Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1196: Climbing & Leukemia with Jason Kolaczkowski

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Ep. 1196: Climbing & Leukemia with Jason Kolaczkowski · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:08
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk with adventures from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there.
0:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
0:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi friends, today I have Jason Koitch-Koski.
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it!
0:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, okay, restart.
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Friends, today I have Jason Koitch-Koski with us, and I am doing my best to say the name.
0:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a real fun one for me, so just straight out of the shoot, Jason, we use say it correctly for us.
0:39
[SPEAKER_02]: You were pretty darn close, and they Koitch-Koski.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are a lot of extra consonants in that name for my Americanized year.
0:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of hard, but Jason, welcome to the program and glad you're here today.
0:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thanks for having me.
0:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really excited to be here.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Jason is a climber, and when I say climber, lots of modalities.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: He does ice climbing, he does tread climbing, it does sport climbing, it does outpenering, it does mountaineering, he is the kind of guy who likes to climb no matter what kind of climbing it is.
1:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to talk about how climbing has helped to shape his life, his family's life, but in addition to this, Jason was diagnosed with leukemia at a young age, it's
1:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And that experience also weaves into the tail.
1:26
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you live your best life when you're going through some things?
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: With your family, with your sports, with everything that's going on.
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Jason's even written a book about it called Notions of Grace, a memoir of climbing cancer and family.
1:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm sure we'll touch on that, but primarily today, we're going to talk about climbing, climbing of all sorts.
1:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I did to talk about it, they talked to a climber about climbing and they're typically not gonna want to shut up.
1:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I tell you what.
1:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I love climbing myself.
1:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't do rock climbing as much as I used to, but I do still a lot of not nearing type things and really, really enjoy it.
2:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's been a big part of my life just enchanted me over the years.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess let's start with talking about Jason the different types of climbing just really in brief.
2:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So that the listeners who may not be familiar with all this climbing lingo will have some sort of a baseline to understand where we're going with this.
2:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So why don't we just quickly define each of the types of climbing that I just called out there?
2:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and maybe I'll do it from my own personal progression.
2:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
2:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So I started out like many people in Colorado because we have 14,000 foot and 13,000 foot peaks just hiking taller things.
2:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So just it's a hike.
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not grabbing the rock.
2:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But then like a good percentage of Colorado and eventually after they've done enough of that, they kind of like touching the rock.
2:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you get into something called scrambling.
2:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And scrambling, you can think of as just your hiking gear.
2:57
[SPEAKER_02]: But now you're using some handholds to help balance.
2:59
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, falls might be consequential in terms of injury, but not so much in terms of death.
3:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I started to enjoy that more and more, then I wanted to get into technical climbing, and so then you get into,
3:11
[SPEAKER_02]: rock climbing and if you're talking about rock climbing on taller peaks is going to be something called Trad which is short for traditional which means there is no pre-placed fixed hardware in the rock you're going to bring cams or nuts or other types of protection that you wear on your own harness you place it in the rock that you can clip your rope into that placement so that as you go above it and someone's holding the other end of the rope if you fall away
3:34
[SPEAKER_02]: by them holding tension on the rope, you swing and your rope stays above you and you don't fall the way to the ground and kill yourself.
3:40
[SPEAKER_02]: From there then there's ice climbing which is the same kind of concept but on ice you're using screws for that placement then there's something called mixed which is what you would think it's a combination of both rock and ice or sometimes snow snow climbing is kind of its own thing because snow can't get vertical ice cans,
4:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So it tends to be like cool hours, which I think of it as like gullies, but now filled with snow, so you can get in the full on mix climbing, which is all three of those mediums.
4:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's high altitude, and high altitude is sort of its own beast.
4:11
[SPEAKER_02]: It can have any of those not technical, the full technical types of climbing, but the difference is now the environment is actively working against your body through the less oxygen molecules per
4:25
[SPEAKER_02]: volume of air that you bring in, due to the lower air pressure, then also typically there's going to be cold involved, and so now you have environmental considerations outside of your normal, kind of like rock fall, ice fall, other things.
4:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's just physiological adaptation that becomes part of the problem too.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So lots of types of climbing.
4:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you made a distinction between alpineering and mountain nearing.
4:47
[SPEAKER_01]: What would that speech and be?
4:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think like anyone who would like truly call an alpenist of the types that you see in the professional climbing world which I am decidedly not, they label themselves if they say, I'm an alpenist.
5:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Think of this as someone who is doing a lot of that mixed media type climbing where they will be proficient on ice, they'll be proficient on rock, they'll be proficient on snow.
5:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So I certainly do that and so I do my own type of alpine climbing.
5:16
[SPEAKER_02]: intonation, the distinction implied, is that mountaineering is going to involve a lot less technical climbing than an alpenist.
5:24
[SPEAKER_02]: An alpenist is therefore the route, like I do the approach to the bottom of the giant cliff, and then do all the crazy mix climbing to go up the cliff.
5:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Ideally, maybe actually not even ideally, maybe to the summit maybe not, they're there for the route.
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas a mountaineer is going to be about, I want the summit of this peak, there might be technical climbing involved, there might not, if there is, there might be less.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, Denali would be a good example, right?
5:50
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're climbing the casino ridge on the south side of Denali, which, you know, is,
5:54
[SPEAKER_02]: ropes climbing from, you know, bottom to top.
5:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You're an alpenist.
5:59
[SPEAKER_02]: If you go do the standard route on the west buttress where there might be a few moments of technical climbing when you're going up the Denali headball or if you're going to washburns, those might be the only times where it's truly technical.
6:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You're probably doing more mountaineering.
6:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
6:15
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a good distinction and actually it's one that I have not had explained before on the podcast so I appreciate that.
6:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I think based on that, I would probably say I'm a mountaineer and less an alpenist, although years ago, maybe I would have leaned toward the alpenism a little bit more.
6:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But actually kind of similar, I'm technically proficient, I'm not technically great by Colorado standards, so yeah, I actually like having this spread out sections where I can sort of
6:43
[SPEAKER_02]: physically recover mentally recover emotionally recover.
6:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I might look for more technicality on a mountaineering route than maybe your average mountaineering, so I might not do the easiest way up to a summit, but I'm simply not skilled enough to do the hardest way to many summons either, so I like that balance.
7:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Jason, what got you into all of these sports?
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's no, I can't just say not nearing, right?
7:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
7:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right, include all of it, but what got you into this?
7:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I was a suburban sports guy.
7:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I grew up in Albuquerque and played soccer and eventually golf.
7:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, I tried to make a living playing golf after I graduated college, which is a whole other life.
7:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But I continued to play pretty competitive and high level, but amateur soccer.
7:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I was at a nationally ranked high school program.
7:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And then a lot of my teammates went on to play division one college ball.
7:34
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a big gap between them and professional.
7:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was never going to fill that gap.
7:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But I played soccer for a long time until I tore my knee up when I was 30 in a soccer game.
7:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that repair, so I had an ACL tear and a Manuscus tear.
7:48
[SPEAKER_02]: But that repair failed six months later, so I had a revision.
7:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that repair failed five years after that.
7:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So three ACL reconstructions on my right knee.
7:58
[SPEAKER_02]: It's now been long enough.
8:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been like 13 or 14 years since the last surgery.
8:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But what that did, just I between meniscous problems and the articular cartilage.
8:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The cartilage that goes around your bone.
8:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a gap in it, and so I can get some bone on bone.
8:14
[SPEAKER_02]: What that prevented me from doing is really big, explosive movements.
8:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Like cutting, changing directions really fast part of what a soccer player would do.
8:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
8:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I was just looking for something to challenge myself physically.
8:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know what I didn't know.
8:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know it was going to be an emotional journey.
8:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know it was going to be a psychological journey.
8:31
[SPEAKER_02]: to get into climbing.
8:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I just knew that I needed to push my body because I'd been an athlete, you know, since I was four, right?
8:39
[SPEAKER_02]: My wife, who I was just meeting and dating at the time, was a backpacker, came from a backpacking background growing up in Colorado, where as I grew up in in Africa, she was interested in doing
8:50
[SPEAKER_02]: some 13ers or 14ers with me.
8:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And my father, who lived in Colorado as a young man right after he got his master's degree, he lived in Longman actually of all places for a year or so while he was doing a training part of his job that he got.
9:07
[SPEAKER_02]: He attempted longspeaks, this is 1973, and he got weathered off because we didn't have GPS devices and cell phones and even really good weather forecast.
9:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So he got weathered off in a pretty dramatic way, a lightning storm in the bolder field.
9:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So boulders were literally loading around him and never tempted it again.
9:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Life took us to other parts of the country.
9:28
[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't around peaks.
9:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Still like to hike, but didn't attempt peaks.
9:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So the combination of the two, my father had moved back to Colorado, my dad and my mom, and I was now dating a woman who came from that sort of traditional Colorado outdoorsy kind of background.
9:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we decided we're going to try and climb long-speak, you know, reverse a cosmic injustice that my- that my father had experienced.
9:53
[SPEAKER_02]: We went up to the saddle of a thirteener and then we went to up a thirteener and then we did some
10:00
[SPEAKER_02]: a climatization or a fitness regimen if you will for our bodies, and then we attempted long speak, and we completed it.
10:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And to me, again, completely naively, you know, think about sort of the emotional environment I was enduring that.
10:16
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this woman I'm falling in love with, quality time with my dad and like, and helping him as a young man do something that he's now as an older
10:29
[SPEAKER_02]: In that way, so I had this incredibly emotionally positive experience and it's like, wow, I need more of that.
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I want, I want more of that.
10:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So my wife and I spent a couple years bagging peaks as they say, you know, climbing up mostly 14ers and then.
10:46
[SPEAKER_02]: eventually getting tired of the crowds and wanting to do 13ers and then as you do the 13ers you go, hey that ridge looks cool I wonder how I could do it and now you need to start acquiring technical skills and so it was sort of that glide entry path into it and then obviously as I got deeper you know you start to not only learn the technical skills which gives it a feeling of craft
11:07
[SPEAKER_02]: and gives it a feeling of mastery like being an artist, right?
11:10
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you use all the right paint brushes and all the right paint strokes and speaking well out of my sphere of competence, but I use it as an analogy, so it's started to be very mentally engaging and then of course, as you start applying those skills in consequential terrain, now it's emotionally encyclologically engaging as well in good and bad ways, but
11:31
[SPEAKER_02]: now it becomes this sort of like holistic hobby that is soul-feeding, mentally-feeding, and physically-feeding.
11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I really believe mountaineering does check those boxes just like you said.
11:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jason, you gave us the why.
11:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you give us a story about an experience that was moving in some way?
11:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it altered the way that you think about things.
11:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we'll go back a little bit in time.
11:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to be a little careful with this story because it's not entirely my story to tell, but it was climbing related and did to your point sort of re-center.
12:05
[SPEAKER_02]: As my wife and I were getting more and more technical and right before we got married, the week before we got married, we went to do a scramble.
12:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, back to the definition, we might be using more precise footholds and more precise handholds, but we're not doing vertical things where you need to get the ropes out.
12:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So Class 3, Class 3, maybe Class 4, Class 4 a little bit.
12:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It turns out a 13er in Colorado.
12:30
[SPEAKER_02]: We had taken the dogs, but the plan always was, because the scrambling was all at the top.
12:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Go up to the base of this summit pyramid.
12:38
[SPEAKER_02]: One of us will stay with our dogs, so we hike a lot with one would go scramble up tag the summit, come down, we'd switch, and then we'd hike our way back out.
12:47
[SPEAKER_02]: My wife went up first, so I'm with the dogs, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting, and I hear what I think is a, a, a, a, a whoop, and one of the interesting things, particularly in the front range in Colorado, where there are people typically outdoing things, you get these giant basins of rock formations, and it is not unusual to hear someone, you know,
13:07
[SPEAKER_02]: screaming in ecstasy as they hit a summit, you know, two basins over, because it just echoes and reverberates through these canyons that the, that the, or basins that these mountains form.
13:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I hear this, whoop, and I know, huh, I'm looking around in the ridges and saying, you know, well, who else is out here?
13:24
[SPEAKER_02]: What are they doing?
13:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, my wife's not returning.
13:27
[SPEAKER_02]: She's not returning.
13:28
[SPEAKER_02]: She's not returning.
13:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I get a cell phone call, which is back then, still unusual, it's a lot less unusual now, but the fact that we actually had coverage.
13:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's my wife, and she says, I've taken a fall, and I say, all right, I'm coming to you.
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So I start winding my way around on the backside of this summit pyramid, and I eventually see her kind of pans and knees crawling towards me.
13:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and as I get closer, she's got, you know, blood running down her face.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Mm, goodness.
14:00
[SPEAKER_02]: She's sort of not using one of her arms.
14:03
[SPEAKER_02]: She still has her pack on.
14:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And eventually, like, oh, and, you know, it first is just triage, right?
14:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, okay, well, what are the injury?
14:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm thinking head injury right away because her face is bleeding.
14:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going, okay, you know, is, do we have spine?
14:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we have neck?
14:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we have nothing?
14:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm an EMT, but, you know, take all the right wilderness responder classes, and all those types of things for first aid.
14:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually through question answers and she's very lucid she knows exactly what's going on so okay well we don't have you know concussion we therefore likely don't have spinal injury because she's also moving around the combination of those two things a lot of this I end up finding out after the fact once we eventually get back down the mountain which will come to again in a minute but she broke her nose and her eye socket she had a laceration in her lower
14:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually she needed stitches for that and she badly sprained.
14:53
[SPEAKER_02]: We thought it was broken, but she badly sprained her wrist So you know making these decisions about okay, well first we can clean off the face just because that's like you know I cite issues and all that sort of stuff Decide to leave the wound in the back open
15:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I don't have the skills or the materials out there to like stitch her up um and at least this way it's well it's not profusely bleeding.
15:15
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not like a gushing cut um so none of those like should it even be stitched kind of on the right things of like at least this is cleaning the wound like at least is getting gravel out of the wound so I'm just going to let go and then you know make shift kind of slaying to keep her her arm elevated so I clip the dogs to my waist I put
15:34
[SPEAKER_02]: My pack on my back, I put her pack on my front and clip it around the back side.
15:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And ask her, you know, are we going to call for a rescue?
15:42
[SPEAKER_02]: She's like, well, you know, I can walk.
15:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm ambulatory by the time the rescue gets here, we're going to be out.
15:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So we start hiking out and she hikes out three and a half miles and, you know, 3500 vertical feet after this fall on her own.
15:55
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like sure I'm carrying her stuff, but she just does it.
15:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that, like, the combination of things that I took from that, you know, this was obviously early, you know, back to my progression.
16:05
[SPEAKER_02]: We were scrambling.
16:06
[SPEAKER_02]: This was early in our joint climbing career, if you call it, we were still learning things, making mistakes.
16:12
[SPEAKER_02]: What we figured out eventually happened is she downclimbed on the other side of the summit pyramid.
16:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And she took both hands on handhold and the entire block came out, so I don't know if she hit her head on the way down or if the block hit her in the face.
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: She landed on her pack, which may have saved her back.
16:31
[SPEAKER_02]: She fell probably 20 feet or something, but not very kind of like down and gully.
16:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But I still don't know if that loop was her, it's still no.
16:40
[SPEAKER_02]: But maybe put the context of the seriousness of what we were doing, that sort of young invincible mentality that you can easily get, sort of put that aside a little bit.
16:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It also made me witness to something I thought was, you know.
16:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, self-preservation, but nonetheless courageous, like just that sort of what maybe great is the right word.
17:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Just like this is what I have to do next, and I'm gonna do it, and she did it, like my body's broken, but this is what I have to do next.
17:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think all of that has colored my perspective on risk in the mountains, and obviously I've had my own risky times, but that was the first time in my climbing career where the numbers caught up to us, and I do really mean the numbers, like you do something enough,
17:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually, bad things are going to happen.
17:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully not that bad, but you know, you're going to get caught in rainstorms and you're going to be too close to the lightning and you're going to twist an ankle and if you just do this stuff enough, those things happen.
17:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So this thing happened.
17:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It was an impetus for me to get really competent.
17:40
[SPEAKER_02]: like I need to be really, because it only takes like one little thing and it happens fast.
17:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
17:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that was a big part of shaping how I approach adventure and going into places where sort of by definition consequences are in play, but both good and bad.
18:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well what's interesting to me is that some people would say that was a close one.
18:06
[SPEAKER_01]: We learned our lesson.
18:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's not do this anymore.
18:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Your response was what I think is probably sometimes more appropriate because life is full of challenges.
18:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Your response was, oh wow, this can really happen.
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to get skilled enough to do this more safely.
18:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I think it's fair to draw that analogy to life.
18:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I don't think at the time it was that conscious to me.
18:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I was still too new to climbing to think of climbing as metaphor for life.
18:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that as well, because it's a trueism to a point.
18:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But for me, it was, again, coming off the back of this, the previous story, very positive, emotional set of experiences, like incredible bonding with my dad and with Christina.
18:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And imagine saying, well, I'm just going to give that up.
19:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't need that anymore.
19:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think it really occurred to us.
19:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it was more of we see intrinsic value in this thing.
19:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And how do we continue to extract that value?
19:14
[SPEAKER_02]: but be joy, let it be emotional growth, let it be the meditation that comes with being in the outdoors.
19:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I find the outdoors to be very fueling and healing.
19:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't want to give any of that up.
19:28
[SPEAKER_02]: She didn't want to give any of that up.
19:29
[SPEAKER_02]: She still climbs, but it did make us think about how to approach generating those benefits in a
19:38
[SPEAKER_02]: less, I was gonna say less risky, that's not true.
19:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Happhazard, not, I'm not gonna say that we were ever haphazard but compare us from them to now, we were in a less haphazard way.
19:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And to your point about life, right?
19:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we all lived through a global pandemic, right?
19:55
[SPEAKER_02]: That we didn't choose.
19:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And whether or not that was a big deal for you or a small deal for you, it was sort of objectively a big deal for the world.
20:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Now again, you can argue about whether a response was right,
20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: from a global political perspective or wrong.
20:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not here to talk about that.
20:10
[SPEAKER_02]: But everyone hadn't experienced.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was your impact today.
20:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone was impacted.
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was an experience based on risk.
20:16
[SPEAKER_02]: For some people who had certain types of risk in their own lives and their own risk tolerances,
20:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Certain responses probably felt like not enough and for other people who had, you know, other risk profiles and other risk tolerances Certain certain ways that the world went about dealing with that probably felt like too much Those are both valid responses The point is to think about it and the other point is that risk finds you whether or not you go out to the mountains
20:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, sure you're adding in a new type of risk, but is it more risky than getting in the car?
20:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it more risky than flying on a plane?
20:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it more risky?
20:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm not here to make the false equivalency, because oftentimes those are things we have to do just to exist in the world and generate a living and take care of your family and all that.
21:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is voluntarily and chosen, so I view it as additive, but I don't view it as inherently bad.
21:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't feel additive risk is inherently bad as long as you're getting some good out of it and you're open to the good that you're getting.
21:16
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't let it shape your character, if you don't
21:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Extract the lessons and hopefully make you a better person.
21:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Then yeah, you're just adding on risk for no benefit So don't do it, but if you can figure out a way to you turn that risk into some sort of Formative shaping of ideally a positive character whatever that means to you then no we didn't we didn't consider giving that up We considered how do we change our character to get more of the good out of these experiences
21:44
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's always a cost-bid effect type of an analysis with this sort of thing, and I personally have found that the magic happens just outside of one's comfort zone.
21:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it is worthwhile.
21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But I always say you do it safely.
22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there are many, many things in adventure sports where you're doing something that gives you the illusion of high risk.
22:10
[SPEAKER_01]: When in the reality, the risk is pretty much mitigated.
22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: If you know what you're doing and you use a little bit of wisdom,
22:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's something that you learn from that experience.
22:20
[SPEAKER_01]: You can really, really grow as an individual and just enrich your life by getting out there and having those experiences.
22:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm glad you didn't stop going, right?
22:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think very few people do stop actually because they realize now this is this is magic out here.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
22:38
[SPEAKER_01]: This is doing something for me You said that you were diagnosed with leukemia in 2018, so these overlap
22:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, yep, because the pandemic came to our shores kind of right around 19 becoming 20, right?
22:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
22:53
[SPEAKER_02]: The coasts first and moved its way inland as people travel as they do for jobs and moving homes and all those things.
23:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I was diagnosed with a chronic lymphocytic leukemia and it's in the name it's called chronic.
23:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Normally when people hear leukemia, what they think of is the acute version of it,
23:15
[SPEAKER_02]: The acute version though is that aggressive one that you hear about on the local news, right?
23:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, oh, you know, 20 year old college football player at our local town struck down by blood cancer and now he's getting a bone marrow transplant, right?
23:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, isn't this tragic?
23:32
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the acute version and it does happen fast and it's still really hard to treat and it often does end up with things like bone marrow transplants and that type of stuff.
23:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Those do tend to hit younger people in their late teens early 20s.
23:45
[SPEAKER_02]: The chronic version, the version I have, A, chronic slow moving, B, chronic, not cured, like you're trying to get into full remission with the acute version, replacing all your bone marrow as an example.
23:58
[SPEAKER_02]: This is like we're going to figure out how to live with this thing and reduce the risk of you dying from secondary things, which will come into you.
24:04
[SPEAKER_02]: and then it tends to hit older folks.
24:07
[SPEAKER_02]: The median diagnostic age, the median age, if someone who gets diagnosed for the first time with it, moves around a little bit, but it's typically in the low 70s.
24:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's 71 still, it might be 72 or 70 now.
24:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I was 41 when I was diagnosed.
24:22
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't really know what causes it, but it is managed rather than cured.
24:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello again, the treatments are getting better into getting something called zero measurable disease or unmeasurable residual disease or choose your acronym.
24:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, it is a immune system cancer because it's attacking the lymphocytes again in the name, which are
24:44
[SPEAKER_02]: the white blood cells, you know, everyone, I think people now because of pandemic, know about T cells, T cells are the things, the white blood cells that attack the virus and kill it off, right?
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: CLL is a cancer of the B cells.
24:57
[SPEAKER_02]: The B cells are the trainers and the commanders.
25:00
[SPEAKER_02]: The B cells tell the T cells what to go attack.
25:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So my B cells don't train my T cells correctly and they don't function appropriately and then they, that being a cancer, they don't die off and so eventually it
25:14
[SPEAKER_02]: which impacts the ability for the good cells in your blood to do their thing.
25:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It starts off if you catch it early, the way I caught it is I changed jobs.
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And because I changed jobs, I changed insurance, because I changed insurance.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: My old providers were no longer in network.
25:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was just getting a physical, just like establishing a new primary care physician.
25:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And the next day in the dentist's office, I get a phone call from my new brand new primary care provider saying, we need you to go into the lab today.
25:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, because all they know at this point, because they don't run a cancer screening panel, they just know I have a really high white blood cell count.
25:51
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't know what it is, what's causing it, but typically people their white blood cell count is somewhere below 10,000, mine's 31,000.
25:59
[SPEAKER_02]: They go go in and then it takes a series of days to get these more sophisticated tests back.
26:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But mine was sort of like middle of the road.
26:10
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have any of the stuff that makes it good, a good one to have, but you don't have any of the stuff that makes it a bad one to have.
26:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I went through this process with twin four-year-old boys of not knowing first which cancer is it.
26:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I didn't know it was the chronic version at first.
26:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, well, this could be really aggressive, you know, the acute kind, right?
26:31
[SPEAKER_02]: While the genetic testing gives you a hint, it's still sort of like, you know, three, five-year-time horizons until people need treatment.
26:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But do those apply to me because people who need treatment are in their 70s.
26:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm in my 40s, is that better or worse, because people in their 70s die from other things, whereas I am less likely to have that happen.
26:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's the fact that I'm younger and I have a stronger body, is that a good thing?
26:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Or it's the fact that I'm younger and I'm more likely to have to see treatment eventually, is that a bad thing?
26:58
[SPEAKER_02]: All of this is unknown.
26:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So they just start tracking your blood markers and they go, okay, we're going to come in every two months and then after two months they don't see enough changes and then they change it to three and after three months maybe for a few years of doing that and they're like, okay, we'll do four months right so they're starting to spread out the amount of time like, yeah, it seems like it's still moving slowly, but none of this I knew.
27:19
[SPEAKER_02]: when the pandemic hit because we were only a year in.
27:22
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't know how my particular version of the disease was going to track and how quickly it would start impacting other systems in my body.
27:30
[SPEAKER_02]: But it isn't a mean system cancer.
27:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So the pandemic wasn't a mean system problem, right?
27:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And didn't know at the time I knew from a little bit of the cancer community just anecdotally that CLL patients were not doing well.
27:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But only after the fact when the peer reviewed journal nature did a retrospective study, the outcomes, the clinical term, meaning are you going to die or not.
27:53
[SPEAKER_02]: The outcomes for CLL patients were worse than other cancer patients.
27:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They were worse than the elderly in the nursing homes.
27:58
[SPEAKER_02]: They were worse than transplant patients.
28:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So all of those people that you heard about on the news that like, oh, you know, it's really bad for these folks.
28:05
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the ones who are
28:06
[SPEAKER_02]: showing up in the ICU.
28:08
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the ones that are dying in the nursing homes.
28:10
[SPEAKER_02]: These are the ones whose family never get to go say goodbye to them.
28:13
[SPEAKER_02]: They were dying at rates less than people with CLL.
28:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
28:19
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just it.
28:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a crazy story to recap a little bit.
28:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about a rare type of leukemia that hit at a very young age at the time of the COVID-19 experience.
28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It's attacking your immune system at a time that you really need a strong robust immune system.
28:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You have a long wait to get sorted what all of this is and what it means and how it's impacting your life.
28:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've got twin boys, four years old, who need a dad.
28:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you were going through it.
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That must have been just a very uncomfortable time.
28:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It's still very emotional to be honest.
28:59
[SPEAKER_02]: I will hold it together, but I also won't pretend that it doesn't impact me.
29:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It was,
29:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, I've had your death experiences.
29:11
[SPEAKER_02]: One's actually, you know, a couple of times maybe in the mountains, but you know, more like close call things.
29:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I was two, I almost died from a walnut.
29:19
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how we figured out I had none out of Jesus, right?
29:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, great.
29:22
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a late 70's, right?
29:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So I have no memory of it.
29:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But like, you know, I literally almost died when I was two years old.
29:28
[SPEAKER_02]: My mom knowing the right things to do and having been a drill around all that sort of stuff, probably say my life.
29:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I almost died when I was 15, when someone broke into my house and stabbed me.
29:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I have five stablins in my torso.
29:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Those feel less emotionally taxing than that period of cancer and COVID and the young kids because the guilt associated with it was the hard part.
29:57
[SPEAKER_02]: We were making the best decisions we could as a family obviously my wife and I were talking about a lot.
30:02
[SPEAKER_02]: it's easy to forget sort of the beginning of the pandemic because we know so much more but but at first like we didn't know if it's airborne or touch right remember they were going on and showing shows and doctors surgeons were telling you here's how you go from clean station to dirty station when you get your groceries or your mail and they're telling you how to wipe down things because we still didn't know right at the beginning right think about like March February March 2020 so many unknowns
30:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
30:27
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't know how bad my mind was.
30:30
[SPEAKER_02]: We knew to your point that we had kids who needed to have a dad around.
30:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Schools closed, remember?
30:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Schools closed.
30:37
[SPEAKER_02]: My kids had three school time, the schools closed down so they're at home.
30:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So our family became about keeping me safe.
30:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And for a while, it was the only rational thing to do because we didn't really know anything
30:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And the hard part with that with kids is they were the most likely vector to bring it into the house.
31:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, especially when schools reopened and all that sort of stuff, right?
31:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, of all the equipment, I can decide not to go to restaurants.
31:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I can decide not go to concerts.
31:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I can decide to not go to enclosed places, bowling, whatever.
31:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The kids don't get to make any of those decisions.
31:16
[SPEAKER_02]: They're young.
31:17
[SPEAKER_02]: We're making those decisions on their behalf.
31:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So their world needs to expand and my world needs to contract.
31:24
[SPEAKER_02]: and where's the balance point between those two things?
31:28
[SPEAKER_02]: The terrible feeling was when I started to realize that what they needed and what I needed were at odds.
31:37
[SPEAKER_02]: At the beginning, it didn't feel that way because it was so scary for everyone.
31:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And we didn't know that it hit youth less vigorously and we didn't do it again didn't have all that information So they closed the schools and everyone stated shelter in place and all that sort of stuff so it was all perfectly aligned like just don't go around other people Okay
31:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But then eventually we learned more, and we saw the effects of, you know, our kids were a little too young, but kids not being in school and all of the downside of that back to your cost of benefit coming.
32:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And I started to realize what I needed to not be dead and what they needed in order to live were temporarily very, very different things.
32:14
[SPEAKER_02]: and that was the thing that we wrestled with.
32:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the thing to bring the transition part of the conversation, hopefully into the circle and the benefits of adventuring and letting it shape your character.
32:27
[SPEAKER_02]: At that point, I've been doing this stuff for well over decade, maybe two decades or something.
32:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of the reflexes that my wife and I both had learned about assessing risk, creating mitigation or avoidance strategies for that risk,
32:43
[SPEAKER_02]: that we had learned for being outside and being in the mountains and doing climbing and doing to your point things that could be dangerous if done wrong.
32:49
[SPEAKER_02]: We had to apply all of those mental models to this very homebound set of risks.
32:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I know it sounds silly now, six years out, but remember where we were and then remember my circumstance, should I go into the grocery store?
33:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that a dangerous thing for me to do?
33:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, we don't know, right?
33:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So like, sure, not just day by day, but hour by hour, assessing risk at the beginning, you know, ordering in the groceries because we didn't view the risk because worth it.
33:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, obviously we knew better about eight months in, but we started out that way.
33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Tangential to that, we had just moved because I got the new job, so we had moved to a new house.
33:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So we were getting stuff done on the house.
33:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we let the contractor come in?
33:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Do I ask the contractor if they've been exposed to a lot of other people?
33:40
[SPEAKER_02]: How do I engage in this emotionally?
33:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, just all of these things that we had to do, like I say, not day by day, like four or five times a day.
33:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm making an assessment of, like, is this worth it for me?
33:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Jason, that's just exhausting.
33:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It is, it's a muscle, it's exhausting.
33:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And the resilience and the mental patterns that I had honed to a degree, whatever degree that is, however good I am at it, I don't know.
34:05
[SPEAKER_02]: out in the mountains.
34:06
[SPEAKER_02]: was what I drew upon.
34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the thing that allowed me to navigate this.
34:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a series of mental techniques, and then to your point, it had a series of emotional, I mean, this is in a good way, calluses, right?
34:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you go out and you get scared a little into your point of being just beyond your comfort zone.
34:24
[SPEAKER_02]: You start to get used to being just beyond your comfort zone that feels okay.
34:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so having that ability to focus on what I need to do next and then move on to the next problem, move on to the next problem, like you do in the mountains, you round the corner,
34:36
[SPEAKER_02]: something dangerous big boulders teetering, like, what do I do about it?
34:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Same kind of thing.
34:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we rounded a corner of 2019 and we hit 2020 and a big scary boulder was sitting over us.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we do about that?
34:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's impressive.
34:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I've often said that what we learn from doing hard things out in nature, it can be climbing, it can be a lot of different activities.
35:00
[SPEAKER_01]: But by doing hard things, we learn something about ourselves.
35:03
[SPEAKER_01]: We gain the fortitude that allows us then in everyday life when we face challenges to be better equipped.
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And your illustration is, I mean, that's powerful.
35:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it was, it was the real deal.
35:16
[SPEAKER_02]: To your point, it was exhausting.
35:17
[SPEAKER_02]: It was emotionally exhausting just having to make those decisions all the time as emotionally exhausting because of that incongruence I mentioned between what my kids needed and what I needed at the time.
35:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
35:26
[SPEAKER_02]: The vaccines were not a rescue for me, back to the B cell cancer, just not, and it's still too new to have like these big, longitudinal studies about vaccine efficacy for COL patients.
35:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But we know that
35:38
[SPEAKER_02]: CLL patients don't react to vaccines the way that they should.
35:43
[SPEAKER_02]: We have good numbers around the flu shot.
35:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you take like what a normal whatever that means, a normal average person would experience if they get a flu shot in terms of antibodies and protection, CLL patients typically are around 10% responsive.
35:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So about 10% of your CLL patients were responded to the flu vaccine.
36:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So the vaccines came out, I got them, but we had to operate as if they weren't going to work.
36:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Like Jason, get them because they might, but act like they don't.
36:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so even after all of that, you're still saying, well, okay, you know, I still, I didn't leave the country again for someone who like does expeditions.
36:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't leave the country again until 2024.
36:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was the first time I got out of an airplane.
36:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wouldn't even travel, like find the remote job and all that sort of stuff.
36:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I still get a vaccine every six months because I mean, compromise people can, but I still have to act like it doesn't work.
36:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So the pandemic's not over for me, it's still in the background all the time.
36:39
[SPEAKER_02]: As the spikes go up and down globally, in terms of, you know, it's seasonal now.
36:44
[SPEAKER_02]: If for everyone else, it's, it's endemic.
36:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It shows up cyclically for me.
36:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to act like it's always there.
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, Jason, I want to just highlight something.
36:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's good for us all to consider for a moment.
36:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The COVID-19 business got highly politicized.
36:59
[SPEAKER_01]: and people started taking sides and I understand it and one of the things that helped me to understand it most was realizing how people aligned based on their personality types.
37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: with various expectations and how they felt like everything should be handled.
37:13
[SPEAKER_01]: But my family lives in a valley that's vacation spot for people from around the world.
37:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And COVID came to our valley before we knew that it was in the states.
37:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when it was first noticed somewhere on the west coast or something like that, I think it was already here.
37:31
[SPEAKER_01]: We just didn't know it yet.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So you mentioned the time window February March.
37:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's when my family got COVID.
37:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we all had it, we were young, we were healthy, we got through it, fine.
37:44
[SPEAKER_01]: We came out the other side of it and said, oh, this is no big deal.
37:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We probably had natural immunity now, and we survived it.
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So our perspective was based on really a position of freedom, 180 degrees different than yours.
38:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
38:01
[SPEAKER_01]: A complete, I mean, juxtaposed these two experiences.
38:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's just important to highlight, we need to be sympathetic toward people's thoughts and inclinations about how they weather different experiences in life differently than we might, you know, because what you were going through, holy cow, it's like an axe is hanging over your head and I don't wanna make this too dramatic, but it's real.
38:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you're looking at your twin boys with an axe hanging over your head.
38:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
38:33
[SPEAKER_01]: and you're fighting an invisible enemy.
38:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, with very little information.
38:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
38:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's terrifying to me.
38:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It was.
38:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It really is.
38:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It was really scary.
38:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I used to call it the sort of damnocleus.
38:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Your tongue is the same thing.
38:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Your thing axing you over your head is the same thing.
