As a touring bluegrass musician, Tim Parr was passing through Malibu, California in 2017 when he decided to shop for reading glasses. At age 49, the outdoor industry veteran who’d worked at Patagonia and founded a bike company (Swobo) had never worn glasses before. But, Parr says, his younger band members had been giving him a hard time for having to print out a separate set list for him, one with a bigger font.

“It was always at least two pages, when the other guys had one,” Parr, who’s now 57,  told me on a GoogleMeet from his home in Baja California, Mexico, last month, after a morning surf session. “That’s what started Caddis.”

Parr channeled his years working in the outdoor industry and recreating on bikes, rocks, and waves (he’s been surfing for 42 years, hence the house in Baja), combined them with rockstar (okay, bluegrass) sensibilities, and came out with super-cool readers.

“Ninety percent of people over 40 have what’s called presbyopia,” Parr said. I looked it up. The Mayo Clinic website defined presbyopia as “the gradual loss of your eyes’ ability to focus on nearby objects.” The Mayo Clinic adds: “It’s a natural, often annoying part of aging.”

I concur. As an active non-20-year-old, it’s annoying. But what’s more irritating is that, as someone who cares about quality products and lives a youthful, adventurous life, putting on cheap, drug-store reading glasses makes me feel older than I want to feel. I mean, we spend decades doing cool shit outdoors and valuing the gear that enables us to do so. I personally don’t want to rely on anything that makes me feel dorky, or worse, trapped in a slow decay of aging and everything that comes with it.

So I’m thankful that Parr started for people like me.

To Read the Menu, Play the Guitar, Work, or Just Not Feel Old

I was in a dimly lit restaurant a couple years ago when I realized I couldn’t read the small print on the menu. I did the old lady thing; I stretched out my arm, pulled back my head, and furrowed my brow in an attempt to refocus my eyes. It didn’t work. In the end, I had a friend confirm what I thought I saw and ordered.

Last winter, after obtaining a pair of at a media event, I was out with the same group of friends in another dimly lit restaurant. I pulled out my new readers to the tune of, “Ooh, what are those?!” My reading glasses were confirmed to be cool, at least by my girlfriends.

I’ve since used them—along with another pair, the which I kind of think are cooler than I am—to work on my computer when my eyes are tired first thing in the morning or in the evening. I use them to read music I print out on my crappy printer to fool around on my guitar, or to work on complicated (to me) picking patterns that benefit from, well, being able to see the strings and what my fingers are doing. Knowing that the glasses were born out of musical need makes this feel especially aligned.

Caddis eyewear’s scope and vibe, however, goes beyond aging musical surfers. While the company’s first ambassadors were surfer/musician Donovan Frankenreiter, legendary surfer Lisa Andersen, and surfer/filmmaker Taylor Steele, the brand has since added iconic Rolling Stone cover stylist Lysa Cooper, tattoo and airbrush artist, Mister Cartoon, custom motorcycle builder and ex-Nike executive Wil Thomas III and more. The thread holding these people together is that they’re all “living their best lives right now,” says one of six Caddis cofounders (and surfer) Enich Harris, who came from roles at Fox Racing, Billabong, and Arnette. And, they’re all over 40 years old.

We’re All in the Cool Club

Harris and Parr explain how potential early investors in the company advised shying away from the topic of aging. But the two realized age was exactly what they wanted to talk about. “We decided we wanted to lean in and make people feel good about getting older in this,” says Harris, 52. “So that became our ‘why.’ We’re really here to empower people in the next chapter of their lives.”

Caddis’ mantra, written out in large, all-cap type on the bottom of the box of every pair of glasses, reads:

THIS IS FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT IN THE LONG PROCESS OF GIVING UP. IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH AGE, BUT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR JOB, YOUR GENDER, OR WHETHER YOU LIVE IN ORANGE COUNTY OR HAZARD COUNTY. IT HAS TO DO WITH BEING WHO YOU ARE AND OWNING IT.

Harris acknowledges that other brands, like Look Optics, Warby Parker, and eyebobs are offering “cool” readers, but that none of them are “leaning in around age” like Caddis. He says that the brand further sets itself apart by offering a narrow selection of classic styles. “We feel like we have a point of view,” he says. [Note: The company launched a line of sunglasses in the summer of 2014 and now considers themselves “full-service optical.”]

The day I spoke to Harris via GoogleMeet from his backyard in Laguna Beach, California, he was gearing up to bring a sampling of readers to what he called a “midlife conference with 200 women” put on by Liberty Road, a membership-based resource hub dedicated to women embracing midlife. “It’s 200 women just there celebrating getting older, supporting each other, and getting new tools in the chest to feel good about this next stage of their lives,” Harris said, adding: “We end up at a lot of menopause conferences.”

The thing is, it isn’t uncool to age. It happens to all of us, if we’re lucky, and so what if we need a little help to read a menu. I’m personally thankful for Caddis’ refreshing point of view, and the fact that my reading glasses make me feel better, not worse, about myself.

Learning about the company—and the fact that founder Parr picked up the dobro guitar at age 50 (and the guitar at 45) and will be working on his third album over the next six months while running Caddis—is inspiring. So is the fact that Parr and five other founders, including Harris, all came together after years in various roles in the outdoor industry—and playing in the outdoors—to create gear for aging.

