Thanks for sticking around

I had visions of grandeur.

We were going to fill the Nordic ski media vacuum. We were going to create content so quickly, amass followers so fast, grow our brand so well, and increase our subscriber base so much that my life would eventually revolve around sports and writing, like a small planet finally pulled into the powerful orb of a massive nearby star.

Maybe that’s why the future looked so bright.

In my fantasy, I’d get paid to punch up stories from my pretty perch in Leadville, looking out my windows at Mt. Massive and Mt. Elbert. My mailbox, stuffed to the brim with Toko test wax, free Fischer boots and Swix samples would overflow onto Mountain View Drive, a constant stream of complimentary fan letters left in its proverbial wake. My front door, cluttered with boxes of free skis and poles, would barricade me from Spectrum salesmen and pesky paparazzi trying to take pictures of Ajee and I recording a show.

The Seder-Skier Podcast was going to be huge.

Meandering introductions would no longer be filled by my own musings on the benefits of fasted workouts. Instead, I’d read off personalized sponsor reads for high-carb GU packets. My workouts would no longer deteriorate into miles of morbid introspection and contemplative questioning over the justification of this madness. Rather, fueled by the fire of explicit purpose, I would rise to new performance heights — with a fancy camera crew in tow to capture closeups of every grizzled facial expression painted across my faced as I leaned over at the end of an interval up some beautifully sweeping singletrack, heavy chest heaving, sweaty brow dripping, toned quads quaking, Instagram followers waiting.

And waiting.

Each day I’d wake up, throw all the unused GU packets in the garbage, bathe myself in the scriptures, soak in a ski, sip a protein shake (post-workout), plug in my microphone and talk truth into GripWax Nation, those thousands of loyal molds who wait to have me pour my esoteric ideas into their frames so they can powerfully conquer every course, on snow and off. Then, I’d kiss my children on the head, hug my wife, grab an afternoon mocha and retreat back to a quiet office with floor-to-ceiling windows in the front and my Birkie bibs hanging in the back and I would write and write (and write, and write, and write, hugging these important periodic glances at my inner dialogue with hyphens) brilliant sentences — even longer and more magnificent than these last two — about the people, places and poignant moments which were being largely ignored in the skinny ski universe.

Alas, it seems all we’ve built is a Calvinist-constructed ‘Sons of Knute’ lodge. Sitting atop America’s highest city instead of within the nation’s flyover country, we’re a reformed version of Lake Wobegon’s fraternal organization, where grumpy but self-effacingly honest Norwegian transplants gather to eat lutefisk, avoid home chores and commiserate about Minnesota weather. Who, having set aside any allusions of some dramatic unfolding of their evidently bland story, having given up on any grand expectations, having accepted their modest lot in life, settled on a Latin motto which would later be engraved on their fictional town’s seal:

Sumus Quod Sumus.

“We are who we are.”

Me, too.

Small. Insignificant. Predictability unpredictable. Theological. Philosophical. Concise. Unique, I suppose. Passionate, I guess. Untethered, at times. Wordy, always.

These are ways you — any one of you 149 subscribers who open emails (at a 63.4% rate) from Seder-Skier.com headquarters, a place proudly proclaiming to host “the fourth-fastest and largest growing Nordic-ski specific podcast in all of Lake County!” — might describe us. OK, so maybe we are slightly self-aware. But not much. After all, we also encourage people to, and this is a direct quote: “Believe your next big breakthrough is right around the corner.”

“Who speaks like that?” I say to myself in a low, gravelly baritone at 5 a.m., channeling my inner Garrison Keillor as I speak into some imaginary, hyper-sensitive Shure microphone, preparing a Prairie Home Companion crowd for the upcoming punchline, which, while it might land, could — upon further nervous inspection — potentially offend certain folks. Perhaps even relatives.

“Not people in Minnesota,” I triumphantly sigh, my performance continuing as someone backstage accidentally twists the gain knob from ‘Min.’ to ‘MAX,’ eliciting a detailed audio collection of my nasal exhalation. Then I quickly add, just like Keillor would have:

“….Except my brother — and he lives in Duluth — and my Mom — and she lives in Moorhead — and both of those places are as close to not being in Minnesota as is geographically possible….”

Maybe that’s why I followed Keillor’s footsteps and left Minnesota. People who say things like, “Your next big breakthrough is right around the corner,” (and believe it) are, let’s be honest, dangerous. People who regularly allow lingo like “rust buster” or “peaking” or “zone 2” leave their lips pose an imminent threat to cautious folk who just want you to cut that racket out and settle down for once, for cryin’ out loud. People who speak in terms of “seasons” and look forward to constructing what they call a “race calendar” do not belong. Thus, I cut the symbolic cord from the comfort of known entities to discover that which was unknown, about myself and (cue orchestra, crescendo in dramatic orchestral music {turn up the oboe}, fade out pink lights stage left, fade in blue background lights stage right, spotlight center in on skinny man standing by the black typewriter and holding a pair of red 2011 WCS Atomic skate skis, aaaaaaaaand…wait, wait for it… ACTION!) the world.

