, free to him because he was a beekeeper. He grew hops up the side of the barn and occasionally brewed with garden habaneros for an extra kick. His process was precise, but not exactly fussy. He fermented 15-gallon batches in a plastic garbage can in the bathroom.

And yet, when I think about his beer, I picture him walking into the house after a day’s labor and pulling from the fridge a weathered 32-ounce Tecate bottle that he’d brought back from Mexico to store his homebrew. He’d crack off the cap and pour a glass for anyone in the room who wanted one, the anticipating smile on his face of someone about to jump into water on a hot afternoon. The beer was fizzy, golden in color, crisp and sometimes a little sour. I’m not sure how a connoisseur would rate it, but if a beer is only as good as the people you share it with, then his was the best. Nothing in a can came close.

During the pandemic I learned, along with the rest of the country, to make sourdough bread, a process that began with an oven fire in the middle of my son’s kindergarten Zoom class. I tried again and failed again and then read an awful lot and eventually learned enough so that now, with just four ingredients—water, flour, sourdough, and salt—I bake two airy loaves for our family every week.

My confidence buoyed by that gateway drug of bread baking, I found myself thinking again about beer, my father-in-law, and my cousin David. I knew what David said was true: I would always be able to buy better beer than I could brew. Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking what I had to offer the world of brewing, though, but rather what the world of brewing had to offer me. After all, do you bother planting a garden when you can buy bigger, juicier vegetables at the farmer’s market? Do you ever string together a few chords on the guitar, knowing you’ll never sell out Madison Square Gardens? Surely, I thought, the process adds value to the product.

So this year I made a resolution to learn. The library books I checked out told me any idiot could do it. If you can make a simple soup, you can make beer. I went to our local brew shop and quickly dropped $100 on supplies including a fermenting bucket, some plastic hose, an airlock, sanitizing solution, and a hydrometer. I paid another $50 for two boxes of old swing-top Grolsch bottles that I found on Craigslist. A friend who had dabbled in zymurgy lent me some other equipment and gave me a copy of Charlie Papazian’s bible of beer: “,”Ìęwhose continual refrain to “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a home brew,” calmed my nerves. Papazian is a former schoolteacher and nuclear engineer who counts among his students the co-founder of New Belgium Brewing Company. His book is almost evangelical in tone. The question isn’t why should you brew beer, it seems to shout, but why would you not?

Like bread, beer is fashioned from four main ingredients: water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. (OK, five, if you count love.) For a homebrewer, though, I learned that what goes into your beer is less important than what doesn’t. If you’re not scrupulous in your procedure and cleanliness, you might accidentally introduce too much oxygen into the beer, or bacterial infections, or wild yeast, all of which can produce off-flavors as diverse as “buttered popcorn,” “cheerios,” and “used band-aids,” according to Papazian.ÌęToo much direct sunlight can render a beer “light-struck,” giving it the flavor of skunk urine, a fact that delighted my children, aged 10 and 7, who wondered if skunk urine, exposed to darkness, would take on the flavor of beer. Hazards lurked around every corner. Duly vigilant, I set to work.

My first batch was out of a beer kit I bought for $35. It was a Kölsch. I like Kölsch. It’s light, refreshing, and very un-band-aid-like. The first steps involved steeping a small bag of malted grain in a big pot of water, like a giant cup of tea. Then I added some hops and the malt extract, which nearly bubbled over into a sticky mess on the stovetop. This was my wort (pronounced wert), a cool new word I planned to use as often as possible. It boiled for an hour, giving our house the steamy, industrial smells of a brewery.

When the batch was almost done, I added a clarifying agent called Irish moss, and more hops for aroma. Then I cooled it, a long process involving an ice bath in our sink. When it was about 68 degrees, I poured it into my five-gallon fermentation bucket and pitched the yeast (cool new verb, check). I attached the airlock to the rubber stopper on the lid, and slid the whole thing into the closet, next to our vacuum cleaner. Within 48 hours I was thrilled to see bubbling in the airlock, proof that the yeast was alive and metabolizing the malt sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. I was on my way. Two weeks later, I siphoned it into bottles with a bit of corn sugar for carbonation, and two weeks after that, I gave it a taste. It was
.mediocre. It was much darker than a Kölsch should be, and had a funny aftertaste. Hilly didn’t love it, meaning it was up to me to finish off 37 bottles.

If you’re wondering, yes, 37 bottles take up a lot of space. So does all the other gear. Brew days are time-intensive, often stressful experiences that involve me banging around the house, cleaning buckets and pans in the bathtub and making a mess of our counters with bags of malt extract and packages of hops. Between batches,Ìęmy equipment takes up a not insignificant corner of our garage. I’ve taken to storing the bottles in two giant Styrofoam boxes in my kids’ room, next to a basket of stuffed animals on top of their dresser.

The hobby is mentally intrusive, too. Brewing beer made my self-doubt soar to new heights. I’ve started to worry in words I didn’t even know before. Have I adequately sparged my mash? Has my yeast flocculated? Is my beer properly attenuated? What should I do with the “trub” (troob), that inch-thick layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of the fermenter?

My head swirled late into the night. Call it the brewer’s burden. I’d lie awake, staring at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about?” Hilly would probe.

“Oh, nothing,” I’d say. “I just can’t decide if I should dry hop in secondary.”

Or, sighing in despair after a bad batch had to be poured down the drain: “I just had invested so much time and hope into it.”

“Well, you don’t learn much when everything goes right,” Hilly said cheerfully.

I rolled over, pointedly.

Often, my worries were well-founded. When I over-boiled some corn sugar in a batch of MĂ€rzen, I imbued the wort with the flavor of burnt toast. A quick chemistry lesson on the internet taught me the culprit was a process called the Maillard reaction. The beer was undrinkable. A total loss. But, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. When I moved on to a hop-heavy IPA, it came in below my expected alcohol content, which I calculate by measuring the change in density before and after fermentation. But the flavor of the beer was excellent; I’d be happy if I paid good money for it, which, in fact, I did. Next, I brewed a cream ale with flaked oats and cracked corn. The result was crisp and refreshing—the perfect summer backyard beer.

The beers I’m brewing aren’t perfect. They likely never will be. But they’re getting better. They might be getting cheaper, too. After my initial investment, I have what I need in equipment. I’m still using malt extract to brew, and with these recipes the beer costs about the same as it would at the store. When I muster up the courage to try an all-grain batch, it will get a lot less expensive. I still have much to learn, but I have the feeling that I’m going somewhere. Things are looking up. I have even felt a measure of pride in my handiwork.

What’s more, my beer isÌęenvironmentally friendly, in that it’s not being shipped anywhere farther than a friend’s house, and I’m reusing my bottles. It has health benefits, too. A bottle of homebrew has much more suspended yeast than commercial beer. Yeast is rich in vitamin B complex, which helps us metabolize food and maintain fluid levels. This may be why so many homebrewers say they get less of a hangover drinking their brews. So there. Brewing your own beer is better for the earth, and better for your body.

Homebrewing has taught me about physics, biology, math, chemistry, and, yes, beer. It’s also provided this bit of wisdom: if you want your life to expand, it usually has to get more complicated first. I think it’s good for my kids to watch me stumble through learning a new skill, too. Brew days in our house are a family affair. Hilly, an artist, carved a hip woodcut logo for what she thought should be my brand name: Tall Hop. (DM me for merch.) Our seven-year-old, Julian, controls the tap of our fermenter on bottling day and is also chief bottle organizer. Our oldest, Theo, loves the pop when he opens the swing-top bottles, and says things like, “Whoa, look at the head on that.” Both boys are my main morale boosters, too. My first batch was barely bottled before they were telling me I should start a brewery, and that they’d decided to save their lemonade stand money until they could contribute $100 toward my capital. My very own angel investors.