I’m ready for whatever comes next, wearing my cool readers.

The post Need Reading Glasses but Don’t Want to Look Old? You’re in Luck, Thanks to These Surfers. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

To predict your longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).

Or perhaps there is a simpler option. The goal of self-measurement is to scrutinize which factors truly predict longevity, so that you can try to change them before it’s too late. A new study from biostatisticians at the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University, and several other institutions crunched data from the long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), comparing the predictive power of 15 potential longevity markers. The winner—a better predictor than having diabetes or heart disease, receiving a cancer diagnosis, or even how old you are—was the amount of physical activity you perform in a typical day, as measured by a wrist tracker. Forget pee speed. The message to remember is: move or die.

How to Live Longer

It’s hardly revolutionary to suggest that exercise is good for you, of course. But the fact that people continue to latch on to ever more esoteric minutiae suggests that we continue to undersell its benefits. That might be a data problem, at least in part. It’s famously hard to quantify how much you move in a given day, and early epidemiological studies tended to rely on surveys in which people were asked to estimate how much they exercised. Later studies used cumbersome hip-mounted accelerometers that were seldom worn around the clock. The , published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, draws on NHANES data from subjects recruited between 2011 and 2014, the first wave of the study to employ convenient wrist-worn accelerometers that stay on all day and night.

Sure enough, it turns out that better data yields better predictions. The study zeroed in on 3,600 subjects between the ages of 50 and 80, and tracked them to see who died in the years following their baseline measurements. In addition to physical activity, the subjects were assessed for 14 of the best-known traditional risk factors for mortality: basic demographic information (age, gender, body mass index, race or ethnicity, educational level), lifestyle habits (alcohol consumption, smoking), preexisting medical conditions (diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, cancer, mobility problems), and self-reported overall health. The best predictors for how to live longer? Physical activity, followed by age, mobility problems, self-assessed health, diabetes, and smoking. Take a moment to let that sink in: how much and how vigorously you move are more important than how old you are as a predictor of the years you’ve got left.

These results don’t arrive out of nowhere. Back in 2016, the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement calling for cardiorespiratory fitness, which is what VO2 max tests measure, to be considered a vital sign that doctors assess during routine checkups. The accumulated evidence, according to the AHA, indicates that low VO2 max is a potentially stronger predictor of mortality than usual suspects like smoking, cholesterol, and high blood pressure. But there’s a key difference between the two data points: VO2 max is about 50 percent determined by your genes, whereas how much you move is more or less up to you.

Fitness Trackers Are Key to New Longevity Findings

All this suggests that the hype about wearable fitness trackers over the past decade or so might be justified. Wrist-worn accelerometers like Apple Watches, Fitbits, and Whoop bands, according to the new data, are tracking the single most powerful predictor of your future health. There’s a caveat, though, according to Erjia Cui, a University of Minnesota biostatistics professor and the joint lead author of the study. Consumer wearables generally spit out some sort of proprietary activity score instead of providing raw data, so it isn’t clear whether those activity scores have the same predictive value as Cui’s analysis. Still, the results suggest that tracking your total movement throughout the day, rather than just formal workouts, might be a powerful health check.

The inevitable question, then, is how much movement, and of what type, we need in order to live longer. What’s the target we should be aiming for? Cui and his colleagues track the raw acceleration data in increments of a hundredth of a second, which doesn’t translate very well to the screen of your smartwatch. The challenge remains about how to translate that flood of data into simple advice regarding how many minutes of daily exercise you need, how hard that exercise needs to be, and how much you should move around when not exercising.

To be honest, though, I’m not sure the quest to determine an exact formula for how much we should move is all that different from the belief that measuring your urine speed will give you actionable insights about your rate of aging. Metrics do matter, and keeping tabs on biomarkers backed by actual science, like blood pressure, makes sense. But it’s worth remembering that the measurement is not the object; the map is not the road. What’s exciting about Cui’s data is how it reshuffles our priorities, shifting the focus from all the little things our wearable tech now tracks to the one big thing that really works—and which is also a worthwhile goal for its own sake. Want to live longer? Open the door, step outside, and get moving.

The post Want to Live Longer? You Better Start Moving—All Day Long. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 2020, Kevin Kelly wrote a post on his website titled “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” which he’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: “Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.”

The post was shared widely, first by people who were fans of Kevin Kelly, and I imagine later by people who hadn’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 he’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 it’s a big-A, expedition to some faraway mountain range șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, or a little-a, let’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 “doing.”

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 you’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. Don’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. You’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 ⅓. Spend ⅓ of your time on exploring and ⅔ on optimizing and deepening. As you mature it is harder to devote time to exploring because it seems unproductive, but aim for ⅓.

Hikers’ rule: Don’t step on what you can step over; don’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. It’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 didn’t know you were looking for.

The post 25 Bits of Excellent Advice for Living a Life Full of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Before the summer heat broke, my wife and I made a decision that would have been unthinkable just a short while ago: we went for a hike without Wiley. He was the reason that I started hiking nearly every day in 2012, a big reason why Virginia and I met in the first place. Wiley is part of every decision I make—to the the degree where he’s become an inseparable part of my identity. But now, at almost 12, he’s an aging dog.

