Month: March 2019

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February is a great time to buy ski gear. With retailers looking to clear out their inventory and get ready for spring, you can come away with killer steals. Backcountry.com is having a huge sale the entire month with great deals on top of the line ski and snowboard apparel. Here are some of our favorites. 

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With a relaxed fit for easy layering and a three-layer Gore-Tex outer, the Mission is a do-it-all shell for both resort and backcountry riding. It's a little heavier than other jackets in this category, in part because of the bomber 70-denier fabric, which will survive some serious abuse. Other features include two underarm vents to dump unwanted heat, a powder skirt, and waterproof zippers. 

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A reliable waterproof breathable shell combined with a thin layer of synthetic insulation makes the Slopestar provide full protection against the elements. The pants also feature internal gaiters to keep snow out of your boots, zippered leg vents to increase airflow, four zippered pockets for gear and cold hands, and Cordura scuff guards for enhanced durability.

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Bibs have been increasing in popularity in recent years and for good reason—they provide complete coverage so you never have to worry about snow or cold air slipping through the seam between your pants and jacket. The Baker is one of our favorites, thanks to the three-layer waterproof breathable membrane that's reinforced with 1000-denier Cordura around the cuffs to prevent cuts or fraying. Fully taped seams make the entire thing completely waterproof and we dig the kangaroo-style chest pocket, which makes access to essentials like snacks and a transceiver easy. 

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A mid-weight puffy jacket is one of the most versatile pieces of gear you can own. Layer it under a shell on extra cold days, pack it as a just-in-case option, or wear it to the bar for après-ski. The Transcendent features 650-fill down in small baffles which keep the down in place and stuffs into its own pocket. 

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Patagonia's Capilene is our go-to baselayer for staying warm and sweat-free in the mountains. The key feature is the Polartec Powergrid fabric, which combines squares of soft-to-the-touch polyester with stitched channels that direct moisture away from the skin. Offset shoulder seams and a flatlock construction do a fine job of minimizing chafing, while the gusseted underarms deliver a full range of motion. 

Men's Women's

These gloves combine goatskin leather with 160-denier nylon shell for a completely weatherproof and durable outer. Inside, a fleece lining wicks away sweat and a thin layer of synthetic insulation keeps the cold at bay. 

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We usually avoid wearing insulated jackets in the backcountry because it's easy to overheat. Not so with the Ozone, which pairs an ultra-breathable Polartec NeoShell outer with a layer of air permeable Polartec Alpha synthetic insulation. Underarm vents and a removable powder skirt round out the features. 

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Earlier this month on a snowboarding trip, I was in the gondola with my friend and two strangers at Jackson Hole when the lone skier in the car struck up some conversation. He looked at me and asked, “What nationality are you?” 

“American,” I replied. 

He waited for me to elaborate. When I didn’t continue, he goaded, “No like, Asian or anything?” I repeated: “My nationality is American.” 

A few years ago, I would’ve spent more energy explaining my existence in response to these questions. Where are you from? What are you? I’d have gotten sucked into it. “I was born and raised in Wisconsin, but my ethnicity is Taiwanese,” I would have answered. 

This time, when he kept talking, I didn’t engage. 

I’ve gotten used to getting questions like this at many resorts. I first discovered snowboarding in college, and as I got hooked over the years, I idolized various pro female snowboarders from the X Games circuit and snowboarding videos. But I never became so excited about a rider as I did three years ago, when I first heard about Chloe Kim. She was already dominating contests by the time I heard of her, and just like me, she was an Asian-American California girl who trained at Mammoth. I was quickly obsessed, and started keeping tabs on her competitions. 

After this exchange at Jackson, I thought of Kim, who is Korean-American. I wondered if she ever gets asked the same alienating questions when she’s on the lift with her friends. Does she also get tired of having to answer for all Asian-Americans when she’s just trying to train, or enjoy a nice day in the mountains? 

For much of my childhood, the most Asians I ever saw on TV at one time was during the Olympics. But they represented other countries, and watching them actually made me feel even more isolated and estranged from my own identity. Like many Asian-Americans, I grew up with a dearth of people who looked like me in popular culture, competitive sports, and my own community. By the time I reached high school, in the outskirts of Milwaukee, I was one of just a handful of Asian-Americans in a sea of 1,400 students. 

As a kid, I happened to excel in areas that were prescribed—even stereotypical—for Asian-Americans, like piano, violin, and ice skating. I liked skating, but I longed for more outdoorsy sports, and I didn't see much precedent for that. After a year of ice skating lessons, when I was 7, I was facing time constraints with too many activities. I quit skating to focus on music, in part because of my parents’ encouragement. 

A few years later, beginning in 1991, Kristi Yamaguchi went on to become a national, world, and Olympic figure skating champion. It made me miss skating just a little, but more importantly, her mere presence in the world championships and the Olympics, singing our national anthem and wearing a gold medal, meant that even I could represent America, too. I hadn’t seen any other Asian-Americans competing in these events, and besides Connie Chung, she was the only other Asian-American I knew of on TV. She had features like mine, represented the country where I lived (but didn’t always feel like I belonged), and she was the very best. Twenty-seven years later, half of the 2018 Olympic U.S. figure skating team is Asian-American. 

Chloe Kim is one of only two Asian-American snowboarders at the highest level. (Hailey Langland placed sixth in the Slopestyle event in Pyeongchang.) I’m hopeful and confident that she’ll have a similar impact on the next generation of snowboarders as Yamaguchi did for young skaters. 

I’d always wondered what it might be like to live among lots of other Asian-Americans. So when it came time for me to go to college, I chose UCLA, where 33 percent of the student body is ethnically Asian. But once I got there, I realized that after years of feeling like I wasn’t white enough (no matter how much I tried to blend in), suddenly, I wasn’t Asian enough. As a result, I became involved with an Asian-American college group, and one of their traditions was an annual ski trip. 

I joined the trip freshman year to Lake Tahoe and decided to try snowboarding. I had skied just once in Wisconsin, where there is barely any elevation to speak of, and had never been on a snowboard. So my skills were pretty non-existent. But snowboarding in the California mountains got me hooked. As I grew more proficient and determined on the hill, I became addicted to the rush of speeding down groomers and pillaging bowls of powder. I perfected my carving skills at Snow Summit whenever I didn’t have class, before eventually graduating to the five-hour weekend treks to Mammoth once I started my first job. Aside from the pure thrill of the sport, it delighted me to crush all the stereotypes of Asian-Americans that I previously conformed to.