By now, the hobby has taken on its own rhythm in our house. I’m brewing about a batch every month. And it’s easily one of the best parts of the day when Hilly gets home from work, I close my computer and we crack open a cold bottle from the fridge, pour it between two frosted glasses, and play a game of cribbage, just like my father-in-law used to do. At these moments, neither of us is thinking about how much it cost or how long it took. It just feels like life well-spent.

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One day last summer, Anne Wiper, Smartwool’s vice president of product innovation, found herself in her kitchen, jamming old socks into her Cuisinart. On average, a garbage truck’s worth of textiles is thrown away every second, and Wiper knew that socks are one of the most discarded items. She wanted to see what would happen if she blended some up. What would the consistency be? Could they be repurposed into something new?

Dozens of outdoor brands have been exploring creative ways to keep their gear out of landfills, either by upcycling scrap material into new items or by collecting, repairing, and reselling used products.

“There’s business value and environmental value,” said Amy Horton, senior director for sustainable business innovation at Outdoor Industry Association. “The outdoor industry is in a unique position for reuse. We make gear that’s meant to last a long time and stand up to quite a bit of wear and tear.”

The concept of upcycled outdoor gear goes back at least to 2009, when JanSport launched a collection of backpacks made from the scraps of old packs returned under warranty. Since its founding in 2014, Cotopaxi has made scrap materials part of its aesthetic. In 2019, Patagonia launched its ReCrafted program, making new products from remnants of its old clothes. This spring, NEMO introduced the Chipper, a foldable seat cushion made of foam scraps reclaimed from its sleeping pad production, and FjĂ€llrĂ€ven announced a collection called Samlaren (Swedish for “gatherer”), which uses surplus fabric to make funky, multi-toned jackets, backpacks, and totes. The trend is gaining traction in tech, too. In March, a British sustainable design company called Gomi launched a portable speaker made from the repurposed battery cells of Lime e-bikes.

“It’s great to see all of these brands piloting ways to reclaim materials and remanufacture them into something else,” Horton said. “But to really scale it throughout the industry you have to think about whole new business models that allow you to grow without being dependent on making new stuff from new materials.”

And that’s precisely what many outdoor companies are trying to do. No brand has turned upcycling into a cash cow as of yet, and the collections are typically small, niche, and short-lived. But the potential is there: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that $100 billion worth of textile fibers are thrown away each year. Upcycled products can also appeal to a broader customer base—FjĂ€llrĂ€ven’s Samlaren collection, for example, is sold at retailers like Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters.

This pursuit of circularity—where a product is kept in use for as long as possible and then recycled—is accelerating in the outdoor industry. In 2019, the resale market grew 25 times faster than traditional retail, according to GlobalData Retail. Younger consumers are especially drawn to secondhand stuff. Traditional retailers like REI have vast inventories of used gear, and third-party vendors like Trove and The Renewal Workshop help brands refurbish and resell their used apparel and gear.

“Each one of our products has a footprint,” said Corey Simpson, communications manager for Patagonia, which launched its Worn Wear program in 2017. “We want you to buy it for the right reasons, care for it, repair it when needed, and give it back to us at the end of its life for recycling.” In May, Arc’teryx announced its ReBird platform to sell used, repaired, and upcycled gear. “It’s a growth opportunity,” said Katie Wilson, Arc’teryx’s senior manager for social and environmental sustainability. “And it’s legitimately good for the environment as well. I hope we can transform ourselves into a business that does more good the more we grow.”

As for Wiper’s blended-up socks, turns out they make great stuffing. Smartwool collected tens of thousands of old socks and will use them to make dog beds it will sell come fall. It’s the pilot program of the brand’s sustainability road map that envisions 100 percent circularity by 2030.

“This is just the beginning,” said Alicia Chin, Smartwool’s senior manager of sustainability and social impact. “We want to spin old socks into new yarn to make beanies, gloves, and even new socks.”

Sometimes moving forward looks like going around in a circle.

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Fourteen years ago, about 60 representatives from outdoor brands piled into a hotel conference room in Boulder, Colorado, to talk about establishing a sustainability standard for the outdoor industry. At the time, companies could make wild claims about sustainability without ever being held to account. Kevin Myette was there, then as director of product integrity for REI. “We were not speaking the same language,” he recalled. “It was like we were from different planets.”

The group lacked common definitions and consensus on where to focus for the greatest impact. But they rolled up their sleeves and created the Eco Index, which has since been renamed the Higg Index. The Index, which is now managed by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), has grown into a sophisticated toolbox that can assess the water use, carbon emissions, and labor conditions throughout a company’s supply network. Today more than 500 brands use the Higg Index and more than 13,000 production facilities around the world report their sustainability footprint through one of its modules.

“We can’t manage what we don’t measure,” said Ammi Borenstein, CEO of Snaplinc Consulting, “and the Higg Index is the best ruler we have.”

In May, SAC announced a new transparency program in which brands will disclose a scorecard ranking the sustainability of their materials. Columbia, Norrþna, and Salomon are early participants. Ratings for manufacturing and corporate responsibility will be added by 2023. By 2025, SAC aims to have all members—currently more than 250 brands—participating so that consumers can evaluate products the same way they compare granola bars on a supermarket shelf.

“That’s the holy grail,” said Borenstein, who advises brands on sustainability. “There’s no judgment, just like on a nutrition label.”

Presenting consumers with socially and environmentally vetted goods was the inspiration behind REI’s Product Impact Standards, a set of requirements for the products it sells. If the Higg Index is a thermometer telling a brand how cold it is outside, REI’s standards are like its mother telling it to put on a coat and hat. REI decided that all products containing problematic chemicals like BPA, flame retardants, and oxybenzone were out. Vendors would be required to create a manufacturing code of conduct to up- hold environmental and fair labor practices. Down and wool would have to be ethically sourced, and carbon footprint assessments and reduction plans were required.

Last year REI’s standards got an update: new requirements include diversity and inclusion in marketing and safeguards against cultural appropriation. Three years in, REI’s more than 1,000 brand partners are still scrambling to be more socially and environmentally conscious.

“For brands that were on the fence as to whether or not this was important, they’re off,” said Myette, who now directs global brand services for BLUESIGN. “REI has set a bar. People could argue it’s not high enough, but it’s been positive for the entire industry.”

Complying with the standards can be burdensome for small to midsize companies with diverse product lines. By 2030, a brand selling down, wool, and synthetics would need to be certified several times over—an expensive and arduous process.

REI’s manager of product sustainability, Greg Gausewitz, acknowledged some brands, already buffeted by the pandemic, wish they had more resources to invest in sustainability and inclusion. But he said REI is ready to collaborate with each brand to help them meet the new standards.

“Change takes time,” Gausewitz said. “We hope to set an example that other industries can follow.”

Borenstein said REI’s new requirements have spurred industry-wide changes on a scale rarely seen without regulation and legislation. Brand responses have been meaningful and far reaching. A sampling: Outdoor Research joined the BLUESIGN system and became a member of OIA’s Climate Action Corps. Big Agnes has committed to using 100 percent renewable energy for its U.S. facilities and started using solution dyeing for some of its tent models—a process that saves energy and water. Selk’bag, a small Chilean company that makes insulated bodysuits, joined 1% for the Planet and began using post-consumer recycled materials.

“The REI standards are moving our industry forward in a way that wasn’t happening before,” Borenstein said. “It was happening in pieces, and some brands were way out front. But to move the whole industry forward? It takes a company like REI to do that.”

