Outside Podcast

Many outdoorsy folks will happily slog for hours toward outdoor fun, despite the fact that any number of adventure derailing smackdowns await us. Gear malfunctions, crummy weather, and bloodied limbs don’t stop us from heading into the unknown. No one puts this optimistic persistence to better use than lifelong surfer and CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, Chad Nelsen. Chad grew up in smog-choked Laguna Beach in the 1970s, when pipes spilled raw sewage into the ocean regularly. He was inspired to pursue environmental science and a PhD combining his love of surfing with sustainability, thus dedicating his life to protecting and preserving the world’s oceans, waves, and beaches. Despite bureaucracy, apathy, and disengagement, Chad pursues environmentalism like a surfer paddling into pounding beach break, confident that the wave of his life is just outside the shore pound.

Wood chopping is objectively awful for all the obvious reasons: blisters, back aches, over-the-counter painkiller expenses. But that’s not what you remember months later, when the fruits of your labor warm you and your loved ones on a cold winter night. See, wood chopping is really an investment—both in terms of that crackling fire, but also your emotional well being.  That is something Nicole Coenen knows all about. The internet’s self proclaimed “lesbian lumberjill” grew up an uncomfortable tomboy in the suburbs of Ontario, and she found both her refuge and her calling in the woods. She’s amassed a huge following from the forest that surrounds her adopted home of British Columbia, and her videos are more than just wholesome, self-effacing clips of her wood chopping skills. They’ve a living journal of a woman who was saved by trees.

Spend time outdoors, and you’ll eventually spend time in brutal, even scary weather. Dangerous winds, flash flood-inducing rain, and vision-erasing whiteouts are sometimes the cost of entry. By the same token, you’re as likely to remember the upsides to those experience—the belly laughter of relief, the rainbows after the rain, the waist deep powder—as the scary parts. Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank, built a career out of those upsides by becoming one of the internet’s most beloved storm chasers. For decades, he’s captured astonishing photos and video of tornadoes, gathering new data on how they work and discovering new phenomena. On his wildly popular Youtube channel, his new photo memoir Storm, and in this conversation, we get to see and hear it all—from a significantly safer distance.

Extreme adaptability and versatility can be found throughout the animal kingdom, but may have found their peak expression in Alexi Pappas. As a runner, Pappas was a two-time All-American for Dartmouth who set a national record running for Greece at the 2016 Olympics. As a performer, she was a member of Dartmouth’s gut-busting Dog Day improv group before going on to write, direct, and star in several feature films, including Tracktown, Olympic Dreams, and Not An Artist. The further into her career Pappas gets, the more running influences her art, and her art influences her running—all of which she talks about in a way that makes you understand how she’s risen so high in two fundamentally different worlds. 

After Lawlor Coe lost his brother Hunter to tragedy, he did everything he could to avoid his pain. Then he laced up his joggers and began to run. At first, it was to elude his grief. But over time, as he began to log miles and miles, he found that the physical suffering he was enduring out on the trail helped him find his way to peace, and then back to joy. He was no longer running from his sorrow, from his anger, but toward a new sense of purpose. And along with the rest of his family, he found a way to honor Hunter’s life and the characteristics that made him one hell of a brother, son, and friend: by creating a fund that supports groups offering transformative experiences for young people in need of mental health support. And what Lawlor found in his runs and fundraising efforts is that after anger and sorrow is all used up, the only thing left to do is run toward love.

The blissed out, swell chasing surfer with a single-minded focus on the next great ride is a pervasive outdoorsy archetype that’s completely at odds with the lived experience of many surfers. Take historian Kevin Dawon, a professor at UC Merced, for whom surfing serves as his connection to a rich tradition of African aquatic culture. Dawson is credited with resurfacing the first account of surfing in Africa, from 1640—more than 100 years before Captain Cook’s famed account from Hawaii—and his research centers centuries of oceanic accomplishment by Black communities there and in North America that have been ignored or actively erased. Dawson’s experiences in the waters of Africa, the Caribbean, and his native California bear little resemblance to what many people think of when they hear “surfer,” but they’re drenched in a joy that’s recognizable to anyone who has ever played in the waves. 

We love our outdoor archetypes, the folk heroes who reject the trappings of the 9 to 5 life and solely focus on the trail, the powder turn, or the frothing whitewater. River guides live a romantic sunburnt existence, ones in which bucket list adventures are their everyday. It’s not just their ability to read water and navigate huge standing waves day after day, but their spiritual connection to the power of the water and landscape they’re paddling through. Folks like professional Grand Canyon guide Cindell Dale. Cindell has been boating “the Big Ditch” since the early 1980s, piloting Ticaboo, her 16 foot dory–a high-sided, v-shaped wooden boat known for its balletic movement and apparent ability to transform a river trip into a religious experience. Cindell was mentored by the female guides who broke through river running’s glass ceiling, a legacy Cindell and her peers continue every summer on the Colorado River. And after countless trips through the heart of one of the world’s most spectacular natural wonders, boy oh boy, does she have stories of the power of paddling through the magical splendor of the Grand Canyon.

We love our stories of human endurance, from Shackleton’s famed expedition to the 11-hour Wimbledon match to days-long ultramarathons. Hell, even the Coney Island Hot Dog eating contest is broadcast on television; that’s just how much we celebrate a person pushing themselves to the brink. But the moments that inspire the most are the ones in which a solo athlete has spent everything physically and mentally, and is forced to find a new gear emotionally. And for Ironman World Champion Chelsea Sodaro, her moment had nothing to do with swimming-biking-running 140 miles. At the same time Chelsea was standing atop triathlon podiums, she was ravaged by postpartum depression, including near-constant anxiety about mass shootings. What is so stirring about Chelsea is not her ability to push herself past the edge of what’s physically possible, but her emotional abilities to handle what happened when that edge pushed back.

In celebration of summertime road trips, this week we’re revisiting an episode from our archives that is one of PaddyO’s favorites. In 2021, two men set out to do something seemingly impossible. And also pretty dumb. Motorcycle gurus and YouTube stars Zack Courts and Ari Henning would squeeze together, buttcrack to belt buckle, onto a minibike—a vehicle roughly the size of a children’s bicycle and powered by an engine that can barely run a lawn mower—and drive 400 miles from a cornfield in Nebraska to a little place called Aspen, Colorado. Sound familiar? It should. That’s right, this is the same iconic road trip that Hollywood stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ Harry and Lloyd took in the cult classic Farrelly Brothers film Dumb and Dumber. The big difference is that this time it wasn’t a hilarious 3-minute movie montage. This road trip was for real. And it hurt like hell.

Famous Hollywood actors aren’t outdoorsy, right? They’re too busy being…well, famous to enjoy the outdoors and certainly too fancy to listen to a podcast about the surprising impacts of a life outside, aren’t they? Turns out, HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” star, Tony Cavalero, is a longtime listener of the Outside Podcast because he’s been obsessed with outdoor adventure since first donning a Boy Scout uniform as a kid. And, Tony’s path crossed with host PaddyO’s decades before either of them decided to move out West to make something of themselves. But Tony and PaddyO have more in common than a “go West, young man” past. Both have felt the crushing weight of active alcoholism and drug addiction. Luckily, they also are both in long term recovery and have a shared joy and gratitude for the rekindling of dormant passions, like adventuring outside and laughing your ass off.