Interview Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

Shaun White’s Next Twist

jversteegh — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 12:00:08 +0000

Shaun White has been the face of snowboarding for two decades. So what is he doing in retirement? A lot. He’s launching his own snowboard brand. He’s raising money to protect public lands. He’s even starting his own half-pipe competition. In this live interview from The ��ϳԹ�� Festival in Denver, former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones talks with White about life after pro sports and how the keys to his past success play a role in his future.

Tickets to the 2025 ��ϳԹ�� Festival and Summit are on sale now at early bird prices at

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How David Quammen’s Writing Career Was Influenced by his Time Fishing in Montana

jversteegh — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:00:32 +0000

This story update is part of the ��ϳԹ��, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The Same River Twice,” by David Quammen, here.

David Quammen is Zooming in from the room where it happens, in Bozeman, Montana. It’s where he’s written his three National Magazine Award–winning articles and his bestselling and critically acclaimed books on topics like island biogeography and extinction, including 2022’s , which is about the origins and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quammen—a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award—worked for 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s as ��ϳԹ��’s Natural Acts columnist. In significant ways, his is the voice that defined ��ϳԹ�� back in the early days of the magazine.

In the grainy Zoom window, I see Quammen’s walls of shelves, heaving with books, and also a large, empty glass tank.

“I’m in here with Boots the python,” he says, as if it’s totally banal to share office space with a large snake. “That’s his tank.”

Ah, the tank is not empty. That’s cool. And a little terrifying.

“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Quammen says. “My wife, Betsy, came downstairs one day about five years ago and said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but—’ You know how those conversations begin. Betsy says, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but I’ve adopted a python.’ Betsy and I are snake people. I said, ‘What species?’ That’s kind of what passes for our collaborative decision-making.”

Boots is a “very gentle” ball python, Quammen says. “He, like most of our dogs and like the cat, is a rescue.” When Quammen lets Boots crawl around the office, the snake will sometimes slither up and into hidden spaces in the shelves.

“Their favorite habitat is rocky walls. A ball python can go into a niche in a cliff or a mud bank and wedge itself in there like a ball, and it makes it hard for a leopard or a baboon to pull it out and eat it. Boots wedges himself in my bookshelf, and I have to delicately figure out: Which book do I take out next in a way that does not hurt him, bend any of his scales in the wrong direction, to loosen him up a little bit? Eventually, he just sort of falls into my hands.

“He’s only bitten me once, and it was by accident. He was very embarrassed.”

We digress, perhaps. But a conversation with Quammen always contains multitudes: Darwinism, connubial negotiation and bliss, dedication to the literary and the true, and a fierce and gregarious curiosity, with Montana often in the wings. Let’s digress a bit more: had he not bought a used Volkswagen bus in England, and had George McGovern won the U.S. presidency in 1972, it’s very possible Quammen might never have ended up in Montana at all.

He grew up in Cincinnati and got into Yale, where he studied literature and wrote a novel, . He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and headed off to Oxford to earn a graduate degree, writing his thesis on the works of William Faulkner. He obtained the VW bus with money earned from the novel. But in May 1972, Quammen recalls, Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam, and “within about 24 hours I left the Rhodes without permission and came back to the U.S. to work for McGovern’s [anti-war] campaign. After McGovern was squashed in November, I promptly went back to England and found that the head of the Rhodes Scholarships hadn’t written me off.”

Quammen got his Oxford degree and then convinced his friend Dennis to ship the VW to a dockyard in New York. Following an unsatisfying stint in Berkeley, California, Quammen decided to drive the bus “to Montana, filled with Penguin Classics and a portable electric typewriter. And a very cheap fly rod, which I soon ran over and replaced with a better cheap fly rod. I arrived in Missoula on September 12, 1973. A significant day in my life.”

OUTSIDE: I came to work at the magazine the year after you wrote “The Same River Twice.” I don’t know if you remember, I was your fact-checker back in those days. I read this essay, and from that moment on I loved your writing. The bones of the story have everything to do with how you came to ��ϳԹ��.
QUAMMEN: In 1981, Steve Byers, E. Jean Carroll, and I were all trying to break into magazine writing from Ennis, Montana, the little town we were living in. I was 33; they were a few years older. We heard that the editor of ��ϳԹ�� magazine was coming to Montana to schmooze with writers, and we thought it’d be great if we could get a shot at meeting that guy and pitch stories to him.

From a phone booth in Bozeman, with a handful of quarters, I cold-called ��ϳԹ�� in Chicago and asked for John Rasmus, editor in chief. My heart was racing. I was nervous. My mission was to say, “If you come to Ennis, Steve and I will take you fly-fishing on the Madison River.”

This young, casual voice comes on the line: “Hi, this is John.” I say, “Hi, John Rasmus. You don’t know me.” I do my little spiel, and he says, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

Steve and I taught him to cast a fly line in my side yard. Then we took him fishing, and we made sure that he caught some fish. By about sunset on this stretch of the Madison, he was landing a 16-inch rainbow trout.

We took him back to the farmhouse where Steve and Jean lived, and we cooked steaks and drank whiskey. By the end of the evening, we were all best friends. At some point I said: I got a story idea for you. I want to write a piece about what’s good about mosquitoes. John said, “Is anything good?” But in the sober light of day he said, “I’m assigning this to you, right?” I mailed the essay off in a manila envelope and thought, What’s going to happen?

What happened was he accepted it and offered you a job as columnist for a slot already known as Natural Acts.
That was the only time, I think, that I ever actually pitched ��ϳԹ�� an idea. After that I’d just send him a piece, usually on time, but at the last minute: “Here’s an essay on sea cucumbers.” “Here’s an essay on giant Pacific octopus.” “Here’s an essay on why crows get bored.” Which is because they’re too intelligent for their station in life.

When I was doing the column, I tended always to look for some kind of synergy between elements that were unexpectedly combined, but when you put them together… well, son of a gun. I had taken some courses in zoology at the University of Montana when I lived in Missoula. I had taken a course in entomology, another one in aquatic entomology, and another one in ichthyology. I was interested in how spring creeks worked, the fact that they maintain a constant temperature and therefore have a 12-months-of-the-year growing season and can be very productive. This creek behind Steve and Jean’s house was a spring creek.

And then Steve and Jean came to an end. I had so revered their union that, when they split, it gutted me. Then, several years later, I was noodling up a column.

I had that spring creek idea, but it was only half of a column. I needed another half. I needed the yang to that yin. That creek that I fished on with Steve, and the end of their marriage and the end of our special moment, the three of us in that town, became the yang of this piece. I always thought of that time as—there’s a wonderful sentence at the very end of , Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. He says, “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

One thing I enjoy about the essay is that there are no identifiers—I don’t know where it is except that it’s in Montana. As I reread it recently, I thought about how we are now so information saturated. This piece is almost allegorical—the opposite of online culture.
It’s a very particular, very personal story, but I wanted it to have some sort of universal dimension. I wanted it to have legs. I want to give myself credit for an instinct that not naming the town, not naming the people, not naming the specifics would give it a little bit of permanence. I was describing science with great care and, I hope, precision, but also connecting it with things that were very unscientific—either artistic or simply emotional.