My allegorical journey of self-discovery didn’t bring me to sophisticated European countries or New York City, like Keillor, but that’s mostly because I need to live in a place where I can rollerski from my door, with my dog — off leash. Still, leaving the conservative landscape of the Midwest was both hard and necessary. I had to walk away from generational familial proximity, from mosquito-infested woods and cul-de-sacs encircled by tightly-knit and tighter-wound neighbors who keep an eye on your lawn and a closer eye on your ambition.

From teachers who taught you after they taught your parents and before they retired to a life of “headin’ to the lakes.” I fled, for better or worse, conservative communities comprised of well-meaning souls compelled to stare down your convictions with odd looks until you conform, shattering your dreams of playing Mozart at Carnegie Hall, only to gently shift gears completely and provide courteous verbal reminders to mail in your Menards rebate “sometime today” or head on over to the Johnson’s for a ride on their new pontoon “later this afternoon.”

I couldn’t flourish in a place where friends and even family members forced you to carve away precious workout time to eat ‘a little lunch’ or replaced useful words from great authors’ lexicons to employ worn out phrases like ‘you betcha’ and ‘dontchya know’ during deep discussions over trivial matters, like, say, the weather. But most of all, I couldn’t become the writer, or athlete, or podcaster or skier or man I was meant to be if I stayed in a place where people offered odd looks to those brave few souls who secretly ventured outside their comfort zones on a habitual basis, just for the heck of it. Just to feel alive. Especially, I realized, if these seemingly masochistic, limit-seeking experiments manifested themselves in zealously constructed 12-week marathon buildups.

And so, I left Minnesota, like Keillor did, a move which signified my decision to dream big dreams. Without saying it, I basically said, “I know I’m going to miss a lot of potlucks, but can you save a bite of Grandma’s hot dish for me when I come back as a the proud CEO of the THIRD-largest nordic ski-specific media conglomeration?”

Alas (is using the word ‘alas’ twice in a column frowned upon?—ahh who cares), like my ancestors, I am who I am. This is what it is. I’m not a famous writer (yet!) and Seder-Skier.com isn’t really a Nordic ski news site at all.

Yet somehow, a decade in, and we’re still here.

I guess you could say we’re running the race we’re in. We’re climbing up the mountain we’re on. Even if it looks more like a marshy, wheat-waving bluff outside Fergus Falls than the Lhotse Face, we’re going to make the most of it. And by golly, we’re going to get to the top. We (not sure why I’m saying we…this is a one man operation, unless you actually count Ajee, a German Shepherd Bordie Collie mutt, as an actual producer) are going to try our best to be our best. For the 2026-2027 season, that means a few things.

New content! (sort of) Starting Nov. 2!

• Monday Mantra – a quote, a line from a novel we’re reading, a self-talk slogan to get you through the week or a workout. Something short and snappy to think long and hard about.
• Stewardship in All Seasons – Tuesday’s letter looks at my trials and triumphs in the toddler trenches. We’ll discuss what it means to steward all of your Talents, in the Matthew 25 sense, in all seasons of life. Balancing sports, writing, parenting and any and all other passionate side-hustles is messy. It’s hard. And that’s kind of the point.
• Wednesday’s Weekly Wax – News bytes and commentary from the Nordic Ski world. We’ll also profile athletes and feature various local loppets throughout the winter, provided they answer my emails. Think of it as The Sportswire meets Sportkeeda, minus most of the actual boots-on-the-ground journalism. Like mixing Ross Tucker and Tim Noakes together in a blender and proclaiming, “This WILL work, trust me.” Less Nordic Insights, more Life of Reilly, plus a paradoxical pinch of grumpy boomer with a balanced sprinkle of your well-traveled cousin’s way-too cheerful Christmas letter.
• The Seder-Skier Podcast – Remember those mugs we made that say the show is live on Minnesota Public Radio on Thursday’s at 11 a.m.? Well, it’s time to place the flagship show — rants and all — in its proper place, right after the replay of the MN Orchestra’s ‘Evening Concert’ flips off.
• Friday’s Food for Thought – Maybe we’ll share a recipe, maybe we’ll share a moderately scientific but mostly anecdotal nutritional take, or maybe we’ll just share a simple link to some article written by someone who knows a thing or two about food. Eat up.
• Saturday Ski Shot – No writing. Just a photo from the best ski of the week. If you have one, send it to us! (sederskier@gmail.com)
• Skieologians – A weekly Sunday sermon on the intersection of sports and sanctification, because that’s what it’s really all about.

You’re probably thinking, “This guy struggled to post one piece of content a month! How on earth is he going to do this?!?”

That’s a good point, Ralph, and to be honest, you might be right. We’ll see.

I was hoping to jumpstart things over my recent paternity leave. But instead of finishing the long-awaited Ivan Babikov biography or conducting in-person interviews at the US Ski Team’s Park City camp, I took a two-month break and tried to find myself while playing Playmobils with my daughters. I tried to perfect my Fathercraft while pointing my training gaze at Pikes Peak. I tried to be home for dinner every night. I tried to write, too, I really did. For the most part, I failed.

Along the way, I serendipitously discovered — or rediscovered — my copy of “My Losing Season,” a Pat Conroy novel I’d picked up in a free-stack outside the local thrift store a couple years ago. I found Conroy’s depiction of his final collegiate basketball season — a completely forgettable 8-17 campaign — highly relatable. I found his transition from boyhood to manhood, from point guard to novelist, fascinating. I couldn’t put the book down. Near the end of the 400-page text, a dialogue with one of his beloved teachers snapped my soul like it was a Swix Triac 3.0 slammed into a spongy, half-hazard Mineral Belt groom job.

Conroy: “I can’t make a sentence sound like I want it to. It won’t say what I want it to say.”
Colonel Doyle: “That will come. Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer when he was 20 years old? No, he did not. ….Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage.. But it’s necessary, Mr. Conroy. This is your last season as a basketball player, isn’t it?”
Conroy: “Yes sir,” I said. “I stink at that, too.”
Doyle: “You say that about yourself as a writer. You say that about yourself as a basketball player. Mr. Conroy, may I give you some advice? You are far too young to know this, but your life is precious and your time is short. You are blind to yourself, Mr. Conroy. You’re too hard on yourself. For reasons I don’t understand, you are deeply unhappy, and it pains me. Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself. Someone has taught you to hate yourself.”

That someone was Conroy’s abusive father, the figure later portrayed in his coming-of-age, New York Times best-selling novel “The Great Santani,” which I placed in my ThriftBooks cart immediately after finishing “My Losing Season,” along with a dozen other books I promised myself I’d read. A couple lines down, Conroy continued with a sentence that struck a little too close to home:

“I linked my destiny as a writer to that of myself as a basketball player because both seemed to represent realms of achievement that would always be denied me.”

In quiet moments of solitude, when I’m paging through my past and mulling over the future, I often wonder if I’m either deservingly headed towards “my next big breakthrough” or if I’m destined to become a Sons of Knute. I ponder whether my patient brick-stacking will pay off, or if it was a selfish, unblessed endeavor all along, never destined to come to fruition — at least in the way I envisioned it. You know, with all the free wax and GU packs. With the ad-reads and World Cup media zone credentials.

Then again, maybe I’ll become the next Pat Conroy. You never know. Maybe I’ll win the Birkie. Maybe World Cup WhineLine will be broadcast to millions and I’ll do play-by-play at the Olympics. Maybe the Mineral Belt will get groomed regularly and competently. Is there anything wrong with dreaming big?

Then again, maybe the only people who will read my blogs, these timid if not exhausting dissertations connecting current sports-related epiphanies to humorous moments from my upbringing, will be the people who brought me up. Maybe I’ll perpetually complain about my skis as I double-pole down Main Street in depressingly fair anonymity, year after year. Maybe I’ll always be NBC’s third or fourth or fifth-stringer behind Chad and Kikkan and everyone else, winter after winter. Maybe Taco Bell Guy will be the only guy who tunes in to find out the WhineLine is once again plagued by tech issues, live show after ill-attended live show.

Like a single parsley flake on a double recipe of my mom’s sweet n’ sour chicken, maybe this site will remain insignificant on the world wide web. The execution of our toil will be compared to a lakes area township council, the kind that only meets once a month in a 120-year-old shack and never remembers to empty the nearby trash containers, which have increased in notoriety amongst the black bear community. Maybe we’ll forever be the flyover country of Nordic ski shows, as humble as the Minnesota cornfields my heart, desktop and mic are meant to be rooted to. Fine.

That’s fine.

Maybe saying “We are who we are” works better than going to Europe and trying to be someone we’re not, like Keillor. He never really believed his own phrase anyway. He abandoned humble small-town Minnesota ideals for splashy and flashy metropolitan ideas only to return and make a living making fun of where he came from.