Following Chloe Kim’s career over the past few years, as a fellow Asian-American female snowboarder, has been an exhilarating ride. At only 17, she’s constantly pushing the sport to new levels, and consistently performs well under pressure. My friends (of all races) who don’t snowboard have suddenly expressed interest in learning just because of watching her. I’ve replayed her gold medal run from last week probably a dozen times. To see her win Olympic gold with such style, ease, and grace actually brought me to tears. Every time I watch it, I think about all the young, Asian-American girls who don’t see anyone like them on their local hill, with their eyes glued to a televised Kim as she triumphs on the world stage. 

Lovingly used and abused

Are you ready for another ski season? These skis and poles sure are! And they could be yours for just $5. But first, you should probably know a few things.

First of all, they’ve been mounted three times, so it might be a little tricky to find a spot to mount your bindings. I bought them for $100 from my friend Mitsu in 2009, after he’d skied on them for a few seasons. He’s a couple inches shorter than me, but I figured they’d work. They were my first backcountry skis, mounted with a pair of Fritschi Diamir Freerides or something, which didn’t have brakes, so I bought some steel leashes for them. I skied them off and on until 2014, when my girlfriend wanted to learn to ski, so she bought some used boots from a friend and used them for a couple years. They’re 170cm, which is a little long for her and a little short for me, but I guess we both made do. Maybe you can too, if, like I said, you can find a way to mount bindings on them a fourth time.

I don’t know a hell of a lot about skis except how to stay upright on them about 95 percent of the time, but these were allegedly pretty decent, and not just in my opinion. Off Piste Magazine reviewed them in 2003 and liked them for alpine touring and tele skiing, even if they were a bit heavy (although at 120/90/110 they were pretty fat). In addition, I texted Mitsu earlier this week to ask him about his memories of the skis and he said, “At the time I thought they were great.” I have no idea why a guy who primarily spent his resort days searching for the perfect tele turn while listening to Harvard Business Review podcasts on his earbuds would have bought twin-tip skis, but like I said, I don’t know a hell of a lot about skis anyway. But apparently these will go backwards if you’re into that sort of thing. Also, there are no core shots.

OK, so they’ve been mounted three times, are a little heavy, and I guess as of this season, they’re a little elderly. But they’re basically the exact same age as Jay-Z’s "The Black Album," which has aged quite well since winter 2003, in my opinion. Although Karhu stopped existing as a ski manufacturer after being acquired by K2 in 2004, so I guess you would say Jay-Z is doing a little better than Karhu. Anyway, a few things to think about if purchasing these skis—but let me mention that I’ll throw in these ski poles as well.

The poles: My friend Brian gave these to me in 2008 when he was getting rid of all his stuff before moving to China to teach English. He had acquired them at a thrift shop for $5, and they served me well all the way through the 2016-2017 ski season. I don’t know how much pole technology has advanced in the many years since these poles were designed, but I do know I punched through some crust on Quandary Peak in June 2009, ate shit, and fell super-hard on one of the poles and it bent but didn’t break.

The poles have pretty much all the parts you would find on normal ski poles, and if you’re the kind of skier whose skiing demands poles that are arrow-straight, or, you know, less than a decade old, you probably won’t be interested in these. But if you’re in need of a pair of skis and a pair of poles and you want to spend less on them than you will on your first apres-ski beer this season, this package is as good as any other ski/pole combo you’ll find in the $4-$6 price range this year.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You’re probably just going to make the skis into one of those ski chairs. You know what, $5 seems a little steep. Tell you what: I’ll just leave them in the alley behind my apartment, and if you want them, come by and grab them.

Read more from Brendan Leonard at Semi-Rad.com

For a picturesque Tibetan village, an increase in tourists represents a complicated past and an uncertain future

In Central China’s Xiahe airport, a wall near baggage claim features a photograph of Zhagana, a Tibetan village high in the mountains of Gansu province. About 1,300 people live there, in a landscape straight out of Lord of the Rings—peaks of sheer rock tower above the village, conifers cover the hillsides, and a narrow stream runs below terraced fields. In summer, tour buses charge up from the nearby county seat and pause for photos at its best vista. Then they immediately descend. As flag-waving tour guides herd their flocks on and off buses, the lookout becomes a spectacle in itself. Chinese people refer to the routine in a self-deprecating jingle, which rhymes in Mandarin:

Ride the bus and sleep
Park the bus and pee
Get off the bus for pics
Return and remember nothing.

I’d first heard about Zhagana from a Tibetan friend who had once worked in the local tourist bureau. She had seen firsthand how these waves of visitors were changing the village from a quiet town to a thriving outdoor destination. The hoards coming off the buses represented the most visible part of the upsurge, but more significant to the town’s transformation, she said, were middle-class Chinese and a small but growing contingent of Westerners venturing into the surrounding backcountry to trek, camp, and hike. They had triggered a guesthouse boom, fueled by Chinese government subsidies, that was making Zhagana and other mountain towns across the plateau increasingly accessible. Local tourist offices were now using buzzwords like “ecotourism” to advertise their wild landscapes and lure this new demographic of traveler. “Tibet markets itself,” says my friend, who left her tourist bureau job to start her own business selling traditional Tibetan medicine. “Now everyone’s heard how beautiful Tibet is.”

The branding has worked. In 2016, 10 million Chinese tourists visited Zhagana’s greater prefecture—a 30 percent increase from the year before—crowding previously secluded mountain hideaways. “The growth is super-strong right now and really picking up, especially in areas outside of Lhasa and Central Tibet,” says Jed Weingarten, a photographer and ecotourism consultant who has worked with towns in eastern Tibet. The explosion in tourism was changing the region, my Tibetan friend told me last summer, and she encouraged me to see for myself. 

(Will Ford)

(Will Ford)

(Will Ford)

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When I visited Zhagana in June, a 14-year-old drove me on his motorbike to his family’s guesthouse. That night, the power cut out; within minutes, flashlights, candles, and moonlight replaced electricity. With the TV off, I asked the family’s patriarch, a man in his late sixties whom I’ll call Tenzin, how Zhagana had so suddenly become a mountain tourist destination. (The subjects of the story wished to remain anonymous due to sensitivity around talking to the foreign press about Tibetan politics.)

