Alex Hutchinson is one of my favorite authors and dudes. He not only does super deep dives on topics that I find endlessly fascinating, from human performance to exploration to endurance and beyond, but he also goes on cool adventures with his family and he even has his own garage gym dubbed Flex Factory North.
I interviewed Alex for his last book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, here in Books & Biceps and it was one of our best received interviews because we got useful information and takeaways you can use right now.
Endure became a runaway NY Times bestseller (as it should have) and now Hutchinson’s new book is out, which is the perfect complement to his previous work:
The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors and the Blank Spots on the Map
The upcoming interview is thorough and awesome because I loved this book and had some specific, research-type questions. And since you’re a sophisticated meathead reading this, I’m confident that many of you will have similar questions so I’m confident you will enjoy our conversation.
Read it below and then immediately buy the book. I promise there will be ten takeaways that will change how you think about what you want to do and how you want to explore for the rest of your life.
FINKEL: You casually start the book with an impressive family trek through the wilderness with your wife and kids along the Long Range Traverse in Newfoundland. And you drop this line in there: “There was no source of water nearby, so I had to bushwack down the slope for ten minutes until I found a little rivulet that was clear and deep enough to fill our bottles.”
You mentioned bushwhacking a few times in this section. Are you talking about smashing through brush with a machete? Scaling thorny bushes? Paint us a picture of your legendary dad prowess haha.
HUTCHINSON: I’m not very good at painting pictures, but I can definitely paste a photo in here:
This stuff is called “tuckamore” in Newfoundland, which is basically the stunted, gnarled trees that grow on windy sub-alpine coasts and form an almost impenetrable barrier. I didn’t have a machete, and it probably wouldn’t have helped (mostly because I would have cut off my toe or something). You just have to push through and get scratched.
As for dad prowess, please note the extra backpack strapped to my own backpack in that pic. I eventually realized that it was too much to expect my younger daughter to push through this stuff while also wearing a pack. This is visual proof that I’m not a complete bastard.
Nils Van Der Poel is my new favorite trailblazing athlete. He’s an Olympic speed skating champion who flipped training on its head, by spending most of his time building overall strength and endurance off the ice (5 hour bike rides in hills, three hour runs)…before dialing in for the big races close to events. I’ve been thinking heavily about this for swimming.
Particularly the 50 fly. Strength and speed work instead of hundreds of laps at a time. What is your takeaway on this kind of unconventional training? Does it crossover most of the time?
If we took a poll of Olympic champions, I guess it would be one vote for the van der Poel method and 10,000 votes for “just do the thing you’re training to do over and over.” Still, there’s no doubt that van der Poel’s cross-training approach has had a big impact on how athletes from a bunch of different sports—running, cycling, skiing—think about their training. And there’s some solid logic behind it.
The one caveat I’d add is that van der Poel already knew how to skate. He was a two-time world junior champion and Olympian before he started this experiment, so he already had thousands of hours getting the reps in on his speedskating technique. I don’t think this approach would work for someone trying to learn how to skate. For you, you’ve got the butterfly muscle memory, but you do need to spend enough time in the pool to make sure your form is on point. With the van der Poel method, you can do that form work at race pace, which might be more effective than doing a bunch of slow laps.
Robert Wilson’s Horizon Task Data is fascinating. Is this something that we can alter by simply being aware of it happening? Like can we consciously reverse the trend? Can you give a quick summary of what it is and why we should all be aware of it as we age?
Wilson uses gambling games to study how and when we decide to explore riskier options versus sticking with safe bets. In his Horizon Task study, he found that we explore more when we have lots of turns left and get gradually less exploratory as we approach the end of the game. This makes good intuitive (and mathematical) sense: it’s more useful to explore when you have more time left to benefit from whatever you discover. It’s also a metaphor for life: kids explore a ton, old people stick with what they know.
The hard question is whether we can—or should—try to fight this trend of decreasing exploration. We can’t just snap our fingers and become young and naïve again. For better or worse, I already know that I don’t like eggplant, suck at ballroom dancing, and fare very poorly after drinking a pint of gin. I don’t need (or want!) to re-explore these questions. But there are plenty of tastes and activities and experiences that I still want to explore, and I do think being aware of the tendency to explore less can help us fight it: as G.I. Joe used to say, knowing is half the battle.
You have a great quote from Tenzing Norgay’s son 50 years after his dad reached the top of Mt. Everest: “You still have to climb the mountain with your feet. But the spirit of adventure is not there anymore. It is lost.”
This feels like a metaphor for much of the modern travel and tourism landscape. And even our modern day-to-day lives. Why is uncertainty of outcome so important individually to keep challenging us?
Let’s use a sports analogy: watching a basketball game where you already know the final score can be mildly entertaining, but it’s nothing like watching it in real time. When you’re sitting on the edge of the sofa living and dying with each possession, you might think to yourself, “I just wish I knew how this is going to end!” But in reality, marinating in that state of uncertainty where we don’t know how things will turn out is the fundamental reason we watch sports. Nobody wants a spoiler.
In travel—and in life—we have that same dilemma. When I backpacked through Europe after graduating from college in the late 1990s, I’d flip open my Lonely Planet every time I arrived in a new place in order to figure out where to sleep, what to eat, which sites to see. That meant I and every other grubby backpacker went to the same places—but there was only a page or two on each city, so I still had plenty of surprises (like the time I accidentally ordered a whole boiled octopus in a little seaside town in Spain).
These days, we have infinitely more information available to us. Even in the most obscure corners of the globe, you can find people’s travel blogs to figure out exactly what you’re going to see. It’s like knowing the final score in advance—there’s no surprise, no joy of discovery. My resolution these days is to do less research before I travel.
My favorite line of yours in the book is when you write “exploration is the anti-habit”. This hit me hard. We all get so locked into our daily routines and habits and many of us think the antidote must be some 5AM trek to summit a mountain or to hike the whole grand canyon or some far off adventure. But you write that the antidote to a perceived boring schedule isn’t to explore faraway places more (although that’s fun). It’s to explore better. Can you share some tips on that?
Yeah, I love the extreme trips, but I don’t want exploration to be something I do only once or twice a year. I had some awesome adventures with my kids this winter taking snowshoes down to the river that’s just a couple blocks from my house and looking for the steepest possible slopes to try scrambling up. Who needs an iPad when you can nearly kill yourself just out the back door?
More generally, the rule of thumb I like best is what scientists who study exploration call “optimism in the face of uncertainty.” Basically, if you’re considering two choices, don’t pick the one with the best immediate result. Pick the one with the biggest potential upside—the one that just might take you somewhere you’ve always dreamed of. It won’t always work out, but the math says that approach will leave you with the fewest regrets—which seems like a pretty worthy goal.
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