 I was born in
Connecticut and raised on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands with my twin
brother Sean. We spent our first two years living aboard a 40-foot sailboat
named Yahoo-on which we were not allowed to wear shoes-and commuting to school
on St. Thomas via dinghy, Jeep, ferry boat, and bus. Eventually we moved ashore
and joined St. John's renowned Little League team, thus becoming the league's
two white kids. I spent much of my childhood in the water, surfing and sailing
and swimming and fishing, and got to be pretty good at catching tarantulas, too.
I attended my last three years of high school at Choate Rosemary Hall in
Connecticut and played football and baseball for Middlebury College in Vermont,
where I earned a psychology degree in 2001. After a year as a counter-terrorism
analyst in Washington, D.C., I headed west, stopping for a night's respite at
10,000 feet. I'm still here.
I have covered major league baseball and NFL football, professional cycling
(both mountain and road), World Cup skiing (alpine, nordic, and freestyle),
elite ski mountaineering, five Winter X Games, and all brands of endurance
sports, including two weeklong Primal Quest adventure races. In the fall of 2009, I accompanied three professional ski mountaineers on a 42-day expedition to the former Maoist lair in Western Nepal.
Beyond event coverage, I view sports as a way to explore the human psyche. Not
only do they reveal our most intimate traits, but also how we value our brief
stay in the world. Some people want nothing more out of a weekend afternoon than
to watch cars blaze around an asphalt track 250 times in a row. Others test
themselves on a dawn-to-dusk ski mountaineering mission that terrifies them at
the same moment it exhilarates them. These kinds of decisions say things about
us. I like figuring out what those things are.
In my own life, childhood exploits in the ocean have been replaced for now by
telemark skiing, trail running, and mountain biking. I live with my wife Larissa
a short walk from the chairlift and 50 yards from a trailhead that accesses
hundreds of miles of backcountry singletrack.
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