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Seven years ago, Adam Bennett told his wife, Mindi, that he wanted their family to become triple crowners,Ìęthe title given to thru-hikers who complete the Pacific Crest, Appalachian, and Continental Divide Trails. Mindi had never heard of the title or the trails, but she enjoyed backpacking with Adam and the kids, so she said she was game.

Then came the logistics. They had four kids between the ages of threeÌęand nine. It would be a while before they could hike long-distance. Adam and Mindi also needed to save enough money to buy their gear and be jobless for three straight summers. They set themselves aÌęgoal of starting when their youngest was nine. In the meantime, they moved between Colorado, Utah, and Washington, cutting their expenses by living in basements. Mindi taught preschool, and Adam stashed away as much as he could from his job as a general contractor, building luxury homes in Park City, Utah, and elsewhere.

As the kids grew, Adam and Mindi began prepping them for the adventure ahead. “We’re going to hike through California, Oregon, and Washington,” Adam told them. “It’s not necessarily going to be like the fun August hikes that we’ve been on, where it doesn’t rain and we go swimming. But we’re going to see awesome things and put miles and miles in and wake up in a different place every day.”

When the year of their scheduled departure, finally arrived, the kids crammed nine months of homeschooling into five months. They trained by walking five miles a day on a treadmill. Daughters Sierra and Kaia were 16 and 14, respectively, son Tristan was 12, and daughter Ruby was 9.

“Not all the kids were on boardÌęwhatsoever,” Mindi says. “Kaia told us, ‘I can’t believe you think I’m going to hike that stupid trail.’”

Adam expected some pushback. “Kids will always test their parents’ resolve,” he says. “We told her, ‘We’re serious. The gear’s bought, the jobs are quit, the house is sold. We’re hitting the trail.’”

On March 6,Ìę2019, the Bennett family and their dog, Muir, did just that from the Pacific Crest Trail’s southern terminus, atop a small hill on the California-Mexico border.Ìę

They hiked 700 miles in two months, before May snow in the High SierraÌęforced them to skip sections of the trail and pick up the route at Burney, California, where they hiked into Oregon. The family hit snow again in Ashland, so theyÌęjumped up to northern OregonÌęand hiked all the way through Washington to the Canadian border, arriving on July 18, with snow blowing in their faces. Then the Bennetts headed southÌęand made up the sections of the trailÌęthey had missed. Adam (trail name Kidnapper) and Mindi (a.k.a. Wildflower) knew their piecemeal approach didn’t fit the classic thru-hiking ethic.

“Right off the bat, we decided that we weren’t going to be purists,” Adam said. “We were going to give it our all, to hike as much of the trail as we could, but we were going to be safe. It had to be something that the kids enjoyed.”

Altogether the Bennetts hiked 2,388 of the trail’s total 2,653 milesÌęin seven months.ÌęAnd in the end, the kids did enjoy it, Mindi says, even if some of it was “type-twoÌęfun.”Ìę

At the beginning of the hike, the family averaged seven to tenÌęmiles each day. By the end, they averagedÌę18 to 20 miles. “If you hiked too far,” Mindi says, “everyone was just grumpy. If you didn’t hike far enough, the kids had too much energy. We had to find that sweet spot.”

For motivation to get through tough weather or grueling ascents, Adam and Mindi doled out candy. A gold-wrapped Werther’s could buy about 20 minutes of endurance. But they couldn’t give the kids all their candy at once—a lesson they learned after Ruby ate her week’s ration of Swedish Fish and then threw up that night.Ìę

Each kid also carried a cheap MP3 player, which they used to listen to Brandon Sanderson fantasy books, Malcom Gladwell bestsellers, and biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, sometimes on the trail and sometimes in their tents. The material led to interesting family conversations around camp. Adam and Mindi’s son, Tristan, listened to more than 70 audiobooks. “We’re not even sure if he knew he was hiking,” Mindi says.

The Bennetts quickly fell into a routine. They’d usually resupply every three to six days. The kids were thrilled to get a greasy burger in town, andÌęRuby would scout for a playground. The family would doÌęlaundry and buyÌęmore food. At first they’d crash at hotels, but when that got expensive, they started camping on the outskirts ofÌętowns.

“We read that once you had all your gear, you could expect to pay $1,000 per monthÌęper person,” Mindi says. “We tried to do half that.” One recurring expense was footwear—between them the Bennetts burned through 24 pairs of shoes.Ìę

Meals weren’t always exciting. When Adam and Mindi realized that cooking oatmeal added an hour to their morning departure, they handed out protein bars for breakfast instead. Lunch was cold-soaked ramen with peanut butter and honey—aÌębackcountry pad ThaiÌęrecipe that Adam picked up on the webÌęfromÌę. On a good day, dinner was packets of Knorr Alfredo pasta.

“Some days,” Adam says, “we’d throw a Clif Bar at the kids and say, ‘Sorry, this is dinner tonight. It’s too cold to cook.’”

Each member of the family had low pointsÌębut rarely at the same time. Three months and 1,000 miles into their journey, the Bennetts set up camp one rainy night in Washington’s Big Crow Basin. The tents were still wet from the morning, and soon ice was forming on the walls. Mindi crawled into her sleeping bag and said, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Four days earlier, in southern Washington’s , Adam slipped on a snowfield and injured his knee. It felt like itÌęwas broken, and heÌęwondered if they’d have to leave the trail. Fortunately, after a week of stretching, it began to feel better.

Through it all, their children impressed them with their grit. “Kids are tougher than adults,” Adam says. “They fall asleep on the ground and wake up the next morning and they don’t have kinks in their necks.”

Their months on the trail was valuable family time, Mindi says, and a welcome reprieve from their busy pretrail lives, when activities and distractions like work, school, and sportsÌęmeant they didn’t always see much of each other. “This pulled us all together and forced the kids to really spend time with their parents,” Mindi says. “That’s just huge.”Adam saw the journey as a chance to teach his children that doing things outside their comfort zone can help them develop confidence, self-worth, and a sense of what’s important. “The latest TV series, or whatever crap is on Instagram or Snapchat, that’s just a waste of time,” Adam says. “I don’t feel like anything that we did on the trail was a waste of our time.”

Along the way, the Bennetts met a whole community of trail angels and fellow thru-hikers who texted back trail reports and took the time to kick solid footholds into snowfields so the family would be safe. “I felt like our kids had pseudo grandparents and substitute aunts and uncles that were always watching out for us,” Adam says.Ìę

Word spread through the network of hikers, and often those on the trail heard about the Bennetts before they met them. “People were so excited to see kids on the trail,” Mindi says. “We were an oddity, totally a circus.”

The BennettsÌęcompleted their adventure atop California’s Mount Whitney on September 30, a bitterly cold day almost seven months after they began. Then they treated the kids with a trip to Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood.Ìę

The family is now in Battle Ground, Washington, where they must rummageÌęthroughÌęboxes of their stuff at Adam’s parents’ house. Adam and Mindi areÌęworking again to try andÌęsave some money this winter.

“There’s no paycheck when you’re on the trail, but it’s definitely more expensive to live in the real world,” Adam says. They areÌęalso using their experience toÌę (a dollar for every mile of the PCT) for refugee families through Lifting Hands International.

The BennettsÌęplan to tackle the Appalachian Trail in theÌęspring. The Continental Divide Trail will be the year after that. But Adam and Mindi aren’t talking about it too much with the kids just yet.

“Maybe it’s a little like childbirth,” Mindi says. “Right after it happens you think, I’m never doing that again, but later you’re more willing.”

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Recently, my family and I finally watched Free Solo. Our two boys piled into our bed, and all four of us endured 90 minutes of empathetic cold sweats and forearm cramps as Alex Honnold climbed 3,000 feet up El Capitan without ropes. It was an intense experience—probably for Honnold, too.

