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

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

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

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

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

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

I imagine having to write a book about the experience pushed Al to try to dig up interesting things about each grid square he explored—which, in my reading, often resulted in me looking up from the book and saying to Hilary, “Did you know 
” And it reminded me of some of the best tour guides I’ve met on trips, who remain enthusiastic after repeating the same facts and figures hundreds of times—or my sister-in-law’s father, John, who has lived in the same town in Wisconsin for almost his entire life and seems to have a million pieces of local trivia ready at all times. And how last year I traveled to a spot very close to my hometown’s , but still hadn’t read the goddamn signs on the riverfront path I’m on five times a week.

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

Several years ago, at an American adventure film festival, I saw a film of an expedition to climb a mountain in a country halfway around the world. In one scene, as the team of climbers slogged onward and upward through the jungle under ridiculously heavy backpacks, they passed through a village and a few local children and adults watched them. The characters in the film were of course far from home, very “out there” in many ways, and struggling against great odds for a goal and a story about trying to reach that goal. But to the people who lived in the village, it was just Wednesday. Maybe a notable Wednesday, since these weird people with colorful clothing and backpacks were passing through, and that didn’t happen every Wednesday. But I found myself thinking more of the contrast: Eight people having a capital-A adventure within ten feet of other people sitting in their front yards. Which is something that never happens in my neighborhood, because people don’t fly halfway around the world to climb the mountains near my house.

But should you have to spend several days and thousands of dollars traveling to have an interesting experience? Seems a little elitist, doesn’t it?

My friend Forest and I have spent time together in many beautiful places, usually as photographer (him) and writer (me). I have picked up a handful of camera tricks from him over the years, but have no illusions about switching careers to photography. I asked him one time to tell me how I could improve my photography, based on what he’d seen, and he gently suggested that I should try to get closer. Of course he was right—I always default to the “tiny person in huge landscape” shot, which is easy for me to see and feel (we’re so small out there!), but hard to replicate without a long lens. Being able to look closer, to zoom in, is something I still struggle with, literally in photography and metaphorically in life. Isn’t it harder to experience wonder the closer you are to where you live and work and get stuck in traffic and take out the trash, or is that just me? I aspire to be someone who can find wonder anywhere.

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

Another paragraph from the introduction of Local:

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

Of course I love to travel, and some of my favorite places in the world are special because the first time I visited, a friend who lived there showed me around. And tour guides are great, but nothing beats someone who is enthusiastic about where they live, because they’ve paid attention to it and don’t mind sharing it with someone else. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to do some research on this streetcar we used to have here in the early 1900s, so I can tell visiting friends about it for the next decade.

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

ÌęÌęÌę

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I’ve read more books on climate action than I can count. So I don’t say this lightly: I’m obsessed with the one I just finished, byÌęAyana Elizabeth Johnson.

In it, Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit think-tank , conducts interviews with 20 experts in everything from finance to farming to film and asks them to imagine what a replenished and healthy world might look like if we use the collective wisdom we already have to combat climate change.

I read this book in mid–November, right after the 2024 presidential election, and I was pretty gripped with climate anxiety.

This is not another preachy enviro-book. It’s not pushing hope for hope’s sake down our throats. Instead, it spotlights innovative solutions that are already working—like an increased reliance on renewable energy, greening up transportation and buildings, regenerative agriculture, and reducing food waste—and urges us to consider the possibilities when these things scale. Interspersed throughout the interviews are lists of jaw dropping facts, poems, and essays. And plenty of calls to action.

There was one paragraph that really hit me. In her interview with Paola Antonelli, senior curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Johnson asks her a question that recurs throughout the book: “How can we be part of the solutions we need? Is there a call to action?”

“The call to action is really to be better humans,” Antonelli says. “I don’t know how else to put it. Be better humans by understanding that we live for others. Otherwise we don’t have much reason to live. And when I say ‘others,’ I mean also the rest of the environment, all creatures and things. The answer is love.”

I decided to reach out to Johnson for a climate pep talk. The book hit shelves in September 2024, and we’ve had a presidential election—and a lot of global unrest—since then. I was curious how Johnson felt now, and whether her attitude or ideas had shifted with the socioeconomic and political tides. Plus, I just really didn’t want the book to end. Johnson’s casual, conversational style of writing left me feeling like we were already friends and hoped I could glean even more insight from one of the most exciting minds in the climate movement.

OUTSIDE: Talk me off the ledge: the book’s premiseÌęponders what theÌęworld would look like if we get climate action right. But can we actually get it right? In the time that we have? How?Ìę

JOHNSON: I have a lot of angsty journalists on my calendar right now and I’m just like, at what point did I become everyone’s climate shrink? How did I become the pep talker? It’s sort of funny because I am decisively not an optimist. I’m well aware that this climate scenario could very easily go even further off the rails. But it has literally never occurred to me that we should give up because that’s absurd, right? You don’t give up on life on earth.

And so it just always comes back to the question of what can we do to make it better? Because not trying is not an option. I was raised by two people who were in various small ways active in the movement for civil rights. At no point did people in that movement say, “This is too hard. Let’s just give up and be unequal forever.”

Sometimes I think there are a lot of people out there who are just quitters when it comes to climate change. They think the odds are too long and they’ll be gone anyway. But that’s a very weak and sad response.

Part of the problem is that we’ve been told that we have to stop or solve climate change. And those verbs are clearly delusional because we can’t solve it and we can’t stop it. But we can make things much better than they otherwise would have been if we didn’t try.

People just need to roll up their sleeves and get their heads in the game. I don’t really know what to say about the anxiety that most people are feeling except to say this: you will feel a hell of aÌęlot better if you’re doing something about it.