I love that ��ϳԹ�� was a place where you could do that, and everybody had the good sense to keep letting you do it.
I did between 152 and 155 columns, something like that. All those wonderful people at ��ϳԹ�� just letting me do any damn crazy thing, as long as I could make it work and get it in on time. It was a fool’s paradise.

But you started out wanting to write fiction, right?
I wanted to be a novelist. I had taken one science course in college, a biology course, and it was not a good biology course. Didn’t even mention Charles Darwin.

I discovered Faulkner when I was a sophomore at Yale, and I became obsessed with his work. I studied him with a great teacher and a great friend to me, Robert Penn Warren, who knew Faulkner, and who was himself a southerner and a towering American man of letters. When I was a senior, I was rewriting what became my first published novel, To Walk the Line.

But I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. The world didn’t need that guy to be a novelist. When I got to Montana I started reading nonfiction. Voraciously. For the first time.

What prompted you to do that?
I had always been interested in the natural world, but I had been in New Haven and then Oxford—not places where the natural world is very strongly present. I got to Montana, and I got back to the natural world. I was interested in feeling the cold and the snow and feeling the flow of the rivers. But also, I was interested in thinking about it. I was interested in ecology and evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin. I started reading Heraclitus. I started reading Herodotus. I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I started reading every which way: Loren Eiseley and J.B.S. Haldane and Mary Kingsley and Annie Dillard and others. And I saw people doing things with nonfiction that were every bit as creative and imaginative as fiction, and much more creative and imaginative than 97 percent of novels.

I want to ask about your books on pandemics, which are both highly literary and diligently reported. You were prescient on this topic, having published , your 2012 book about the rise in zoonotic diseases that transmit dangerously from animals to humans. A decade later came Breathless, in which you argue persuasively for the zoonotic theory of COVID-19 and against the theory that the virus escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
One story is the imagined story of a lab leak, and the other is the inferential story of a zoonotic spillover. There is a lot of empirical evidence to support but not finally prove the idea that COVID originated with a zoonotic spillover. There’s a whole historical and scientific context for that. There are pieces of immediate evidence that support that idea.

There’s no empirical evidence to support the lab story. But it is a very, very powerful, enticing story. And that is why it has legs, in my opinion. One of the things that they argue on that side is, “Well, if this came from a zoonotic spillover from a bat, why haven’t we found the original virus in the bat? It’s been four years now. That’s very suspicious.”

Well, no. The problem is they don’t know anything about the history of zoonotic diseases. With the Marburg virus, for example, it took 41 years to find the bat. With Ebola it’s been 48 years, and we still don’t have the answer. It is not mysterious that the last section of evidence in the structure of empirical support for zoonotic spillover of COVID hasn’t been found.

Are you working on a book now?
Yeah. My desk is covered with files, files, files, books, books, and files. I’m working on a book on cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’ve been incubating this book for 17 years.

How is cancer evolutionary?
There is a school of thought that I stumbled across in 2006 or 2007 that says to understand cancer, you have to understand it from a Darwinian perspective. Every tumor is a population of cells. As a tumor begins, the cells start mutating more and more. As a tumor grows, it’s a population of cells that vary from one another with genetic variation. And they’re competing. They’re competing for space. They’re competing for blood. They’re competing for oxygen, for other resources that allow them to grow. And when you have a population of variant individuals competing for resources in order to survive and replicate themselves—does that sound familiar? You turn the crank and you have evolution by natural selection.

So why does chemo so often not work? An oncologist prescribes a drug, and I don’t know how much cancer you’ve experienced in your family or your life—

I had breast cancer, and my husband died of lymphoma.
All right. Ouch. Yes. So an oncologist says, “We’re going to treat this with chemo. This is a good drug.” And the chemo knocks down the cancer for six months or so. You get some improvement. And then the cancer becomes resistant to that drug, so you’re forced to use a different drug. Why does it become resistant? For the same reason that a field of grasshoppers becomes resistant to the insecticide DDT. You hit the grasshoppers with DDT one year. You kill off 99 percent of the grasshoppers, and 1 percent of the grasshoppers happen to have genetic resistance to DDT. Two years later, your field is filled with grasshoppers again. This is cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon.

If we live long enough and are lucky enough, we’ll all die of cancer. Lucky enough because it is a result of, among other things, but importantly, the cumulative number of cell divisions that you have. But here’s a question: Why do whales not get cancer?

Whales?
It’s a mystery. It’s called . Whales live a long time, and they have lots and lots of cells. Their cells are not larger than ours, they just have more of them. If you trace a linear curve, whales should be dying of cancer in early middle age, all of them, and they’re not.

Are there any tiny animals that don’t get cancer?
Yes. The naked mole rat, which lives in burrows in the Middle East. It has hardly any fur. It’s blind. It lives underground. A naked mole rat lives to be 20 or 30. A mouse lives to be two. There are cancer biologists who have whole colonies of naked mole rats and have been studying them for 40 years.

This conversation makes me want to be huge. Or very small.
Lisa, just remember: ��ϳԹ�� in the 1980s, that’s what it was like, when we were very young and very happy.

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I Went to Alaska to Learn How Carhartt Pants Save Lives

jversteegh — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 15:23:07 +0000

It started as spillover from a different assignment. In late 1999, GQ sent New York–based writer Natasha Singer to Talkeetna, Alaska, to cover a “bachelor auction,” a party originally put on by the Talkeetna Bachelor Society during the long, dark, cold winter, to attract women to the remote town at the foot of Denali. After the trip, she contacted ��ܳٲ��’s executive editor at the time, Jay Stowe, with a brief but enticing pitch that went something like: I heard about this local affair called the Carhartt Ball, where weathered Alaskans swap wild stories of survival—angry walrus attacks, inadvertent dips in icy rivers, accidental immolation—all thanks to their Carhartts. Interested?

She had us at “angry walrus attacks.” The vision of hardy frontier folk stepping up to the mic to regale friends and neighbors with gonzo tales of death-defying rescue by outerwear was too good to pass up. So we sent Singer back to Talkeetna to cover the annual event. (Which is still going strong, despite a COVID-19 interruption in 2020.) At the time, the ball consisted of locals modeling Carhartt’s spring line at the VFW hall, followed by a storytelling competition at a nearby bar. Not only was it sponsored by Carhartt, but the clothing manufacturer’s main man in Anchorage served as the event’s emcee (decked out in a “bespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels,” natch). Singer’s story ran in the magazine’s 25th anniversary issue, in October 2002, under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

This wasn’t the first time Singer had traveled to a remote locale for ��ϳԹ��, and it wouldn’t be the last. As a roving correspondent for the magazine in the early 2000s, she documented a cockeyed attempt to return Keiko—the killer whale star of Free Willy—to the sea off the coast of Iceland, hopped a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempting to break through the ice-choked Northwest Passage, and slogged through the jungles of Thailand in pursuit of a group of WildAid activists trying to halt an illicit trade in endangered species. (“Oh, my God,” she said, recalling that reporting trip, “did I tell you about the anti-leech socks?”) These days, she writes about technology and education for the New York Times business section. Stowe recently caught up with Singer about her globe-trotting experiences.

OUTSIDE: Maybe I shouldn’t say this, since I wrote it, but your story ran under my favorite headline: “These Pants Saved My Life.” It’s straight to the point, prominently employs the word “pants,” and has the added value of being true. How did you discover the Carhartt Ball?
SINGER: There’s this saying about Alaska—if you’re a woman looking for a guy, the odds are good but the goods are odd. And in Talkeetna especially, the odds are better but the goods are odder. I had been sent there to do a story on the bachelor auction, and I started to hear these really interesting stories, episodes where people got into trouble and their Carhartts—miraculously, like the Shroud of Turin—seemed to have magical properties that were healing or lifesaving. People were telling real stories, like: This tree fell on me, but I was wearing my double-knee Carhartt pants, so I didn’t get hypothermia. I survived for three hours. This was normal discourse, and the pants were the common denominator.

I’ve always thought there’s a reason people go to live in Alaska, and it’s mainly to get away from the rest of us in the lower 48.
We all have tribes, and we all have things that distinguish who gets in the tribe and who doesn’t. The Carhartt epic is a way of saying, “OK, we have a shared lived experience, even if yours is, you know, dropping your lighter on your pants and flaming out the crotch.” It’s a common thread that binds people and demonstrates their Alaskanness.

Was it easy to get people talking?
One of the things I love about being a reporter is when people share their passion for the things that matter to them, whether that’s expertise about the bearded iris or how to butcher a roadkill deer. So even in standoffish places, I find that if you’re authentically interested, people will show you something, and then it will be super cool. And you’re naturally going to say, “Oh, that’s amazing.” And they’ll say: “Well, you want to see the next thing?” And then it’s three hours later, and they’ve shown you every single pair of Carhartt pants in their closet.

At one point you meet Ted Kundtz, a “jack-of-all-trades” in Talkeetna, and over eggs and reindeer sausage he scoffs at the tourists who’ve tried to buy his Carhartts right off him. He says: “They called the years of wear and tear I put in them ‘authentic character.’ ” He’s very perceptive. Like, these Alaskans know they’re being ogled just as much as the grizzlies.
Essentially, he was saying: These are real. The tourists want the veneer of reality, but they don’t want to live our lived experience. Which—it’s tough to live in Alaska, right? It’s cold. And the winters are harsh. And it’s still our frontier—that is, if you don’t live in downtown Anchorage. I got what he was saying. People want frontier cred without actually putting the years into the effort.

How did you get your start?
I studied Russian in college and wanted to go off to Russia. Even though I was not fluent, I ended up going to Moscow and staying for a decade. This was in the 1990s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and it was inexpensive to travel because everything was in rubles. So I was going all over. I was covering human rights for The Forward, business for USA Today, and fashion for Vogue. It was this crazy decade. You know: If it’s Monday, this must be Siberia! If it’s Tuesday, I’m doing a segment on Good Morning Kazakhstan! And then I was asked to help start Vogue Russia. I’m grateful I was able to cover those former Soviet republics, but at some point you have to either decide to stay forever or go home. Then I went back to New York and nobody wanted me to write about New York. I was Ms. Strange Places.

One of your first ��ϳԹ�� stories was about an American billionaire’s attempt to release Keiko back into the wild. In another you hitched a ride on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker as it busted through the Northwest Passage—a trip made possible by climate change. When you think of those pieces along with the Carhartt Ball, the range is impressive. Ridiculous, sublime, daunting—you were able to do it all.
The various stories I did with ��ϳԹ�� had an adventure quality, but they also had a quality of observation. It’s what we now call lurking, right? Watching what’s happening and then explaining it. I felt lucky to be in that position.

We have this romantic notion of icebergs, but the Northwest Passage, it’s just miles and miles of bumpy, ugly ice. As I wrote: “Unlike freshwater icebergs, sea ice is not romantic. It is neither majestic nor soaring. It does not give off that otherworldly spectral glow of pure whiteness born of glacial snow. Its verticality does not threaten ocean liners with a predatory, awe-inspiring loom. It is not prehistoric in origin. Quite the contrary, most sea ice is younger than a decade. It is flat and flawed. It is often pockmarked, dirty with algae, and lumpy with protruding hummocks.”

I love that paragraph, and I still don’t know how I got away with writing it, or how anybody signed off on it. I’m working at the Times now, and I don’t get to write paragraphs like that very often. So the other thing I’m grateful for is that ��ϳԹ�� pushed me to write at the top of my range.

I was very happy to sign off on that.
We still have to talk about my friend from high school who wrote a letter to the editor of ��ϳԹ��. She was like: I read the story by your writer Natasha Singer. I went to school with a Natasha Singer, and I’m wondering if it’s the same person. Because in high school, we didn’t think of her as an ��ϳԹ�� girl. We thought of her as an inside girl—as in, inside the house.

I’m glad we were able to help you defy the opinions of former classmates. You’ve been able to report on a lot of amazing things that go on in the world.
It’s like when we said that those pants saved Alaskans’ lives. In a way, ��ϳԹ�� changed my life. To be able to write those stories, report them, and meet all those people and get to do all those things—real stories, where there were people telling us real things that really mattered—it was a gift to be able to do that.

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After 50 Years of Friendship, These Alpinists Just Bagged (Another) Unclimbed Peak

Corey Buhay — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 22:16:59 +0000

Earlier this month, 68-year-old Mick Fowler and 74-year-old Victor Saunders pulled themselves onto the airy summit of Yawash Sar (20,532), becoming the first known people to stand atop the Pakistani peak. The two took a photo, frowned a bit at the mass of clouds blocking their view, and then turned around, descended the peak, and went home.

“We went to Pakistan, saw a mountain, climbed to the top, and came down,” Fowler joked. “Nothing much else to it, you know.”

Take the understatement with a grain of salt. The feat involved a weeks-long expedition into the Karakoram—the notoriously rugged range that borders the Himalaya and contains K2, the world’s second-highest peak—and seven days spent living on the side of the mountain.

On their best nights, the two slept in a tent wedged onto narrow shelves of rock and snow. On their worst, they slept sitting upright in their harnesses, with their legs dangling off the side of the cliff and tent draped over their heads for shelter. In between, they kicked steps and swung their ice tools up narrow ribbons of ice and walls of crumbling rock.

They had no map, no guidebook, and almost no route information—aside from what they’d managed to glean through their binoculars in the days before the climb.

Saunders and Fowler are used to such discomforts: both men are veteran alpinists, each with their own long resume decorated with first ascents and remote expeditions. But they’re also well past the age where most mountaineers hang up their boots.

Fowler is a cancer survivor, and Saunders is firmly in his mid seventies. So, what’s the secret? The two spoke to ��ϳԹ�� about their recent ascent, their long friendship, and their guidelines for living a long, adventurous life.

Yawash Sar, the peak Fowler and Saunders made a first ascent of this September. (Photo: Mick Fowler)

OUTSIDE: You two have been climbing partners for almost 50 years now. How did that friendship begin?

Fowler: Ha, well, when we first met, we didn’t quite get along. I described Victor as an irritating little squirt, and he described me as an arrogant twat. So, I’d say it got off to a pretty good start. But we had a week in Scotland together doing some good winter climbs in 1979 and that’s when we began to appreciate each other more and formed a friendship that has lasted nearly 50 years.