In the days after watching the Oscar-winningÌędocumentary, what stuck with me wasn’t so much the sheer terror and athleticism of Honnold’s climbÌęasÌęan offhand comment he made, lamenting the fact that the priorities of his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless,Ìęinclude being happy and cozy.

“Anybody can be happy and cozy,” he snarked. “Nothing good happens in the world by being happy and cozy. Nobody achieves anything great because they’re happy and cozy.”

I took this personally. I’m half British, and I love being cozy. SometimesÌęon a sunny summer afternoon, I dream of a chilly downpour and a hot cup of tea. To me, being cozy is appreciating one’s comfort in the face of some relative adversity—a thermos of chili after a ski, dry clothes after a rainy hike, a down sleeping bag in a snow cave. In my mind, coziness is an honest, worthwhile aspiration.Ìę

Of course, not everyone can be happy and cozy. For most people in the world, adversity is an overwhelming constant, and comfort is fleeting. Coziness can happen only after our basic needs have been met. It entails a lot of privilege, something it would behoove Honnold, and the rest of us, to acknowledge.Ìę

But as a privileged American outdoorsman for whom comfort is a predictable baseline, I recognized some truth in Honnold’s words. When I think of my childhood, I don’t remember mugs of hot cocoa by the fireplace;ÌęI remember the moments my parents described as “character building.” I remember following my father through chest-deep snow to go fishing in January and not being able to feel my fingertips for two weeks afterward. I remember grimy 28-hour bus rides in India, where we lived. I remember nighttime storms in the mountains when rain flooded our tent. Cozy, happy moments are nice adornments to a life, but hardship is the skeleton on which they hang.

To Honnold, I assume, being cozy means procrastinating the opportunity to test oneself in nature’s crucible. It’s a lifestyle of challenge avoidance, of forfeiting the chance to walk to the brink of your own mortal limits. It’s safe, predictable, and boring—exactly the opposite of what Honnold must have felt from his toes to his fingertips as he hung 3,000 feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. I envy that crackling, centeredÌęaliveness, and I find it also offers some instruction for parenting.

I don’t have it in me to climb vertical granite walls without a rope, nor would I like my children to take up thisÌępastime. But as a parent responsible for curating a balanced, active, healthy risk-taking life for my kids, I am finding simpler (and safer) ways to make our days together slightly less comfortableÌęand infinitely more meaningful.

These are seven ways I parent outside of my comfort zone, choosing the memorable over the predictable, for my kids’ benefit and my own.

Camp in Your Backyard

It takes time and forethought to pack for a weekend camping trip. It takes very little preparation to camp in your backyard. Pitch a tent in the grass, roll out your sleeping bags, and get cozy. (Don’t tell Honnold.) If weather permits, keep the fly off the tentÌęand look for shooting stars. If you’re ready to escalate the adventure, wait for a decent winter snow and build an igloo to sleep in. If it gets too cold, or if the sprinklers soak you in the morning, you can always run back inside to bed.

Ride Bikes Everywhere

The number of American kids riding bikes has dropped by 19 percentÌęsince 2007. This is a shame, because bikes are the , and cycling helps develop fundamental skills of independence, self-esteem, and healthy risk-taking. My wife taught our son Theo to ride when he was four, and it’s been the best thing to happen to us. Now we try to go as many days as possible without driving. I put our two-year-old, Julian, in a bike seat and we ride together to the store, the dentist, the library, their aunties’ houses, and to the creek. On longer trips, I’ll put the boys in the bike trailer. Biking entails more planning and sweat than driving, but the experience is more engaging and sensorial for all of us.

Forage Your Dinner

You don’t have to be Bear Grylls to live on the food you can scrounge from the forest. Foraging with your kids helps get them outside and gives them a task, while also teaching them lifelong skills, like how to recognize plants and mushroomsÌęand how to honor an animal before you kill it. Foraging with your family offers a way to feel connected with your food and with your children. Whether you’re dining on Dungeness crab and silver salmon in AlaskaÌęor seaweed and mussels in San Francisco, finding your own food will give you a renewed appreciation for what’s on your plateÌęand also the healthy appetite to enjoy it.

Plan an Epic Day

My family is lucky to live at the foot of the mountains. One of my greatest satisfactions as a father has been introducing my boys to their local geography by planning epic day hikes. With enough fruit snacks, creative storytelling, water breaks, and encouragement, five-year-old Theo has hiked up to the top of several mountains near town, while Julian rode in a backpack. Reaching these summits has given Theo self-confidence and a new perspective on where he lives. And it usually tuckers him out enough for an early bedtime.

Ride the Bus

Just like cycling, riding the bus requires a level of engagement that car travel lacks. When we take the bus around town, my boys meet people. They see their town in a new way, and they have a lot more fun than they do in their car seats. Riding the bus is less efficient than driving, but it’s more environmentally friendly and fosters a sense of community. It also opens the window for the sort of unpredictable encounters that make life memorable.

Build Something

Nothing upsets the daily humdrum of parenting like a project. My father has memories of building a balsawood biplane with his father and releasing it into the wind on the English coastline, where it slowly banked toward the waves and soared off toward France. When I was a boy, my dad and I built a wooden sword. This summer, Theo and I built and launched a model rocket, which was equally thrilling for both of us. It could be anything from building a treehouse to assembling a bike, but when you make something with your child, you are simultaneously constructing a better relationship.

Go Backpacking

Camping in your backyard is good, and car camping is better, but backpacking may be best of all. When we just had one kid, backpacking was relatively easy, so long as we had enough sunlight to dry his cloth diapers. With two kids, it’s a little more challenging. Now we require a three-person tent, another sleeping bag, and more food and water. When we took a backpacking trip last month, Theo walked, my wife carried Julian and a daypack, and I carried the rest. It was grueling. But when we reached our campsite, and our kids fell into a state of nature bliss around the fire, we knew it was the best decision we’d made all summer.

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I’ve never been big on gyms. I like working out, but I feel self-conscious exerting myself within arm’s reach of total strangers. It might have to do with the fact that when I exercise, I get pallid and hollow-eyedÌęand sweat profusely. A few years back, I was recovering after a race when I heard a boy ask, “Mom, is that guy dead?” That’s a lot to put on my treadmill neighbor.

I’m even less likely to go to a gym now that I have kids. I know gyms have tried to help parents by providingÌędaycare, but my children have never been thrilled about daycare. So I’m left toÌęsweat in solitude withÌęmorning YouTube yoga and the occasional jog.

And then recently, in the doldrums of summer, it hit me. My five-year-old, Theo, was in the kitchen, barking at me in an obnoxious unicorn language he invented, and it occurred to me that this beautiful, smart, sometimes annoying boy is also a vastly overlooked 40-pound free weight. I’d heard of doing postpartum leg lifts with their infants. Couldn’t I do something similar with Theo?

I decided to bring up the idea with my buddy Nate, a father of three, athlete, and generally good guy who enjoys arbitrary fitness goals. He trained to run a mile in under five minutesÌęand a 5K in under 18. To prepare for a competitive Spartan Race, he fashioned a spear out of materials he found at a hardware store and practiced throwing it into a hay bale in his back yard. He competes in CrossFit workouts—the latest of which entailed 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and a two-mile run, all while wearing a 20-pound vest. He also went almost an entire year testing the health benefits of .

I knew he’d have a good take on my idea. “Do you think I could incorporate kids into a workout routine?” I asked when Nate came over to my house with his family.

The wheels were turning before he even answered. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You could definitely do that.”

We went out into the back yard with two of our kids, and Nate started listing off different exercises. Some were old standards—squats (with your child on your shoulders), lunges (ditto), push-ups (with Junior on your back)—but others were more inventive. , for example, are a popular CrossFit exercise in which you squat holding a medicine ball andÌęthen explode into a standing position, throw the ball against a wall, catch it, and return to a squat. Take away the wall and instead throw your child into the air, and you’ve got an exhausting full-body exercise that most kids will love. (Parental discretion advised, of course.)