Most of the people reading this interview care and want to take action. But unfortunately there are so many who don’t, who just go about their lives, and intentionally or unintentionally don’t think about what the world will look like in 50 years. What would you say to them? Wake up! As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution,Ìęyou’re part of the problem.

You use a Venn diagram exercise to help people find their niche in the climate movement. Can you explain how it works? To ensure a livable future on this planet, we need to move beyond the platitudes of reduce, reuse, recycle. There is no one person or one entity that can fix this problem. We need to create a culture where everyone has a role to play. Are we gonna put our heads in the sand or pitch in?

The Climate Action Venn Diagram is a tool that helps everyone find their unique role by finding the intersection of three questions. 1) What brings you joy? 2) What are you good at? 3) What work needs doing?

The book is the result of my Venn diagram.

The Biden-Harris administration has arguably taken more climate action than any in history. A lot of environmentalists are bummed—even scared—about the results of the recent presidential election. You wrote the book before it happened. How did the election impact you personally and how will it impact your work and message moving forward? The last Trump administration rolled back well over 100 environmental protections and we don’t want that to happen again. In this current environment, I think we may need to do some reframing. We may get more traction if we talk less about “climate change” but keep pushing on the solutions. For example, there may be some openings in just the basics like the government protecting clean air and clean water, and we can reframe a lot of climate stuff in those terms because all Americans care about that.Ìę

When you feel like you’re banging your head against the wall, stop doing what you’re doing and find a different way. Because if yelling climate facts at people was enough, we would have solved this already, right?

I also think it will be really hard for the Trump administration to turn its back on the economic benefits we’ve seen from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Especially when so many red states are benefitting the most. Texas and Iowa lead the nation on wind energy. Not because they’re a bunch of hippies but because the finances just make sense. As of 2022, the clean energy sector employs more than 3.3 million people, over three times more than fossil fuels.

My reaction to this election was OK, what does this mean for me and my work? My answer, after reevaluating all my projects: I just need to double down. That includes focusing on what city governments can do to adapt to climate change, via my think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and supporting the next generation of climate leaders through teaching at Bowdoin college, and consulting with corporations that are trying to get it right since the federal government isn’t adequately regulating their climate impacts.

But overall, the role that I see for myself in climate work is to welcome more people into it. We need way more people working on climate solutions. So how can I help people get creative and find their own personal approach?

Was your book tour, which really wasn’t a book tour in the traditional sense, part of that approach? Yes, the Climate Variety Show, which we put on in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Portland, Maine, was born out of my own complete lack of desire to read my book aloud in bookstores across the country. What could be more boring? People are already bored of climate change, so how do I entice people in? I feel like there are things we haven’t tried yet as far as communications and influencing our friends and family.

So the was all about taking climate seriously without taking ourselves seriously. It was basically like a high school talent show—comedy, dancing, hula-hooping, poetry, games, music, puppets, and magic all mashed up into an evening of delightful chaos.

And everyone there filled out their Climate Action Venn Diagram in real time. If you want to get a sense of what it was like, you can hear audio clips in and see a in my Substack newsletter.

In What If We Get It Right?, you end each chapter by asking your interviewee the top three things they wish everyone knew about their particular area of expertise. So I’d like to ask you: What are the top three things you want everyone to know about your book?

1. It’s quite a fun, spirited read. I’ve been told the vibe of the book is like eavesdropping at a dinner party with me and 20 dear friends and colleagues, because the book includes interviews with these brilliant folks who are showing the way forward to their “visions of climate futures,” as the subtitle puts it. And if you listen to the audiobook, you get to actually hear these conversations.
2. There’s magnificent art and poetry mixed in.
3. I envisioned this book as something that people would read and discuss together, so, for book clubs and teachers, I made .

Oh! And as a bonus, the very last page has , which I spent an inordinate amount of time putting together and includes anthems for victory, love songs to Earth, tunes for tenacity, and sexy implementation vibes.

Kristin Hostetter is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s sustainability columnist. This column is the result of a similar Venn diagram exercise she did several years ago when she became a founding member of the . Follow her journey to live more sustainably by for her twice-monthly newsletter.

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Paige McClanahan, a journalist and travel writer, is much too diplomatic to phrase it this way, so allow me to be the grump: you’re the reason locals so often dislike tourists.

“Travel has become a consumerist exercise where the goal is to get our money’s worth out of a place,” McClanahan says in a phone interview from her home in France. “We need to wake up. Paris owes you nothing.”

The tourist-local tension has been around since before Marco Polo, but in her debut book, , McClanahan shows us just how bad things have gotten. Globally, travelers will log some 1.5 billion trips abroad by the end of 2024—the largest movement of people the planet has ever seen. In a handful of years, that number could reach 1.8 billion. Closer to home, Americans are on track to take almost two billion domestic leisure trips annually by 2025. Despite the buzz around mindful experiences and sustainable travel, locals from Athens to Zermatt have had enough of us. Some Hawaiians have requested that we stay home. Romans fine tourists up to $280 for clogging the Spanish Steps. In July, an annoyed mob roamed Barcelona’s boulevards dousing visitors with squirt guns.

McClanahan, who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, has plugged her journalistic pen into this bursting dike with empathy, not by shaming or lecturing anyone. Nor does she ask people to stay put, which would be detrimental to conservation work, prosperity, and cultural bridge building. Instead, McClanahan uses the voices of locals adversely affected by tourism to inspire us to travel with more curiosity, humility, and appreciation for how our holiday can be hell on the climate and local residents. Above all, she wants us to know that we have the power to make travel a force for good.

This elevated mindset is the hallmark of the new tourist. Becoming one isn’t hard. It means visiting Iceland in the off-season or trading the line at the Louvre for a Paris Noir walking tour to soak up the city’s Black history. You can control your partying in Amsterdam and stay behind the fence at the Grand Canyon. You can insist on supporting local guides and locally owned hotels, restaurants, and food carts. (The Barcelona mob targeted people eating at a Taco Bell, among other spots.)

