After I got home from a run in November of last year,��I typed into my phone a list of things I’d seen on my run and added it to my Strava post. I thought I might keep doing it, as an exercise in noticing things. It was nice, having a little visual journal of the ordinary sights and sounds of my afternoon jog.

Of course, I couldn’t take it seriously, and the very next run, I wrote a short poem, and put that on Strava. It went like this:

Procrastinator’s 5K

I would like extra credit

for the calories I burned

sliding around in the snow

thank you

I just kept doing it after that, every single time I recorded an activity: Short poems, long poems, none of them with any sort of real structure, but poems, about the things I see or think about when I’m out running, or hiking, or skiing. I don’t listen to music or podcasts when I run, so I have plenty of time to think. I assume there must be at least a few other people who do this same thing (Strava has 95 million users after all), but I have only heard from one other person.

When I scroll through my feed, I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to. But I really enjoy seeing what my friends are up to when they take the extra 15 seconds to use that Strava space to add in a joke, whether or not it has anything to do with what they just did on their run or ride or ski. And I think that’s a nice thing to put out into the world.

Are my Strava poems any good? I assume they are not (but maybe someone with an MFA could provide some clarity). Is this what Strava is for? Most people would say no, it is not. I don’t even know if more than a few people who follow me have noticed that I’m doing it, despite my having kept it up for almost four months now. But I’m committed.

Here are a handful of them. If you’re on Strava, you can��.

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I’m Kelsey Barnes, the membership retention manager at ���ϳԹ���. My job is to keep our ���ϳԹ���+ members informed about and engaged with our core benefits: Read, Map, Watch, and Learn. Personally, I’ve never been able to just do one hobby or sport. Like many ���ϳԹ��� readers and ���ϳԹ���+ members, I love learning new things and generally spending time outdoors—no matter how I’m doing it. My interests range from mountain biking in our beautiful trail systems where I live in the Pacific Northwest, rock climbing, backcountry snowboarding, and bike packing. How often I do any one of them ebbs and flows year over year.

When I joined the team in 2021, we set our sights on building a product that served those with the passion that all of us here at ���ϳԹ��� have for nature and the unique ways each of us chooses to experience it. That includes the road cyclist, mountain biker, backpacker, triathlete, meal plan extraordinaire, outdoor-curious, and everyone in between. We had an ambitious roadmap to bring our publications, which cover a range of activities and subjects in the outdoors, all under one roof.

You, our readers, told us our content was difficult to navigate from site to site—especially for our ���ϳԹ���+ members, who have unlimited access to all of our content—and we listened. Here are some of the exciting features our team has worked tirelessly to create in our first iteration of our ���ϳԹ���+ app. And stay tuned, because there are more to come later this year!

! Not a member? Join today.������

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You can scroll through our popular long reads, breaking news, gear reviews, buying guides, opinion pieces, training plans for all levels, yoga practices, recipes, meal plans, and more. Plus, play award-winning video content from ���ϳԹ��� Watch.

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We are so stoked to be able to introduce the to you all, and we appreciate our members who make it possible for us to continue to support our mission in getting everyone outside.

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���ϳԹ��� editors started out the year strong. We tested out some healthy habits, stubbornly stuck by a few bad ones, published five new long reads, and looked back at the best disaster movies of all time. ���ϳԹ��� of work, we kept up with some of the best new films, read poetry inspired by nature, contemplated our acoustic environment, and learned a few new skills to take into 2023. Here is everything our editors loved in January.

What We Watched

The Banshees of Inisherin

Drawn in by an adorable donkey, the Irish brogue, and the verdant landscape of the Emerald Isle, I watched The Banshees of Inisherin, which has been nominated for nine Academy Awards this year, including best film. The premise, as you may have heard, is that one of two longtime friends—a musician named Colm (played by Brendan Gleeson)—decides he no longer wants to have anything to do with his neighbor Padraic (Colin Farrell, whose expressive eyebrows may likely secure him the best-actor win). Colm threatens to cut off his own fingers one by one if Padraic continues to bother him with conversation. Even watching this play out, I was baffled as to why a fiddler would do this. But once I learned that this entire black comedy was a parable of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, all facets of the tale made more sense. In fact, I loved having to rethink the plot points and actions of the characters with this history as a background, and I’d watch it again just for that reason. —Tasha Zemke, associate managing editor