We didn’t take him hiking that day because it was over 90 degrees out, uncommonly hot here in the mountains of southwest Montana. And Wiley’s endurance has started to fade, even on cooler days. He’ll lay down in the shade and refuse to go farther, start lagging behind on uphills, and has even stopped beating up his little brother and sister when they stray off-trail.

The reason we’re hesitant to take Wiley on our hikes isn’t because he can’t or won’t keep up—and definitely not because he doesn’t want to come along. It’s more because we’re worried about him. He’ll slip and fall occasionally while climbing our hardwood stairs—something he now accomplishes at a walk rather than a run. And jumping into bed is a feat that he can now manage only with a running start. More than half of my “load ups” at the trucks are now met with Wiley’s sad eyes, which I know to mean he wants me to lift him into the bed.

At home, Wiley spends most of the day sleeping on the couch, laying in the yard, or relaxing on the dog beds we stacked together for maximum comfort. I find myself scratching his head to say goodbye as often as I’m leashing him up to take him with me.

Protection duties—once Wiley’s greatest source of joy—have largely been ceded to Teddy, our six-year-old Kangal. I can’t remember the last time he bit someone or something.

When Wiley swims—something he loves, but has never been any good at—I now keep a watchful eye on him, and drag him out of the water once he starts to show any signs of fatigue.

Wiley wasn’t my first dog by a long shot, but my first after leaving home for college. He was given to me by friends who figured a puppy might be just the thing to drag me out of depression after I lost a business I’d spent years building then, temporarily, the ability to walk following a motorcycle crash. I was so broke the first year that I had Wiley that I chose food for him over food for myself on more occasions than I’d like to count.

Writing that is enough to bring back some uncomfortable memories, but I don’t really think about those that much anymore. The house, the cars, and the security that seemed so unobtainable back then have come through work and time. That’s in large part thanks to the sense of purpose and confidence being forced to provide for Wiley gave me.

But our good times together far outweigh any struggles we faced. Wiley’s been to three countries, most states east of the Mississippi, summited 14,000-foot peaks, rafted rivers, and sailed in the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Cortez. He’s bitten bears, helped me fight off a home invasion back in Hollywood, and served as the best man at our wedding. He was better at those first two tasks than he was the last one, but did at least manage to lead a group howl session during the reception dinner.

And while he’s still healthier looking than many dogs half his age—thanks to cutting out ultra-processed food early in his life—we can still see Wiley aging. From his peak of fitness, where you could visibly see his muscles even through his dense brindle fur, he’s lost about ten pounds, and is now what one of my friends described as “old man skinny.” What used to be meat is now bone. He has a lipoma on his rib cage, and a growth on one eyelid that our vet describes as non-cancerous.

Most dogs with hybrid-vigor—a post-purebred description for a dog that won’t die from cancer at a young age—live 10 to 14 years or so. And while Wiley shows no signs of crossing the rainbow bridge anytime soon, even I have to admit that the end of our time together is now much closer than the beginning. Watching people on television, or friends in real life make end-of-life decisions about their dogs is starting to feel more and more uncomfortable. Selfishly, I’m hoping it’ll still be a feat of heroism involving a mountain lion or grizzly bear that takes him, but realistically I know it’ll probably have to be an injection in the comfort of our own home.

But that’s still hopefully at least a couple years away. My job in the meantime, I figure, is to create as many memories together as possible. Even as it’s harder and harder to bring him along, it becomes more important to put in the effort, or scale activities to Wiley’s ability. Airplane rides—trips where my dogs cannot tag along—feel less appealing. Visits to our cabin, trips to see friends within driving distance, and vacations to Mexico, where we bring the pack, have become easy to prioritize.

Or just hanging out at home, where Wiley likes nothing better than lying under our chairs while we eat dinner, sleeping on his bed next to ours while we sleep, or cuddling up to us on the couch watching a movie. None of that may sound quite as exciting as our old hikes, but we adapt. It turns out any time spent with Wiley, in a place he’s most comfortable, is time well spent.

The post As My Dog Slows Down, I’m Learning to Appreciate the Little Things appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I can tell you the exact moment when I started thinking about longevity in a serious way. It happened on March 10, 2023, at 10:20 P.M., in a hospital delivery room ablaze with overhead lights. I stood bedside, my hand crumpling under my wife’s grip, as a tiny, screeching alien, an eggplant with eyes—our daughter, Esme—slipped into the hands of the attending ob-gyn. At 56, I became a father for the first time.

Until Es arrived, the grand total of my thoughts about aging could be summed up in a line my father likes to say: “It sucks getting old, but it beats the alternative!” Now as I stared into her little purple face, I wanted every healthy minute I could get. I began to imagine all the things I’d be able to show her—mountains, rivers, books (made of paper), and how to mix the perfect margarita. By the time we got home, I was no longer the center of my universe. She was.