“Even if you’re a low-budget traveler, you can still be a high-value visitor,” McClanahan says.

McClanahan, who left the United States at age 26 and has spent the past 17 years writing from Africa and Europe, admits that she has made plenty of old-tourist mistakes—like posting a self-serving Instagram reel from Angkor Wat that barely showed Angkor Wat. “I live in a glass house,” she says.

McClanahan casts no aspersions on the types of trips you like but does bristle at people who consider themselves “travelers” and not tourists. “I don’t deny that people travel for a huge range of reasons, some higher-minded than others,” she writes in The New Tourist. “So, sure, call yourself a traveler but never forget you’re a tourist, too.” What matters is that we make informed decisions on how to travel in ways that put places and the people who live there first.

“One of the most constructive things we can do in our flickering moment of life is to embrace the chance to leave our comfort zones—those dangerous lairs where we learn to languish,” she writes. She adds to me: “None of us can wave a magic wand and change the behavior of millions of other people, but each of us can be that change.”

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Nothing says “winter holidays” to me like the combo of a cold day, a warm fire, a soft couch, and a book. If you’re looking for some couch material—or gift ideas for the endurance people in your life—here are the books I’ve enjoyed most this year that fit with the general themes of Sweat Science.

The Inner Clock, by Lynne Peeples

There’s lots of advice about circadian rhythms floating around the internet these days, some of it useful (be aware of light exposure before bedtime), some of it very much not (). This new book is the definitive take on what scientists currently know about how the circadian system works, how it’s disrupted by the ways we live now, and what we should do about it. Peeples’ reporting is exceptionally thorough (including a week-long stay in a converted missile bunker in Arkansas to experience life in the complete absence of circadian cues), and there were a lot of insights that were new to me: I had no idea, for instance, that in addition to rods and cones we have a third type of photoreceptor in our eyes that helps regulate circadian clocks.

The Norwegian Method, by Brad Culp

It’s the hottest thing in endurance training these days, as I wrote here and here. But beyond buzzwords like “double threshold” and gadgets like lactate meters, what is so-called Norwegian training really about? Culp traces its origins to the days long before Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Kristian Blummenfelt ruled the world, all the way back to… the Vikings! Starting with a deep dive into Norwegian culture, he pieces together a much broader view of the components that have made Norwegian athletes so successful, spanning various sports like rowing, cycling, and running. And as a veteran triathlon journalist, Culp has particularly good access and insights into that world. Definitely worth a read before you start toying around with double thresholds.

To the Limit, by Michael Crawley

Crawley is an anthropologist and 2:20 marathoner whose 2020 book on Ethiopian running, Out of Thin Air, grew out of the 15 months he spent living and training with Ethiopian runners. His new book takes a similar anthropological approach to the broader topic of endurance, seeking to understand why we do what we do and what meaning we derive from it. He travels to Mexico and Nepal, grapples with issues like wearable technology, social media, and climate change, and takes on various endurance challenges of his own, like a bike ride to Scotland. It’s a thoughtful (and sometimes critical) take on the big questions that drift through your mind when you’re out on the trails.

Out of Your Mind, by Jorge Cham and Dwayne Godwin

Grad students and academics are familiar with Jorge Cham’s long-running series, which captures the unique angst of life in the lab. Cham got his PhD in mechanical engineering, and he has teamed up here with neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin to write an accessible (and cartoon-illustrated) primer about the human brain, due to be released in January. There’s no particular overarching thesis here—no radical new theory or brain-optimizing biohack. But you get a nice intro to key ideas about how the brain works and the famous experiments that got us there, organized around questions like “Where Is the Mind?,” “What Are the Limits of Memory?,” and “What Is Consciousness?” If you’ve already read and enjoyed neuroscience books like A Brief History of Intelligence (which I recommended on my summer list), this might be a little too basic for you. But if you’re interested in brain science and unsure where to start, this is a good choice.

The Striker and the Clock, by Georgia Cloepfil

This is a collection of ninety short “chapters,” each a few pages long at most, mirroring the ninety minutes in a soccer game. Together, they tell the nonlinear tale of Cloepfil’s evolving relationship with soccer, which she played growing up, in college, and then professionally for six years in six countries from Australia to Lithuania to South Korea. There are a few different recurring themes, like the cramped horizons facing women who want to devote themselves to sport as adults, and, always in the background, the inexorable passage of time. The book reminded me a lot of Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl: introspective and unflinchingly honest, with sparks of recognition for anyone who has ever gone all-in on a passion.

Scarcity Brain, by Michael Easter

I was a big fan of Easter’s first book, The Comfort Crisis, which argued for the importance of getting out of your comfort zone. (I also love that his newsletter, Two Percent, is named for the fraction of people who take the stairs when there’s an escalator available.) In Scarcity Brain, he takes on a less straightforward problem. What is it in our brains and evolutionary wiring that always makes us want more? Easter pins the blame on “scarcity loops”: the combination of opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability, a nefarious trio that is increasingly (and deliberately) engineered into our modern environment. There’s no simple hack to defeat these scarcity loops, but Easter offers thoughtful reflections on how to feel like you have enough, mixed with gung-ho reporting from casinos in Vegas, jails in Iraq, and the jungle in Bolivia.

Small Game, by Blair Braverman

My family and I got addicted to the survival show Alone a few years ago, so a novel about contestants in a survival show gone wrong getting stranded in the wilderness caught my attention (belatedly: the book came out in 2022). Braverman is a columnist here at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, a seasoned outdoors professional, and, notably, a former contestant on the survival show Naked and Alone (which she wrote about here, though I’d recommend reading the novel first and the real-life experience second). It’s a fun and engaging read, made particularly worthwhile by the reflections on what we’re seeking when we head voluntarily into the wilderness (or watch shows about others doing so).