During the last 10 weeks, I openly discussed deleting Seder-Skier.com with my wife, one of the website’s five or six consistent readers (though I often remind her if she read my last post and then stand behind her as she does to see if she’ll laugh at my jokes). In our current stage of life, I couldn’t see how I was going to give it the attention it deserved. I knew what it could be, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to get it there. After one of these depressing conversations, I was doom scrolling YouTube late at night, the only space in the day where I feel like I’m not really needed. I randomly decided to look up one of the first videos made by Seth DeMoor. And I promise, this will be my last story.

DeMoor hails from Buena Vista, a cute town 35 miles south of Leadville. He walked onto the University of Colorado’s NCAA DI cross-country team after high school but really made his mark in the running world a decade or so later. Winner of both the 2020 and 2021 Pikes Peak Marathons, DeMoor spent his 30s and early 40s winning races and setting FKTs on the most well-traveled 14ers in the state. Along the way, he bravely paved the way for future athlete influencers, drawing the blueprint for content creators with his seven straight years of daily vlogs. The father of six amassed nearly 170,000 followers by the time he stopped in 2023.

These days, he still occasionally posts videos of himself running up mountains, winning races, eating ice cream with his kids or going on dates with his wife. Hundreds (insert Common Man bit: “Hundreds? Yes, hundreds”) of packages of product are delivered to his Front Range home and unboxed in his ‘Shoedio’ — a private, dimly-lit shed in his backyard. S-Lab shoes line the walls and Team USA and CU Buff singlets hang from the rafters, serving as unique, well-earned accessories for his video backdrop.

As I watched, I realized something. Seth was pretty much where I wanted to end up: A stud runner, an awesome dad and a successful content creator. How did he get there?

Curious, I clicked on some of his first videos. I wasn’t totally shocked to see that many year 1 uploads struggled to climb above 200 views. I was, however, surprised to see that in year 2, 3, and even 4 the traction remained pretty insignificant. One video, made a few years into his project, is titled “Quitting YouTube.”

It has 895 views. I glanced at the comment section. I read what @jasonpara wrote.

“Thank goodness you stayed with it.”

After looking out at the sunset over Mt. Massive and Mt. Elbert (a part of my Letsrun.com dream that has become a reality), where my ascent times are both second only to Seth’s (a reality which needs to be rectified!), I finally peeled my hands off my desk, folded my laptop shut, put my cereal bowl in the sink, and slowly — so as to not wake the children — crept downstairs. On the way to my bed, I walked past my microphone, my keyboard, my posters from past Alley Loops, and my meek collection of trophies, cups and plaques. Part of me thought, with mild unsatisfaction, ‘we are who we are.’

And then, another part whispered:

‘Keep on striving. Keep on skiing.’

The more I move forward in the race of life, the more I’m inclined to look back. Not to see the progress, per se, but to recognize and appreciate why I am who I am. Why I’m not tormented by the young boy I set on my writing desk each day to analyze, like Conroy is. Why I only have half as many kids as DeMoor — and 1/165,000 the followers and two less Pikes Peak Marathon titles. And why I still have something to say nonetheless.

Storytelling is the act an individual writer takes to say something about the world. They look through their unique lens, use their personal voice, choose their own words, so that ultimately, readers can discover something about themselves. And so, when people come to this site, no matter how big or small it is or becomes, I hope they realize they aren’t just learning about skiing.

Whether they like it or not, I plan to keep irresponsibly spraying similes and meaningless metaphors onto the oceanic canvas wrapped around this limitless blogosphere, a comforting cover for mediocre creatives like myself. Someday, I think I’ll craft a stunning sentence, the kind that pulls you from one period to the next. Someday I’ll plunk out the symphonic sounds of syntactical synergy on my pearly white keyboard, lacing together lyrical rhythms for fateful readers, who, when they finally reach the phrase’s resolution, are left shocked into a shivering silence, chilled by a my chordal structure: clarity at the root, creativity as the third, and on the top of my careful constructed literary triad, a pure, unadulterated stream of consciousness — the final element needed to unlock that hidden jewel of human experience, freely available to all but only heard and cherished by the careful, contemplative readers who open their ears enough to feel its deep resonance, ringing in an abstract zone, a third realm, an invisible, magical place, like the incorporeal buzzing of overtones singing out behind a high school band’s third trombone player when he suddenly realizes everyone is playing the right pitch.

In tune.

Together.

“Winter is the basis of Minnesota citizenship. It’s the bond that holds people together in this state,” Keillor said during one show many years ago. “Those days when they have a low of 30 below and they’re forecasting a high the next day of 10 below; that’s when Minnesotans come to love each other with pure affection.”

Well, if it’s that cold, at least it will probably snow. If it snows, I’ll be skiing, I suppose. As long as I’m doing that, I’ll keep on striving.

And writing.

(And writing.)

See you next week. – The Seder-Skier