The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist

In 2008 and 2009, a group of teens in L.A.��started robbing celebrities like Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, and Audrina Patridge. They’d wait for a big event that they knew the victim was attending or for the target to post on social media that they were away from home, and then they’d go try doors and windows. Surprisingly, they often found one unlocked, so they’d go inside to steal cash, jewelry, and clothes. I remember this being all over the news 15 years ago, and a film about it premiered in 2013, but I had never known the details of exactly who the robbers were, or that the entire case became intertwined with a reality TV show when it went to court. The new Netflix docuseries “The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist” speaks directly with two of the teens, so we hear firsthand��how and why they stole from some of the biggest names in Hollywood. It’s a binge-worthy series that I couldn’t stop watching. —Abigail Wise, digital managing director

The Fabelmans

Watch first, then read. As someone who loves films and film reviews, and has written and studied them, I usually view and then peruse to see what others got out of a film and whether or where we agree.

I went out to see Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, then home and of course onto Rotten Tomatoes. And, after that, found an account of which parts of this “semi autobiographical” film were accurate. (I do that, too. You’d be surprised, for example, which sections of the excellent Captain Phillips really happened.)

One true-to-life sequence is what many reviewers naturally focused on, the moment of shock when the teenage protagonist, representing the young writer-director Spielberg, realizes through the filming he so loves that his mother is having a love affair with his father’s best friend. Both Sammy Fabelman and Steven Spielberg keep—kept—the secret for years.

The scenes that moved my friend and me the most, though, are those of the adolescent Steve/Sammy filming his entire Boy Scout troop in enactments out in the Arizona desert. The shootouts and battle scenes delight the young Scouts (and presage other scenes in later Spielberg greats). In one, Sammy directs a youth on how to feel upon arriving to a scene of gory defeat. Sammy evokes anguish in both his young actor and, to his surprise, himself; and then sees his audience weep, and understands the power of film. —Alison Osius, senior editor

Watch:

What We Read

Felicity, by Mary Oliver

I’m going through a Mary Oliver phase, and I expect it to last the rest of my life. Her poetry is soft but sharp, simple but complex, and nearly always holds the natural world at its center. (Oliver’s process involved taking walks in her local woods until a poem came to her, then scrawling it down with one of the many pencils she stowed in the crooks of trees.) I read this 2015 collection in January, but it’s perfect for Valentine’s Day season—verses full of longing, delight, sensuousness, and love that are perfect for reading aloud to your sweetheart. Take Oliver’s tack and tell them they are more beautiful than the trees and kiss like a flower opens, and you’ll have them swooning. —Maren Larsen, podcast producer

Ocean of Sound, by David Toop

Experimental musician, sound artist, and author David Toop first published Ocean of Sound in 1995. On its face, this work is marketed as a history of ambient music—a misleading and limiting label. In 2023, when most of us hear the term “ambient,” we jump straight to the relaxing musical genre, pioneered by Brian Eno and now delivered to us through YouTube algorithms, Spotify playlists, and sleep apps. Ambient sound, as presented by Toop, encompasses a much wider range of experience.

When we listen to music, we aren’t just hearing a performance, or a recording. We hear the room we’re in, the sounds of traffic outside, the people around us, even our own movements. The entire soundscape dictates our experience. Framed this way, Toop takes us through an array of anecdotes, interviews, and personal accounts, spanning through Javanese Gamelan music, free jazz, nature recordings, and nineties rave “chill-out” rooms (and yes, there’s some Brian Eno in there as well). His unstructured writing style mirrors the subject appropriately, though the free-flowing association of topics can be disorienting until you get where he’s going.

