Inside out - the bigger picture

  "The actual achievement doesn't really change your life like you think it might when your building up to it, but what your left with is the journey that got you to that point.  And if you have this big journey where you had to figure a lot of stuff out, you had to plan and it was more immersive and then you were somewhere beautiful for a long time and then had to work really hard and overcome some kind of mental barrier, your left with so much more of a story or memory and experience, and that's what I find is most important" - Marc-André Leclerc (The Alpinist) I almost fell off my treadmill a few times while simultaneously running and watching "The Alpinist" on Netflix last night.  The drone and GoPro captured scenery spun in front of me as Mar-André hung from the tip of an icepick hundreds and even thousands of feet above solid ground.  It was mesmerizing in a lot of ways; the type of documentary that makes you wonder what it would be like to do somethin...

I want my daughter to love skiing as much as I do. Last year while on a long weekend in Vermont with friends I decided to take Teddy on her inaugural runs at Killington with a pair of plastic skis she could strap her shoes into. She loved it and I couldn’t have been prouder when she bawled her eyes out because she didn’t want to stop skiing. However, at 2.5 she wasn’t quite strong enough to balance on her own two feet while in motion so I ended up in an awkward back breaking bent over position holding her between my arms and her skis barely touching the snow while she repeated over and over again "Faster daddy, faster!”. I learned a few lessons.  First, gear matters. The plastic skis had so much drag that it was hard for her to slide down the hill even with me holding her. The skis acted like anchors slowing us down. That friction made the act of skiing even more difficult since moving is necessary to learn. The second lesson was that a child needs to be strong enough to...