With this new cosmology in mind, I sat down with Peter Attia’s book, , cowritten with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor Bill Gifford. The book has clearly resonated with a lot of people. It sold more than a million and a half copies in less than a year and has been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly as long.

I approached it with trepidation. I’ve been writing about health and fitness for more than two decades, and most things that promote “longevity” give me hives. Why we die, and why we don’t, involves enormously complicated science that’s difficult if not impossible to research conclusively. Dudes—it’s almost always dudes—who claim they’ve got it figured out are suspect by default.

Outlive, I soon learned, isn’t about death per se but about decline. Attia believes that you can prevent decline—or, as he puts it, “square the longevity curve”—through an aggressive combination of exercise, lifestyle (nutrition, sleep, etc.), and elements from personalized health care, or what he calls Medicine 3.0. Can getting old suck less? He says that the answer is a resounding yes.

Attia, 51, is a licensed physician who runs a concierge telemedicine practice from his home and fitness HQ in Austin, Texas. To be a patient of his is rumored to run into the six figures annually. (He won’t disclose this number.) He’s also a rising star on the self-improvement influencer circuit, appearing frequently on podcasts hosted by Rich Roll, Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, and Rhonda Patrick, among others.

In addition to his guest appearances, Attia produces his own podcast, The Drive, along with a weekly newsletter and a robust stream of social media content. He has a million followers on Instagram alone. You might even have caught him as the doctor on the Disney+ show Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, a.k.a. Marvel’s Thor. Want more? You can sign up for the expanded, members-only version of Attia’s output for $149 a year. Or splurge for his online longevity video course, Early—essentially an enhanced, interactive version of the book—for $2,500.

I spent months immersed in Attia’s ideas, including his book, podcast, newsletter, and the Early program. Some of the advice in Outlive—get vigorous exercise, don’t eat too much or too little—seemed like it had been around since Jack LaLanne pulled on a stretchy unitard and started doing push-ups. But overall I hadn’t seen anything as comprehensive and visionary as Attia’s approach.

In Attia’s view, Medicine 3.0 is a paradigm shift from the pills-and-procedures protocol (Medicine 2.0) that is the current health care status quo. It’s heavy on prevention and arranged into five pillars: exercise, nutrition, sleep, emotional health, and what Attia calls “exogenous molecules” (pharmaceuticals, supplements, and so forth). They’re all important and get appropriate play in the book, but exercise reigns supreme as “the most potent ‘drug’ in our arsenal,” he writes in Outlive. “The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline better than any other intervention.”

Exercise breaks down further into subcategories: strength, stability, aerobic efficiency, and peak aerobic capacity. The goal is to obtain optimum fitness in each of these, since they’ve been shown to form a powerful shield against our biggest health threats: cardiovascular disease, cancer, metabolic dysfunction, and degenerative neurological disorders—what Attia refers to as “the four horsemen.”

Fitness sounded like good medicine to me, but the emphasis on exercise also prompted a lot of questions: What kind? How much? How hard? I reached out to Attia’s camp, asking if I could essentially become a patient for a few days and write about his methods. They said no to that—herr doktor is extremely busy—but after months of back and forth they agreed to let me come out for a couple of days last April, to meet him and go through some fitness assessments. I felt like I was doing pretty well—I rode my mountain bike and lifted weights regularly, among other things. But what was I missing? What should I be doing going forward?

The timing was good, because Attia was preparing to open a new facility in Austin called 10Squared, a sort of hybrid testing lab and training center that will cater to his existing patients and a new cohort of select members. His team sent me an NDA ahead of my visit, with the caveat that this would be a black-box project until I’m informed otherwise. This struck me as over the top for what sounded like a fancy private gym, but sure, why not? If that’s what it took to finally get a taste of the secret sauce behind Outlive, show me where to sign.

The post Has Peter Attia Found The Fountain of Youth? Our Writer Tries His Program to Find Out. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I’m in my mid-forties, and for the past 15 years, I’ve lived an extremely steady, boring life. I know I sound like a stereotype, but watching my friends get older and experience health problems makes me want to savor the youth I have left. When I think of living like this for the rest of my life, and then dying, I start to freak out. I want to do things. Both of my kids are teenagers, and when I watch them try new things—full of possibilities for how their lives could go—I’m incredibly happy for them. But I wish I could have that same feeling of possibility for myself.

I’ve been daydreaming about quitting my job and hiking the PCT, or learning how to surf (I haven’t decided yet), and then coming back and starting a new career. I’ve mentioned some of my aspirations to my wife, and she’s supportive, but I haven’t talked to her about the full extent of what I want to do: completely shake up my life and take the time to figure out who I really am now. I love my family, and I don’t want to worry them or change anything about them. It’s just me I want to change.

That said, I’ve always been the stable one for my wife and kids to lean on, and I worry that doing something big—like leaving to hike the PCT solo—would cause a lot of stress for them. My own parents weren’t around much growing up, and I always promised myself that I’d never be like them. That said, this feeling is getting stronger and it’s hard for me to ignore it. How do I handle my midlife crisis without being a jerk to the people I love?

Your kids are teenagers. When they try something completely new, is that a crisis? Not at all. It’s self-discovery. Who says that kind of exploration has to end when you hit a certain age? You’re never too old—or young—to reimagine who you want to be in the world.