Some of the book’s early-internet utopian attitude has aged poorly (Toop addresses this in his author’s note in a new edition). But other observations about technology’s influence on our sonic lives feel even more true today than they did then. Taken as a product of its time, Ocean of Sound is one of the most extraordinary works of music writing I’ve ever read. —Jonathan Ver Steegh, digital production manager

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

The first book I read this year was Yiyun Li’s fantastic novel��The Book of Goose. It centers on two young girls, Fabienne and��Agnès, who live in rural France in the 1950s. Fabienne is the more domineering one in their friendship, and she convinces Agnès that the two of them should write a book together, as a sort of prank to entertain themselves. Agnès agrees to be the public face of the project, and the book becomes an unexpected success, catapulting her into an improbable life of literary stardom.��The Book of Goose explores their intense and complicated friendship over the many years that followed, told from Agnès’��perspective as an adult after she’s learned that Fabienne has died. There’s a lot of darkness in this book, but it turned out to be one of the best I’ve read in a long time. —Molly Mirhashem, digital executive editor

How We Learned

Khan Academy

I was a poor student when it came to physics and math—I wasn’t especially good at either of them, and had an inkling even in high school that they were probably not going to feature prominently in my career path. I survived both subjects with good enough grades to make it through school, then promised myself I’d never think about calculus again. Fast-forward to adulthood, and I’ve started to appreciate how critical physics and math are to understanding the world around me. The problem: I’m still terrible at both.

I’ve been taking remedial classes with Khan Academy, an educational non-profit that’s been making tutoring videos about everything from astronomy to American history since 2008. The lessons are simple, straightforward, and easy to follow along with. At night, it’s taken the place of Netflix in my routine; there’s something fulfilling about going to bed having learned something, instead of just having consumed whatever whatever the algorithm told me to watch. I’m working my way through the series on stars, black holes, and galaxies; once that’s done, I’ll grit my teeth and take my first swing at integral calculus since I was 18. —Adam Roy, executive editor, Backpacker

Korean American, by Eric Kim

In my eyes, the best cookbooks both make you want to cook and are eminently readable. This one by Eric Kim is one part memoir and three parts recipes, but the whole thing is a love letter to his upbringing in Atlanta, from his mother Jean’s kitchen to the local White Windmill Korean bakery chain. The food is interspersed with essays and snapshots from his family experience around food, be it fishing trips to North Carolina with his uncle or how his mother cooked on weeknights. Kim unapologetically fuses together his experienced food cultures into tantalizing and unexpected recipes (with mesmerizingly saturated photos) like gochugaru shrimp with roasted seaweed grits, kimchi-braised short ribs with pasta, and even “Judy’s Empanadas” which are a riff on a recipe his mom got from another Korean immigrant, who came to the states by way of South America. I know I’m inspired because I spent a small fortune at the local Asian market to get the necessary pastes, sauces, and spices to cook the recipes. I also bookmarked about 80 percent of said recipes as I read the book front to back. And, the kicker: I also have five pounds of salty, sour, sweet, fishy kimchi fermenting in the fridge. —Will Taylor, gear director

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Search “weather” in the App Store and you’ll be bombarded with an endless scroll of options—from radar imagery��good enough for meteorologists to an app that shows you a different picture of a kitten every time you check the weather. Seriously. Weather kittens.

But if you’re using your smartphone to plan an adventure, survive extreme weather, or even just figure out when you should walk the dog, you’re going to need more than just cute kittens. We spent a month testing dozens of weather apps on our smartphones in a variety of scenarios. I used them to plan hikes and bike rides in the mountains and surf sessions on the coast in an attempt to separate the good from the bad. And I learned a few things in the process.

Tips to Pick the Best Weather App

Here are four things to keep in mind when you’re picking your next weather app, followed by our favorite WApps (that’s weather+apps) at the moment.

1. Radar is Everything

Forecasts are fine and dandy, but I don’t trust any forecast, especially in the mountains,��without also being able to see up-to-date radar. Seeing is believing. The best apps give you radar imaging that’s current within the last five minutes. A couple will give you a “future-cast” that predicts the track of the storm over the next 30 minutes to an hour.

2. User-Created Input Is Fun, but Not Reliable

More apps are allowing users to input the weather around them to help dial in the immediate forecast in your area. There’s something satisfying about being able to report the conditions near you, but this user-generated info isn’t terribly useful, particularly in under-populated areas.

3. The World Is Bigger Than You. So Is the Weather.

Most weather apps focus on hyper local forecasting—what’s happening where you are right now. It’s helpful, but the best apps also give you a broader sense of the weather in the region so you know how your hyper-local forecast fits into the big picture. This info helps you forecast your local conditions beyond the next hour or two.