The Frontrunner, by Brad Fawley

You might think the plot—small-town Kansas boy takes on scientifically trained (and doped) Soviet twins for running supremacy—sounds like an ersatz Rocky IV rip-off. But the plot’s not really the point here. The yardstick against which all running fiction is measured is still John L. Parker Jr.’s 1978 book Once a Runner, which remains beloved not for its plot or character development but for the way it managed to capture the ineffable feeling and essence of serious training and racing. That’s the buzz you get from The Frontrunner—though the plot, to be fair, ends up being more nuanced than my capsule summary suggests. If you’re hungry for more when you finish, try Brian Glanville’s 1969 classic, The Olympian.

The Obvious Choice, by Jonathan Goodman

“Building a business and becoming an online entertainer are different games people play—neither’s better or worse, but problems arise when you conflate the two—playing by the rules of one and desiring the rewards on the other.” That’s the central insight underpinning Goodman’s new book, at least for me. Goodman is a big figure in the personal training world, offering training and software and other services. But he’s also a thoughtful critic of how most of us engage with the online world. If, like many of us, you’re feeling guilty because you have the vague sense you ought to be building a bigger following on social media, The Obvious Choice (which comes out in January) is worth a read.

Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat

I read a few of Mowat’s children’s classics with my kids this year, like The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (and we’ve got Lost in the Barrens on hold at the library). That led us to Never Cry Wolf, the 1963 book about Mowat’s own experiences as a government biologist sent to the Arctic to study the wolves who were supposedly decimating the caribou population, which was later adapted for the 1983 Disney movie of the same name. Mowat’s reputation as a non-fiction writer has taken a hit since then—he “never let the facts get in the way of the truth,” he later acknowledged—but if you keep that caveat in mind, it remains an amazingly entertaining book and a fascinating portrait of northern life and wildlife.

The Explorer’s Gene, by Alex Hutchinson

I’ll finish with an advance plug for my own forthcoming book, The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, which will be released in March. My last book, Endure, tried to figure out what defines our limits and how we push them. This one takes a step back and asks why we push them. Why are we drawn to the unknown? When should we listen to this urge, and when should we ignore it? Why is it so much fun? You can preorder .

Join me on and , sign up for the , and check out my 2023 holiday book round-up for more great reads.

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In 2010, a camping trip to the Sahara opened my eyes to the magic of the night sky. I was a college junior spending the summer abroad in Morocco, and until then I’d never seen the Milky Way, let alone a meteor shower, due to light pollution back in my suburban hometown of Dayton, Ohio. But that night, tucked into a sleeping bag beneath the African desert’s real-life planetarium, I saw them both. The experience opened me up to all the unfathomable marvels of the universe.

In the years since, I’ve built a travel-writing career around my fascination with the moonlit world. Recently, my noctural adventures have included: watching nesting sea turtles with Indigenous guides in Panama, pitching a tent on the Greenland ice sheet in a snowstorm, chasing the northern lights in Iceland, and searching for fluorescent rocks on the shores of Lake Superior—among many other sleepless excursions.

These trips, and many more such outings, fill the pages of my upcoming book, , published by National Geographic and available on December 3. I hope the following three adapted excerpts—some of my favorite experiences—inspire you to skip sleep and soak up the night’s wonders, too.

The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: Ice-Sheet Camping in Greenland

Spend an icy night camping above the Arctic Circle, following in the crampon-carved footsteps of polar explorers on the Greenland ice sheet. It’s a rare and immersive way to admire the world’s second largest expanse of ice, a blustery behemoth that blankets nearly 80 percent of Greenland’s landmass with icy mountains, teal lakes, and a minefield of crevasses and moulins (deep shafts in the ice).

Given the harrowing surroundings, most overnight ice-sheet jaunts are reserved for professional exploration or scientific research teams. But makes the dream possible for more amateur, yet still intrepid, guests. The outfitter’s two-day, one-night camping trip offers a taste of expedition life—but don’t let the short duration fool you. A sleep on the unforgiving 656,000-square-mile sheet of white—an expanse roughly the size of Alaska—is no walk in the park.

On the trip, you and a team of trekkers haul tents, sleeping bags, and fuel for roughly one hour of hiking into the ivory abyss. Once you reach your overnight accommodations—an open patch of ice—it’s time to build camp from the ground up. You’ll crank ice stakes, sort gear, pitch tents, and collect snow to boil for water.ÌęIt’s grueling work, but the sweat’s worth it for quality time with this rare wonder.

Once camp is set, you’ll have the opportunity to hike among ice mounds and pristine cerulean water bodies, aurora hunt (in the spring or fall), and admire the midnight sun come summer. Just as memorable are the deep conversations shared over freeze-dried dinners in Camp Ice Cap’s orange globe mess tent. One topic that’s sure to arise among these fragile landscapes: climate change.

As the news headlines show, Greenland’s ice sheet is ground zero of earth’s shifting climate. The white mass is expected to lose up to 110 trillion tons of ice by 2100—a change that could raise sea levels by a foot. To do its part protecting this natural resource, Camp Ice Cap tour operator Albatros Arctic Circle has a strict Leave No Trace policy. That means everything you bring with you must be carried out.

Each season introduces a different flavor of adventure. Come in the calmer summer months for ice hikes with endless hours of daylight and, on the warmest days, even short dips in meltwater “lakes” (water temperaturess hover slightly above freezing this time of year, but a warm sun can make the quick swim surprisingly refreshing). Visit in the shoulder seasons—spring or fall—for a chance to see auroras. But be prepared for particularly unpredictable and unforgiving weather that time of year. You could have a snowstorm, clear aurora-streaked skies, or both in the same night.