Nate kept rattling off ideas. “You could do with your kid on your back,” he said, and then showed me how to alternate moving your hands and feet for a shoulder-burning, core-strengthening exercise. If you have a toddler, you could do standing jumps over them—baby jump-overs, Nate called them. (More parental discretion here.) Or have your kid get down on all fours and do side jumps back and forth over them.

If you have an infant, you could lie down on your back on a blanket in the grass and lay your child, perpendicularly, at your feet. Then, work your core by raising and lowering your heels to gently tickle her belly. Then you both flip over, and you do a set of while your baby has some tummy time. Or put your baby in a front pack and use the extra weight to enhance your pull-ups or crank out a few sets of step-ups on a bench.

It seemed there was no end to the ways I could be using my kids to get ripped—and no excuse for either of us sitting on the couch on a hot summer afternoon. Before long, Nate had curated a workout routine that incorporates four complex sets of exercises and works well with a five-year-old. Here’s how it goes:

1. Air Squats (10 Reps): With your feet shoulder-distance apart and your child riding on your shoulders or clinging to your back, sink your hips below your knees while keeping your chest as upright as possible. Doing these slowly will make them more rewarding.
2. Baby Thrusters (10 Reps): These are like wall balls, minus the throwing. Start in a squat with your child facing you and your hands under their armpits. Rise into a standing position with your child and extend them into the air over your head. Then slowly lower them down to chest level again and return to a squat position.
3. Lunges (20 Reps): With your child riding on your shoulders or your back, take walking lunges around the yard, ten on each side.
4. Push-Ups (10 Reps): Lie down on the ground and have your child lie flat on your back, holding your shoulders. While rotating your palms into the ground as if you are trying to turn them away from you, rise into a plank position and then lower down. These are challenging, especially if your child is heavy, so feel free to drop your knees to the ground when necessary.

Nate prescribed four rounds of this routineÌęwith a 30-second rest between rounds. He suggested working toward the goal of not resting at all. When I did the routine, each round took me about threeÌęminutes. Within 15 minutes, I was finished, and Theo was on my shoulders, giggling and shouting, “Again!”Ìę

I laughed. I was in my back yard. The birds were singing. Theo was thrilled. I would be sore the next day, top to bottom, as if I’d spent an hour at the gym. And although I was a little pallid, hollow-eyed, and sweaty, Theo knows me well enough to know that I wasn’t dying.Ìę

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I come from a long line of fishing fanatics. My Irish grandfather smuggled a fly rod into his honeymoon suitcase on Scotland’s Isle of Islay. My granny may have envisioned lazy mornings and breakfast in bed, but instead she spent her days tramping through the boggy moorland, ruining her shoes in search of wild trout.

My father is similarly obsessed. Over the years I have watched him descend dangerous cliffs to promising pools, trawl around lakes at midnight in search of nocturnal lunkers, and capsize his float tube while bringing a seven-pound brown to net. OnceÌęI saw a black bear swim across the Blackfoot River just 50 yards upstream from my father, who kept one eye on the bear and the other on his fly and never interrupted his drift.

I inherited this madness. On family camping trips in Colorado, I would watch my dad wade into a mountain lake in his rubber hip boots and swish a dry fly in calligraphic arcs out to the rising cutthroats. I made my first casts in those lakes. I got in tangles and jammed my reels and snagged dozens of flies in trees. But eventually, under my father’s tutelage, the skills coalesced. I remember one magical evening on a corner pool of a meadow stream near Leadville, my sister and I crouched on our kneesÌętakingÌęturns flipping a yellow humpy into the current and waiting for the splashy rise at the end of every cast, when my dad would shout, “Strike!”

As time passed, I grew and changed, but fishing with my father remained a constant, in all seasons.Ìę

TodayÌęI fish like my father does, and like my grandfather did: in total absorption, somewhere beyond thirst, hunger, or sunburn. For meÌęit’s the activity that defies distraction in these most distractable of times. When I am at the river, I feel the sense of expectation, the pregnant, hold-your-breath stillness usually reserved for sacred spaces. Fishing can seem like an addiction at times, but it may equally be the antidote for the ills of our age.

Now my wife, Hilly, and I have two children of our own:Ìęfive-year-old TheoÌęand two-year-old Julian. They have already grown up clutching our ankles as we cast into mountain lakes. I want them to feel the same yearning, drama, and excitement I did as a child. I want to share adventures and make memories with them. I want to be a family of fishing partners. So, I called up my dad—the world knows him as Paul—and asked him how, and why, we should teach our sons to fish. And he gave me this advice.

Start Simply

“I’d recommend starting them on the lawn,” Dad said. “Teach them how to bring the rod back, keep the line up high, load it, and then cast it forward.” Tie a big, bushy fly on the end of the tippet and clip off the hook, thenÌęcast with your hand over your child’s until they learn how far forward and back the rod should go—the classic ten-o’clock, two-o’clock motion. Set a dinner plate on the grass, and see if your kid can hit it. When they do, move the plate a little farther away. It will help to learn the basics in this fun, low-pressure environment before they ever get on the water.Ìę

There’s no need to go out and buy fancy gear, either. We found Theo’s rod at a garage sale, and I rigged it with one of my old reels. A short, light rod is perfect—something like a seven-footÌęthree-weight.

Fish Stillwater First

Learning to fish is full of discouragement, so it’s important to find the best setting for your child’sÌęfirst experience on the water. Try to find a pond or a lake without too many trees to hang up your child’s backcasts. (Reservoirs stocked with trout are often good places to begin.) Tie on a big, visible dry fly, something like a Royal Wulff or an Adams Irresistible, add plenty of floatant, and don’t forget to crimp down the barb in case somebody gets it in their ear. ThenÌęencourage your child to cast as far as they are able.

Those early casts are bound to be sloppy. Fortunately, trout cruise in lakes, so even if the cast is splashy, a fly left floating for long enough is likely to disappear in a swirl. ThenÌęcoach your child into keeping a tight line and striking at just the right moment. They’ll miss many more than they’ll hook, but they will be thrilled and honing their reflexes with each rise. If they can’t connect, most kids will enjoy bringing in a fish that you’ve hooked. Teach them how to hold it, remove the hook, and release it.

“Fishing is infectious,” Dad said. “If you’re really passionate about it, the chances are your kid will be passionate about it, too. At firstÌęyou’ll spend a lot of your time untangling and unhooking things, but that intensity of being present with a child, that’s the best.”

Graduate to a Meadow Stream

Once your child can cast, take them to a small stream, ideally one without too many willows to snag their fly. HereÌęit will be important to teach your child how to sneak up on a pool.

“Kids really respond to stealth,” my father said. “I loved crawling on my belly with my dad to fish the highland streams in Scotland.”Ìę

Fishing moving water will reveal to your child one of the hardest parts of fishing: how to land a fly on the water and let it drift like it’s a natural insect that’s not attached to your line. If you pick the right stream, with plenty of small, hungry trout, your child will have lots of strikes to keep them focused as they perfect their drifts. In the meantime, you can help them sharpen their casting and develop a sense of awareness for what’s going on around them.

“You’re teaching them fine motor skillsÌębut also how to be aware of the water, and the insects, and where a fish would hang out,” Dad explained. “Imparting that knowledge, wisdom, and experience to your children is really rich. There’s something ancient about it.”

Embrace the Tangle

There’s no way to learn to fish without getting into a lot of tangles. “There’s probably more that goes wrong than right when you’re first learning,” Dad told me. “Patience is critical. Kids are like a mirror—if you’re impatient, your kid probably will be, too.”