He explained that the Chinese government had begun to see outdoor tourism, among other development initiatives, as a promising political tool to integrate remote villages like Zhagana into the Chinese economy. This was particularly true in regions of the Tibetan Plateau outside Central Tibet, like Kham and Amdo, where Zhagana is located. The strategy represented a stark tactical shift away from decades of failed Chinese attempts at assimilating villages by force that started with Chairman Mao Zedong’s occupation of Tibet in the 1950s. “Before, everything we did was about communism,” Tenzin told me, referring to Mao’s disastrous policies through the 1970s. “Now it’s tourism.”

But first, there was a three-decade period of quiet in the 1980s, ’90s, and early aughts when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adapted the country’s economy to capitalism. In Zhagana, villagers recovered from decades of failed experiments in communism, rebuilding their monasteries and dividing plots of land among families again. Harsher tactics returned, however, in 2008, as China prepared for its global beauty pageant in the Beijing Olympics. That March, China’s central news station broadcast news of riots in Lhasa, Central Tibet’s capital, where dubious arrests of local monks incited Tibetans to vandalize neighborhoods gentrified by Chinese migrants. Unrest spread across the plateau.

In Zhagana, a mob descended the mountain road to the county seat of Diebu, where they threw rocks at local government offices. Riot police responded with tear gas, villagers told me. For two weeks after that, police interrogated villagers, cellphones were checked, and phone service was cut off. Families with pictures of the Dalai Lama in their houses or on their phones or who had sent text messages deemed “suspicious” were liable for arrest. PLA soldiers and police increased foot patrols and roadblocks; though the village was never formally sealed, few dared leave their homes. Tenzin’s son, Norbu, who helped run the guesthouse, recalled more than 20 villagers being arrested and held in custody for up to four months. According to Tenzin, they often returned with bruises and had trouble sitting down.

But the CCP’s tactics of intimidation never won over Tibetans. Eventually, officials changed strategy and attempted to buy loyalty instead. In 2012, the Chinese government’s local tourist bureau began promoting the area to visitors, putting up posters like the one in the Xiahe airport. At the same time, they began offering generous loan packages and subsidies for families looking to start businesses. In 2013, Tenzin’s family accepted a blank check of more than RMB 20,000 (about $3,000) from the local government to build a guesthouse—one of the first in town.

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During my visit, guesthouse construction was still in full swing, with the sounds of drills and jackhammers ringing out over the valley. One day on the patio, I caught Norbu, handsome and with an energetic smile, considering the dirt road leading down to Diebu, which was scheduled to be paved soon. Five years ago, he recalled, there wasn’t a single guesthouse in town. “Now, every family has one,” he says.

Later, he told me more about how fast the village was changing. These days, electricity was more reliable. More guesthouses had Wi-Fi. Villagers were happy about the standard of living, and Norbu’s family was doing well; they had made all the money back from their initial investments, and they felt in control of their decisions. The terror that followed 2008 was largely over, though the memories still made Norbu shudder. Meanwhile, village traditions endured—the local monastery was full, and most families still had nomadic relatives herding yak on the high mountain grasslands. Tibetan was still the village’s first language.

But the CCP’s influence still loomed over the town and its new economy in subtle ways. I had hoped to camp with Tenzin’s grandson, a shepherd who moved between distant pastures tending sheep and yak, tethering himself to his family’s village as if in orbit around a host star. While he refused to market homestays for trekkers on overnight hikes as other nomads had begun doing, he extended a rare invitation to me to visit his pastures and sleep in his traditional, leaky black tent made of yak wool. I was thrilled. But as soon as I had packed, Tenzin vetoed the trip. It had snowed recently, and he worried that I might slip, that I wouldn’t be able to stomach raw yak milk, or that his son’s guard dog would attack me, unaccustomed to the smell of a foreigner. And if anything were to happen, their relationship with the local CCP tourist bureau, which certified tourist outfits like guesthouses, might be ruined.

Cultural norms were changing as well, Norbu told me. When I asked how, he grimaced. “Before, helping a neighbor with something wasn’t really a big deal,” he said. “Now, people ask for money.” There was an underlying assumption that helping with a neighbor’s renovations could be risky: Improvements to one business might take away customers from another. “We’re richer, but a lot has been lost,” he said.

Norbu also fretted about the erosion of the Tibetan language among young people. He taught the language in a local school, and fewer students were signing up for his classes. They were choosing to focus on Mandarin instead—a choice their parents almost always pushed for, seeing the Chinese market around them.

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One day, three Chinese tourists from Lanzhou, the provincial capital seven hours away, checked into Tenzin’s guesthouse. At dinner among themselves, they began criticizing Tibetans as ungrateful for the favorable treatment they received in development money, including the type that had kick-started the guesthouse they were staying in. It was a common complaint among Chinese, who tended to view themselves as noble missionaries bringing modernity to an impoverished backwater of the country that, as they saw it, had forever been a part of China. Tibet’s transformation to a more urbanized society, they believed, was an honorable undertaking, and stories of Tibetan farmers turned guesthouse millionaires resembled the legends of Chinese boomtowns on the coast, worthy of celebration. But when I asked them how this transition could happen smoothly if all Tibetans didn’t aspire to CCP-scale development, there was a momentary silence. Finally, one tourist spoke up.

“Some Tibetans,” he said, frowning, “maybe they’re just happy tending sheep.”

That was an oversimplification, but it touched on the core of the problem. Tibetans tended to be far more skeptical than Chinese about the sacrifices required for CCP-scale economic development. This confounded party leaders; nearly everywhere else in the country, development had ensured political stability. “The extraordinary development of Tibet over the past 60 years points to an irrefutable truth,” said Xi Jinping, China’s president, during a speech in Lhasa. “Without the Communist Party, there would have been no new China, no new Tibet.”

In a different way, Western visitors often remained just as oblivious to Tibet’s complexities. It can be tempting to view Chinese-fueled development as threatening a romanticized land full of peaceful nomads and monks shielded from modernity’s evils. But Tibetans like Norbu and Tenzin cautioned me against casting them as victims. Another Tibetan I knew had been in Lhasa for the riots. She had grown sick of fielding foreigners’ questions about it and rolled her eyes when the Tibetan independence movement was brought up. To her, “Free Tibet” had become a kind of hippy slogan performing a global wokeness; the West, by making Tibet an international symbol of victimhood, now fetishized even her people’s problems.

That narrative also conflicted with her own success as an entrepreneur: She had since migrated to a city and was making good money selling Tibetan jewelry. Another Tibetan guesthouse owner I knew, previously a small farmer, was now making more than RMB 1 million (about $150,000) each summer. And while the Chinese government had helped push the tourist market on Zhagana, Tenzin and Norbu stressed that it was ultimately up to the individual villagers to decide whether they wanted to engage with it. Left with the choice, Tenzin was proud that many families like his had willingly opened tourism businesses to better their lives. No one would soon forget the CCP’s political motives, but it was unfair to blame anyone for being pragmatic.

I thought about all of this as I wandered the mountains around Zhagana. Chinese and Western critiques often devolved into a shouting match when it came to Tibet, yet both felt rooted in different savior narratives. Tibetans themselves were often left in the middle, ignored like a child by two domineering parents whose arguments long ago ceased to be about the child. Meanwhile, most Tibetans I knew were operating despite all the shouting, improvising their way forward and making the best decisions they could in the face of an uncertain future. Tenzin and Norbu didn’t yet know what to make of all the changes in Zhagana and other mountain towns, but they were still the best guides through the backcountry. They welcomed every traveler, led them through the mountains, and told them where to explore next.

At the University of Vermont, an unusual initiative wants to help students discover the benefits of well-rounded healthy living. Is it working?

The tattered, brain-shaped football immediately begins flying around the classroom. It’s just past 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in early September, and Dr. James Hudziak, a professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Vermont, tosses the foam ball around his auditorium like a quarterback marching his team down the field. Deep throws. Quick slants. Lasers down the middle. Seemingly every one of the more than 200 first-year students get a hand—or, in some cases, a face—on the object. Even those who sit directly in front aren’t spared the good doctor’s aim.

On it goes. Hudziak’s marksmanship and occasional wobbles are accompanied by a soundtrack—a little Frank Sinatra, some Billy Idol—that belts from the room’s speakers. As students find their way to their seats to the growling tones of “White Wedding,” the atmosphere feels more like a playoff contest than a college course.

“This is the most unusual class I have,” says a student sitting next to me while she scans the room for friends and unexpected flying objects. Then it gets quiet.

Hudziak, a barrel-chested man with a penchant for quoting movies like The Jerk and Pulp Fiction, instructs his class to put away their phones and notebooks before turning the room over to the yogini, who leads the group in a five-minute meditation. It’s standard stuff—a closed eyes, deep breaths, embrace-the-present kind of session. With a seeming flip of a switch, this collection of fidgety pre-meds and confident Division 1 hockey bros sits still. The 75-minute lecture will end the same way.

These meditative breaks are an essential component of Hudziak’s “Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies” course, which goes deep into the science and benefits of clean living. This class is the signature component of the university’s three-year-old Wellness Environment (WE) program: an incentivized health-promoting substance-free community, founded by Hudziak, that motivates first- and second-year students to engage in various healthy behaviors. The doctor’s lectures are fast-paced and heavy on the science, and he doesn’t allow his students to take notes. A calmer mind, the thinking goes, is a more focused mind.

On this hilltop campus in Burlington, Vermont, Hudziak is making a preemptive strike against the lifestyle issues—booze, drugs, lack of sleep—that exist at schools across the country. According to the National Institutes of Health, one in four U.S. undergraduates report academic issues as a result of drinking, and some 1,800 college students die from alcohol-related injuries each year.

“What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” says Hudziak, who received a $1.8 million grant in July from the Conrad Hilton Foundation, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that funds social programs around the world. “Universities around the country have a five-year graduation rate below 50 percent, [a ton of] kids are getting hurt every year at universities because of alcohol, one in five women experience negative sexual interaction, almost all due to alcohol and drugs. That’s why we’re doing this.”

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In WE, students sign a contract to not introduce drugs and alcohol into their dorm. In return, they’re given free access to classes on meditation, mindfulness, yoga, cooking, and nutrition, and even music lessons. Gym passes are free for those who commit to working out 40 times a year. So are Apple Watches for students who file nightly reports on things like what they’ve eaten, how much they’ve slept, and whether they worked out. The WE course catalog reads like a lesson plan for better living: “The Science of Happiness,” “Adversity and the Brain,” “Sex, Love, and the Neuroscience of Relationships.” It’s science-meets-lifestyle stuff with everything built around Hudziak’s “four pillars” of health: exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, and mentorship.

“We can all change who we are, and we can change who we are by changing our brain,” says the 60-year-old neuroscientist, who has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed papers and holds professorship positions at the University of Washington at St. Louis and Erasmus University in the Netherlands. “The way we change our brain is by changing our environment.”

Universities are often allergic to quick pivots, but during its short existence, WE has grown from a niche program of just 120 students into one that welcomed nearly 1,200 first- and second-year students this past September. A majority of them live in a new, $55 million residential building that’s exclusive to WE students. It features a gym as well as yoga and meditation rooms on each of its seven floors. The neighboring dining hall allows WE members to eat locally sourced food and learn to cook. On-demand fitness is available throughout the day, and each student is given a violin for the year and offered free lessons.

In WE, Hudziak has built something that’s integrated into his students’ lives. There are iBeacons, for example, throughout the WE buildings that allow students to seamlessly check in at the dining hall, gym, and yoga studio via a custom mobile app. The tech allows WE participants to monitor their activity while also pushing the data, anonymously, to Hudziak so he can study WE’s impact. The students’ participation in WE activities earns them virtual WE coins to buy program swag like sweatshirts and hats. These may sound like cushy perks, but there’s a science behind the offerings.

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Hudziak’s launch of WE was borne out of the same anxiety many parents face when they first send their children to college. A Chicago native, he attended medical school at the University of Minnesota and completed his residency program at Washington University in St. Louis, where his research included studying the effects of genetics and environment on 450 sets of twins. He and his wife, Theresa, moved to Burlington in 1993, and Hudziak started work at UVM’s Larner School of Medicine. There, he launched the Vermont Family Based Approach, a child psychology practice that incorporated much of what he later used in WE. Hudziak worked with parents on navigating their own stresses and helped their children dial back their use of medications and steered them into music, yoga, and meditation.

But it wasn’t until Hudziak, who has four daughters, saw his second-oldest child fail to secure space in one of UVM’s limited substance-free dorms that he turned his attention to the lifestyle issues affecting college students and their particular period of brain development. The more he researched, the more he wondered if he could apply his findings to this age group.