Weather is all part of the Camp Ice Cap adventure, as is the journey to get there in the first place. The trip begins in Kangerlussuaq, located inland in central-west Greenland. This town, home to one of the island’s main international airports, has the only road in Greenland that connects to the ice sheet. It’s a potholed 15.5-mile route, with potential reindeer and musk ox sightings along the way.

A good base level of fitness is required for a Camp Ice Cap visit, as the hiking can be strenuous and requires a bit of agility on the ice. Albatros Arctic Circle provides tents, sleeping bags, trekking poles, crampons, and food, but it’s up to you to pack warm-weather essentials: coats, gloves, hats, wool layers, headlamps, and, by all means, an extra pair of socks.

While You’re in Greenland

If a night at Camp Ice Cap whets your backcountry Greenland appetite, Kangerlussuaq has more where that came from. The town is connected to the island’s famed , a 100-mile thru-hike that runs from inland Kangerlussuaq to Sisimiut on the west coast. Expect unspoiled tundra sprinkled with musk oxen and reindeer on this roughly ten-day trek.

Other Greenland Marvels

A quick 45-minute flight north from Kangerlussuaq will drop you in Ilulissat, home to the Unesco World Heritage site . This 34-mile patchwork of icebergs, some 10 to 20 stories tall, stems from the Sermeq Kujalleq (also known as Jakobshavn Glacier), which runs from the Greenland ice sheet. It’s one of the world’s fastest-moving glaciers, and scientists believe it produced the fateful iceberg that struck the Titanic in 1912.

The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: Riding the Star Train in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert

In the early 1900s, the Nevada Northern Railway put the remote town of Ely on the copper-mining map. More than a century later, the railway’s historic locomotives still tote riders into Nevada’s Ìępiñon- and juniper-dotted Steptoe Valley—although visitors now come seeking a different sparkly prize: clear, bedazzled nightscapes. They’ll find this rare bounty aboard the special-edition , which runs deep into the Great Basin Desert.

Up to 80 percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way due to light pollution. The same can’t be said for those at the far-flung Great Basin, which covers much of Nevada. This 190,000-square-mile high-desert patchwork of sagebrush grasslands, rolling mountains, and broad valleys boasts some of the country’s darkest nightscapes. The Nevada Northern Railway, now a national historic landmark in Ely, roughly four hours north of Las Vegas by car, makes the most of the celestial entertainment via the Star Train, which departs around sunset on select Fridays between May and September.

As the desert transitions from honey-hued golden hour to coal black night, onboard rangers from nearby Great Basin National Park and railway staff share tidbits about the night-sky attractions that await. Once you’ve reached your final destination—a private Great Basin viewing pad with high-powered telescopes—rangers narrate the universe’s marvels, from Saturn’s iridescent rings to any stargazer’s beloved treasure, the glowing Milky Way.

The șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: Hunting the Southern Lights in Australia

You’ve heard of the northern lights, but did you know you can chase those sky fluorescents in the Southern Hemisphere, too? Spotting these elusive green and violet streaks, known as the southern lights, or aurora australis, requires a bit of luck. Like the northern lights in the Arctic, southern-lights sightings are most frequent over Antarctica. But the Antarctica travel season—summer—coincides with the all-hours midnight sun. What’s an aurora hunter to do?

Head to Tasmania, a landmass better positioned for aurora sightings than virtually anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere, excluding the White Continent. Its aurora potential has to do with its geographic position and the mechanism through which auroras occur.

During solar storms, the sun flings charged particles into space. When the protons and electrons reach earth, they congregate near the north and south geomagnetic poles, then react with the atmosphere to create ribbons of green, purple, red, or blue. Typically, the lights appear over far north or far south stretches of earth such as Iceland or Antarctica, but when a solar storm is strong enough, you can catch them farther in toward the equator. Tasmania, situated close to the south geomagnetic pole, is one of the hemisphere’s most reliable perches.

“We have no landmass in the Southern Ocean that corresponds with Norway or Iceland,” says Tasmania-based Margaret Sonnemann, author of . In the Arctic or Antarctica, where the charged particles collide with the atmosphere in the skies above, you can see the reaction—the auroras—straight overhead. In Tasmania, you’ll typically admire the show from a distance, roughly between 45 to 60 degrees on the horizon.

This vantage point offers a unique perspective. When the lights are overhead, green colors are the most noticeable, says Sonnemann. “Side on, you see the layers of color.”

Given Tasmania’s pristine night skies, you can spot these colorful night swirls all over the island. Look for a panorama with minimal obstructions to the southern horizon; the northern banks of a large lake looking south, or the island’s southern coast looking out to sea, are ideal.

Some tried-and-true Tasmania aurora spots include Goat Bluff Lookout on the South Arm Peninsula, Carlton Beach, Tinderbox Bay, and the . For a southern lights–friendly hotel, try , which has minimal light pollution and unobstructed south-facing views across Lake Pedder. Hit Taroona Beach, south of Hobart, during the warmer months to catch a thrilling after-dark duo: auroras snaking across the sky as electric blue bioluminescence pulses across the water.

One advantage of Tasmania aurora hunting: you can catch the lights year-round. Tasmania experiences nighttime darkness in every season. Though you’ll have more hours of potential aurora displays in the darker winter, you could snag a stellar show on a warm summer night.

Fast Aurora Facts

The hue of an aurora depends on where the sun’s charged particles collide with earth’s atmosphere. Red auroras hit at the ionosphere, around 150 miles high. Green streaks occur in a mildly dense stretch of the atmosphere, roughly 60 to 150 miles from the ground. The rarer purple hues appear when the reaction strikes in our thick lower atmosphere, about 60 miles above earth’s surface.