I lost the first big fish I ever hooked because my line had tangled in my reel and jammed while the fish was in the middle of a powerful run. Somehow the tangles always happened when the fishing was best. Occasionally, I would walk over to my father in the middle of a hatch, holding a reel that looked like a bird’s nest. I can remember him hissingÌę“DarnÌęit!” through clenched teeth, which is as close as my father gets to cursing.

He is cooler in retrospect. “Tangles are part of fishing,” he said. “You have to teach the child how to solve the problem. If you get irritable, you’ve lost them.”

It’s usually easiest to cut off the fly and try to work the end of the line back through the mess. Sometimes you might save time by cutting more line off and tying on fresh tippet.

Follow Your Child

Of course, it’s entirely possible that your child will not be as obsessed with fishing as you are, and that’s OK.

“You were all in,” Dad recalls of my early angling career. “There was no stopping you. You just wanted to fish. But every child is unique. There’s no generic, cookie-cutter approach to teaching them to fish. There are different levels of patience and motivation.”

Thankfully, fly-fishing is a hobby that accommodates a wide range of interests. When your child wearies of the fishing, reel in the line and go looking for bugs. Pack a little net with you and start flipping over rocks to find stone fly larvae, mayfly nymphs, and little caddis fly houses made of leaves and gravel and silk. If your child likes this, consider buying an entomology kit to collect bugs for closer inspection. Learning about the life cycles of insects is interesting and will also help your child become a better angler.

If your child is interested in arts and crafts, teach them how to tie flies. My father didn’t tie, but he found a fly shop that offered lessons. I liked learning how to spin feathers and fur around a hook until it looked like a bug. And it was supremely rewarding once I started catching fish on flies that I had tied.

Fishing with his father are some of my dad’s favorite memories. “He just completely calmed down,” my dad said. “He was totally focused on me. He’d take me out at night sometimes, and we’d fish wet flies for sea trout. He’d hold my hand, and we’d cast a couple wet flies downstream and let them sink. We’d strip them in together. Then we’d feel that thrill of a sea trout grabbing it and shooting out into the darkness.”

My grandfather died five years ago, but my dad said he feels that same sense of connection with me. A love for the mystery of water and fish has bound three generations of our family. Call it a blood knot.

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My kids can’t swim. It’s ironic, really, given that they were both , in an inflatable bathtub in our living room, and they’ve spent their childhoods splashing in mountain creeks, tossing stones into lakes, and rafting down rivers. But however much they enjoy water, they’re out of their element in it. And nowhere is this more apparent—or more dangerous—than in the ocean.

My wife and I discovered this last month when we flew to CancĂșn, Mexico, for a friend’s wedding and some R&R along the Mayan Riviera. On the first day, our two boys, Theo (age five) and Julian (two), ran toward the ocean like it was a long-lost friend. The day was beautiful and windless, and I waded out with them into a seaÌęthat was calm, flat, andÌęindeed,Ìęvery friendly. In the deeper water, Theo discovered that if he wiggled all of his body at once, he could keep his smiling face above the waves. He called it a “giggle swim.” Sheer joy was making him buoyant.

But joy is an unreliable flotation device. A week later, we drove down to Tulum, where three-foot waves battered the beach. As I was smearing sunscreen on my shoulders, I watched Theo skip out into the whitewater with a plastic bucket. Immediately, a wave slapped him in the face and knocked him down. He sat in the foam, coughing up salt water and wiping the sea from his eyesÌęwhile the receding waves pulled at his ankles. I raced over and scooped him up before the next wave broke. Suddenly, theÌęswirling, opaque waterÌęfelt more like a monster than a friend.

The ocean, of course, is neither friend nor monster—it’s liquid indifference. Just like mountains, the sea can teach us important lessons about our own cosmic insignificance. One day my children will learn these lessons. But in the meantime, when the waves were buffeting my boys and clawing at their toes, it seemed safer to avoid the ocean than try to understand it.

So when we got back to Montana, I called up Richard Schmidt, the Californian big-wave surfer who runs the popular in Santa Cruz. Schmidt raised his two boys, now 21 and 18, in the water. At age two, Schmidt’s oldest son, Richie, was catching waves on the front of his father’s surfboard. (Richie is now a world-class surfer, so the bug obviously caught.) His youngest son, Makai, took more time to be comfortable in the water, but now he’s an excellent surfer, too. His boys took swimming classes in a pool, but Schmidt made sure they knew the ocean was a different creature altogether.

“You need to really make it clear to kids that you have to be careful with the ocean,” Schmidt told me. “A swimming pool stays the same every day. The ocean changes.”

Schmidt suggested a few ground rules to help parents safely introduce their children to wilder waters.

Watch the Ocean

Just as fools rush in where angels fear to tread, children often feel a little too confident about dashing into the sea. “Never go into the ocean until you’ve watched it for a good 15 minutes,” Schmidt advises. Even when the waves are big, the ocean can appear calm between sets. “Some people jump right in, thinking it’s docile,” Schmidt says. “The next thing you know, you’re getting pounded.”

Instead, do a thorough job of checking out both the water and the beachÌęwith your children. Are there lifeguards? Are there red flags? How are other people getting into the sea? Are there any rip currents? Rocks?

“Figure out what the ocean is doing,” Schmidt says. “Get a game plan, and imagine the worst-case scenario.”

And once you are ready to enter the water, make sure your kids know the fundamental rule of ocean safety: never turn your back on the sea.

Watch Your Kids

As I learned in Mexico, keeping track of your offspring can beÌęhardÌęat the beach, especially when the surf gets rough.

“You can’t take your eyes off of them,” Schmidt says. “More worry is better than less worry, that’s for sure.”

Schmidt spent 15 summers as a lifeguard in Santa Cruz, and he remembers seeing a four-year-old boy go under in the San Lorenzo River, which empties into the ocean in the heart of town. “I saw the kid go down,” says Schmidt, who raced to save him. “I’ll never forget looking down through the water at that little guy standing on the bottom, looking up at me. I pulled him up and found his parents, who were sunbathing.”Ìę

When you take your children to the beach, their safety is paramount, but remember that you’re also establishing relationship with the ocean. Schmidt has seen surfer parents try to introduce their kids to wavesÌętoo quickly, only to unnecessarily traumatize them.Ìę

“You’ve got to be careful with your kids in their early days,” Schmidt says. “If they get trounced by a wave when they’re young, they might reject the ocean and hold that fear forever.”

Pick the Right BeachÌę

Set your children up for success by carefully selecting a beach that will make their introduction to the ocean really positive. The perfect spot for young kids should be sandy, with a gentle slope into the water, and no rocks or tricky currents. “You want to be able to wade out for ten yards and it’s still knee-deep,” Schmidt says. “You don’t want drop-offs, where kids can fall into holes and the water’s over their heads.”

Look for these spots in protected places like coves. If you don’t know the area, find a surf shop and ask them about a child-friendly beach. Put a life jacket on your kids for a little extra security. And even before you head out to the beach, it’s wise to do some homework on the conditions. and the offer information on swell heights and intervals, the tide schedule, and wind conditions that will help you get the timing right.

My family and I found our happy place by accident, just north of Tulum, in Akumal, where we paddled around in what felt like a giant turquoise-colored bath while pods of bonefish nosed the sand at our feet. Someone told us there were loggerhead turtles out a little deeper. But we were having too much fun lolling around in the shallows to investigate.

