What a year

I have returned to the old ancestral homeland of New Haven for the holidays. Airport travel, as always, is nasty business and my luggage has yet to join me, but nevertheless it is always great to be home at this time of year. It's a wonderful opportunity to reflect - and by "reflect" I mean lay on the couch and alternate between watching Wallace and Gromit and devouring all my mom's food.

2011. Wow, what a year. It's a hell of a thing to take your ideas, passions, dreams, ...I'm out of words, and put them out into the world. The attempt to package everything you are into a... product(?) is a nutty experience in and of itself. I will always be iterating, refining, improving the programming and progressions for Fifth Ape training, but I will still never get it perfect - a frustrating and beautiful truth. This first year of Fifth Ape training has taught me as much if not more than all my years of school - the sort of education that is not possible in an academic setting. It's sort of terrifying every day - in the best possible way.

We are all made of others. I wouldn't be here without a long list of friends, mentors, and supporters. My thanks to Frank Forencich, Erwan le Corre, Vic Verdier, Clif Harski, Kwame Brown, Josh Leeger, Charlie Reid, Justin Doran (& family!), Duncan Germain, Dave Rubin, and many others I can't think of right now.

Extra special thanks to my two coaches: Sean and Eric. It's hard to find people who can 1) Do everything that Fifth Ape classes cover, 2) Teach it all, and 3) Help with all the other businessy things but both of these guys do it all. I really wish I could pay them more because they deserve it.

Finally, a huge thanks to our wonderful and supportive clients. We've enjoyed getting to know all of you and we are immensely proud of you for all the progress that you made. Take a moment and think back on everything you've done - all the ways you improved, all the "impossible" jumps you made and be proud of yourselves.

I put together a video looking back on the year. I hope you enjoy it:

(make sure you watch it fullscreen in HD!)

I'm actually pretty proud of the way the video turned out, so if you want to do me a big favor please share it with people!

Fifth Ape on the radio!

An even shorter post today as I am hard at work on something pretty cool that I'm looking forward to sharing with you. Here's a preview.

BUT - here's the big news: I was on the radio! Isn't that awesome?? On Tuesday I sat down for an hour with Jose Drost Lopez of PsychTalk to talk about, well, basically everything. I had an absolute blast - thanks to Jose and WCOM for giving me the opportunity to talk about Fifth Ape.

Thanks to the wonder of technology, you can listen to the podcast right here. Enjoy!

A fun behind-the-scenes fact: We were supposed to take a station break in the middle of the show so Jose could thank/plug sponsors, underwriters, etc. But you can't stop a train... the train in this case is my mouth... once it's left the station. I happily blabbered right through our scheduled break and Jose had the good grace to not shut me up. A tip to all future radio hosts who have me on *ahem* Dick Gordan *ahem*: Say anything that needs to be said before I start talking, because I will NEVER stop.

Freedom

A short post today.

I am going to be on the radio! If you're in the Triangle area, you can tune into 103.5 FM today at 2PM to hear me on PsychTalk. If you're not local, or can't tune in live, you'll be able to listen to the podcast. I'm super excited - one step closer to my dream of being on NPR.

I saw this posted on Facebook yesterday - I forget who posted it, but thanks for doing so. We've talked about adventure, risk, fear, etc, a lot here. This clip sums it all up. Some incredible stuff - the free solo highline made me stop breathing. I'm not recommending that you do this - but the fact that you could should be pretty empowering. Enjoy: