Category: Write-up

When I’m moving through mountains on foot, I sometimes imagine that I’m knocking with my feet on the soil below, knock-knock-knocking with every foot strike like knuckles rapping on a padlocked portal made of earth and rock and gravity. With every knock, I imagine asking the dirt underfoot, “Am I worthy of returning yet?” Now I’m not wishing to die; it’s more that I wish fiercely to live. Perhaps it’s because, with a regular practice of trail running, our soft animal bodies swing life and limb so intimately close to earth’s cadence. Perhaps it’s written calligraphically into respiration and lactic acid rise paired with a planet that roars past us and right through us, stinging our retinas as we dash along singletracks of the unasphalted, the unmodified, the untamed. So I ask, as deep ecologist and poet Gary Snyder once did: How edible am I? Am I giving back to the planet a body that’s been unused, atrophied from couches and cages, repressed with anger and narcissism and conformity? No, I wish that feast upon nobody. Instead, I aim to be as edible as possible, to be worthy of that inevitable return to earth. After all, gravity always wins. With every wilderness outing, I attempt to discover more humility, more insight into the ways this planet revolves and evolves, churns and composts itself anew. I try and honor those who lived here before me, and to fight for protecting the last honest places for posterity. Because when it finally comes time for that stuff beneath the mountains to let me back in again, I aspire to return to the soil at least, mildly, palatable. So I keep running. I keep knocking. I keep living. – Nick Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, activist, and sponsored ultrarunner living in Missoula, Montana. He’s run across the Baja peninsula in a day, finished sub-19 hours at Western States 100, and has won the Oregon Trail Series. Learn more about Nick’s projects at the Jasmine Dialogues Blog.

The extended network of amazing humans that I have garnered and been exposed to by bike touring has become the most important thing that I have built in my life.  These people and their stories are ones I tell very often and to this day affect the way I live. To say they have changed my life would be an understatement.  So, I am here to encourage you to slow down, stop and talk to people, meet the locals, drink a beer, have a milkshake, take their photo, or don’t.  Listen to their story, and maybe tell yours as well. It just may change your life. – Spencer Harding is a Los Angeles, CA based photographer/artist who enjoys riding bikes. For more of his work, check out spencerjharding.com

In the early part of 2013, I led a 3-man team in an unsupported walk across the Arabian Desert. We pulled a cart weighing 900 pounds and walked for 40 days, filling up water at 3 wells on route, but carrying everything else with us. We operated under a self-imposed set of rules. That is, to walk unsupported and unassisted. This meant no one could offer any help in any form, and everything had to be carried from the start, with the proviso of water. Within a week, we were dehydrated and dreaming of water. Our daily ration of 10 pints each was simply not enough. But there was no other way. As the days went by, the ‘dreaming’ became obsessing. Not a moment went by without the thought of water in its myriad forms. I thought of cool mountain streams where I had learnt to rock climb, deep blue oceans, the fridge, a running tap, the sound of a toilet, an afternoon thunderstorm and playing football without a shirt, and the water smashing down on my skin on a hot day. I would look left and right, searching for an oasis. An old discarded water bottle cast out in the sand would grip my attention for minutes as we labored past, staring, hoping beyond hope that there just might be a drop. But it was all in vain. Some nights I would wake and find my tongue had slid out my mouth, like an old lizard in search of something wet. Dry and cracked, I would milk it back to life with my lips and slip back into the night. There was no respite. No afternoon storm to quell the growing thirst and deep concern that we might just be in trouble. Time and again I promised myself never, but never, to take water for granted. I made elaborate plans and schemes to stretch out and savor the drinking of a bottle of cool water. I tried to etch it in my memory so I would never forget. After 40 days we rolled into the Park Hyatt in Dubai and downed a burning Pepsi. More followed, then bottles of water, whisky, chocolate milkshake, then beer, all to celebrate. In the days and weeks that followed, I found, sadly, that water quickly lost its mythical appeal. I tried hard to think back and savor it as I sipped it in the comfort of my home. And then it struck. The obsessive passion; the zeal with which I thought about water existed only because of the absence of it. The two, ironically, were mutually exclusive. They could never co-exist in the same moment. I could never savor it now like I did when I did not have it. But not a moment goes by when I sip some water and I don’t think back to those dark, dry days in the desert. Our lives are simply too tame to really understand the privilege of having. You need to get out. Go do something. Go explore somewhere where you wont have, where you’ve never been. – South African-based Alex Harris has climbed the seven summits (the highest mountain on all seven continents), and became the first African to walk unsupported to the South Pole. Under his brand Xplore, Alex offers guided experiences, coaching and speaking engagements.