Who Wants to Go Skiing?

Issue No. 6 : How to relocate anywhere for the grand life adventure in a few simple steps

The days after a big unexpected weekend dump of powder in the snowboarding paradise of LAAX, Switzerland in December 2017. Photos: Per Håkansson.

After seven years by the beach in Southern California I’ve been thinking about relocating to a mountain resort for a season. The idea was ignited when reading Steven Kotler’s latest book, “Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad.”

In this book the author (born 1967) is applying his knowledge about peak performance to the hard challenge of aging and his focus is to learn park skiing, a sport that is mostly associated with teenage kids and twenty somethings.

Although Steven Kotler is a very experienced and passionate skier, park skiing is a different game, played out in a terrain park with obstacles like rails, boxes, and jumps where the skier can perform a multitude of tricks.

This idea to explore new challenges as we are growing older is really interesting. Only a few years ago, it was believed as once you passed your forties it was all downhill from there with little we could do about slowing down the aging process.

But over the past decade science has discovered that the mind and body is much more expandable that we previous was told to believe, and that we can keep on learning and staying physically active throughout our whole lives.

The reason people prematurely slow down, I believe, is that there hasn’t really been any role models in previous generations (before Gen X) of men and women that have kept on pushing the limits of what we’re really capable of doing.

My current experiment in getting back into competitive swimming falls into this area, where I’ve improved my breaststroke from 2.48 minutes to 1:45 per 100 yards over the past 7 months. Another ten seconds and I’ll qualify for US Nationals.

Now, let’s get back to the relocation. The reason doesn’t need to be competitive. It can simply be that it’s interesting to explore different kinds of places for living, and taking advantage of digital technologies, allowing us to work from anywhere.

But if I were to relocate to a mountain resort, both skiing and betterment would be a major part of the adventure. So I constructed this as a thought-experiment to see what it would take to move from the beach to the mountains for a season.

Here are the first things to think about: