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​Friday Inspiration 491​
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NOTE: I'm publishing this week's post on Thursday since this Friday is July 4th, and lots of people/Americans do other things on July 4th. Please feel free to read it on Thursday, Friday, or whatever day suits your needs.

This is a bit longer than the videos I usually include here, but I got sucked into this guy’s adventure on “America’s Worst Rated Train,” and honestly, it delivered. About halfway through, I wasn't sure it was good press for Amtrak, but by the end of the video, I thought, you know, yeah, maybe it is good press for Amtrak. Kind of. (Although I do think it’s a little strange that he says “There is one train route that exists all the way from Miami to Alaska,” when the final, quite significant, leg of the trip is quite obviously on a boat?) (video)

I don’t know how I found this essay on youth sports (and also about parenting and coaching), but I kept stopping while reading and going, “huh, yeah,” and wondering if over the past couple decades, we have been (at least partly unintentionally) making sports less and less fun for the kids who participate in them?

When I mention newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration in these posts, it’s usually some sort of personal endorsement from me, a 46-year-old mid-pack ultrarunner dad, which I hope has some value (and authenticity). LIke hey, I’m a regular person training and running, and this stuff works for me, not just for super-athlete types who bound up mountains and barely break a sweat doing it. I was going to do that again this week, but then I saw the results for the Western States Endurance Run come in over the weekend, and realized that five of the top 10 men were sponsored by Precision Fuel & Hydration. (Including four of the top five, which included Missoula’s own Jeff Mogavero). So I guess take it from me, this stuff works for super-athletes too. Here’s a link to the PF 90 gels, a favorite product my both myself and Caleb Olson, who won Western States.​

We are pretty lucky in Missoula to have a great local coffee roaster in Black Coffee, and maybe even luckier that Jim Chapman, one of the co-founders, is a creative guy who loves writing and photography. So when I get emails from Black Coffee (besides the ones that inform me my monthly coffee subscription just shipped), I usually open them. The most recent one—“My 5 Favorite Methods for Camp Coffee”—was an easy sell, too, because Jim knows a ton about coffee, and isn’t a snob when he discusses it (I appreciate that he includes instant coffee in his list, because in my opinion, there’s a place and time for it). Anyway, don’t take it from me, a mere coffee enthusiast—take it from someone who’s actually an expert on coffee, and camping.

I can’t even remember the first time I bought a pack of Field Notes pocket notebooks, but I vividly remember the 15 or so minutes I got to spend talking to Aaron Draplin at an event we did in Chicago in 2017. Being charismatic is one thing, and being down-to-earth and funny in tandem with being charismatic is a whole other thing. I have been rooting for Draplin for a very long time, and it’s really cool to see this article about the phenomenon that is Field Notes (as well as this link to a page showing part of Draplin’s vast collection of vintage pocket notebooks).

It’s crazy to think that it’s been 15 years (!) since The Social Network came out, and I can’t say I think the material for a sequel is exactly uplifting, I am cautiously optimistic that Aaron Sorkin will make another good movie (especially if he can convince Jesse Eisenberg to participate again?).

I’m not trying to put a link about AI in every issue of this newsletter, but I knew when John Oliver tackled the subject, it would at least be entertaining. And of course he went at it from an angle—only talking about AI slop, which, in the span of this 29-minute segment, had me laughing, a little sad, laughing, disappointed, laughing, a little angry, laughing, and then applauding at the end.

Because that’s how the PhotoshopRequests Subreddit works, you have to scroll through the replies here to see all the wacky edits people did to this photo of this guy tossing his baby in the air, but I think it’s pretty rewarding scrolling per centimeter of thumb travel.

Last weekend, I was in Wisconsin for my niece’s graduation party, and the morning of the party, I ran down the street from their house to a county park and ran three 1.05-mile loops around the road that circles the park before heading back to the house to pick up my nephew to run a couple more laps around the park with me. To my great surprise and mild entertainment, I got an email from Strava informing me that the first three laps had given me the “Local Legend” title for the most reps on that loop in a 90-day period. I have always found Strava’s Local Legend feature to be humorous, because I every time I’ve gotten a notification that I’ve become a Local Legend of something, it’s always some obscure short segment that I’ve never consciously tried to run a lot of reps of. And it’s usually called something like “Unnamed Rd Climb,” which for some reason is really popular in the Missoula area (and I guess a few other places). So, that’s a long story, but: We made a coffee mug. For me, I guess, and you, if you’ve ever been a Local Legend of Unnamed Rd Climb or something else obscure. OR, even better, if you’d like a gift for your spouse or friend or running partner who would get a good chuckle out of having a dubious honor displayed on a coffee mug. Here’s a photo, which you can click on for more information:

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