In the late fall of 2014, Hudziak sat down with Annie Stevens, UVM’s vice provost of student affairs, and Dr. Jon Porter, the school’s director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and outlined how he wanted to bring the Vermont Family Based Approach to UVM’s undergraduate population. At a university consistently listed in Princeton Review’s “top party schools” in the nation, Hudziak’s ideas dovetailed with the university’s recent efforts to roll back student drinking. In the spring of 2014, Hudziak taught his first “Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies” class. That fall, WE officially kicked off.

The program’s success stems in part from Hudziak’s sheer will. He is both WE’s visionary and its biggest booster. He’s part professor, part doctor, part football coach. A stroll through the dining hall becomes a round of check-ins with his students, most of whom he knows by name. Popular phrases include “Are you building community?” and “Win the week.” His enthusiasm is infectious, and rather than getting eye rolls from skeptical students, Hudziak is greeted with high-fives and handshakes. They comfortably interrupt his lunch to ask a question (“So when are those Apple Watches coming in?”) or update him on their WE progress.

“His passion, his personality, his genuine care for students—those are the things I think helped us change so much so quickly,” says Stevens. “He would remind us if it feels hard, it’s because we’re changing systems. We’re not just changing residence hall environments, but changing the systems around those environments to make this work.”

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While UVM is on the vanguard of student wellness programs, in recent years an increasing number of colleges and universities have incorporated more healthy practices into campus life. In September, NYU launched the Wellness Initiative (WIN), a small program loosely based on WE’s tenets. At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, students can take advantage of nutrition counseling and massage therapy. Yoga, tai chi, and qigong classes are offered at Bowdoin College in Maine. And in 2013, Spelman College in Atlanta went so far as to scrap its athletic department in order to fund yoga, Pilates, and swimming programs. As WE has taken shape, Hudziak has had conversations with fellow neuroscientists and psychologists at universities like Georgetown, Tulane, and Virginia Commonwealth about replicating his program.

But before any of that happens, Hudziak has some grand ideas for expanding the WE program at UVM. There’s talk of more classes and other extensions, like a WE run, WE triathlon, and a WE a capella group. Eventually, Hudziak would like to spread the program’s tentacles beyond first-year students, even to those who live off campus. And then beyond. He envisions building a WE institute to help other schools bring the program to their schools.

Big plans, to be sure, but the neuroscientist in Hudziak believes that by giving students a better understanding of who they are, how their brain works, and the reasons they’re feeling the way they feel, WE is helping them embark on a life after college that is much less likely to include common American ailments like obesity, diabetes, and depression.

And between the perks, lifestyle choices, and the academic curriculum, students have embraced all angles of Hudziak’s program. “I wanted something beyond an alcohol- and drug-free dorm,” says Cameron Digiacomo, a first-year student from New Hampshire, as he prepares to do some squats at the WE gym with his friend and fellow first-year student Halle Sullivan. “It offers an incentive to stay healthy and have that college experience,” he adds. “I’ve always been academically and athletically competitive, and I wanted to keep that going.”

Sullivan, who grew up outside of Boston, nods her head in agreement. “You hear about people going to college and eating pizza all the time, the freshman 15 or whatever, but here it’s so different,” she says. “WE makes it so easy to sustain your health goals.”

Just across the room, Solenne Kriner, a second-year German student who returned to the program this fall to work as a residential assistant in the new dorm, is in the middle of an arms and back session. “[WE] was probably the biggest thing for me for feeling at home here,” Kriner says. “It also taught me to step back in moments that feel super stressful, like an exam, and say to myself, ‘This is not as important as my health and personal well-being. I’m going to be fine.’”

These aren’t isolated success stories. Returning rates among WE first-year students are 6 percent higher compared to UVM students not involved in the program. And coupled with programming the university already had in place, such as incorporating more substance-free events during high-risk drinking weekends like Halloween, WE has helped drive down student-reported binge drinking by about a third over the past five years. Overall, UVM officials see WE as being a crucial component in reducing undergraduate alcohol consumption and diminishing the university’s well-established reputation as a party school.

“Promoting health is far more powerful than preventing illness,” says Hudziak. “The transitional age brain—we think of it as this incredibly toxic space. Drug abuse, depression, suicide, horrible accidents. But my response to that is to think of it as a reactive space. And if you’re reacting to health-promoting things, it’s like the greatest opportunity for positive health outcomes.”

Maybe that sounds overly optimistic, but it sure seems like it’s working.

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In the 60-year history of modern Yosemite rock climbing, the sport’s all-time greatest cultural hero was Jim Bridwell, who died of complications from hepatitis C on February 16 at age 73.

The Valley has had other heroes, to be sure. Clean-cut Royal Robbins, who died late last year, created the enduring image of the climber as earnest moral seeker. Thepowerfully athletic Lynn Hill, who became the first person to free-climb El Capitan in 1993—meaning she used ropes only for safety, and made all upward progress with hands and feet on rock—filled the climbing world with pride that great female climbers could be every bit as good and sometimes better than the best men. But in the same way that Jimi Hendrix remains the model for every rock-n-roll guitarist, Jim Bridwell, with his excellent mustache and deep presence, towers above all the others as the ultimate embodiment of climber cool.

Bridwell was born in 1944 in San Antonio, Texas. His father was a pilot in World War II and later flew for commercial airlines, while his mother was a sometimes artist. Bridwell first climbed in Yosemite in 1965, when the sport’s culture was gelling around the campground known as Camp 4, and when titans of the sport like Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, and Warren Harding were making first ascents of the Valley’s most prominent walls. By the early 1970s, Bridwell had become the undisputed leader of the next generation.

In 1975, with John Long and Billy Westbay, Bridwell made the first one-day ascent of El Capitan, via the Nose route, which still takes most climbers three or four days.Their achievement still echoes through the international obsession with speed records on big climbs all over the world—the current record on the Nose has been whittled down to a blazing 2:19. Bridwell also ushered in a new era in aid climbing, in which upward progress is made by fixing gear into the rock, attaching stirrups to that gear, and then standing in those stirrups to place the next piece of gear.

Peter Mayfield, director of the Gateway Mountain Center near Lake Tahoe, and a longtime climbing partner of Bridwell’s, points out that the generation before Bridwell did first ascents on the great cliffs by tackling “big features, lines of least resistance” where prominent cracks allowed climbers to hammer in pitons secure enough to hold falls. When climbers of that earlier generation reached long sections too smooth for secure piton placements, they often drilled holes to place permanent safety bolts. Bridwell, in order to break new ground for his own first ascents, found new ways up vast smooth sections where stable piton placements were scarce or non-existent, and mostly without drilling the safety bolts that eliminate danger and adventure.