Tell Your Kids Stories ÌęÌęÌę

Keeping young children safe in the waves can be stressful for a parent. One way to preempt this is by telling your children stories about the ocean. Inuit parents instill caution in their kids by telling them about a monster in the ocean that will rise up out of the waves, put them in a big pouch, and drag them down into the water if they get too close. Stories like this help young children learn to be careful around the oceanÌęand save their parents from anxious yelling on the beach. Of course, you don’t want to terrify your kids so much that they won’t even get wet, just enough to ensure a healthy respect of the ocean.

The stories needn’t always be folklore, either. Tell your children about times that you were afraid in the ocean. What did you do wrong? How did you get help? What did you learn? Important safety lessons are often more effective when they’re told as a story rather than a scolding.

Keep It Fun

If you want your children to grow up with respect and affection for the ocean, it’s important that their experiences around it are as positive as possible. The best times I had in the waves with my kids wereÌęwhen I carried Theo or Julian out to where I could stand but they couldn’t. I’d hold them by the arms, and we’d face the incoming swellÌętogether. As a wave rolled in, I’d lift my son’s head over the crest at the last minute. He was safe, I was relaxed, and we were both having fun.

But when the surf picks up and you tire of hovering over your kids in the breakers, shift gears and hit the sand. There are endless things to do on a beach that don’t involve a risk of drowning. Walk over to rocky points and look for tide pools. Start a seashell collection. Bring some toy dump trucks and excavators to dig holes and tunnels, and build castles. Kids don’t need much guidance for that kind of play. They’re hardwired for it. But they’ll almost always appreciate your companionship.

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Last fall, our four-year-old, Theo, competed in his first race. It was a 1K fun run, a fundraiser put on by the physical therapy students at the University of Montana. They called it the , and it was scheduled for the weekend before Halloween. Kids of all ages were invited. Costumes were encouraged. There would be snacks and prizes. When we asked Theo if he wanted toÌęit, it was like we’d just offered him some ice cream. He was thrilled.

He was also supremely confident. “I’m going to win,” he informed us on the morning of the race, as he slipped on a pair of hand-me-down Nikes. “I’m the fastest runner in the world.”

I was a little surprised that this was his first thought. I also felt that involuntary twitch parents feel when their child is sailing, obliviously, toward disappointment. I wanted to protect Theo, so I had to correct him. “Well, you’re not the fastest,” I said. “There are loads of people faster than you. Have you heard of Usain Bolt?”

My wife, Hilly, tried another tack. “You know how Papa and I run in races sometimes?” she asked. “We don’t run them to win. We just try to push ourselves and have a good time.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever won a race in my life,” I addedÌęsupportively.

Theo gave us a quiet, pinched look. “But it will be fun,” Hilly said. “You’ll see. Let’s just get out there and see how it goes.”

There was already a crowd gathered when we arrived. It wasn’t exactly the Boston Marathon, but there was a big, inflated starting gate, music, and that humming prerace energy. Theo, dressed as a sugar snap pea, shifted his weight from foot to foot, with a faraway look in his eyes.

At the starting line, he met up with his buddy Lyndon—a four-year-old dressed convincingly as a ninja, with plastic short swords strapped to his back. They lined up under the starting gate next to ladybugs and princesses, and then they were off.

Theo was quickly at the back of the pack. I ran alongside him and watched his little legs splash through the puddles. Before long his breathing quickened. His cheeks went red and then sallow. It was the longest continuous run of his life.

It probably took about ten minutes for Theo to come in 23rd out of 34. At the finish line, he was happy enough to wrap his hands around a snickerdoodle. But he also seemed a little older. HeÌęknew that someone had won this race, andÌęthat it definitely wasn’t him. Prizes were given out to the first-place boy and girl. Lyndon got a bag of candy for his costume. Theo got nothing.

His feelings welled up later, in the car. “I’m the worst runner ever,” Theo lamented. “I’ll never win anything.”

I didn’t know what to say. Hilly and I aren’t hypercompetitive people, so Theo’s obsession with winning caught us off guard. Before the race, I had tried to tether his expectations. But now he was demoralized, and I didn’t want that either. Was it a terrible idea to enter him in a race, even a fun run, at his age?

I also felt that Theo’s earlier confidence that he was guaranteed victoryÌęimplicated us.ÌęHe is lucky to have a doting family and a lot of love. When he got that pair of Nikes from his cousin, for example, we all said, “Wow, you’re going to run so fast in those shoes!” His world was shapedÌęby hyperbole, attention, and praise. No wonder his expectations were grand. AndÌęof course, all this well-intentioned support was setting him up for inevitable disappointment.Ìę

What’s more, I realized that we’d been injecting competition into his life since he learned to walk. At first it was chasing him around the house. Then it was racing him down the road—and letting him win. Even our games of Go Fish were usually rigged in his favor. We also used competition as a strategy to get him to come home from the playgroundÌęor to clean up his Lego Duplo.

“Do you think you can clean up that mess before I wash all the dishes?” we’d ask. The race was on. It was relentless.

Some childhood-development experts, like Alfie Kohn, that American culture fetishizes winning and that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in terms. Kohn defends this position in his 1992 bookÌę.

But I’m not ready to throw out competition completely. I just want to teach Theo to compete in a way that prioritizes effort, fun, and fulfillment over victory. So I called up , a journalist and the author of . I told her the story of Theo’s race, his hubris and disappointment.ÌęShe responded with some good news.

“The most important thing you just said was that he’s fourÌęyears old,” she said. “At four, you’re still the center of the universe. You’re the best at everything.”

This is especially true for first children, who have no older siblings to outperform them. At age four, children are still accumulating the life experience andÌębrain development to situate themselves amongÌętheir peers.

“By five,” Merryman said, “if you ask your son, ‘Who is the best athlete in your class, and who is the best reader?’ he’ll know.”Ìę

The value of competition, Merryman said, is that it teaches us about our strengths. “It’s not about beating the other guy,” she said. “It’s about using other people’s performance to gauge whether you’re good or bad at something.”

When a child competes in a race, for example, it’s a chance to learn if he enjoys running. If he does, and he’s good at it, he may be motivated to pursue it toward excellence. Along the way he’ll learn a host of positive values like persistence, discipline, and grit.

“The thing to learn,” Merryman added, “is that if something is important to you, you have to work at it. That concentration will hold him, no matter what he eventually pursues.”

Merryman also pointedÌęout that competition occurs on a spectrum. Competition is meaningless to novices who are still learning the skills and rules of an activity. But it is equally abstract for the truly elite.

“I know Olympians who throw tantrums when they win a race,” Merryman said. “Their goal wasn’t to win, it was to break a record. Where competition really matters is the intermediate. That’s the point where you start saying, ‘I think I’m pretty good at this. There’s only one way to know.’”

Merryman bemoans the feel-good culture in which every kid gets a medal. “To me, thatÌęmessage is that nothing is worth doing unless you come home with a trophy,” she said. But equally detrimental, in her opinion, is teaching kids that they need to win at all costs. Merryman calls this “maladaptive competition.”

“A maladaptive competitor tries to get a promotion at work or a parking space at the mall with the same ferocity,” she said. “No one wants to be around that person.”

Fortunately, there is a middle ground in which competition is motivating, exciting, and fun. The best way to nudge kids in this directionÌęis to concentrate on improvement rather than winning,ÌęMerryman said.ÌęThis is certainly the mindset I apply to my running. I never expect to win a race, but I consider it a victory if I run the course faster than I did last year. And, of course, it should be fun and feel good, too.

To this end, it’s important that, asÌęparents, weÌęwatch what we say when we guide our children through races, bike rides, or rock climbs. Our words should focus on what theyÌęareÌędoing, not who they are.

“You should say, ‘That was a good climb’ as opposed toÌę‘You’re a good climber,’” Merryman said. “Because if he falls the next time, is he no longer a good climber? If you focus on the process, you can talk about how to do it better next time. It’s always about skill developmentÌęand not about the outcome.”