Stephanie Vermillion is a travel and adventure journalist with a particular interest in after-dark adventures, from the wonders of the night sky to the nocturnal happenings on planet earth. She recently wrote about how to take great aurora photos on an iPhone.

100 Nights of a Lifetime: The World’s Ultimate șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs After Dark, by Stephanie Vermillion

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

Here’s the book trailer:

The below is excerpted from the book’s prologue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When both fighters are in their corners, Apollo’s trainer says to him, “You’re bleeding inside, Champ. I’m gonna stop the fight.”

Apollo replies, “You ain’t stopping nothing, man.”

Rocky’s team cuts the swollen skin around his eye so he can see again, and Rocky stands up, saying to Mick, “You stop this fight, I’ll kill you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first time Ray Yoder ate at a Cracker Barrel, he wasn’t that impressed. He was in Nashville in 1978, helping to set up an RV show at the Opryland Resort and Convention Center, and there was a Cracker Barrel nearby. So he ate there, and it didn’t exactly blow his mind. But he had a job delivering RVs across the country from a manufacturer in his hometown of Goshen, Indiana, and he spent a lot of time on the road. So he found himself in a lot of places with Cracker Barrel restaurants. He kept eating at Cracker Barrels, and they started to grow on him.

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

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

Their journey had taken them to 44 states, and Ray estimated they had driven more than 5 million miles. “Well, everybody does something, usually anyway,” Ray said. “So we thought we would do this and it would be fun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Rodden is one of climbing’s most influential athletes. In the nineties she gained attention for her junior national titles and impressive ascents of big walls in Yosemite. Then, in 2000, Rodden was thrust into the mainstream when she and her partner Tommy Caldwell executed a harrowing escape from kidnappers in Kyrgyzstan. In the mid-aughts, she and Caldwell became two of the most visible climbers on the planet.

In 2014, after becoming a mother, Rodden began speaking and writing about her internal struggles during this period, shattering the illusion that she’d enjoyed the perfect career and life. She wrote candidly about her 2009 divorce from Caldwell, who’d been her climbing partner on many of her groundbreaking ascents, yet wasn’t the love of her life.

I found Rodden’s openness to be extremely relatable, and at the time I was dealing with a resurgence of clinical anxiety that I thought I’d beaten. In her essays, Rodden revealed that she, too, struggled with anxiety, shame, and a host of other mental health hurdles including PTSD and disordered eating.

Earlier this year, Rodden, now 44, published a memoir, titled . The book is a compilation of everything she’s learned in the decade since she began opening up about her inner landscape. I recently caught up with Rodden to talk about the book and her experiences in climbing.

OUTSIDE: What motivated you to writeÌęA Light Through the Cracks?
Rodden: I grew up climbing in the nineties and early aughts. Back then, vulnerability was seen as a weakness, talking about fear was seen as a weakness, eating issues were prevalent but never talked about. Attempts to talk about mental health were shut down.

As I got older, I saw how much of a disservice those kinds of attitudes did me. I thought that if I had heard people talking about any of that stuff, being vulnerable, showing anything except the highlight reels of their sends and how they conquered the mountain through suffering and all the chest thumping that was happening, it would have really helped me.

I first started talking about some of these things, and writing about them on social media and for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű because I felt like it was a huge void in our community that needed to be filled. With the book, I hoped to be able to shed a broader light by using a longer medium. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good entertaining, reaching-the-summit story, but there’s more to people than just that. And the fact that we’re not sharing that is, I think, a real missed opportunity.Ìę

Climbing has struggled with sexism. Where has the sport made progress since the nineties, and where do you see room for more work to be done?
When I started climbing there were just so few women and girls in the sport because climbing’s culture was so male-dominated. When I became a professional, there were just one or two women on a company’s team of sponsored climbers. And they were token women, so that the brand could check the diversity box. Like, ‘oh yeah we’ve got women!’ Now, you look at the teams and it’s way more equal, sometimes even skewed toward having more women on the team. That’s been a huge transformation and an ongoing progress.

But I don’t feel like the outdoor or climbing communities have crossed the finish line. If you look at feature films or a lot of books out there, or you look at the media, it’s still pretty male-dominated.

For mental health issues and body shaming and disordered eating and those types of things, we’re shedding light on them, but I don’t feel like we have reached a point where they’re no longer prevalent issues in our sport. If you look through a typical climber’s social media feed, I bet 90-percent of the images are of really fit people. Go into any climbing gym and that’s not an accurate representation of who’s climbing. I feel like there’s this image, or this myth, out there that you have to look a certain way to be strong, but in real life strength comes in so many different shapes and sizes. Marketing could better reflect our whole community instead of just the top one-percent.

Two years ago you launched the short film This is Beth, in which you confront some of your struggles with body image, including your self-described “soft” abdominal region. What did you take away from that project?
That was the first time I’d worked on a media project that was fully women led and run. It was a joy to work with them. Nothing against the male producers that I’d worked with—they’re some of my best friends—but it spoke to the change that’s happening in the industry that there could be an all-women production team.

It’s so great that the film was able to have so much traction. It talked about something that would never—at least not when I was growing up in climbing—have had the opportunity to be shown. And the more people can talk about these so-called shameful topics, the less power they’ll have over us.

What are your go-to practices for keeping perfectionism, negative self-talk, and other damaging elements of the psyche in check?
None of those things are like a box that you can just check and be done. For me a lot of times, if I feel myself kind of slipping down that slope, I stop and ask myself, Why am I feeling that way? Who or what made me think that way? And that’s always such a big eye opener. I’ll realize something like, ‘Oh, it’s because of that magazine shoot in the late nineties when the photo editor asked me to suck in my stomach.’ And then I’m like, ‘Oh, well, that’s silly. Clearly, I don’t need to try and impress, or listen to, that guy.’