I think it’s fantastic that you’re filled with the kind of energy that makes you want to do something big. You’re seeing possibilities that you never considered before. A mid-life crisis doesn’t have to be a crisis—in fact, it doesn’t have to be negative at all. With the right framing, and as long as you don’t abandon your responsibilities, it can be an incredible adventure.

Because you do have responsibilities now, ones you didn’t when you were younger, and you know them better than I do. I’m guessing they include financially contributing to your household, being a loyal partner to your wife, and caring for your kids. That last role, in particular, is changing fast. Your kids may not need you to brush their teeth or make their lunches anymore—but they sure as heck need you to love them, see them for who they are, offer comfort, and guide them on their way.

Your stability as a family member, as a parent and partner, isn’t dependent on you doing the same thing day after day, year after year, until you die. It’s about your commitment and your loyalty. It’s about listening to your kids and wife, and hearing what they need from you, even if it’s not what you expected. It’s about never giving up on changing for the better.

None of that is contingent on stifling your own dreams. Keep in mind that being part of a stable, loving family doesn’t just mean you’re supporting your wife and kids. It also means they’re supporting you.

Talk to your wife. Tell her what you’re thinking. If you made major life decisions and simply informed her, rather than asking her opinion, you would be a jerk. But if you came to her early, explained the situation to her with humility, and asked for her perspective and advice, that would actually make you a responsible partner. You can talk through options together, consider your finances, and explore what makes sense for the whole family. What concerns does she have? What solutions might address them?

Maybe you can take a break from work, rather than quitting outright, and see if some time away helps you feel refreshed. Maybe you can start with a smaller adventure, like taking a surfing class or planning a week-long hike—and your family could even come along! Or, if travel’s rough, is there a way for you to take on something new and exciting without leaving home? Could you study at night to prepare ahead of time for a career shift? Your wife may have ideas that would never have occurred to you on your own. She might not be as surprised as you think.

Or maybe she’s even been feeling similarly herself, and you’ll be the one who’s surprised.

All this energy you have right now, this stirring to change things? . It doesn’t have to be destructive. Think of it as the energy an athlete has before a game, jumping on the sidelines to warm up, or the energy an artist has before putting a brush to canvas. Now is the time for possibilities, and daydreaming, and making sure your family’s on board. It’s the time for considering their dreams, too, and seeing how everyone’s visions mesh. Then, when you step into your new life, you’ll be doing so together. Or if you do try something new on your own, they’ll be right there cheering on the side.

Blair Braverman writes our Tough Love column. She lives near the Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, and her longest hiking trip was the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail. She has not yet had a midlife crisis. 

The post I’m Having a Midlife Crisis. Will a 2,000-Mile Hike Snap Me Out of It? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Few things scare Caroline Paul. Not scuba diving with sharks, nor flying a motorized gyrocopter that looks like a dubious cross between a bobsled and a whirlybird. The 60-year-old adventurer has been chasing risk since she was a girl growing up in Connecticut. At 13, she attempted to break the world record in crawling—12.5 miles—but was thwarted at mile 8.5 by skinned knees and hypothermia. That same year, she went whitewater rafting on Connecticut’s Housatonic River, in a boat she and her twin sister made out of milk cartons.

Paul writes candidly about her lifelong relationship with risk in her new book, . I first connected with Paul, who lives in San Francisco, in 2016, after the publication of her bestselling memoir, Gutsy Girls. At the time, she explained the unconscious biases often evident in how we talk to children about risk in sports: we warn girls to be careful, she suggested, while encouraging boys to be brave. Fortunately, as a girl growing up in the 1960s, Paul didn’t listen to adults telling her to dial it back.

After her intrepid childhood, Paul made half a dozen kayaking first descents around the world, worked as a firefighter in San Francisco for 14 years, and took up hang gliding, Onewheeling, and skydiving. By her early fifties, though, she found herself facing a new challenge: staying adventurous through perimenopause and beyond. “I thought this was going to be a good stage,” recalls Paul, whose mother took up cycling in her forties and thrived well into her eighties, “but all around me my friends were talking about plastic surgery. I wanted to embrace elderhood, but I didn’t know how.”

So Paul set out to learn. She delved into the science of aging and searched for women who pushed the edge of adventure far into their later years. “There were always a ton of men older than me outside, but no women,” she explains. One by one, she tracked down a sisterhood of role models: an 80-year-old scuba diver; a 72-year-old champion orienteer and trail runner. There was Britta, 55, who taught her to fly a gyrocopter and land it in a crosswind, and a 52-year-old grandmother who illegally BASE-jumped off Yosemite’s El Capitan. Despite the range of sports and ages, these women all reaped the same powerful benefits from recreating outside: a strong sense of community, wellness, novelty, purpose, and positivity about aging, which Paul believes are five of the most important markers for healthy aging.