I’ve been trying to take Merryman’s advice to heart, and the other night I got an indication that we may be making progress. I was in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, when Theo rushed in with a plastic lion riding a Duplo car with a grocery bag tied behind it. “Papa,” he said, “this is Liony. He’s a drag racer. He’s the best racer in the world. He’s won 61Ìębazillion hundred races.”

“He sounds very accomplished,” I said.

“And well trained,” Theo added. “The first race he did, he lost. Then he practiced lots and lots of times. And now he’s the best.”

I hope Theo learns that “the best”Ìęis an elusive goal. But like Merryman says, he’s four. So if he’s starting to talk about practice, I’ll consider that a victory.

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It was my wife’s idea. In winters past we had seen our friend Craig, a 50-something father of three, turn his small backyard into a magical ice rink, complete with strings of lights and homemade ice lanterns. He’d been doing it for years.

“We should do that,” Hilly announced one day in January. “Let’s ask Craig how.”

Every relationship has a dreamer and an accountant. On this matter I was the accountant. I didn’t want to be, I just was. By nature, I’m careful to commit. I fear failure, so I’ve learned to preempt it. “Is it going to ruin the grass?” I worried aloud. “Will it flood the basement? I don’t think it’s cold enough.” My heel-dragging on the rink became emblematic of my personality of inertia and grew into a point of marital contention. Hilly works full-time, but we both knew my schedule could accommodate a project like this. Still, I ruminated.

The universe intervened when I ran into Craig and his wife, Shelly. They were off for a hike up the mountain. I asked Craig if it was cold enough to make an ice rink.

“Sure it is,” he said. He tapped a small patch of ice in the road with his hiking pole. “You see that? That’s a little ice rink right there.”

I asked more questions, angling for some pessimism, some sense that the timing was wrong, that it wouldn’t work, that I should wait until next year. But Craig is an optimist. There’s nothing he can’t learn, and nothing he won’t try. He is very much like Hilly.

“It’s a great idea,” he told me. “I’ll swing by this evening.”

We were halfway through dinner when Craig arrived. He had walked from his house, about a mile away, and he was ready to get to work. I set down my fork and followed him into the backyard.

It was a dark evening, about 25 degrees, and Craig was dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a hat with earflaps. He looked like Ernest Shackleton. “You’re going to need a hose,” he told me, pacing around in the snow, looking down like he’d lost something. “And a sprayer. You have a sprayer?”

I rummaged through the garage and emerged with a hose and a sprinkler.

“This should work,” Craig said. He connected the hose to the faucet and the sprinkler to the hose and then walked around like an apparent madman, watering the snow.

“Now we pack it down,” he said.

We started stamping the snow with our feet. Hilly came outside with our two boys, Theo, 4, and Julian, 1. Craig and I dragged the kids around on sleds. When Craig said we needed more weight, I got on the sled with both kids and Craig towed the three of us around in circles. Finally, we all linked arms and shuffled in a line like tantric dancers. ÌęÌę

“Oh yeah,” Craig was saying. “Oh yeah. This is nice. This is going to be nice. It’s like a piece of art, really. You’ll see.”

Three hours later, we had compacted a large 30' x 20'Ìęoval into a rippled field of white. Craig sprayed it lightly again and showed me how to blow the water out of the hose and drain it completely so it wouldn’t freeze and crack. He wished us luck and left.

I looked over the yard. It didn’t look like much. But with time, I could just imagine it becoming something special. Ìę

Craig is a flannel-clad craftsman of life. I met him and his family almost 15 years ago, when I was in college. They all looked cut from a Jan Brett book—bright-eyed, homespun, and game. Craig always had a new hobby—knitting, rock climbing, riding a unicycle. He develops his own film. In the fall he gleans apples from neighborhood trees, runs them through a press he built, and brews hard cider. In the hours that remain, he’s a criminal defense attorney. He grew up playing pond hockey in Michigan and, as a rule, he gets up early.

The next morning, I was up early, too. It was 19 degrees. I sprayed a light layer of water on the snow and was just draining the hose when Craig’s Volvo pulled into our driveway and honked. It was 5:30 a.m.

“Jacob!” he called out, without moderating the volume of his voice. He walked over and inspected the thin ice. “Oh, we can put more water on this,” he said. He set down his coffee and sprayed it some more. He started shoveling snow into the low points. He was a whirl of activity. Ìę

At this temperature, Craig said I could spray a layer every hour. I was already getting the hang of the routine, but I was curious about what lay ahead.

“How many layers do you end up putting down before it’s a rink?” I ventured.

“Oh, about 100 or so,” he said.

So, over the next week and a half, that’s what I did. When the days were too warm, I’d go out at 2 a.m. to put down another layer. I started waking up at 4:30 a.m. I was sick with a sinus infection and not getting healthier, but I was committed now, attending to our ice like it was a newborn. Nights were wakeful. When I slept, I had nightmares about the whole thing melting. I learned its strengths and weaknesses. I fretted over it. I was invested now, because I had something to lose.

In the mornings I’d walk out, kneel down, and stroke it with my palm. It could be coarse, fragile, grainy, or slick. It had moods. I pressed my thumb against the end of the hose and showered water down on the ice. In places the ice was thin and brittle like glass, and the water hit these patches like a snare drum. In other spots the ice cracked, sputtered, and hissed. I’d stand there holding the hose in the dark, the whole world asleep, and watch Orion stride across the sky. When I’d come into the house, my frozen hand would stick to the door handle. Ìę

For most of my life I’ve endured winter. Now I was desperate for it. I started obsessing over the forecast, and I dreaded any day over 35 degrees. I winced whenever the low sun crept over our neighbor’s roof and hit the rink. I vigilantly cleared off the dark maple seeds that absorb heat and burn holes through the ice. I patched the thin parts and added layer after layer of ice, as often as the weather allowed. Within a week it was lumpy and cratered. But when the boys walked on it, they fell on their faces. IÌęfound thatÌępromising.

Finally, on day ten, by the miracle of physics, the ice found its level. It was three inches thick, with a tidy berm of mounded snow around the edge. We strung globe lights above it. We made ice lanterns by freezing water overnight in a five-gallon bucket then flipping it over in the morning, pouring out the water in the middle that doesn't freeze and putting a candle inside—another trick we learned from Craig. Hilly found some used hockey gear online, and we started skating around our yard, as relentlessly and unselfconsciously as children. Julian waddled around like a penguin in his snowsuit, catching snowflakes on his tongue. Theo teetered on his skates, wielding a plastic shovel and delaying the game by burying our puck in the snow.

Hilly started telling friends that the rink had changed her life. It wasn’t hyperbole. Any other winter weekday evening, we’d be cooped up inside, slavering for spring. But now, on the darkest days of the year, we are outside, breathing hard, moving. We don’t even have to drive anywhere.

I’m lucky to be married to Hilly because, frankly, she’s more fun than I am. It hasn’t been easy to come to terms with, but the examples abound. Just the other day before breakfast, she laced up her skates and walked out to the rink with a cup of coffee.

It was a frigid morning, and I stayed inside with the kids. We watched her through Theo’s bedroom window, our faces pressed against the glass at three different heights, our chests filled with three different measures of pride. She skated lap after lap, turning tight figure eights, flexing and twisting and gliding across the ice, absolutely absorbed. Then she came inside cheeks red and eyes a-glitter, like a Mary Oliver poem.

“The elk are up on the mountain,” she said. “Did you see them? And eagles! There were five bald eagles circling above me!”

I knew then what I should have known all along: that in life and marriage, sometimes you’re the dreamer and sometimes you’re the accountant. There’s honor in both. But whatever your role, with a good partner any project is worth it. It will always, always be worth it.

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