I usually find that the reason I’m feeling that way is because of some sort of external dialogue that I subscribed to that doesn’t deserve that power over my body anymore.

What’s your next project?
I’m getting ready to head to Banff for the Festival. I’ll be there talking about the book. I first went to the festival like ten years ago and was really blown away. All the films that I saw and the topics I went to were just so engaging and inspiring.

It was really busy this spring and summer with book promotion. Now, I have some stuff for fall, but it’s one of the first times in my adult life where I’ve purposely not tried to fill the void with some big thing, whether it was a climb or a creative project, because the quiet times are when the creative things happen. It’s easy for me to just stay really busy, and I’m purposely trying not to do that, to just give myself a little bit of time and space.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.Ìę

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When Ada Limon, America’s first Latina poet laureate, was tasked with bringing poetry to people who otherwise might not be exposed to it, she knew just where to put it: National Parks. The celebrated poet talks to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű about her inspirations for the You Are Here project, and how nature and poetry can help us rethink wild places, and our place in them.

You can find a list of National Parks for the You Are Here project .

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In 2016, then-21-year-old Molly Seidel was the top distance runner in the NCAA and seemed destined for a thriving athletic career. But a series of injuries sidelined the Notre Dame student from that year’s Olympic Trials. That summer, she quietly checked into a four-month-long eating disorder treatment program.

“It was the kind of thing where it had to be so secretive, and it was such a shameful thing at the time,” Seidel says now. “Even within my own family, we weren’t going to admit what it was. It was just such a different time.”

She returned to Indiana to wrap up her collegiate career in 2017. Her post-grad years were plagued by more injuries, including one to her hip that required surgery and caused her to miss months of training. All the while, she continued to work on her mental health.

When Seidel joined her friend Julia Hanlon’s podcast as a guest in January 2020, she was finally ready to speak publicly about what she had been through.

“I’ve dealt with depression basically since I was 16, and have been on medication on and off,” Seidel said, adding that her symptoms worsened in college. “I find with my depression it is kind of just this spiral you go into, and you find you can’t get out of it. 
 You just get stuck, and your brain is stuck.”

As Seidel’s career took off, she continued to be forthcoming about her mental health struggles. In a ahead of the Tokyo Olympic Marathon Trials in 2020, Seidel talked about how dealing with depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and an eating disorder had affected her as an athlete. When she qualified for the Olympics, the publicity hit a fever pitch. As more people discovered her story, the number of her Instagram followers shot up from about 5,000 to 70,000. Seidel felt the discourse flattened her into one of two archetypes.

“It’s like you’re either a martyr hero that people put on a pedestal, or you are the worst thing in the world, and people will tear you down,” Seidel says.

But after years of shame and staying silent, coming forward felt good—like maybe she had made a difference for others in her shoes.

“That was one of the first moments I would be like, ‘Oh man, maybe a lot of people go through this. And maybe a lot of people are feeling the same ways that I’ve been feeling and have also just been waiting for someone to actually say it, too.’â¶ÄÌę

Why Confidential Mental Health Treatment Matters

In the years since that podcast interview, Seidel’s candor has become a core part of her public persona. She’s relatable and transparent, and when she has to take a break from competition—whether that be for her mental or physical health—she tells her fans what’s going on. “I’m really fucking bummed,” she said in February, after she announced that she was pulling out of this year’s Olympic Trials due to injury.

She’s not alone. Athletes like the gymnast Simone Biles, tennis star Naomi Osaka, and NBA player Kevin Love have all shared intimate details about their experiences with performance anxiety, depression, and more. Their disclosures have helped to reduce mental health stigma in and out of sports.

This growing culture of openness can be liberating for both athletes and their fans, but it can also set a tricky precedent. As conversations around mental health become more normalized in sports, it’s important to recognize that athletes don’t owe the public a glimpse into their struggles.

Historically, sports journalism has included extensive reporting on athletes’ physical health and ailments, says Mike Delayo, a Penn State PhD candidate who wrote his master’s thesis about the rhetoric of athlete mental health disclosures. That has led to a culture where some fans feel like they need to know all of anÌęathletes’ medical information, including mental health challenges they might like to keep private.

“When we have sports reporters talking about the mechanics of the surgery that an athlete just had, and what effect it’s having on their bodies,” Delayo says, it can be easy for the public to feel entitled to even more personal information.

As I spoke to dozens of athletes and experts in the course of reporting and writing my book ,ÌęI found that confidential mental health treatment is key to recovery for athletes—just like anyone else. When athletes are allowed to keep the details confined to their close support networks, they are able to process their experiences at their own pace. They might be ready to publicly share some of what they’ve been through in a week, a month, a year, or a decade—or they might never be ready at all, and that’s okay.

Whether it’s due to a social media culture that values oversharing or invasive questions from fans and journalists, athletes can sometimes feel obligated to talk about their mental health challenges. Ron Bishop, a communications professor at Drexel University, says he’s seen how this phenomenon plays out in the NCAA. “Athletes would somehow have to come up with a way to talk about [mental illness] with the press, kind of like it’s a required part of their journey,” says Bishop, author of the 2023 book . “And that can obscure the fact that you don’t have to, necessarily. You could just deal with it privately with your family.”

How Athletes Take Control of Their Own Narratives

Professional rock climber Sasha DiGiulian, the subject of the new HBO documentary , says she does feel compelled to speak out about what she’s been through with depression and body dysmorphia. But importantly, that sense of obligation doesn’t come from external sources.

“I’ve always operated my career as wanting to reflect all the dimensionality of who I am beyond just being a climber,” she says. “And so, for that reason, I do feel a responsibility to share what I’m going through with my audience.”