“He really pioneered the climbing of the smaller not-even-features, little ripples and incipient seams,” says Mayfield. 

Bridwell became the first great master of extreme aid-climbing tools like copperheads, little lumps of soft copper swaged onto wire loops. Bridwell and his partners became adept at placing those lumps of copper against faint indentations in the rock and then striking them with a hammer to mash that soft metal against the cliff. The climber would then clip stirrups to the wire loop hanging off that mashed metal, stand in those stirrups—very gingerly, so as not to rip the copperhead off the wall—and then bash another, and another, sometimes for a hundred feet or more without placing a single piece of gear that could hold even a short fall.

Bridwell’s greatest first ascents, including the routes Zenyatta Mondatta and Sea of Dreams, both on El Capitan, included such long stretches of extreme aid climbing that even a small mistake, like a brief loss of balance that caused a jerk on the rope, could tear out whatever copperhead he was hanging from and send him on a 200-foot fall ripping out every copperhead along the way. In some cases, those falls had the potential for grievous impact with rock features below.

Bridwell made important first ascents elsewhere, too, like on Cerro Torre in Patagonia and the east face of the Moose’s Tooth, in Alaska, but his enduring role as cultural hero derived as much from Bridwell’s personal style and the sheer force of his personality. The single most iconic photograph in Yosemite climbing history captures Bridwell and his younger partners, John Long and Billy Westbay, after that first one-day ascent of El Capitan’s Nose Route in 1975, and it resonates as much for the climbing accomplishment as for attitude. Wearing wild paisley shirts and bell-bottomed pants, smoking cigarettes and posing with rebellious insouciance, Bridwell and his partners created an utterly new image of the rock climber as biker-hippy-hardass, letting their freak flags fly while doing stuff harder and more terrifying than anything done before. Rumors of LSD trips during rest days in the middle of big first ascents added a very 1970s sense of extreme seeking, as did Bridwell’s route names: Sea of Dreams, of course, but also Aquarian Wall, Dark Star, and the Dance of the Woo-Li Masters, named for the 1979 bestselling book about quantum physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Bridwell never managed to convert his accomplishments or his image into lucrative sponsorships or business opportunities as many of his contemporaries did, and this was a well-known source of frustration in his life. But he always remained a natural leader and great mentor, deeply admired by the many younger climbers he encouraged. Mayfield, who was 18 when he joined Bridwell on Zenyatta Mondatta, recalls taking a 40-foot fall on that route only to have Bridwell say, “You know, I see you up there pussyfooting around trying to be delicate, and that’s not the way to climb this stuff. You got to take that hammer and bash the shit out of that diorite until the loose outer rock comes down and you get to the solid stuff underneath.”

“I said, ‘Okay, let me at it,” Mayfield recalls. “I went right back up there and swung my hammer hard and he was right.”

Despite Bridwell’s hard-and-wild appearance, Mayfield insists that he was a flawlessly safe climber, and that his temperament was mostly “sweet and soulful.”

In the late 1980s, European-style sport climbing first came into vogue. It emphasized minimizing danger in order to maximize the potential for extreme gymnastic difficulty on tiny handholds and footholds. As part of this new wave, climbers putting up new routes often hung from ropes to pre-drill protection bolts before attempting their ascents. This was a grave violation of traditional Yosemite climbing ethics, which dictated placing protection gear only from the ground up. According to Mayfield, when two Bridwell protégés came to blows over the issue, Bridwell told them, “On your dying day you are not going to give a shit about how hard you climbed. You’re only going to care about who you connected with and how many people you helped along the way.”

In his own final hours, surrounded by family, Bridwell surely remembered that he’d connected with and helped far more than most.

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Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by Sam Anderson titled “What Cross-Country Skiing Reveals About the Human Condition.” By the second paragraph, it became clear that Mr. Anderson isn’t a cross country skier himself. Unsurprisingly, the story didn’t go over well with actual participants of the sport.

Among the most reviled lines of the piece is when Anderson describes cross-country skiing as an unwatchable hassle “where the elegant majesty of winter sport goes to die an excruciatingly drawn-out death.” Cross-country skiers responded with an outpouring of reactions, mostly on social media. (Sam Evans-Brown, the host of NHPR’s Outside/In podcast and a high school nordic coach, also wrote a response on Slate on Thursday). 

A favorite gripe was about Anderson’s description of cross-country skiers as “existential heroes in goggles and tights” who “strap on a helmet and slog right in.” I'm a skier myself, and while we do like to think of ourselves as heroes, we don’t wear helmets or goggles. When Anderson finished his treatise by stating that he hadn’t skied since he was a little kid, no one was all that surprised.  

Though I did fire off a few of my own angry tweets, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this might seem like we’re taking things a little too personally. And I’ll admit that Anderson doesn’t get everything wrong. Cross-country skiing is really damn hard. Arguably the toughest outdoor sport in the world, it requires a unique combination of  strength, speed, and endurance. The lateral movements of skate skiing are at once unnatural and exhausting, while the technique for proper classic skiing leaves most untrained participants feeling like they’re just shuffling around. To succeed at racing uphill, athletes have to have ridiculous VO2 maxes, and put in 800 to 1000-plus hours a year of endurance and strength training. It’s understandable that someone might give up after an uncomfortable first try and never go back. But when you keep going and actually learn the sport, it’s really fun—and Americans are just beginning to discover it. (Bragging that your sport is harder than everyone else’s is pretty fun, too.)

And while it may seem alluring to describe cross-country skiing as an exercise in solitary masochism, in both culture and practice, it’s truly a team sport. That’s not just fluff talking, it’s just too damn hard to do alone. According to Snow Industries of America, over four million Americans participated in cross-country skiing in 2013, I don’t suspect those folks are hammering alone in the forest contemplating the meaning of their pain. Rather, there is a vibrant, spandex-clad community that bands together to celebrate “the sanctity of the goddamn grind,” as Anderson put it. Even the U.S. Women’s Team attributes their success to working together, wearing glitter, and having a good time. 
 
Last week, I compared cross-country skiing to watching a Tour de France stage in 20 minutes. Both cycling and skiing share group race tactics, treacherous climbs, whipping descents, and sprint finishes. Add icy snow, the grit of Olympic athletes, and a couple dance videos, and let me know if it still looks like “a brutally sustained non-thrill.” This season, the U.S. cross-country contingent is crushing it. They’ve landed 11 World Cup podiums, including two wins to add to their three World Championships medals from last season. Do you know what’s pretty thrilling to watch? Your country winning the Olympics.
 