Saunders: I found I felt more comfortable with Mick on more serious ground than I felt with a lot of climbers on easier ground. I think we instilled a lot of confidence in each other from the get-go.

Fowler: Yes, and Victor is an exceptionally confident chap. It’s quite difficult to ruffle his feathers. Which is a very valuable trait in a climbing partner.

The team poses at the base of Yawash Sar. (Photo: Mick Fowler)

What about Yawash Sar struck you as a peak worth climbing?

Fowler: We’d probably first discussed it more than 10 years ago. There was a very small photograph of the mountain that had appeared in the American Alpine Journal taken by a Polish chap back in 2011. We both discussed it as a possible objective, but all sorts of things happened between 2011 and 2024—my health, the pandemic. All sorts of things.

Saunders: Aside from that photo, we didn’t actually see the route until we got into base camp. Until that moment, we’d seen the picture, but we didn’t know what it would really look like. We were both pleased to see that it looked shapely and steep.

Fower: We have a list of criteria before we climb a mountain. Ideally, it should have a wonderful unclimbed line that goes straight to the summit. It should be in an area neither of us have been to before, and in an area that’s culturally interesting. The climbing has got to be challenging for us but not too hard. Yawash Sar ticked a lot of the boxes.

Saunders and Fowler faced a range of conditions—including heavy snow on summit day. (Photo: Mick Fowler)

When you mention your health, you mean your brush with cancer, which I understand was pretty brutal. How has that impacted your climbing?

Fowler: Ah, well, we were about to go on a trip a few years ago, and the doctor told me I had cancer of the anus, which is not what you want, really. So I did radiotherapy and chemotherapy and eventually the removal of my anus and rectum.

It’s not recommended, cancer. All that left me with a colostomy bag. Most people would think that’s the main problem, but for me the bigger problem was that I was too thin for the surgery to be convenient. So they had to remove all the fat from my buttocks and do plastic surgery, and that left me with no padding whatsoever.

That makes things like sitting down really uncomfortable. And then with the colostomy bag, the trouble is that on these big alpine climbs, you have your harness on all day and lots of layers of clothes. So it’s not so easy to maneuver when you start to have some output into the bag. But that’s just life, you know.

Saunders: On the other hand, in a tent, he doesn’t have to go out to take a poo. So there I am, having to hang on outside the tent in terrible conditions, tied onto the mountain somehow, doing my business off the side of the cliff, and Mick just laughs at me. He says “Ah, you should get one of these things, it’s much more convenient.” We spend a lot of time laughing it. We’re really just a couple of four-year-olds at heart, you see.

The two typically had to build ledges from rock and snow to get a platform big enough to pitch their tent.

What was the biggest unexpected challenge of the climb?

Saunders: No bivouac sites. [Bivouacking means “ad-hoc camping,” typically on the side of a mountain.] There wasn’t any climbing that was outrageously difficult, but there were very few places to put a tent.

Fowler: Most of the time, we managed to arrange rocks in a vaguely flat way so we could pitch a tent over them. But we had one bivouac that was especially uncomfortable. It was a sitting bivouac, which was my worst nightmare, given the surgery I’d had. And it was very windy and the ledge we were sitting on was icy and slippery so we kept sliding off.

Saunders: We used the tent fabric without the poles and hung it over ourselves like a sack. It was a very cold night with just enough wind that, without the sack, we would have had hypothermia. I don’t think either of us slept more than a half-hour or so.

Mick Fowler poses on the summit of Yawash Sar. (Photo: Mick Fowler)

Many of the alpinists we interview for ��ϳԹ�� are in their thirties, forties, or even younger. What’s your advice for staying in the game so long and continuing adventures late into life?

Fowler: For me, it’s been very important to make time in my life to do what I love, which is to go mountaineering and go climbing. A happy father and happy husband is one who’s had his fill of mountaineering. But within that, I’m very careful with my choice of objectives and with my choice of climbing partners.

Choose a reliable, safe climbing partner like Victor, and more than anything, carry on having a good time and living the life. I think we’ve also always chosen routes that are going to give us the most pleasure. We’re not looking to climb things just because they’re the hardest—that doesn’t come into it at all.

Saunders: You grow up, you get less arrogant with age.

Fowler: I do?

Saunders: Yes, everyone does. Even Mick. You get the hard edges knocked off of you as you go through life. And you start to prioritize enjoyment, and the people you’re climbing with.

Fowler: I would also say that I don’t think this partnership is going to end anytime soon. We already have more plans.

Editor’s Note: The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Caroline Gleich’s Biggest ��ϳԹ�� Yet

jversteegh — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 11:00:48 +0000

Caroline Gleich is a renowned climber and skier, a climate activist, and now the Utah democratic party’s candidate for US Senate. But what would she actually do in Washington? And does she have a chance of getting elected? Gleich joined author and conservationist Luis Benitez onstage at the ��ϳԹ�� Festival in Denver in early June to talk about how life in the mountains has prepared her for life in the political jungle.

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How the Perils of ‘Alone: Frozen’ Prepared Woniya Thibeault for Motherhood

irosario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:00:10 +0000

Woniya Thibeault, the first female winner of the History Channel’s reality competition show Alone, always wanted to be a mother. But after she turned 46, having already experienced a miscarriage in her late thirties, she accepted the possibility that she may never have children. In June of last year, Thibeault spoke about this difficult realization during a storytelling event . Her period was three days late, and she felt absolutely exhausted. She assumed the excitement of promoting her new book, , was simply sapping her energy. Days later, Thibeault learned that she was pregnant. Her son, Hawthorn, was born in February.

As a longtime fan of Alone, I became enthralled by Thibeault after she tapped out from the shores of Great Slave Lake during season six. Her ability to listen to her body and respect her limits resonated with me and many other viewers. When she announced her pregnancy—only a year and half after she left the wilderness as the winner of Alone: Frozen—I knew that as a nature-lover and foraging enthusiast, there was a discussion to be had about the connection between pregnancy, motherhood, and surviving in the wilderness. I recently interviewed Thibeault on a video chat while she breastfed Hawthorn and then let him sleep on her shoulder. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

OUTSIDE: From two seasons of Alone to pregnancy and childbirth at 47, your body has endured a lot. Can you talk about this?
THIBEAULT: We had a traumatic birth. I had a C-section which was not remotely what I expected. I was angry with the doctor. Honestly, it felt like his fault. And then I learned from my midwife, who’d been out of town for the birth because Hawthorn came early, that the baby and I probably would have died without the C-section. Feeling like my body wasn’t capable was really hard. I had a lot of grief around that. It was harder emotionally recovering from birth because of that sense of my body betraying me. Childbirth is one critical defining thing about being a woman, and I was unable to do it without surgical assistance. My body didn’t recover until I was able to better process and face the emotional parts. I was just stuck in it for a while because of that grief, anger, shame, and guilt.

How did Alone prepare you for pregnancy and childbirth?
Having experienced what I did on Alone, I do feel that I was better equipped to handle all physical challenges. The birth was absolutely a near-death experience and very traumatic. But I also wasn’t really freaking out, even when the baby’s heart rate was going way down, and it was looking dicey. I had a sense of inner-calm through it because I survived really intense stuff already. In the hospital I had support, and so I think that I had less fear than I would have, had I not done Alone. The hunger and depletion of pregnancy felt very much like survival. I would say it’s the same kind of deep physiological need.

The contestants of ‘Alone: Frozen’ in 2022. (Photo: History Channel/A&E Network)

During season six, you tapped out because you listened to your body. How did you apply this lesson to pregnancy?
It’s interesting because the show pushes you to give it everything and you get into that mindset. I hit this point during season six where I realized I didn’t believe in this, and if I continue, I’m modeling this for millions of people. How could I do that?

Pregnancy and birth change your body. But on Alone I went through losing 50 pounds and then gaining it back. I’d already seen my body endure insane changes, and I think that helped me know that I could go through childbirth and recover and find normalcy again. If I had known that pregnancy was coming, I would have prepared for it differently, but I was actively recovering from starvation on Alone when I got pregnant. Nutrition was definitely something I concentrated on. I’m an advocate of what I call primal- or paleo-nutrition—eating more of the foods that our ancestors ate, like organ meats. The first couple of weeks after giving birth, I felt like I was dying. But I also think I recovered better and quicker than most people partly because of good nutrition, and because I’ve been so in touch with my body. To me, eating something wild every day feels really important.

The hunger and depletion of pregnancy felt very much like survival. I would say it’s the same kind of deep physiological need.

Would you compete on Alone ��?��
During season six, I never wanted to leave. But on Frozen, I had to convince myself to stay every single day. It was so hard and there were a lot of factors involved, like having a partner waiting for me at home. There was PTSD in my body. I didn’t think of my first season as traumatic, but then you get back out in the wilderness and you realize it was actually really hard. My body was remembering that trauma. With all that said, both times were the most amazing experiences of my life. When am I ever going to be able to live in pristine Canadian wilderness by myself and use a trap line that would usually be illegal? I long for those experiences again, but I don’t know that I could step away from my son.

You built a strong skillset of self-sufficiency and adaptability during your time in the wilderness. How has this translated to motherhood?
In Labrador, the weather was so terrible that even if I was able to get a rare satellite signal for my rescue radio, they would need to wait for hurricane-force winds to calm so they could fly a helicopter. There wasn’t a guaranteed immediate rescue. Just like motherhood, you don’t have an immediate tap-out option. And you’re just in it from the time you’re pregnant. We’re so entitled in our normal world because we can have anything we want with the click of a button, and that is unprecedented in history. We’re not adaptable. We’re not healthy. We’re not emotionally grounded and stable. Having whatever you want, whenever you want is really bad for you. Mothering is often about sacrificing what you want and need. I thought it was impossible to survive postpartum. It was so hard, but I had no choice. I couldn’t not feed my baby when he was hungry. I couldn’t just fall asleep when my baby was screaming and I felt like throwing up from exhaustion. Survival, pregnancy, and motherhood are the things you have to do because it needs to get done—and that’s beautiful.

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Do You Enjoy Pain? And 86 Other Questions for a Professional Ultrarunner.

jversteegh — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:00:33 +0000

I am not that curious about how to get faster as a trail runner, but I am curious about how fast people’s brains work. My friend Mike Foote and I have a lot in common (we’re dads of toddlers, we both like early Metallica albums, we both live in Missoula, we both grew up in small towns in the Midwest, etc.) but running velocity is not one of them (he’s on the podium when he races; I am proud to finish without injuring myself). So when we decided to travel to South Africa together in November, I thought it might be a good chance to pick his brain a little bit. He came over and sat down for an interview before we left, and then I kept asking him questions throughout our trip. Which was fun for me, and tolerable for Mike, who was a good sport about the whole thing.

of our very extended interview—I hope you get a kick out of it (and maybe some useful insight):

Here’s the full, lightly-edited transcript if you’d rather read it:

Brendan: This is my friend Mike. He’s been a professional trail and ultra runner for 11 years. He’s sponsored by a really big outdoor apparel company. During his career, he’s podiumed at a bunch of the world’s top mountain ultra marathons. A while back he invited me to go to South Africa with him for the Ultra Trail Cape Town. I thought it’d be fun to ask him some questions since he’s a world class athlete and I’m not a world class athlete. OK. Are you comfortable?

Mike: I am.

Brendan: OK. So do you run first thing in the morning to get it out of the way or because it’s your favorite thing to do every day?

Mike: Yes, both. I do it because that’s when I have energy and because I’m looking forward to doing it and I enjoy it most in the morning.

Brendan: Do you drink coffee first?

Mike: 100 percent of the time.

Brendan: Have you ever entered a race and said, “I think I might just take it easy for this one? Not like go hard.”

Mike: Not really.

Brendan: That’s good. In your experience and opinion, is it more fun to try hard?

Mike: I don’t know if trying hard is the only thing that matters. I think committing to something can bring more purpose to it. Sometimes that’s trying hard, sometimes that’s just, you know, embracing the moment, whatever that looks like. For a race, I think trying hard definitely puts you in the moment a lot more.

Brendan: Are you ever out there during a race and you just lose track of stuff and you’re like thinking about some other things and you’re like, “Oh, I should be running faster?”

Mike: Yeah, I have. I mean, if you’re running a 100-miler and it’s all day or it’s the middle of the night, you tend to get a little loopy and your mind starts to drift. That can definitely happen.

Brendan: What’s the best advice anybody has ever given you about running a very long distance?

Mike: It was actually advice for climbing, but it was a climbing guide out in the Tetons and he said, “Perfection is in the process.” To me it was like a lightning bolt of like, “Oh, it’s less about, you know, the outcome and more about the journey”, which is cliche and we’ve all heard it, but I just felt like perfection is in the process is such a succinct way of putting it. I really enjoyed it. I try to approach my running that way. I break down an ultra marathon into moments and I try and just keep on top of those moments, versus the whole thing. That’s perfection in the process. If it’s 2:00 AM and I’m 70 miles into a 100-mile race and it’s raining really hard and all I really want is to be done, instead of just thinking about the finish line, I’m gonna think about all the things I can do in that moment to stay warm, stay fed, stay moving forward as fast as I can. I’ll think about efficiencies in the moment and focus on that very acutely versus what’s at the end. That way your brain is staying present and you are working through it versus just trying to be done with it.

Brendan: Have you ever vomited from exertion?

Mike: I have never vomited from exertion.

Brendan: What about the other end?

Mike: Yes.

Brendan: What’s the longest you’ve ever spent in a porta-potty during a race? Like just guess.

Mike: No more than a minute.

Brendan: Whoa.

Mike: Yeah. OK.

Mike: Yeah, I’m a lucky guy.

Brendan: Do you enjoy pain?

Mike: No. Do I accept pain? Yes.

Brendan: Do you experience a lot of pain in your daily life?

Mike: It’s all relative, but yeah, I’m uncomfortable almost every day at some point. But the pain, it’s like a one out of 10, you know?

Brendan: How do you deal with pain during a race?

Mike: I don’t try to ignore it. I accept it for what it is, I acknowledge that there’s a very big difference between discomfort and pain and being injured and unsafe. So as long as I’m just really uncomfortable and in pain from running really hard or just having a really big day, that’s OK, and then as soon as it feels like I’m unsafe or injured, then I pay attention to it. Sometimes when things are just really, really hard, I’m not thinking about the pain, I’m just thinking about how hard it is and I remind myself, this is what you came for, this is the moment that you were working towards.