4. No Good Weather App Works Offline

You can’t cache weather data because weather data is constantly changing. Like every single minute. The best apps are updated constantly with new radar images and forecasts, so if you don’t have a solid connection, they’re not going to do you any good. So remember in the backcountry, red sky at night…

4 Best Weather Apps Worth Your Time

Weather Underground (Free, iOS��and Android)

How It Works

Most weather apps worth your data plan use ’s radar data, (a network of next-generation radar stations operated by the National Weather Service), and . But the app also uses a network of personal weather stations that are 200,000 strong worldwide. Each of those stations has a suite of weather-measuring instruments that gauge temperature, humidity, pressure, rain fall, and wind speed,��and direction. So you get trustworthy radar imaging and real time reports from the station closest to your location.

Our Take

WU is the most comprehensive app we tested. It gives you a super-detailed hourly forecast as well as a look at the week ahead. You get radar imaging, but also a layer that shows the projected path of each storm around you so you can tell if that red and yellow blob is coming your way. If you add Storm, a separate app from WU, you can get their FutureCast radar, which shows you the projected path of the storm over the next five hours.

Our Favorite Feature

First light/last light. Plenty of apps tell you when the sun will rise and set, but WU tells you what you really need to know—when it will actually get dark, which is key if you’re out on a ride and wondering if you have time for a few extra miles.

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Dark Sky��($3.99, iOS and Android)

How It Works

pulls data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s network of 140 radar stations spread across the U.S. but then uses some fancy math to forecast hyper-local weather. Their theory: while weather in a broad sense can be chaotic, you can see and predict patterns on a smaller, local level. The app also uses your phone’s pressure sensors to generate more local forecasts through a “report” feature allowing you to contribute data straight from your phone. The forecasts still rely on the NOAA radars, but the user reports add another layer of on-the-ground��data.

Our Take

Dark Sky focuses on the here and now, so most of the data you get focuses on the next hour of weather in your area. There’s an extended forecast, but it’s pretty basic. Get this app if you want to know if it’s going to rain in the next hour. They’ll tell you what minute it’s going to rain and how hard. And it proved to be pretty accurate, forecasting rain on a number of occasions within a reasonable margin of error.

Our Favorite Feature

The global radar.��Dark Sky has a slick global view that shows you broad weather patterns all over the world. Zoom in and you can see your country, your state, your town:��I like being able to see how the weather in my backyard is part of a bigger system.

��

RainAware��($4.99, iOS��and Android)

How It Works

Much like DarkSky, is focused on hyper-local, short term forecasting, which it calls “nowcasting.” The app pulls data from radars, satellites and surface stations and “extrapolates areas of precipitation to your location.” In other words, it predicts the path of local storms. Open the app and you get a detailed view of your weather over the next three hours. If it’s going to rain, the app tells you when and for how long. It also gives you a more general forecast for the next 24 hours, as well as a seven day forecast and up-to-date radar imagery.

Our Take: I like the detail on the radar imagery, which gives you the track of the storm up to a minute prior to opening the app. I also like how the app is constantly updating the forecast based on the movement of the storm. The forecasting proved to be as accurate, if not more accurate, than DarkSky. But there’s no magic here—any meteorologist will tell you that forecasting immediate weather is relatively straight forward. Forecasting weather days in the future is when it gets tricky.

Our Favorite Feature: Rain spotting. RainAware��focuses on what’s��happening in your location in the next three hours, but the app can��also tell��you where the nearest rain is falling when you open the app. It’s handy if you’re planning a trip or tracking a storm.

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Bonus for Weather Geeks: RadarScope��($9.99, iOS)

If you really want to geek out on radar, spend the extra cash for , which gives you NEXRAD Level 3 and “Super resolution” radar data—the highest level of radar detail you’ll find for a smart phone. Private pilots use this app to navigate around storms. It’s overkill if you’re just looking for a weather app to tell you if it’s gonna rain in the next hour, but if you really want to get into reflectivity, velocity,��and dual-polarization, RadarScope is the app for you.

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There’s nothing quite like leaving the office on Friday evening, jumping into a car with all your gear, and heading out for a weekend in the woods. In theory, camping trips are simple. You don’t need much, and you can keep most of your regular kit packed and ready to go.