Yes, there is an existentialist element to cross-country skiing. I’ve certainly done my fair share of philosophizing and meditating on steep climbs in dense woods. Participating in one of the hardest sports in the world in bitter cold will do that to you. But if your takeaway is that this sport is boring, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re still not convinced, let me know. I will gladly take you for a ski. 

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On the morning of August 14, 2017, pro triathlete Gwen Jorgensen, heavily pregnant and two weeks past her due date, went for a bike ride. It was a mellow ride, but still, she was out there. The year before, she won Olympic gold in the triathlon at Rio, then took off the next 12 months from racing after she found out she was pregnant. But Jorgensen kept running and biking throughout her entire pregnancy—she stopped running just three weeks before her baby was born, due to a strain in her Achilles. After the August bike ride, she went to the hospital and, per her doctor’s orders, was induced into labor.

Two days later, Jorgensen was still in the throes of childbirth. After 4.5 hours of pushing, her doctor suggested either using a vacuum extractor or going in for cesarean surgery. Jorgensen and her husband, Patrick, decided on the vacuum, a rare intervention these days, used in less than 3 percent of births.

Their son, Stanley, arrived soon after, healthy at seven pounds, ten ounces. But the birth had taken its toll on Jorgensen. She spent an hour getting stitched up and remained in the hospital for six days due to high blood pressure, fever, and other physical complications. (Most women stay in the hospital for just a couple days following a conventional vaginal birth.)

Eighteen days after Stanley was born, Jorgensen went to the gym to attempt a workout on the elliptical. “In my head, I always thought I would be running ten days after giving birth, and it actually took six weeks until I was ready,” she says. On her first post-birth run, Jorgensen jogged for a minute, followed by four minutes of walking, and repeated that pattern for 20 minutes.

She spent a lot of time working on strengthening her pelvic floor muscles, which are under a great deal of pressure during pregnancy and birth. “Dealing with the new baby and trying to recover from the birth was a lot to handle on both a physical and emotional level,” Jorgensen says. “That first month trying to get back into training seemed like an overwhelming mountain to climb. I didn’t think I was making any progress.”

Eventually, though, she did. In November, less than three months after having a baby, Jorgensen announced via Twitter that she was switching sports. Her new goal? Olympic gold in the 2020 marathon.

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It’s a common narrative: The endurance or outdoor athlete who returns quickly to her sport after giving birth, with apparent ease and often great success. British distance runner Paula Radcliffe started running again 12 days after welcoming her daughter. She won the 2007 New York City Marathon nine months later. At the 2011 Boston Marathon, American runner Kara Goucher set a personal record and finished in fifth place just seven months after delivering her baby. American Nordic skier Kikkan Randall had a son in April 2016 and came back to win the bronze medal at the 2017 world championships in February. This February, Randall competed at the 2018 Olympics as the only mother on the 244-person U.S. Winter Olympic team—and went on to win her first Olympic gold.

Yet there’s a wide spectrum of what recovery from childbirth actually looks like, in both elite and recreational athletes, and there’s no straightforward rule for when women should return to sport after having a baby.Many women, pro athletes or not, seem to return to normal quickly after giving birth, but in some cases, the recovery is much more complex and prolonged.

Take the case of climber Beth Rodden, who spent months recovering after having her son, Theo, in 2014, and didn’t return to climbing challenging routes until more than a year later. “I was under the assumption that since I was an elite professional athlete, I would get back to normal quickly after birth. I had friends who went on a monthlong bouldering trip to Europe when their baby was two weeks old,” Rodden says. “For me, the first few weeks after birth, I couldn’t walk around without extreme pain and pressure and feeling like my insides were going to fall out.”

Rodden says it took her several months before she could even hold Theo without pain, and breastfeeding was a nightmare at first. “I was pretty much a wreck and in fight-or-flight mode for a very long time after Theo was born,” she says. “I couldn’t even imagine climbing, and in some ways I felt like such a failure because I saw other moms just bounce right back.”

Middle-distance runner Sarah Brown has a similar story. At 29, she became unexpectedly pregnant during the peak of her career. Brown trained throughout her entire pregnancy, which was documented in an ESPN video series Run Mama Run. She even ran ten miles the day before she went into labor. Brown gave birth to her daughter, Abigail, in March 2016, then returned to training one week later to start prepping for the Olympic Trials that July. “I’d seen other women come back from pregnancy and run very strong,” Brown says. “You think you’re going to feel amazing because you don’t have this giant bowling ball in your stomach anymore, but I was still running in that pregnant-runner form. It took a lot of work and drills to get my normal stride and form back after having a baby.”

About six weeks after her baby was born, Brown suffered from multiple stress fractures and was diagnosed with a rare condition called postpartum osteoporosis. At the Olympic Trials, a bone issue in her Achilles, caused by the osteoporosis, forced her to run in devastating pain. She finished last in her heat and failed to make the Olympic team. “There wasn’t regret. I’d done everything I could,” Brown says.

Brown had Achilles reconstruction surgery in December 2016 and is just now getting back into racing, with an eye on the 2020 Olympics. “My personality is such that I like to know what I’m doing next. I don’t like things to be touch and go. I want more certainty,” Brown says. “But I can only do what I can do each day and see where I end up. It’s very humbling.”

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Professional athletes are now competing well into their late thirties or forties in some sports, so it’s no surprise we’re seeing more women balance motherhood with being a high-level elite athlete. Women are no longer forced to give up their running, triathlon, or climbing careers because they’ve had a baby. Because of this, in 2015, the International Olympic Committee held a first-of-its-kind meeting to look at the research surrounding exercise during pregnancy and returning to competition after childbirth for elite-level athletes.

Kari Bø, a professor of sports medicine at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, authored a report from that meeting, which was later published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. “For the first time, this consensus report on exercise during pregnancy and in the postpartum period is addressing all the different illnesses and problems women may meet,” Bø says.

Traditionally, women have been advised to abstain from intense exercise until at least six weeks postpartum to let the body recover. Bø’s report declares that the six-week window is just an “arbitrary time point” and states that many athletes start exercising again even earlier.