38:49
[SPEAKER_02]: it's this this sword that's dangling over someone from a drinking and eventually is supposed to get cut and gives, I think it's Greek mythology.
38:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what it felt like.
38:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And to your point, I understand why I got politicized too.
39:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a massive public policy problem to solve, and so of course it's going to be politicized.
39:06
[SPEAKER_02]: To your point, the antidote is empathy.
39:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I can appreciate that the contractor coming into my house doesn't need to take the same safety precautions as I do and so where do I have that balance point on that personal interaction between not impinging upon them so much but not putting myself at a risk that I'm unwilling to tolerate and how do I have that dialogue in a way that personalizes it so it's not just the don't wear mask or do wear mask or
39:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
39:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I still wear masks on airplanes.
39:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to.
39:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm one of those people and almost every time I go in the airport, someone gives me crap about it.
39:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just want to say like, you don't know.
39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
39:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You need to wear it.
39:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not here telling you that you're doing it wrong.
39:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not making a political statement saying everyone should be wearing a mask by wearing mine.
39:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just saying that I need to protect myself.
39:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's okay that you don't and that's fine, but yeah, it was it was a hard thing.
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a really hard thing I had these two Kind of catastrophic hypotheticals in my head and I'm not saying this is healthy In fact, eventually like talking to therapists and stuff about what you know working my way through this because I don't think it was healthy But I have these sort of two catastrophic thoughts on the one hand how bad would it be if my kids grew up without a dad
40:24
[SPEAKER_02]: because actually my bachelor's degree is in political science, and my master's degree in public policy.
40:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So I know all the stats, right?
40:30
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, you know, it doesn't mean it's good or bad, or I'm not saying don't be single parent households because sometimes it's way worse if you're not.
40:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But we do know that statistically, kids do better in two parent households.
40:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So if I don't take this seriously enough and I die, what are the outcomes, right?
40:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And I had this catastrophic narrative in my head that, again, I think was unhealthy.
40:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, everything just escalates for you.
40:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But then on the flip side,
40:54
[SPEAKER_02]: My kids bring in the disease, and that's what kills me.
40:58
[SPEAKER_02]: How are they gonna feel about that?
41:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Not now, because they're four or five or six, but when they're 12 or 13, 14.
41:08
[SPEAKER_02]: When they're not equipped, and it is not their responsibility to make those decisions.
41:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, back to the guilt, it's like, well, I'm making decisions on their behalf that they will have to deal with the emotional consequences of.
41:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe that's just parenting in a nutshell, and this is an extreme case of it.
41:25
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, it probably is.
41:27
[SPEAKER_02]: We do that with our kids all the time.
41:29
[SPEAKER_02]: We make choices when they're young that they have to deal.
41:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I have an in law who says, you do the best you can and you save for their therapy, fair.
41:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But this felt really extreme.
41:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And it felt like the consequences of making the wrong call.
41:46
[SPEAKER_02]: were really high.
41:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the beginning, they probably were and then the world learned more and the treatment got better.
41:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And so my odds got better.
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't when you're talking about a tale of a probability of a consequence Jason.
42:01
[SPEAKER_02]: back to that nature study.
42:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, before we knew really what we were dealing with, and remember they would watch people in the ICU first.
42:07
[SPEAKER_02]: There was no like super aggressive treatment.
42:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like, okay, how do we keep them oxygenated and you know, put them on the respirator, all that sort of stuff.
42:15
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't do any of that anymore.
42:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's like super aggressive treatment right away, you know, what can we do?
42:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the beginning, CLO patients, you could still get mild COVID if you got CLO.
42:24
[SPEAKER_02]: You can mild version.
42:25
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you got moderate to severe COVID, you had a 50% chance of
42:30
[SPEAKER_02]: not the beginning.
42:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the end, after the vaccine came out, it was down to 38%.
42:36
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not like, you know, I might get through it.
42:38
[SPEAKER_02]: The only rational strategy is don't catch it.
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's kind of go full circle back to climbing.
42:50
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people leaned into outdoor sports.
42:53
[SPEAKER_01]: The sanity during COVID, right?
42:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're talking about needing to expand your children's world at a time that you needed them to contract their world for your safety.
43:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, I mean, wow, I'm just guessing here that how did the outdoors help your family?
43:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah, you're not wrong.
43:13
[SPEAKER_02]: A ton, it came in winter, right?
43:16
[SPEAKER_02]: At least here in the States came the winter.
43:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It starts snowshoeing.
43:20
[SPEAKER_02]: First thing, like, you know, kids are full of, like, what physical skill they had done some stuff out the doors before, just because the people we are.
43:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And they had on your first outdoor rock climb, I think they were like three and a half and you know, put them on a little top rope and That's so much fun.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so much fun.
43:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not like it's not like we like just gotten the outdoors for the first time, but there's only so much they can do at that age.
43:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So we started snowshoeing and then it tilted into something that
43:46
[SPEAKER_02]: in retrospect, only through the process of writing a book that, you know, going back and thinking about some moments in fatherhood, I realized then, as I was writing, not so much at that time when we started getting outside.
44:00
[SPEAKER_02]: The kids always love downside.
44:02
[SPEAKER_02]: They always love downside when they were kids do.
44:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, when they were 80, you know, you get the little safety harnesses that they look back and dust your harnesses but put the kid in front and so they can walk around with you and you got them on your chest and let's first off.
44:14
[SPEAKER_02]: We would do that when they were fussy or we try the stroller or we try the car ride, car rides no good, stroller, no good in the little carrier thing fine but they'd better be facing out but still no good if you're inside.
44:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, they just loved to be outdoors and this was that right.
44:36
[SPEAKER_02]: This was getting them into the outdoors to your point.
44:39
[SPEAKER_02]: It felt like sanctuary for me and it felt like something that would still expand their world is it was that rareplace in that particular moment in time where that cross purposes I was talking about.
44:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Was it misaligned to keep me safe we should be outside to keep their world expanding with the school's clothes and everything They should be outside so we just kept going outside and eventually they convinced me I resisted it for a while to Basically make a YouTube channel that was about teaching them all the skills and stuff that you need to be outside
45:12
[SPEAKER_02]: and we started with snowshoeing, and we started with for that reason, it's like, hey, outside's one of the safest places on the planet right now, and it's winter, and a lot of you probably don't know how to manage that.
45:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's talk about clothing, let's talk about equipment, and let's talk about
45:27
[SPEAKER_02]: the little bit of technique that goes into snowshoeing, and so you don't have to be locked up in your house.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You can still go out and do things, and that became the very first set of videos that we eventually made for this YouTube channel, because my kids were just saying, my, hey dad, like you're having to teach all this to us.
45:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I bet you other people need to learn, and you should film it.
45:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So we did, and so that became, it's a created of cadence to get out.
45:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, really helpful.
45:51
[SPEAKER_02]: for us.
45:52
[SPEAKER_02]: That we could get out a little bit every week and then every other week and whatever the time period might be and have fun, explore a wider world and feel safe all at the same time.
46:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Is your YouTube channel still active?
46:06
[SPEAKER_02]: very um it's called short guys beta works it now has a very strong climbing tilt because my kids have a strong climbing tilt and again like the background is basically whatever I happen to be teaching them now is what I'm making videos about so so theoretically someone who was brand new to the outdoors in 2020 could have come along to the ride
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Now could be doing ice climbing and alpanism and all that sort of stuff because that's what my kids are doing They're really good rock climbers.
46:30
[SPEAKER_02]: They're better than me.
46:31
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not quite as good on the like Trads side of things.
46:34
[SPEAKER_02]: They're better than me at sport.
46:35
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just getting into ice climbing This is like the fourth or fifth season, but it's the first time they've been big enough to have like the real equipment So that helps So they're like nine or ten years old or they're like right they're 12 11.
46:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So wow, what a great age to be Teaching your kids how to do this stuff
46:53
[SPEAKER_02]: But yes, it was a, you are on the nose.
46:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The outdoors made sense from a risk perspective for us, but it also became soul-feeding in a way.
47:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, for all of the, the hard part of the pandemic, you know, I didn't have to feel the claustrophobia of shelter in place.
47:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And I didn't have to feel the claustrophobia of stay at home.
47:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And some people did.
47:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Either because their bodies weren't ready for it or they didn't have the knowledge and skills to break out of that.
47:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for all of the extra difficulty I had, you know, back to your point about empathy, one of the things that I was fortunate enough to be equipped with in that situation was knowledge skills abilities, gear and proximity given where I live in Colorado to the outdoors.
47:35
[SPEAKER_02]: That I didn't have to feel like I was, you know, binge watching Netflix for six months, you know, right?
47:41
[SPEAKER_01]: We've already burned through our time, so we're going to have to wrap up, but you've done a lot of climbing in a lot of places, it's a big part of your life still and a big part of your family's life.
47:53
[SPEAKER_01]: What words do you have for people who are wondering, should I try mountaineering, should I try tread climbing or sport climbing or what's the why?
48:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you alluded to it, I'll start there and then maybe go from it.
48:07
[SPEAKER_02]: People grow at the edges of their comfort zone.
48:11
[SPEAKER_02]: If, whether that be psychologically, they literally call it exposure therapy, you're afraid of spiders, then first you go to a glass case of a spider, so you can see it from a distance, and then you open the case, so you know it could get out, but it's not really going to.
48:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you get a little bit closer to it, and then eventually the transition was calling up your arm.
48:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the same thing, right?
48:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You grow.
48:34
[SPEAKER_02]: through exposure to situations that are hopefully just to your point, just beyond the comfort zones.
48:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's too far.
48:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to make mistakes and you could really bad consequences.
48:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But if it's within it, you're not really growing.
48:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I started late.
48:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I started because of knee injuries that happened in young adulthood.
48:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So the it's too late to start.
48:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't put in the time.
48:57
[SPEAKER_02]: You can learn a lot.
48:59
[SPEAKER_02]: through really good books.
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: You should supplement that with people who know what they're doing, whether that's hiring professional guides to teach you.
49:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I would never say, as much as I have a YouTube channel, do not rely on anyone to video.
49:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no substitute for real world experience.
49:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of the different variables that no video can do.
49:16
[SPEAKER_02]: do not learn only through that kind of medium.
49:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But find mentors, higher professional guides, do lots of reading, do lots of watching informative, well-researched YouTube videos, all of this things are available to you.
49:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And the growth that you will experience,
49:33
[SPEAKER_02]: from being outside of your comfort zone won't be just how to tie the knot or get the system built or use the right ice axe.
49:41
[SPEAKER_02]: What you will grow into is a person who knows how to take skills, whether that be emotional, knowledge skills or physical skills.
49:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Take those skills from one situation and apply it someplace else because the variables of the outdoors are just greater than any other
50:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if you go to the outdoors and get the right knowledge and skills in the right exposure, you not only will become a competent, how a door's person, but you, I think, would become a more competent human being doing this weird thing that we do in life, where we face risks as well.
50:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that, Jason, I would like to hear more, maybe though that's a good place to wrap it up because people should get your book so they can hear the rest of the story, right?
50:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Notions of Grace is the name of the book subtitled a memoir of climbing cancer and family.
50:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like you learned a ton from this and it also sounds like climbing in the outdoors really came to your rescue and that's what a bit your sports can do.
50:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I've experienced it myself.
50:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I know so many people who have thanks for sharing their story with us.
50:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for taking a time and for listening and uh...
50:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope, uh, I hope people do take advantage of your prompt and get outdoors, um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's fantastic.
51:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, the YouTube channel.
51:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Short guys beta works.
51:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
51:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if you want to learn the progression of kids learning the progression of it sounds like a great place to go.
51:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
51:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fantastic.
51:12
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
51:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Jason, thank you so much for your time today.
51:14
[SPEAKER_01]: and for all the listeners out there, thanks for listening in, while we kind of went deep, I think we learned some lessons from this that could be very, very helpful.
51:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you get out there and have some fun.