In practice, however, getting away is rarely simple. You have to figure out where to camp, what the fees and regulations are, and what the weather will be like, among other concerns. Thankfully, there are apps for that. Here are a few of our favorites.

The Best Camping Apps for an ���ϳԹ��� Assist

Best For Finding a Designated Campsite: Recreation.gov

This go-to app has an exhaustive database of campgrounds around the country, from RV to tent sites. Just plug in the area you’re visiting and your arrival and departure dates, and the app produces a map with pins denoting nearby campsites. (You can manually select specific towns or cities or use location tracking to auto-populate sites in the surrounding area. The app chooses a mileage radius, which is not adjustable.) Blue pins signify available campsites, and yellow pins mark campsites that are booked. You can call an agent or make a reservation online from within the app.

Best For Boondocking Beta: Campendium

Camping for free is great but often involves a lot of shooting in the dark. It’s easy to pick a national forest or tract of BLM land on a map, but you never really know what you’re going to find. Campendium makes the process a bit easier. The app’s database includes information about cell service, site size, and amenities like toilets or RV hookups. You can also filter destinations by elevation, get detailed trail maps, and more. The comments section is a cache of more specific information based on people’s experiences staying at each site—like whether there’s space to turn around a large vehicle, if the road is in good condition, or whether you’ll experience crowds.

Best for Weather Reports: MyRadar

How many times have you seen rain in the forecast and packed up camp, only for it to merely drizzle? Or chosen an exposed campsite for the beautiful views and been rocked all night by heavy wind? MyRadar provides detailed weather data to help you avoid such trip-ruining mishaps. Like other weather apps, it gives you an hourly and weekly forecast, but it also shows you the direction, speed, and severity of impending storms, wind, temperature swings, wildfires, and even earthquakes through an interactive map. (You can turn all these filters on or off as needed, like if, say, you’re not camping on an active fault line.) A $7 upgrade gets you access to detailed information from 150-plus individual radar sites that provide the aggregated satellite weather reading. That upgrade also gets you ad-free app usage, Apple Watch compatibility, and a hurricane tracker.

Best for Staying Organized: PackPoint

Between the camp kitchen, food, hiking gear, fishing gear, bikes, and first-aid kit, there’s a lot of equipment to keep track of when prepping for a camping trip. Enter PackPoint, which lets you create different lists for certain types of trips—like separate “camping ” and “hut trip” lists—and then populate each with activities or categories such as food, clothing, and toiletries. Add items to each, specify a quantity (three pairs of socks, two six-packs), and then click the check box once the item is accounted for. The app is free, but upgrading to the premium version ($3 per year) let’s you share your list with others, sync across your devices, and further customize your lists (great for type-A packers).

Best for Stargazing: Night Sky

Outsource constellation-remembering duties to this app (no, not you, Siri). Use your phone’s compass to line up the screen with what you’re looking at in real life—be it a star, planet, or satellite—then click on each constellation for a mini astronomy lesson. Night Sky can also help you search for a specific constellation. Nightly stargazing reports tell you what will be visible that evening and (also key) where to find a spot with minimal light pollution for optimal viewing. The app is free, but $2 per month gets you augmented-reality tours of planets and moons.

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I am a high-level snowboarder but a relatively new skier. The sum total of my experience: two half-day lessons three years ago, and then another half-day two years ago. So when I was offered the chance to try , a program that uses sensor-equipped insoles to give you digital ski coaching, I said sure. Nowhere to go but up.

The device ($149 for the device and basic analysis functions, plus a $199 annual subscription for the more detailed coaching services) consists of an insole with a long, thin wire running up to a small, rectangular battery pack that clips onto the outside of your ski boot. A whopping 36 sensors per foot measure exactly how much pressure you’re putting on your ski and how that pressure breaks down across your foot. Meanwhile, the battery pack is also equipped with an accelerometer and gyroscope to track things like speed and angular velocity, plus a Bluetooth radio chip that sends all that information to an app.