“Outdoor adventure checks all the boxes,” she says. “If we shift our mindset, our later years can be a time of exploration, adventure, and joy.” Research backs this up. As she writes in Tough Broad, studies show that daily exposure to nature relaxes frenetic brain waves, leading to improved memory and cognitive function. Take Dot Fisher-Smith, a spry 93-year-old who spent much of her golden years logging impressive long-distance treks at high altitude. Now Fisher-Smith gambols daily around her suburban neighborhood in Ashland, Oregon, planning her walking routes to maximize time among trees, grass, and bushes. “She’s onto something,” Paul writes. “Chemicals released by trees, called phytoncides, strengthen our immune system and lower blood pressure.”

Just as powerful are the psychological perks of moving around outdoors: delight, optimism, and a healthy perspective. “Old? You’re not old!” Fisher-Smith told Paul indignantly. “Just do what you’ve always done. It gets better as you get older!”

Paul was curious to find out what happened to her brain when she tried something new, so she booked a wing-walking lesson with Cynthia Hicks, a 73-year-old cancer survivor and endorphin junkie. The activity is just as hairball as it sounds: you walk onto the wing of a biplane while it’s airborne and strap into a harness, then the pilot maneuvers through hammerheads, loops, and rolls.

Paul learned to fly a single-engine Cessna when she was 20, but wing walking teetered on the far edge of extreme even for her. She thought back to the daredevil she’d once been, realizing, “The truth is, that person barreled through life with a clenched jaw. She wasn’t a show-off, but she had a lot to prove. She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself a lot of the time.” Now in her late fifties, Paul was wiser and perhaps a touch more circumspect. Was she still as piqued by adrenaline? There was only one way to find out.

On the day of her lesson, Paul watched with disbelief as her fellow students went first and then, once safely back on terra firma, flopped to the ground, exhilarated. When it was her turn, she says, “I kept thinking, Why am I getting out of the cockpit?’” Her account in Tough Broad of what happened next is mesmerizing: “The horizon curdles, falls away. Spinning earth, buffeting air, iceberg clouds flashing by
 I am no longer afraid. I am something else entirely. Oddly, I begin to laugh.”

She had discovered one of the most powerful predictors of happiness and good health at any age, and something else she’d been seeking all along: awe. “Wing walking showed me it wasn’t adrenaline I craved as much as it was awe,” says Paul, who has a new appreciation for bird-watching and “awe walking”—meandering around without destination or goal simply to notice and be present, the way Fisher-Smith does. “I used to worry I was losing my edge or becoming boring. Now I see that I can keep being myself and be more with less.”

While Paul admits to being content sitting on her couch with her wife, the illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, and her cat, she shows no signs of slowing down. After her lesson with Hicks, she got her gyrocopter license. But she’s adamant that she’s not trying to act young, or even young at heart—a phrase she rejects. “Being curious and brave and energetic aren’t just reserved for 20- or 30-year-olds. We’ve assigned them those attributes, but they belong to all of us.”

As for new adventures, Paul has plenty on her tick list. “I’ve been eyeing the electric unicycle,” she says, then catches herself and laughs. “Maybe I should wait until after my book launch, in case I get hurt!” Most of all, she wants to learn to sail. A friend has a boat and offered to teach her. “I’d like to navigate by stars with a sextant.”

By the end of Tough Broad, Paul has given us a road map for aging adventurously: stay curious, try new things, be adaptable, cultivate awe—and, above all, keep moving.

The post Age Is Just a Number appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

You may know Strava as a fitness tracking app. Maybe you use it to keep track of your running, or bike rides, or hikes, or rollerblading. Maybe you use it as a social network, a way to keep up with your friends who also exercise. Maybe you use it to find out about local trail conditions, or to keep tabs on what your favorite superhero athletes are doing for training these days.

I use Strava for many things, but mostly I just want it to give me a sign that I’m not dying just yet.

Sometimes people say things like, “I’m not afraid to die.” Oftentimes they are men, playing a movie character who is about to do something heroic. Other times they are teenagers, and maybe not very smart, which is what I was at one time. This time seems to be growing further and further away in my rear view mirror. I would not say I am exactly afraid to die either, but the feeling is more like it would just be a huge bummer. Does anyone really know if there is an afterlife, and if there are breakfast burritos there?

So I run, which in theory will help me keep from dying for as long as possible, but of course you never know. If every day is:

Then running is one of my ways of getting busy living.

And when I run, I use Strava to track my mileage, elevation gain, pace, and a bunch of other metrics, some of which I don’t pay that much attention to because I am not THAT serious about running.

Strava also tells me how I did on certain segments of my runs, such as “Smokejumper Descent,” “Higgins to Footbridge,” and “Unnamed Rd Climb.” A couple weeks ago, for instance, I achieved my all-time personal record on a segment called University Ridge. That last performance was better than my performances on the same segment in 2021, and in 2020, when I was a younger man with slightly more elastic skin, smaller crow’s feet, and fewer gray hairs. I also don’t remember my feet being so sensitive to rocks on the trail back then.

But since I did so well on that segment last week, surely that means I am still getting faster, which means I am not quite yet entering the slow slide on the downslope into the hereafter, or into worm food, or whatever. That’s what the little gold “PR” icon means on Strava: I am not dying. Yet. Doesn’t it?

I am generally pleased with Strava. I don’t send messages to the folks who work there, asking for new features to be added (since I have no idea how coding works). But, hear me out: What about a notification when I achieve one more day of staving off my own mortality?