Brendan: The pain.

Mike: Sure, you can call it the pain. I call it the challenge and discomfort. But yeah, it’s painful.

Brendan: Why do you run a 100 miles or 100 kilometers or 31 miles instead of 26 or 13?

Mike: Those are the distances that mean I can go a little bit slower and be out a little bit longer, and that’s the type of stuff I enjoy. And when I do adventures, they’re similar to that, all-day, relatively slow adventures. Running 100 miles or 100 kilometers in the mountains is pretty slow. It’s a lot of power hiking up and running down and that’s the gear I enjoy the most.

Brendan: Do you eat aid station food? You’re a pro athlete, you have nutrition dialed. Do you ever get up to an aid station and you’re like, “Oh my god, they got Double Stuf Oreos” and you just house like four of ’em and then keep running?

Mike: Yes.

Brendan: You do?

Mike: Oh yeah.

Brendan: OK.

Mike: Yeah, you gotta enjoy the aid station fare.

Brendan: I don’t know, sometimes I picture people being like, oh, I can’t mess with my delicately balanced nutrition. Like if I’m gonna win this thing or whatever. I kind of assume they’re not like, ooh, you got quesadillas.

Mike: I mean, to be honest, if I’m running 55 kilometers, I’ll probably just eat the calories I’m carrying because it’s gonna go pretty fast. Hopefully five or six hours. But if it’s a 100-miler, I’ll peruse, I’ll have a full meal, I’ll ask what they’ve got, sometimes they’ll cook for you if you’ve got time.

Brendan: What would make you stop and grab food from an aid station in this upcoming race? What would be so good you would have to? You’d be like, “Nah, yeah, I’m hitting this.” Like a bear claw.

Mike: I think it’s gonna be hot, so probably like watermelon or an orange or something, like some sort of like hydrating fruit. I probably won’t eat a bear claw.

Brendan: Well, what if they had it like cut up into smaller pieces?

Mike: OK, yeah, that’s fair. Still no.

Brendan: What is the longest conversation you’ve ever had with someone at an aid station during an ultramarathon you’re competing in?

Mike: Hmm. I go into every aid station and I’m convinced that the nicer I am, the better things are gonna go and that’s what volunteers deserve. So I think I’m really nice, but I’m not very curious.

Brendan: When do you go fast?

Mike: What do you mean?

Brendan: When do you think like, “OK, now I’m gonna go fast the whole time.”

Mike: You know, I don’t, not the whole time. My worst races are the ones where I get overconfident. I’m like, “I’m gonna go out hard today.” That has rarely worked out for me, especially in longer distances. It just depends—on the terrain, on the distance. But if I’m feeling good, I’ll just slowly press on the gas pedal throughout the day without any major big shifts. I’m not the kind of person who just sits and sits and then is gonna sprint it in. I’d like to have smooth energy throughout. But if I’m feeling good and I can close down the race hard, then I’ll do that. But I don’t really have like a, the last 20 percent or anything like that. Do you need more prescriptive?

Brendan: No.

Mike: Do need me to lie?

Brendan: Nope. No. Just be honest. Do you start at the front of the pack or a couple rows back or like…middle of the pack.

Mike: I start at the back of the front of the pack.

Brendan: Back of the front of the pack.

Mike: That’s my spot.

Brendan: So like 300 people in the race, how many people are in front of you at the start?

Mike: Twenty to thirty.

Brendan: Is that because you’re a polite Midwesterner or you’re like legit this is where I feel the most comfortable?

Mike: Probably a little bit of both. Yeah, I don’t wanna get in people’s way. I just really, really don’t like being in people’s way. I’d much rather they’re in my way. And that feels good when you pass them later if that happens.

Brendan: What is advice you would give someone about running an ultramarathon but you would never apply to your own race?

Mike: I mean, the only thing that comes to mind is I always tell people that nobody in the history of running 100-milers has ever said I went out too slow. But I think it’s possible. I think people probably have said it. So like sometimes I’m like, I wouldn’t want to test that theory. It’s good to go out conservative, but I would not want to end a race and be like, “Oh man, I waited way, way, way too long.”

Brendan: During a race, do you ever ask yourself why you’re doing it? Like why don’t you just golf?

Mike: I mean, only all the time. The whole time, like why am I doing this? I don’t know. I think it’s a good thing, I think it’s a good question. Like, I mean, I think it’s in vogue to ask, you know, to have a why when you’re doing something like this and I think that your reasons for running shift, like it’s important to have like a good purpose behind it. My answer at the beginning of my career, I probably told myself I was following my curiosity, but I really was competitive and I wanted to prove myself in something ’cause I’d never really had much success athletically. When I started to in running, I was like, “Oh, this feels good.”

Brendan: OK, and then what about now? When you get to that point in next week’s race, what’s your why of doing it? Like “this is my job”?

Mike: My why now?

Brendan: Like “I clocked in”?

Mike: “I gotta collect my paycheck?” My why now is that I truly do love it. And for me, we’re going to South Africa, I love experiencing new places, I like experiencing new communities and cultures. I also have one child and another on the way and I want to be able to show my kids that they can do hard things, they can do extraordinary things and that it’s OK to swing big. And so when I’m out there now I think about that.

Brendan: What’s worse, overtraining or undertraining?

Mike: Overtraining.

Brendan: Are you undertrained right now?

Mike: I’m hoping I’m right on the edge. Yesterday I felt overtrained, but the week before I felt undertrained, so.

Brendan: How many miles have you run this year? Approximate.

Mike: I don’t know, I don’t pay attention.

Brendan: How many miles do you run a week?

Mike: I mean, it’s a lot less than it used to be. I’d say when I’m actually training, 60 to 80.

Brendan: How many miles did you run per week when you were like top of your game?

Mike: Like 100 to 130.

Brendan: Do you ever stick around and watch the last place person cross the finish line?

Mike: I do, yeah, it’s the best.

Brendan: Why is it the best?

Mike: It’s really cool to see somebody chasing cutoffs like that. And often you’re also surrounded by other people that may have finished sooner, but also came out and hobbled to a finish line to watch that last finisher, and there’s this collective effervescence that happens and this communal feel that kind of transcends the event. It’s this celebration, it’s like the exclamation point on the end of a really cool experience. And it’s always emotional, people are chasing this thing and it’s incredibly hard. Yeah, it’s pretty special.

Brendan: Do you think the cheers are louder for the first place finisher or the last place finisher at most ultramarathons?

Mike: Definitely louder for the last place. Perhaps more people for the first place, but it’s a more moderate decibel. The last place person, you’re like losing your mind for ’em because they may or may not get this arbitrary time and therefore will have finished or not finished and it’s very exciting.

Brendan: How many toenails do you have right now?

Mike: Nine.

Brendan: What’s the lowest number of toenails you’ve had in your career?

Mike: I mean, I actually take pride in not having awful feet. I don’t know, maybe five. But usually I don’t lose ’em, so.

Brendan: What do you attribute that to?

Mike: Wearing shoes that fit. This is a pet peeve about ultrarunning. I think that we’re a little too proud of our awful toenails. I think that people just need better footwear.

Brendan: What do you eat during a race?