The app then translates all that combined data to show you exactly how each of your ski boots is oriented in space, where and how hard you’re pressuring each ski, how well you’re initiating each turn, and to what degree you’re getting your skis on edge. That information gets tallied up to calculate what Carv calls Ski:IQ, a zero-to-165 scale for categorizing your skiing ability. In addition to that score, the data-based app identifies your biggest deficiencies and then gives you one or two tips to improve, either at the end of each run or turn by turn. For every tip, there’s an accompanying video you can watch on the chairlift back up. The videos feature high-level coaches like Tom Waddington, Tomass Marnics, and Tom Gellie��and are easy to follow. In other words, it’s basically like having a tiny ski coach inside your boot who sees and feels everything.

The Test

I spent��two days testing the system—one day at Buttermilk and one at Snowmass. First, the app advised me to spend my first few runs in Free Ski mode with the audio coach turned off. Basically, you just ski without any feedback so the system can establish a baseline. My baseline Ski:IQ was pretty terrible: in the 50 to 55 range, which put me squarely at the bottom of Level 1. After that, I turned on the audio coach and things started to change.

Each run is automatically broken up by the individually named segments—that is, the trails—at any given resort. (Carv comes preloaded with more than 1,000 resort maps.) After each run or segment, the audio coach would tell me my new Ski:IQ and offer me one tip to make the biggest difference. My biggest problem, it seemed, was that I wasn’t fully finishing my turns. The audio coach advised me to finish by really pressing through my heels, as if I were trying to “push them through some heavy sand.” The image worked. Quickly, I felt more control and better able to carry speed into the next turn. My numbers started improving, as did my confidence.

Over the course of the next couple days I would get digital advice on my edge pressure, how long to draw out my turns, how to shift my weight from edge to edge, and how to rotate my hips properly. I also played with some of the training modes, which focus on one specific skill and give you audio feedback on a turn-by-turn basis as you go. There are such modes for carving, pivot slips, outside-edge ski turns, and balance. Next, I tried the Edge Angle Challenge mode, which directs you to drive through your knees to really get your skis up on edge.

The Verdict

By day two I’d gone from barely picking my way down green runs to charging blues at speeds above 33 miles per hour (yes, the app measures that, too). Toward the end of my second day, I flew down my final runs back in Free Ski mode with my Ski:IQ scores now in the upper eighties, which I was told was a huge improvement for a day and a half. Ultimately, I didn’t really care about the numbers—this was the first time I was really having fun on skis.

That day, a surprise storm dumped knee-deep powder. Normally that would send me running for my snowboard—which I did after lunch—but I wasn’t ready to do so right away. Carv had gotten me to a level where I was able to get down some steep, lumpy, powder-covered blues and come out hooting and hollering. It wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t objectively suck.

Now, for the first time in my life, when someone asks me if I can ski, I can just say yes.

Note that to get all of the digital coaching, training videos, and detailed metrics, you need to buy a membership, which costs $199 a year on top of the $149 base cost for the Carv system. That might sound steep, but consider how expensive ski lessons are: often hundreds just for one day. I’m glad I had a human instructor for my very first ski lesson all those years ago, but even the best ski coach can’t see every single turn, and they certainly can’t feel what’s going on inside your boot. I found that nuanced information really helped me level up beyond the foundational skills I’d learned through in-person instruction.

I think there’s also a lot of benefit in combining Carv with a traditional ski lesson. The metrics this technology provides can give your instructor a lot of insight into how you’re skiing and may help them steer you in the right direction for faster progress.

Since my testing in December I’ve recommended Carv to a bunch of different friends who, like me, are new to skiing. Several have reported positive experiences and dramatic improvement. That being said, I haven’t yet recommended it to any of the good skiers I know, because, frankly, I’m not qualified to. Thankfully, an expert skier also volunteered to test Carv technology for ���ϳԹ���.

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Something surprising is happening on the video app best known for silly dance moves: users are finding inspiration for adventure. There are some fundamental differences in the way TikTok works that make it stand out from other social media platforms, and those differences may make it a space that’s more prone to bringing different kinds of people together to try new things. Camping. Hiking. International travel. It’s no utopia—like other social apps, TikTok has been called out for causing harm to younger users and spreading misinformation—but there’s a unique energy here that can be a force of good.

This episode is brought to you by ���ϳԹ��� Learn, a new online education hub loaded with instructional courses guided by best-in-class experts, like climber-filmmaker Jimmy Chin. See our growing list of offerings at .