Every once in a great while, I get an email from Strava saying I’ve become the “Local Legend” of a certain segment, which basically means I’ve run the same route a bunch of times lately. It seems possible that Strava could also send me a quick message when I have PRed a segment—any segment, really—and thusly am still putting distance between myself and the grim reaper.

It could be just like the local legend email, but like this:

Is that too heavy of a lift? Again, I know nothing about coding. I’m just a regular guy running around in the woods, hoping to keep from entering Dark Mode for as long as possible.

The post I Just Want Strava to Tell Me I’m Not Slowly Dying appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I thought I was being careful, gingerly hike-jogging down the snow-covered trail, when both my feet suddenly slipped a few inches on the bulletproof ice under the snow. Both my arms shot up in the air in an instinctive attempt to reclaim my balance.

Whenever this happens—when I slip on ice—part of my life flashes before my eyes. Not in that moments-before-death way people talk about, but a sort of highlight reel of ice-related falls I’ve had in my life. It’s my brain’s way of saying, “Hey, you think this one is going to crack your All-Time Top Three?” as I do that sort of spasmodic dance to stay upright, maybe yelping out something like “Waaaaayoaooah!”

No. 2 of all time: I was walking to work at the newspaper along Colfax Avenue in Denver during the winter of 2006-2007 after it had snowed a ton and then stayed cold, leaving ice everywhere for a very extended, un-Denver-like period of time. I was walking fast, on the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven at Colfax and Ogden, and I think I might have even had my hands in my pockets, when both feet popped out from underneath me, like a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel, and I’m sure my entire body went parallel to the ground for a half-second before I dropped, slamming onto the icy pavement. I remember thinking in midair, “I hope some of these people driving by get a kick out of this,” because I knew it was going to look funny—I mean, as long as I didn’t hit my head. I didn’t, and I carefully picked myself up and kept walking to the office.

No. 1 of all time: I was sitting in a classroom on the second or third floor of my college’s business building, doing very poorly on an Operations Management test I hadn’t studied properly for, probably because I was partying. I got halfway through the multiple-choice test and just gave up, circling “C” on every answer, and then walked up and handed my test to my professor and bolted out the door. I was mad at myself for not studying enough for the test, and for not caring enough to study for the test, and I was probably fishing around in my pocket for a pack of cigarettes as I pushed open the building’s west door to storm back to my apartment.

I knew the door opened onto a ramped sidewalk that traversed downward in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling windows in front of a lounge where a dozen or so students were usually studying in comfortable chairs and couches. What I didn’t know is that it had been raining lightly while I was in the classroom taking my test, and the air temperature was low enough that the rain had formed a slick sheet of ice over every concrete surface on campus.

A pissed-off me popped out the door, took two very determinedly angry (at myself) steps, and immediately realized I had made a mistake, sliding on the soles of my shoes, then flailing. For the next 60 to 90 seconds (it felt like), I frantically waved my arms and gyrated my hips like a man whose clothes had caught on fire, picking up speed as I shot down the sidewalk. Finally, after what must have been something like 20 to 30 feet of sliding completely out of control, one of my feet slid off the sidewalk, caught the grass, and I flipped over, mercifully ending my slide. As I slid my messenger bag around my back and clambered back up, I wondered how many people had just watched through the mirrored lounge windows as I ate shit.

Up until a few years ago, I used to write outdoor gear reviews, or attempt to write outdoor gear reviews. I don’t think I was very good at it. There are people who are fantastic gear reviewers who love to get into the minutiae of materials and features and explain to the rest of us what works and what doesn’t, and I am grateful for those people. I am not one of those people. My friends have to tell me when my skis are too skinny, or the boots I have are not responsive, or that my bike is too heavy, or whatever. And then I usually forget. I just want stuff that works well enough for a below-average skier/runner/cyclist (me) to have fun (usually not a problem). My gear reviews are more like “these shoes seemed pretty good,” “this air mattress leaked,” or “the kayak did not sink.”

Sometimes, since I have some outdoor magazine bylines and some publication names in my LinkedIn bio, public relations folks will send me cold-call emails about new camping stoves or tents or backpacks or jackets, and sometimes offer to send me a piece of gear to review for a publication. I’d love to help them out and get some new (free) gear, but I am just not up to the task, unless someone wants a review that says,

So I don’t do too many gear reviews anymore.

But this winter, I got really into my microspikes, or winter traction devices, or whatever you call the things you pull over the soles of your shoes so you don’t slip on the ice and fall on your ass. I think they’re great. We had a pretty snowy winter where I live this year, so I put in some significant miles running on ice- and snow-covered trails and sidewalks. Is that kind of a dumb hobby when you live in a town with good access to nordic skiing, backcountry skiing, and downhill skiing? I asked myself the same thing dozens of times. Yeah, maybe. Without winter traction devices on my feet, significantly dumber. I paid 60 bucks for mine a couple years ago and I think I’ve probably put 150 miles on them since then, maybe 200. Several companies make winter traction devices, and I have a couple pairs. I wear most of the time. They’re nice. They work for me. They have some features. If I were a better gear reviewer, I would be able to say more about them. At least we are close to the beginning of winter, when most people are thinking about buying things like winter traction devices.