Before Bø’s report, there were very few studies conducted on elite athletes doing high-intensity training during pregnancy and after childbirth. These women simply weren’t studied. So the findings are novel and broad—the report addresses everything from how serious exercise affects the ability to breastfeed (it doesn’t), how body posture and anatomy change during pregnancy (mostly in changes to the pelvic floor muscles), and when elite athletes return to the same level of performance as pre-pregnancy (that depends). The key takeaway is this: The fact that the IOC is acknowledging these complex issues for the first time and recognizing that each woman recovers at a different pace is a major turning point.

Exercise after childbirth, of course, has been found to be beneficial in many ways, including reducing the risk of postpartum depression and aiding in weight loss, and it’s been found to have no negative impact on the ability to breastfeed. Bø does warn, however, that returning to strenuous exercise too quickly can strain the pelvic floor muscles, which generally take six months to a year to recover after childbirth. For athletes returning to training after cesarean births, her study points to issues of abdominal pain, fatigue, and wound healing.

“Elite athletes are at the same risk as all others for these injuries,” Bø says. “But the female body has a tremendous capacity for getting back into shape.”

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Jackson-based Stio is mostly known for its casual, mountain-town inspired gear, but a few of its products harken back to its core Cloudveil roots. In December, I called the Environ bib one of the best products of 2017, praising its bomber 150-denier material, which after two seasons of use has barely shown any signs of wear. While there's a matching Environ jacket, I prefer a slightly slimmer fitting, lighterweight shell. That's why this winter, I paired those bibs with the Raymer. 

The Raymer is the lightest ski shell Stio makes. It’s made from three-layer Dermizax waterproof breathable fabric with a DWR finish and a soft tricot backer, which is soft to the touch. Although it’s pared down feature-wise, it still features useful details like taped seams, a helmet-compatible hood, and pit zips. The simple, three-pocket design provides plenty of storage space without being overkill. 

I've used mine skiing powder on a hut trip in Colorado and layered over just a T-shirt while ripping groomers during New Mexico's unseasonably warm winter. It worked great for both. 

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Hate craft beer? Dogs? Urinary tract infections? We have answers to some of the most pressing outdoors issues.

Welcome to Tough Love. Every other week, we’re answering your questions about dating, breakups, and everything in between. Our advice giver is Blair Braverman, dogsled racer and author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. Have a question of your own? Write to us at [email protected].

We get a lot of very serious relationship questions, but just as often we hear from readers with simpler dilemmas. Below, we’ve gathered and rapid-fire answered them, in order from least to most complicated.

What’s the best birth control for thru-hikers?
An IUD.

Can hunters and vegans date each other?
Yes. They both see their food with open eyes.

Is it appropriate to break it off with a woman after three dates because she doesn’t like dogs?
After three dates, you can break it off with anyone for any reason you like.

Sleeping bag or quilt for couple’s backpacking?
Once you backpack with a quilt, you’ll never go back. Sew on a DIY footbox with fleece if your toes slip out and get cold.

What have been your favorite outdoor dates?
Inner-tube float trips down the Oconto River, surprise dog-friendly campouts, slacklining over a snowbank, and riding horses double-bareback. I’m also partial to trying things, like surfing, that neither of us have done before; there’s no pressure, and there’s nothing quite like falling down together to get you laughing.

My friends are all geeking out on craft beer, but I think it tastes gross.
Find another drink you like so you can join in without yucking their yum. Try a dry cider or an on-tap root beer. If you want to geek out on something, too, read up on cheese or chocolate or pretzels-and-mustard and bring samples for everyone to try. I guarantee they’ll be happy to oblige.

Why does my husband always bring an elaborate espresso-making setup camping? Cowboy coffee has always been good enough for me.
Because, like the best of us, he’s hooked on caffeine and wants to get as much pleasure as possible out of his addiction. Get off your high horse, cowboy, and take advantage of his excellent standards.

I get jealous when my dog cuddles with other people.
Take your cues from polyamory and try to cultivate compersion, which is basically taking joy in your beloved’s joy. Your dog is happy! He’s enjoying himself and building social skills and probably getting petted very nicely. There’s still no question, of course, that you’re his person. You’re just helping him learn that the world is full of goodness.

I’m a woman with a vulva, I love multiday hikes far away from modern plumbing, and I am sometimes lucky enough to hike with someone who also wants to have sex with me. The problem is if I have sex in the woods and don’t manage to get a shower afterward, I almost inevitably end up with cystitis—“feminine wipes” just don’t seem to work. Any tips for avoiding this?
Humans have been successfully sexing it up outdoors since before we were humans, so this is a great one to talk to your doctor about. In the meantime, switch out scented wipes for a plain wet washcloth, drink lots of water, make sure everyone washes their hands, and—since different positions can spread bacteria differently—try to treat this limitation as a challenge: What are some new and different ways you can hook up?

My best friend and I met this girl (“Mary”) in Telluride, Colorado, at a festival. When Mary left, he called dibs on her and told me that I needed to back off. I didn’t want to create any problems between us, but I was getting more vibes from her than he was. Ends up we go back to our hometown and all three hang out for like four weeks biking, paddleboarding, drinking, etc. Every time we are out, Mary gravitates toward me and is very touchy and flirtatious. Recently I told her that I liked her through a little bit of a drunken text and asked where she stood with my friend. She responded that she likes me as well and loves being around me but really didn’t know where they stand, and now that she knows how I feel, this is a game changer. The next time we were all out at another festival in town, she was getting pretty drunk and hanging all over me in front of him. I told her she needed to make a decision or tell me to step aside. Her response was, “I don’t want you to step aside.” The problem I have is that she and I get along really, really great, and I know more about her life than my friend does by far. Since then, I have found out that they have slept together recently, and I am really disappointed but happy for him at the same time, if that makes sense? He is a great guy and a great friend, but I am as well, and we both met someone we both like. It’s hard to be around them and act like it’s no big deal. And who the hell calls dibs on a girl? By the way, there is a 20-year age difference between us and Mary.
You can have two great friends here or possibly none—and since Mary isn’t making an explicit decision, it’s time for you to be decisive. Congratulate your friend, don’t engage with Mary’s flirtations, and dial back on the drunk texting. Maybe Mary even has some cool outdoorsy friends she can set you up with for a double paddleboarding date.

My hunch is that since Mary’s a lot younger than you and your friend, she may be intentionally holding back to avoid starting a commitment. Or maybe she’s genuinely crushing on both of you and doesn’t know how to decide. Either way, if you step back now, you’ll give the message that you’re not interested in competing or playing games. And if your romantic paths end up crossing at some point in the future, she’ll know that you’re a man who takes friendships—and relationships—seriously.