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I’m biking as fast as I can down a mile-long ribbon of singletrack in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, navigating roots, lips, a miniature rock garden, and an abundance of turns—everything from big, swooping corners and twisty hairpins to fall-away berms. My breathing is heavy as I try to maintain my pace. When I arrive at the bottom, I check my time: a solid three minutes and 13 seconds, for an average speed of 17.8 miles per hour. But I want to go faster. And in a week or so, I absolutely expect to.

The day before, I downloaded , an app that lets duffers like me get personalized tips and advice from world-class athletes and coaches. Users upload a 20-second video of themselves doing their activity of choice, then choose an expert to work with. The app can connect you to professionals in a range of different sports, including Alex Ferreira, a freestyle skier who won silver at the 2018 Olympics; Steven Nyman, a veteran World Cup ski racer and Olympian; and Shaun Murray, a member of the Wakeboarding Hall of Fame. Ask a question, and before long they respond with advice. The average price for a two-and-half-minute instructional video? Twenty bucks.

Using video for remote coaching is by no means a novel idea. For more than a decade, elite tennis players, golfers, and track and field athletes have relied on it to improve their serve, swing, or stride. In the past few years, video-analysis tools from online platforms such as and have made the process even easier. Then, last year, Willie Ford, formerly of the helmet and goggles manufacturer POC, saw an opportunity to deliver the same kind of instruction to amateur athletes. The result was Givego. “It lets anybody have cheap, easy access to coaching, and at the same time provides income to struggling professional athletes, helping offset training and travel costs,” Ford says.

To get started, I uploaded a video of myself riding to the Givego app and then connected with my coach, Lea Davison, a two-time Olympic mountain biker and world champion medalist. I wanted some tips to help with my downhill cornering. “You have picked the hardest and most complicated skill in mountain biking to improve on,” Davison responded. “Every mountain biker can always improve their cornering.”

She went to work on my clip like a Monday Night Football analyst, freeze-framing the footage and drawing circles and arrows to help explain what was going wrong. Basically, I needed to do a better job of tilting my bike from side to side as I rode. I asked Davison if she could offer a progression of moves to practice. She sent me to a soccer field (a safe place to crash) and told me to tilt the bike with each pedal stroke until the saddle hit the inside of my leg. “The arm on the outside of the turn should be at 90 degrees,” she said. “The arm on the inside should be straight.” It was great to have a specific drill to work on.

My sole complaint about Givego is that you are allowed only a single follow-up question, and no longer than 250 characters. But it’s better than nothing. “Online coaching isn’t a cure-all, nor is improving performance always a straightforward matter of getting feedback from an expert,” says Blake Bennett, a professor at the University of Auckland who specializes in coaching. “But having an opportunity to get a few minutes of targeted advice can be helpful.”

I practiced cornering for a week and felt like things were starting to click. So I decided to record a second video and send it to Davison. “I do see some improvement,” she replied, noting that my outside-arm angle was closer to 90 degrees and my inside arm was more properly extended. But was I faster? I headed back to the trail and booked it. My time: two minutes and 53 seconds, for an average speed of 19.9 miles per hour. I liked how I felt on the bike and was pleased with my progress. What’s more, getting better is addictive. I look forward to uploading another video and trying again.

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I have this terrible fear of death. Not my death, but my loved ones’. Whenever they leave the house and go on adventures, vivid visions of car crashes and climbing accidents wiggle their way deep into my brain.

It wasn’t until I was 30 that I learned not everyone thinks like this. My partner at the time was a worry-free skier, climber, and biker who would often put his phone on airplane mode before heading into the mountains. As soon as the sun would set, I’d wait, my mind frantic, desperate to feel the vibration of a text message. Does he have a headlamp? Shouldn’t he be finished with his tour? I’d pull up the local avalanche-center reports and check for news of any accidents. I’d pace around my house, unable to focus on simple tasks and wondering how soon I could call search and rescue.

Backcountry recreators have used GPS devices for years to share their locations with loved ones. But it was rare that people could watch the comings and goings of their partners on screen at any given moment. That changed in the last couple of years with the iPhone—today, many of my friends seem perfectly happy to use it in their daily lives, for reasons beyond safety concerns. “I always thought I wouldn’t like it, but now my husband and I use it. It just cuts down on the ‘when will you be home’ texts and makes me feel better when he’s mountain biking,” says my friend Kasey.