Mike: How long is the race?

Brendan: Let’s say 50 miles maximum. What do you eat during that?

Mike: 50 miles maximum, I eat sugar. I eat a lot of chews, just like whatever, like chewy gummy stuff I can eat and I probably eat a few 100 calories an hour.

Brendan: Why not gels?

Mike: I’m just kinda over ’em. I ate only gels for like a decade.

Brendan: Just running, not just like you ate ’em all the time? For 10 years. How many calories do you think you eat per hour?

Mike: 300 on average.

Brendan: Do you drink calories or do you just drink straight water?

Mike: I’m not dogmatic about it, but I usually drink mostly water.

Brendan: What have we not touched on that you had thought about?

Mike: I used to like get on the start line and just like size people up and be like, “Oh, that person looks fit, that person looks fast, like, hmm.” And now I just imagine that everybody at one point was a toddler because I have a toddler. And I’m just imagining them being two years old, toddling around, being tyrants to their parents. And I’m like, this is ridiculous. It’s just incredible that we got here. I sincerely did that this year at a race and it was such a pressure release for me.

Brendan: Do you practice positive self-talk during races, in your head, or literally talk to yourself?

Mike: I do, and it’s benign stuff like you got this, stay strong, stay in the moment. And sometimes some expletives if I’m really digging deep. I don’t know if those are positive or not. Actually maybe that’s the one thing that I would tell somebody else to do is positive self-talk whereas sometimes I can fuel myself with some strong language and it seems to help in the moment.

Brendan: But it’s not negative strong language like, “You’re a piece of shit, Mike”?

Mike: Well, it’s like, don’t be a piece of shit. So it’s like right on the edge. I try and stay action-oriented and solutions-oriented, that’s my positive self-talk. I’m like, “OK, what can I do now to make sure that I’m feeling good ten minutes from now? How much liquid do I need? How much food do I need? That solutions-oriented curiosity and mindset is my positive self-talk.

Brendan: Do you have a mantra? Like would you say there’s things that you or some mantras that you repeat?

Mike: When my mind is getting super distracted, sometimes I’ll just repeat the phrase, “Now, here, this.”

Brendan: Have you ever shut off your headlamp when you’re way behind somebody who’s ahead of you in a race and then passed them and then turned it on?

Mike: Oh yeah. I’ve done headlamp warfare for sure. Either I’ll keep it off as long as possible so somebody doesn’t know I’m near or I will turn it off as I’m approaching somebody so they don’t get motivated to run any faster away from me.

Brendan: Do you ever say anything nasty to them as you pass by or like try to, like [imitates “ch-ch-ch-ah-ah-ah” sound from Friday the 13th]

Mike: No. I do not do that. I’m overly nice and just act like I’m not in any sort of pain or discomfort at that moment. I’m just overly jolly, and it’s just like psychological warfare.

Brendan: Do you like getting up early?

Mike: Yeah, I do

Brendan: How much coffee do you drink per day??

Mike: A cup.

Brendan: One cup?

Mike: Mmm hmm.

Brendan: What your policy on moving walkways?

Mike: I don’t take them.

Brendan: You want a donut?

Mike: No.

Brendan: Do you listen to music or anything when you run?

Mike: Yeah. Mostly podcasts.

Brendan: Are you gonna listen to podcasts during your race?

Mike: I don’t listen to anything when I race.

Brendan: Do you stretch?

Mike: I do the couch stretch. It’s to keep my knees happy. So that’s only recent, but normally not really.

Brendan: Can you sleep on planes?

Mike: Just a little bit.

Brendan: Do you enjoy being famous in a very niche environment? Like you don’t get recognized walking down the street in New York, but at trail running things you get recognized? Do you enjoy that?

Mike: Oh yeah. That’s the only reason I’m still here.

Brendan: Have you ever gotten lost during a race?

Mike: All the time, yeah.

Brendan: Really?

Mike: Oh man, yeah, I’ve got a bad record.

Brendan: Have you tried going slower? Because I’ve never gotten lost.

Mike: You haven’t?

Brendan: I don’t think so.

Mike: Really?

Brendan: I don’t even think I’ve had to turn around.

Mike: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like sometimes I’ll get there before the volunteer and so there’ll be like flags going in two directions and they’re the same color but ones for a 25K and one’s for the 50K.

Brendan: Not a problem a lot of us have. I can see you having it though. So you have a cold?

Mike: Yeah.

Brendan: And you’re gonna race anyway. You think I’m gonna get your cold before my race?

Mike: Probably the morning of. Right when you wake up you’ll feel it

Brendan: Do you do speed work?

Mike: I do intensity. So most of my like hard efforts are up the hill so it’s not that fast actually. But I’m doing it at a high effort. So I’ll just do five by three minutes up a steep hill to build strength and aerobic capacity. And then, you know, I’ll switch that up, sometimes I’ll just do a hard 30-minute effort up a hill. So it’s just rare that I’m doing speed, something really fast and flat. For the goals I have, I don’t really need a whole lot of flat speed work.

Brendan: Can I offer you an ass-wipe?

Mike: Yeah, sure, thanks.

Brendan: Have you ever had a nickname that stuck? When do you use poles in a race?

Mike: When it’s too steep to run.

Brendan: Have you ever worn the race T-shirt in the race?

Mike: It’s like wearing like a band T-shirt when you’re going to their concert, I just can’t do it.

Brendan: So no.

Mike: No.

Brendan: What’s your goal for today?

Mike: What’s my goal?

Brendan: Yeah.

Mike: Stay hydrated. Run fast. Make a friend.

Brendan: Do you get nervous?

Mike: Yeah.

Brendan: What about constipated?

Mike: No.

Brendan: What do you get nervous about?

Mike: The pain that will happen, the fear of expectations versus reality sometimes. I’m actually usually the most nervous like two days before and then by the time I get to the start line, I’m not very nervous.

Brendan: What’s your ratio of liquid calories to solid calories?

Mike: Probably 75 percent solid calories, 25 percent liquid.

Brendan: Do you have any advice for yourself before you start this race?

Mike: I think because I just don’t know the race course that well, it would probably be good for me to be judicious in the first hour so that I set myself up for the second half.

Brendan: And then if you’re feeling good, you’ll push it a little bit?

Mike: Yeah. Vision quest has begun.

Brendan: How you feeling?

Mike: I’m not good at all. I just don’t have any energy. I mean, it might come back and I’m trying, but.

Brendan: How far am I behind the leader?

Mike: You’re really far behind the leaders. You’re like five hours, six hours.

Brendan: OK.

Brendan: Mike, what do you when a race takes longer than you thought it would?

Mike: Well, you just, you work with what you got and you keep taking care of yourself. The strategy doesn’t really change, you just kind of acknowledge that maybe it’s not going as fast as you want. That’s OK, you still have the same goals: getting to the finish as fast as you can and taking care of yourself along the way.

Brendan: You ever get a rock in your shoe during a race?

Mike: Yeah.

Brendan: What do you do?

Mike: Well, if it’s not that big and it’s not slowing me down, I just leave it in there. But if it’s bothering me, I’ll take my shoe off and get the rock out.

Brendan: What about like an invisible poky plant piece?

Mike: I have a high tolerance to discomfort in my feet and usually I’m way too lazy to do anything about it.

Brendan: Have you ever read this book?

Mike: Yes.

Brendan: Have you ever bonked during a race?

Mike: Many times.

Brendan: What happens?

Mike: Well, sometimes I’m smart and eat a lot of food and take care of myself and turn things around, and sometimes I don’t or I don’t finish.

Brendan: Do you double knot your running shoes?

Mike: Depends on how long the shoelace is, if they’re longer, I’ll triple knot, but I at least double knot them.

Brendan: You think you’ll be able to get a selfie with a lion?

Mike: It’s possible.

Brendan: How long do you usually wait after a race to start running again?

Mike: You know, I like to listen to my body. It could be a few days, could be a few weeks.

Brendan: Was it worth it?

The post Do You Enjoy Pain? And 86 Other Questions for a Professional Ultrarunner. appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

A Wild Conversation with E. Jean Carroll

jversteegh — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 12:00:56 +0000

Before she became famous for her lawsuits against former President Trump, the writer took a road trip for an ��ϳԹ�� story that had her asking total strangers if they had sex outdoors. Her destination: the many American towns named Eden. Were Americans copulating in the gardens of Eden? She was in a car that she had hand-painted with blue polka dots and green frogs, her snacks consisted of cakes and pies, and her copilot was a giant poodle. In this gem of an episode from our archives, producer Paddy O’Connell hangs on for dear life.

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Mikaela Shiffrin Gives a Lot of Interviews. This Time, We Had Her Mom Ask the Questions.

jversteegh — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 11:00:34 +0000

Mikaela Shiffrin had a banner year in 2023. On March 11, she notched her 87th World Cup win, breaking the record for most career victories, held for 34 years by Swede Ingemar Stenmark, considered by many to be the most successful ski racer of all time. Shiffrin is now the winningest racer in World Cup history—and at 28 years old, she has plenty of time to add to the tally.

She has a lot going for her, to say the least. Incredible discipline, strength, technical skill—you name it. But Shiffrin has long said that the secret to her success isn’t her time in the gym or a perfect ski tune. It’s her mom, Eileen Shiffrin. Eileen has coached and traveled with Mikaela since her first season on the World Cup circuit, at age 15.

Eileen is a former masters ski racer herself, but by the time Mikaela was notching her first results, she’d settled into a career as an ICU nurse. Eileen never set out to be a ski coach. But it was a natural fit, and the two Shiffrins made a remarkable, inseparable team. The few times Eileen has stepped away from her coaching role—once in 2015, and again in 2019—Mikaela’s results suffered. In 2020, they weathered the loss of Jeff Shiffrin, husband and father.

Instead of assigning a writer to interview Mikaela about her year, we decided we would pass the mic to Eileen, so she could ask her daughter about relationships, success, life in the public eye, and what’s next. They recorded this interview while Mikaela was in Portillo, Chile, for a preseason training camp.

Shiffrin doing a World Cup slalom run at Soldeu, Andorra, in March (Photo: David Ramos/Getty)

EILEEN SHIFFRIN: Last season was a really big year for our team. I know you said it was the first season since Dad passed where you really felt like you could focus for two runs on race day. I know you focus on process rather than on goals, but what did it feel like to reset Ingemar’s record? What motivates you now that that’s in the rearview?
MIKAELA SHIFFRIN: The whole time, I was mostly worried that I was going to break the record when you weren’t there. I was feeling the pressure, and I just didn’t want to think about it anymore. Then you came back to help with the season, and that was a deciding factor for me subconsciously. I thought, If it happens here I’m OK with it, because Mom’s here. It was like the universe said, It’s OK to do it now, because your family’s here. Let loose.

Once I did it, it just felt hectic. You get about ten and a half seconds to yourself, and then you’re thrown to the media and you have to start talking about how you feel before you’ve processed how you feel. I’ve realized that if you don’t let it sink in within the first 24 hours, it just never will. It’s been cool to come to camp and ski and not think about the record at all. I’m focused on working on my position, my downhill performance, and getting better at gliding. With slalom, there’s room for more precision. It’s really exciting to think that I still might be able to get faster.

Picking up glittering prizes at Soldeu and Meribel, France (Photos: David Ramos/Getty; Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty)

Would you say that your motivation comes from making small improvements over time?
Right, the record wasn’t a limit. It was just the furthest that anyone had gone up until that point.

It was a result of the process, which has always been your guiding light. The result was resetting Ingemar’s record. But what keeps you motivated is the process, and continuing to set yourself apart with better skiing. How has your relationship to being in the public eye changed since you first started getting attention for your racing?
I’m actually really interested to hear what you think about this one.

OK! I feel like you’re more comfortable than when you first started getting attention for your racing. I think it was exciting for you in the beginning, but also tiring. The hardest part was that you’re an introvert, and you were put in the spotlight.
It forced me to be more comfortable with myself. I still think back to the days at Burke Mountain Academy. If I had to go alone to the dining hall, I just wouldn’t go—I’d skip meals, because I had such a fear of showing up to a room alone. It’s already full, there are no seats open, and you’re just carrying your tray and standing there. Everybody’s already in their conversation. I felt like nobody was missing me, and I shouldn’t be there. That’s still my natural instinct. But somehow I’m more comfortable with just doing what I need to do, and existing how I want to exist, and not worrying about what eyes are on me anymore.

(Photo: Benjamin Rasmussen)

You and I have a multifaceted relationship. I’m your mom, and to some extent your manager and coach. We’re also best friends. A lot of people assume that it was hard for us to develop this dynamic. How do you feel about the relationship we have? Was it ever hard for you to trust me?
I remember when I was at Burke, and you had gotten a job nearby as a nurse at the St. Johnsbury Hospital, so you would be close when Taylor [her brother] and I were at boarding school. I remember you telling me about one of the parents who said something along the lines of, “Don’t you think it’s kind of strange for you and Mikaela to still be so close?” I think I was 14 at the time. And that’s a perspective a lot of people have had through our whole relationship, as you’ve developed from my mom to my coach to literally the manager of Team Shiffrin. I remember us both being frazzled by that question. Like, what’s wrong with being close to your family? What could possibly be wrong with that?

I felt like it was such a gift for us to be close. It also set me apart through my ski career—to have that closeness with you, and with Dad and Taylor, and just with family in general. There have been periods of time when I’ve been a little bit more difficult. But the fundamental premise in our family philosophy is to be close, loving, and caring. It has carried me through my career.

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What Mikaela Shiffrin Only Tells Her Mom

jversteegh — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:00:26 +0000

When you’re one of the greatest skiers of all time, there are some things you only say to the person you trust most in the world. For Mikaela Shiffrin, that person is her mom, Eileen Shiffrin, who has coached and traveled with Mikaela since her first season on the World Cup circuit, at age 15. Eileen has always played an enormous role in her daughter’s life and that role grew even larger when Mikaela’s father died suddenly a few years ago. So, when ��ϳԹ�� decided to interview Mikaela for our ��ϳԹ��rs of the Year issue, we figured the best way to get truly candid answers would be to have Eileen ask the questions. In this episode, we sit in on their conversation, which offers a rare chance to hear how an Olympic champion really feels about the personal challenges she’s faced on her path to the top of her sport.

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