When deciding whether to share her diagnosis of anorexia, former Olympic alpine ski racer Alice Merryweather wasn’t responding to pressure from fans or the media—she simply felt she owed it to herself to be transparent. So, she posted an update about her treatment on Instagram at the beginning of the 2020-21 season.

“Over the past few months, I have been struggling with an eating disorder. It has beaten me down, broken my heart, drained me, and quite nearly destroyed my passion for the sport I love so dearly,” Merryweather wrote. “Luckily, I am surrounded by some of the best people in the world who helped me come to terms with my disorder and encouraged me to seek help.”

Sharing the post was a way for Merryweather to be proud of the effort she was making to get better.

“I had felt so ashamed of it, and I was embarrassed. And I felt alone,” Merryweather says. “The best way for me to conquer that was to be open, and just lean into everything that I was going through. And so it was therapeutic for me.”

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Deciding whether and when to go public with a history of mental illness can be a complicated process for athletes. There may be drawbacks that accompany strongly tying your identity—and your “brand,” so to speak—to mental health awareness. Not everyone wants to become a spokesperson, but they might inadvertently be stuck with the label after opening up.

“Sometimes, it’s like people want to see me as the eating-disorder athlete or the ADHD athlete,” Seidel says. “And I’m like, ‘No, I am an athlete.’â¶Ä

Overly simplistic narratives about athletes “overcoming” mental illness can also lead to feelings of shame when recovery isn’t linear, as it hardly ever is. After Seidel returned home with a bronze medal from the Tokyo Games in 2021, she had a relapse of her eating disorder. She checked herself into treatment again in 2022. “I felt like such a hypocrite because people had held me up as this mental health advocate,” she says.

One thing Seidel, DiGiulian, and Merryweather have in common is the need to maintain a sense of agency and control over the messages they share. Instead of getting vulnerable at a press conference, they’d rather share their experiences on Instagram.

“I’ve had my fair share of interviews where they are specifically aiming to get shit out of you, and you can always tell,” Seidel says. “We’ve had to pull the plug on a couple of media things because it’s like mental-health baiting.”

But for all the potential downsides associated with being open about her mental health, Seidel says she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I remember being that kid in college who had no space to talk about her eating disorder, and it consumed me. It almost killed me,” Seidel says. “Having the space to be able to not only put it out into the light but also have the connection with people who say, ‘Hey, we see you. We’ve experienced this too. You’re not alone in it’—I think that has probably been one of the most healing experiences I’ve been able to have.”

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Time slows down in the summer. Where I live it’s too hot to do much unless you’re out early in the day or late in the evening. It seems like everyone else is on vacation, and the academic back-to-work creep of September is still off in the distance.

In short, it’s the perfect time to laze about in the midday heat—for long afternoons of reading on the porch or hiding out in the dark in front of a fan watching a movie.

And this summer we have a lot of good options.

What Books Should I Read This Summer?

My neighbor spotted a mountain lion on our street when she took the garbage out the other night so I have been thinking a lot about human-wildlife interaction. It helps that I’ve been reading , Julia Phillips’ novel about what happens to two sisters when a grizzly shows up on San Juan Island.

The story culminates when their diverging reactions to the bear—fear and fascination—split them apart. To understand which of those reactions I should realistically have to my local predators, I’ve also been reading Brandon Keim’s non-fiction tale, . On the surface, the book is about how we can better live with wildlife, but really is a charming dive into all the way animals interact with each other, and with us. We’re not as far apart as we might seem, according to Keim.

If summer has you thinking about plants more than animals, check out Olivia Liang’s new book It’s a whirlwind essayistic mashup of the history of cultivating and colonizing plants, and the ways gardens have been an important source of liberation and inspiration and survival, all set against the background of Liang’s own quest to rehabilitate a historic garden in the depths of COVID. She fumbles a little when she tries to address warming summers, but she makes up for it in her lush descriptions of growing things.

If gardens (or nonfiction) aren’t exciting enough for you, the perfect summer read might look something like Liz Moore’s which incorporates summer camp, family drama, and a set of missing siblings into a twisty, hard to put down thriller. Moore’s language, and her knack for building character and scene give it that jumpy feeling of stepping outside the campfire’s light and wondering what’s around you.

Indie Flicks and Summer Blockbusters

Movies more your summer speed? In , Amy, a visiting New York consultant, in town with her negligent fiancé, develops a reciprocated crush on Loren, a fishing guide barely skating by in Jackson Hole. The summer light of the Tetons is a character all its own, and the film nails the details of skid life (multiple jobs, insecure housing, the performative localism of second home owners). But the best parts are the painfully tender ones about the shiny, hard-to-achieve appeal of a place like Jackson, and about the ache of not getting to live all the lives you can imagine for yourself and having to commit to just one.

Speaking of films, we could talk about , this year’s biggest tease of a seasonal blockbuster (Why don’t they kiss? Why don’t they talk about climate change?) But the real standout from the movie is the music.

Summer, in my house, is weekend road trip season and the Twisters’ soundtrack feels like exactly what you should be playing on a Friday night when you’re driving down a dirt road hunting for a campsite.

There are a couple skippable bro-country bombs, but there are also standouts from Oklahoma artists like Wyatt Flores, and a Shania Twain song that sounds exactly like a Shania Twain song should.

Perfect Podcasts for Long Drives

If you’re not a music in the car person, and if you’re already missing the drama of the Olympics, there are a couple of podcasts that might scratch your itch. Consider , about mechanical doping in bike racing, or , a CBC podcast about, um, broom doping, in curling, the most adorably Canadian drama ever. They both fall into my favorite category of podcasts: twisty investigative journalism where no one gets hurt or killed.

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