However, others feel it is an overreach, an invasion of privacy. “My wife and I don’t use it. We had both been in relationships in the past where we shared locations, and we both felt it became toxic and unnecessary,” explains another of my friends, who asked to stay anonymous.

For me, it was a crutch to avoid working on underlying issues, both personal and relational.

My anxiety started off benign enough, confined to the realm of my partner’s risky outdoor excursions and long-distance drives. But it soon grew to occupy space in my daily thoughts. I’d constantly plead as he walked out the door to text me when he arrived at his destination. He was a good sport, but the incessant worrying and need for communication weighed on him. He went outside to get away from technology, not check in with his overly anxious girlfriend six times a day. And he knew he was bad at it. So one day, he turned on his iPhone tracking—indefinitely. A wave of relief washed over me. If my mind flashed to a tragic scene, I’d just take out my phone. Instant fix.

But in the weeks that followed, I found myself checking just because, even when I didn’t fear for his well-being. I found comfort as the map readjusted to his current location, visualizing him on the trail or at a red light, his little white and blue initials a sign that his physical body was intact. Though it felt unhealthy even at the time, I didn’t know how else to temper my obsessive thoughts. Logically, I knew my partner would be OK. As a former backpacking guide with wilderness medical training, I always felt confident in my ability to improvise in any outdoor situation, and I trusted my partner’s competency, too.

But location sharing was a Band-Aid for my overactive imagination; it gave me enough information to fill the gaps of the unknown—until it couldn’t. To me, Washington seemed like one of the states with the worst cell reception; when my partner would ride his bike under a thick canopy of ancient trees, I’d be left with my phone in hand, helpless and unable to pinpoint his exact location. These out-of-service adventures were a crucial part of our lifestyles—both together and separately—so I couldn’t ask him to reorganize his life to indulge my anxiety. He already felt he was sacrificing personal freedom by regularly updating me on his status before he even started sharing his location.

During that relationship, I learned about attachment styles, using internet surveys to self-diagnose my tilt toward anxious attachment. At first, I didn’t understand. Anxious attachment often coincides with jealousy or abandonment, even lingering childhood trauma. This was just my strange, deep-seated fear of loss. But the more I learned about the anxious tendencies, like struggling with impulse control, the more it resonated. Instead of embracing the unknown, I was becoming dependent on constant access to information. For me, part of the joy I feel in the backcountry is the uncertainty and potential in every outing. So why was I using a technology that made me uncomfortable with that?

“There aren’t studies yet about how location sharing affects relationships,” says Tess Rafferty, a marriage and family therapist based in New York. “There’s so much that remains to be seen.” But her stance never wavered when I talked to her: what looks healthy for one couple may not be for another. “We want to feel safe and secure in relationships. How each couple creates that safety differs.” For many of my friends, location sharing provides a sense of well-being because their partners know where they are when they go for a run or bike ride. And this boost of reassurance has allowed many people to embrace solo adventures. But while couples can use location sharing as a tool, it isn’t right for every relationship. “In my case,” I probed Rafferty, “do you think the location sharing was unhealthy?” She smiled and put her hands over her heart, “I think you know the answer for yourself.”

And she was right. I didn’t want to just cover up my anxiety, I wanted to manage it. Dozens of motivational quotes tell us that is discomfort is where growth happens—I’ve repeated this platitude to my backpacking clients and friends while scrambling a ridgeline or taking off our hiking boots to ford an ice-cold river.

Now it’s my turn to lean into the type-two��fun. Even though my partner and I are no longer together, I haven’t asked any new partners or friends to share their locations, except for one-off instances, like long bike trips or when buying a car from a stranger. At times, my anxiety rages back and my mind wanders into dark thoughts about avalanches or rockfalls. Instead of refreshing the map, I lace up my shoes, hop in my car, and drive out of cell reception. The sun is high overhead and the sagebrush shimmers on the hills while I unload my bike. As my tires roll across the dirt, my breath eases into a rhythm and my thoughts start to clear. With each stroke of the pedal, I feel more like myself. Someday, I may choose to share my own location with a partner and enjoy the comfort of knowing they can find me. But for now, I have a bit of work to do to get there.

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