Friday Inspiration 453 I have been following Kraig Adams’ YouTube channel for a couple years now, but I don’t think I’ve ever put one of his videos in this newsletter. What I love about it is how anti-YouTube-algorithm it is—usually no talking, with very unhurried, long shots of hiking in beautiful places. Also he absolutely knows how to frame a shot. This one’s in Switzerland, and the actual hiking footage is just under 15 minutes. (video) If you’re not already following my wife, Hilary, on...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 452 I was really happy to see this episode of “PaddyO Sucks At” come out, especially given the ending, and was a little bummed that it would only exist behind the paywall at OutsideOnline, but then they randomly put it on YouTube for free, so everyone can watch it. (I do make a small cameo in it) (video) This is from 2015,but as a fan of old sports photos, I was definitely interested in why they all (at least the indoor ones of basketball and boxing) had a bluish haze, and...
14 days ago • 2 min read
The Peace > Justice Bike Lock -- If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting my work.
15 days ago • 1 min read
Friday Inspiration 451 This video is probably not for everyone, but if you like Oreos, it will be very ... informative. (video) I’m writing this on Thursday afternoon, and by the time you read it, the Chicago White Sox may have broken the record for most games ever lost in a Major League Baseball season. I’ve been a little interested in this for a few weeks now, not out of schadenfreude, but because people are writing about “losing” in really thoughtful ways, like in this piece. (gift link) I...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 450 My friend Mark made this video, and I love everything about it: A regular guy runs his own 100-mile ultramarathon in his backyard mountain range (his third attempt at it, BTW), films the whole thing, and gets them both done, with fast food, hallucinations, and a brief section in Crocs. (video) Organizational psychologist Adam Grant seems to be everywhere the past few years—most recently, inside my head with this tough love about “research” actually sometimes sometimes...
28 days ago • 2 min read
The Rut 50K In 4 Minutes I was standing in the dark in the starting corral at the base of Big Sky Resort this past Sunday morning, with my friend Mitsu and the rest of the 100-plus people in Wave 4 of The Rut 50K, thinking, “How am I going to remember this race in a few years?” Then everybody started running, and so did I, and I forgot to start my watch for the first 300 feet or so. Around the 1.5-mile mark, I decided I’d try to shoot one 10-second video every mile for the rest of the race,...
29 days ago • 1 min read
Friday Inspiration 449 This is kind of a rapid-fire of short video stories about pizza, and maybe you won’t watch all of them (the whole video is a bit over 8 minutes), but if you watch the first one, you will have seen, maybe for the first time, the World Pizza Games pizza acrobatics competition, a sport I just found out existed yesterday. (video) I don’t often eat ice cream at McDonald’s, but I love that someone made a website (in 2020!) that tells you which McDonald’s ice cream machines...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 448 As much as we all at know, deep in our hearts, that social media isn’t real life, it’s interesting to hear some experts talk about how we can keep it from distorting our perspective (also, there’s an ad in this video from about 00:50 until 2:10, if you’d like to skip it)(video) Sure, Shohei Ohtani is impressive as a baseball player because he’s able to succeed at a high level as both a pitcher and a hitter (and base-stealer), but how many other MLB players have ever...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I Stopped To Read Some Signs And Let Me Tell You 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...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
