“I love that you work at ϳԹ but aren’t, you know, ϳԹ-y,” an acquaintance who shall not be named told me earlier this year. I get variations of this comment a lot.I live and work among people who’ve been on ski patrol, undertaken weeks-long backpacking trips, and handled Class V rapids without any help. I have done none of those things, but recently, I was nearly killed by a ski lift (my backpack got stuck,and the emergency-stop bar malfunctioned—not my fault!). I also barfed in a lift line (motion sickness—driving and skiing’s fault!) and cried on a ridge because I was too paralyzed by fear to ski off a cornice (my fault, from all angles!). And skiing is only one of the sports I started learning at age 22 when I moved to New Mexico to work for this magazine.
In the five years since, I’ve also learned how to climb, backpack, and trail run without hurting myself, and I’ve taken somebaby steps in biking and paddling. To me these sports are fine arts, each with their own special world of gear, rules, and lingo. Relatedly, they are also crash courses in trying to gracefully feelstupid in front of other people.
The outdoorsy types in my life have been kind to me as I’ve learned the ropes,but it does bother me a little when I mess upor can’t hangor otherwise demonstrate that I am not one of them. When peopletalk about being outdoorsy, there’s a lot to unpack. Everyone sits somewhere on the active spectrum and has their own reasons for being there, with personal preferences and socioeconomic and health-related considerations all wrapped up in it. But what I’ve learned from my own experience is that it takes finesse to be a good beginner in the land of hardcore athletes.
When peopletalk about being outdoorsy, there’s a lot to unpack.
It turns out that at ϳԹ,saying you ran cross-country pretty well in high school is like sharing your SAT score any time after graduating high school: irrelevant enough to get an awkward look. I’ve spent most of my time at this magazineforensically picking apart all the reasons I didn’t arrive here a skilled outdoorswoman. For one thing, give me a break, I grew up in Florida. This is an imperfect but decent excuse for not knowing anything about mountains and the activities you can do on one. Florida made me appreciate nature, but in a slow and aimless manner, like floating on my back in the ocean for as long as I wantedor watching a lizard die on a muggy day after my dog sliced its throat open by accident. I was the only unathletic one of three siblings growing up, with not enough hand-eye coordination for even kindergarten ballet. But I was bookish! And you know those kids who devour Into Thin Air and pluckily find their way onto a mountaineering expedition later in life? Also not me!
Still, by the end of college, when I got my job at ϳԹ, I certainly had the most outdoor cred of my family: I liked running and had gone on quite a few camping trips(with borrowed gear). I love hearing how my friends’ early exposure to the outdoors built the foundation for their current, supercool adventure lifestyles: maybe they scaled a grand peak as they were totedin a BabyBjörn or took on a blue-square ski runwhile attachedto their parent witha cute littleleash. But adventure sports are not an inherited skill for me. My mom and dad grew up in Chicago and SaintLouis, respectively, whererock climbing and skiing were not really a thing. My dad also has a chronic health condition andstarted losing the use of his legs when I was six. We just were not the family that did big hikes together. I had a wonderful childhood,but I’ve found that family members induct many people into favorite sports early—it helps to start before you can even walk, right?
Are you exhausted listening to my excuses for not doing sports? I am, too.It’s mostly a coping mechanism.I’d rather believe that all the accomplished outdoorspeople just had some lifelong advantage over me, soI don’t have totake responsibility for the many times I wasn’t resourceful enough to do cooler things outdoors. I brace for impact when I ask good skiers how long they’ve been at it, because what if they also didn’t learn to ski before 23 but simplypicked it up faster?
This may come asa shock, but I have not yet picked upa sport quickly. I always start in “just happy to be here” mode,like a lil’golden retriever on skis, desperate for instruction, encouragement, and snacks. I expect nothing, I’m here to have fun! As I get more confident, it becomes kind of insidious, because now I expect myself to keep up and will absolutely hurt my own feelings if I don’t. Someone once asked if I’d be OK on a bumpy blue run, and I almost cried into my goggles:Do I look like a beginner? (It took me a while to get down the bumpy blue run, fine.)It’s not really about competitiveness; it just seems likeif you love doing something and do it enough times, you get togo faster or achieve harder things. This is how progress and goals work, no?
I try to remind myself that learning to hang on to a wall or zooming down a mountain for the first time in my twentiesis something to savor, not a personal failure.
Being a beginner has revealed this key flaw in my thinking: I both desire and assume a linear relationship between loving a sport and getting good enough at it to fit in.Not to mention thatsports like skiing and climbing presented me with activities whereeveryone looked cool just by doing it well. I want to look cool! Not attaining that has sometimes brought out the ugly side of my ego. I get bored with being the slowest and the least impressive—I still have fun, but it’d be more fun if people paid attention to me.
Instead of beating myself up, I’m trying to get to know myself and be a little more encouraging. I’m learning the distinction between self-deprecation (much easier than showing people how badly I want to get better) and productive levity. Once, staring down a tree-filled run and knowing I’d need to whip out some knee-destroying pizzas, I justrenamed it the Florida Snowplow, which helpedme commit to each turn. I’m trying to treat my personal history of the outdoors with affection—it’s part of the reason I can’t mountain bike or navigate for shit, but it’s also why I have an appreciation for reptiles and bugs that really enhances nature outings.And I try to remind myself that learning to hang on to a wall or zooming down a mountain for the first time in my twentiesis something to savor, not a personal failure.
One of the best parts of all this is thatforcing others to hang out with you toteach youis not just encouragedbut pretty necessary. The thing about knowing lots of hardcore athletes is that the really skilled people are usually the ones who most want to help beginners love that sport. I have a theory thatthe progression of ego is shaped like a plateau: it rises with skill at first, peaks at the intermediate stage, and then starts descending as yougetbetter, so much better that youraccomplishments precede youor just speak for themselves. Or maybe, it’s dawned on me, skilled athletes aresogenerous to beginners like me because they’re obsessed with their sport—they want to do it all the time and pass along their obsessionjust because they love it so much. On bad days and beginner-to-intermediate-angst days, I try to be more like those people.