Waxing Poetic about the Outdoors and Other Such Stuff
I thrive outside. Vast deserts, steep mountains, deep canyons, and endless ocean horizons. My roots are in Colorado, despite only living there until I was 9 months old. I grew up with the stories my parents told me of hikes in boulder fields, snow drifts to the roofline, tornadoes tearing across high plains of Denver. I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia; and I never really appreciated the countryside, or the beauty of the rolling, ancient mountains that I could see every day. I took them for granted growing up, and like all teenage kids, just wanted to get out of there.
As I got older and discovered more and more of the great parts of the Blue Ridge and the rural mountains, it started to sink in just how much I needed them as part of my life. Trail running and mountain biking became my side distraction to time on the water (on a wakeboard mostly, I still have almost zero love for fishing). Summers could be hot and unpleasant, but nonsense in a creek, or the shady side of the hill was always near. Not so much down in Florida.
Florida summers are rough for me in a weird way. I have no issues with XC MTB riding in the heat besides the insane volume of sweat requiring me to wear gloves lest I lose all grip on the handlebars, but I can’t take Ripley on those adventures, and she loves them almost more than her ball (which is in her mouth 85% of the time at home). So I feel guilty leaving her to go ride alone, selfish almost. These young years with her are the time that she’ll be most capable of it and I feel like I’m robbing her of these adventures. But she bonks hard, and I mean HARD. In the winter, 10+ miles at an almost dead sprint the whole time is nothing to her - summertime, she’s smoked 3 miles in and barely wants to move (the last time she was out, she laid down in poison ivy and I’m still dealing with the aftermath on my body).
So because of all of that, I used to just stop riding and neglect one of the few outdoor things in Jax that I really enjoy, but this year I rebuilt my entire bike (frame, wheels and seat are basically the only original components that remain of the 2017 Rockhopper Comp I picked up after my 2009 model bit the dust), and I’ve found some people to ride with consistently. Ripley will have to accept frequent trips to the dog park and morning bike rides around the neighborhood on those infrequent mornings that the temperature is lower than 80 degrees and the humidity is somewhere south of 90%. So despite me feeling like I’m robbing Ripley of the things that bring her joy, the motivation to head outside and adventure the greater Jacksonville area trails has been strong this summer.
Ultimately, between finding riding buddies and the full rebuild of my bike (done in my garage where I could consistently screw up and then fix things and then follow youtube how-to videos), I’ve been given a source of adventure, despite a more recent overwhelming lack of adventure compared to my years traveling for GORUCK or that one time that I drove to Moab that I’ve been getting social ammo from for years at this point (headline picture for this blog post is from a stop in New Mexico at a mountain bike trail that I discovered because I saw a sign off the highway with a MTB silhouette and “Trails in X Miles”).
So as the stream of consciousness that is how I write goes, this circles back to why I quit working full time - I was profoundly unhappy indoors, at a desk, all day every day, for the sake of a consistent paycheck. There are obviously a lot of drawbacks to not being given a salary, but having the time to go out on the trails in the morning and not have to make it back to be at the office by 9, even if I didn’t have any important or time sensitive tasks that day, has been profoundly freeing. Getting laid off at the start of 2020 before the pandemic was the first step in this direction before taking another job almost immediately, and it was probably one of the best things to ever happen to me because it forced me to step out of my comfort zone and look at the things that really make me, happy. I spent the next year and a half at that job evaluating the things that made me happy, and as I worked 9-5, I spent most of my free time in the background building myself the path, client base, and freedom (mostly financially) to pursue the path I wanted.
To be fair - I have a lot of super supportive friends and they have helped me dramatically when it comes to aligning their businesses and brands with my growing work portfolio, and those have been the make or break line for this career path to be successful. So to them, thank you, even though you all are unlikely to make it this far in my meandering thought process.
The other important thing for me with leaving the nine to five grind is the impending birth of my daughter (who unless something dramatically changes is likely to be named Saylor) and the realization that I’d rather be there for her life than be stuck in an office for 8-9 hours of my day, not including the nearly full hour of commuting surrounding that day. I’ve said this to a fair number of people at this point, but so often I hear regrets from older dads about not being there for the younger years of their children’s lives, and I want to be involved in every part of it. Yeah sure there will be big trips and work and times where I’ll be both physically and emotionally unavailable, but those sections of life are far fewer and exist more in the inbetween than they do when you’re working 40 hours a week, filling your time with nonsense busy work to justify the paycheck.
Plus, hopefully the next chapter after the potato stage of Saylor’s life will hopefully involve taking her on the same kinds of adventures my parents took me on as a kid, so that maybe I can ingrain and foster the deep love of the outdoors that my parents gave me as a young child (first trip to Colorado and Wyoming was a super long road trip with a popup camper towed behind the first model year of the Jeep Grand Cherokee when I was 4 years old). Just maybe with more activities like climbing and mountain biking and ridiculous exploration than maybe my parents had been into.
It seems like many of us become our parents eventually, just hopefully a better version (a tall order for those of us who were fortunate enough to have amazing parents).
-Nick