The main point is: They kept me from falling on my ass all winter. Including the instance described at the beginning of this piece, in which I found myself sliding out of control on an ice sheet on one of my favorite trails. I’m happy to report that I made it to the bottom of the trail unscathed. Back at the trailhead, I removed my winter traction devices for the remaining two miles home.

And, then, about eight blocks from my house, as I was glancing around deciding whether to turn onto 4th Street or 5th Street, I tripped on a chunk of pushed-up sidewalk and ate it HARD. In front of someone’s house. I don’t know if anyone saw me, but I would not have blamed them for laughing, as long as they waited until I popped up and started running again, which I did within approximately 1.2 seconds, winter traction devices folded up in my left hand.

The post An Ode to Falling on Your Ass in the Wintertime appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A few years ago, after a decades-long, 60,000-mile-plus love affair with road cycling, I started dabbling in mountain biking. I did this largely because I’d moved from New York City, where the discipline was essentially alien, to New Jersey, where the off-road riding was not only close by, but surprisingly good and abundant. I initially pictured the transition to be merely a shift in terrain. A bike is a bike, after all. But I was vastly mistaken. Like anything in the world of cycling, mountain biking comes with its own inscrutable rules and mores, its own fiercely inhabited subcultures, and its own baffling array of clothing and equipment choices. Did I need a trail bike? A cross-country bike? A “downcountry” bike? How much travel did I need in my suspension? Did I need 27.5-inch wheels, or the 29-inch variety? Never had I seen 1.5 inches loom so large in people’s worldview.

But soon enough I was out on my local trails. Like beginner drivers, my motions were twitchy and hesitant, my focus almost entirely on what was directly in front of me—every fearsome root and rock flooding my brain with data. In road cycling, the asphalt you’re riding on, barring a pothole or two, is an afterthought. But in mountain biking the surface was a moving puzzle, requiring careful attention, planning, and decision-making.

I plodded along, my improvement hindered by the inconvenient fact that, for me, mountain biking requires driving to a trailhead versus riding straight out of my garage. So I usually default to road riding, keeping my mountain-biking mediocrity safely intact.

Thus was the state of affairs when, one weekend last summer, I was invited to ride in Vermont with a group of friends. There would be some gravel riding—more equipment choices, more rules, more subcultures—and some mountain biking, including a visit to . I had been dimly aware of the movement by ski resorts to try and generate summer dollars by ferrying cyclists on lifts up to their snowless summits, but I’d never stepped foot in such a place. Which was quite obvious to me when I arrived at the so-called Beast of the East wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a traditional bike helmet, and found myself amid what looked like a casting call for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome; it was packed with dusty men and women, with thousand-yard stares, wearing body armor, neck braces, and full-face helmets. A sign, no doubt crafted at the behest of a lawyer somewhere, warned: “Injuries are a common and expected part of mountain biking.”

A friend glanced at my bike and advised me to lower the seatpost: “You’re not going to be pedaling much.” That’s when I realized I’d never bothered to set up the dropper post on my Canyon Neuron. Coming from road riding, where a precise saddle height is sacred and Never to Be Changed, I figured it’d be superfluous. (And, full confession, I couldn’t figure out the install instructions that synced up the little switch on the handlebars to the seatpost.) I hastened to the repair room, where the park’s mechanics quite graciously set up my post in a matter of minutes, making no comment about this forehead-slapping moment in noob history.

We hoisted our bikes onto the lift, rode to the top of Snowshed, home to the beginner terrain, took in the verdant, panoramic view, and then headed down Easy Street, one of the park’s few green runs (bike parks, I learned, retain the green-blue-black rating system utilized by ski areas everywhere). I rode it, tentatively and with excessive amounts of braking, entering the precisely sculpted banked berms low and exiting high, exactly counter to how it should be done. For my efforts I was rewarded with a more technical blue trail, known as Step It Up. According to Strava, I was among the slowest riders to ever descend that route—I ranked 5,077 out of 5,459—but it still felt like I was flying. And then, a minute or so into the ride, I encountered a sloped earthen structure looking like one of the . This was a “tabletop.” It is meant to be jumped. But it was also, as they say, rollable, meaning it could simply be ridden over. Which I kept doing: barreling toward the upward slope before suddenly freaking out and jamming on the brakes, trying to maintain control as my body pitched forward.

That afternoon was a revelation. Normally, in my cycling life, I’ve suffered on the climb and been rewarded on the descent. Killington flipped that idea on its head. Here I suffered on the descents—my heart was in my throat, my hands, back, and knees were on fire, I crashed more than once—and was rewarded with a tranquil, breezy lift ride to the top. (And whatever you may think about the lack of pedaling, at least has found that the majority of a downhill ride results in a heart rate in “a zone at or above an intensity level associated with improvements in health-related fitness.”)

But I was left with the nagging feeling that I’d left something on the table—or the tabletop, more precisely. I wanted to know what it would feel like to leave the ground on my bike. I wanted to catch air.

The post To Air Is Human appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.