Lisa Richardson Bylines

Kokanee Crankworx dropped their promo video this week.

The best mountain bike athletes in the world know that when gravity beckons, you simply say, yes mistress. I’m coming.

Untitled from Crankworx on Vimeo.

It’s funny, but when I wrote that copy, the voice in my head was a woman. Gravity. As played by Carla Bruni.

Still, voiceover by a guy who eats a handful of gravel with his breakfast Scotch works for me too. (I imagine he’d be more likely to say, “hey, rider, get your ass over here and pump”, than beckon with come-hither eyes, but nevertheless…)

Have been thinking a lot lately about holding space, about opening, and the discomfort that comes leading up to release. (And about how overdue I am for my next appointment with the yoga mat.) So dug out this piece I wrote last year in response to an online call for contributions on “sustainable tourism” for Whistler’s TedX conference. We still live in a world in desperate search of the quick fix. I still need to be reminded that everything is a process. So I reminded myself. (I was so smart last year. How did I forget this?)

Frog pose kills me.

My hips creak and lock into place and my ass protrudes like a half-raised flag of surrender while all around me people press their pelvises flat against the floor, their legs splayed out like champion breaststrokers’.  Really?

But every day that I stand at the top of my yoga mat, I set my intention again: today, I will work towards expansiveness. I will keep breathing when my glutes and hips and lower back creak and howl, and expansiveness will start to infuse my whole person, will permeate my being and my interactions with every living thing. (Though honestly, the intention is more like : I will keep breathing even when it fucking hurts.)

Sometimes, at the end of the class, the teacher says: Now that you have created these openings in your body, think about what you will fill those spaces with.

I lie in corpse pose, with salt water leaking out my eyes, because frog pose undoes me, and I think about that tiny space I created and I think: fill it with compassion. Keep that hard-won opening pried apart with a little droplet of compassion.

Being a tourist is hard.

I see it in Whistler’s visitors – this yearning they have to connect, their curiousity about even their servers – where are you from, how did you get here? Their desire to penetrate beneath the surface.

I feel it myself, when I travel. When my husband and I went to Spain on a rockclimbing trip, I was so confronted by a powerful sense of disorientation, my own strangeness, other people’s strangeness. I find the world difficult to navigate when I can barely order a coffee or translate a menu.  (And I’m vegetarian and really don’t want to end up with some body parts on my plate that I’m then going to have to deal with politely and sensitively.) But I dredged up rusty language skills, pushed away fear that people would think me rude or stupid, andI just kept pushing myself forward, out of my comfort zone. And with every stranger who leant forward to listen, to try and parse my mangled phrasing, to give me directions, or take my order, a little opening between us was created.

Sustainable tourism is not a drop-in class, a package, a carbon offset.

It’s an attitude, a willingness to make effort even when you feel like you’re getting nowhere, to expand in tiny ways to let love in.

I interviewed Scott Dickson by email last week for an artist profile for the Kokanee Crankworx Event Guide. Dickson’s art brings a vibrant and vivid energy to the 2011 event poster – it’s a refreshing alternative to the photo-heavy approach that event posters often resort to.

Sometimes the freeride world with its gladiator vibe and bro-down energy intimidates me a little. (I just don’t get those 10 part handshakes.) But Dickson, for all his core-credentials (art director at Freeride Entertainment, illustrator for Troy Lee Designs and the Motocross National, cover artist for the latest Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine)  is so humble and down-to-earth, it’s impossible not to feel a real satisfaction that the young artist behind the Whistler Mountain Bike Park’s first promo poster got a chance to put his mark on the place again over 10 years later.

Our ‘conversation’ rambled all over the place and it seemed a shame to leave these insights from Dickson on the cutting-room floor. So here are a few of his comments on the role and opportunities for action sports artists.

SD: Yes, totally. With the technology that the manufacturers have, they can reproduce images onto the products themselves, like printing complicated pictures on fabrics or oil paintings on skis and snowboards. Then they can use the same image for print, web and moving pictures. That is a lot of value. When you add in the infinite number of styles available in the world from all of the artists out there or even the unique opportunity the brand has to create custom one-of-a-kind pieces for their specific purpose, it can be a powerful mix for conveying an idea.

Does working with an illustrator who lives and breathes the culture guarantee a more authentic look and feel for a brand?  Or will it always be associated with the “freak”y passionate ones? Your style smacks a little of the fringe/counterculture to me – ski-touring, rootsy kind of stuff. But Crankworx is a different energy altogether. Has that been a shift for you?

SD: For being close to the core, I think art is a bit more raw, and because it is hand-made it can feel more personal and unpolished, which makes you think of someone who is more busy at doing their thing than polishing up their drawing technique. But they are going to express themselves ready or not. For these kind of pieces it is the message that matters more than the medium. Also, working with people who have a passion and understanding of what they are communicating is a big advantage as long as they can translate it to a casual observer.

This painting for Kokanee Crankworx was a big deal for me due to Whistler’s rich history so I tried to make sure to hit the points I needed to and refine my style as much as I could along the way.

I recently pulled the dusty old hypewriter from the back of the closet, where it was languishing in semi-retirement, to crank out some verbiage for service as boilerplate and taglines for a somewhat large and kickass mountain bike festival known as the Kokanee Crankworx. (I thought I’d reformed my ways and sworn off  hyperbole forever, but one sniff of Superbowl-sized festivals and the fingers start twitching…)

As the Globe and Mail reported last August,

More than 100,000 people visited specifically for Crankworx last year, and the seven-year-old festival issues close to 300 media credentials. A 2005 study concluded that Crankworx had a $10-million impact on the local economy and a new study, due this fall, is expected to show massive growth.

On Friday, one professional snowboarder made the grudging admission that Crankworx is now superior to the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival, the 15-year-old winter showcase that caters to Whistler’s traditional customers.

Not to mention that the team the Crankworx braintrust, led by Darren Kinnaird as GM, pulls together, rank as the best in their fields, whether that be the founder of original Slopestyle contest, Joyride’s Paddy Kaye, action sports artist Scott Dickson, PR and social media maven Michelle Leroux, creative director Susan Butler, or athletes like Cam Zink, Darren Berrecloth, Thomas Vanderham, Brandon Semenuk and Mike Montgomery, who provided input into the Red Bull Joyride slopestyle course design. Passion is contagious. It’s hard not to spill a little hype when that much stoke is going around. The countdown begins.

Beg for mercy. Beg for more. Gravity beckons.

During Whistler BC’s 10 day Kokanee Crankworx festival, the dirt-adorned put the revel in the free ride mountain biking revolution, bending physics and blowing minds with their tail-whipping back-flipping hard-charging ways. For the eighth year running, the venues of the Whistler Mountain Bike Park serve as a modern day Colosseum, masterpieces of stunt and trail engineering, forum for the ultimate in gladiator contests and public spectacle. 

In less than a decade, Kokanee Crankworx has become the authoritative free ride festival, a supercharged magnet for the world’s best riders, the definitive domestication of dirt in the service of epic endurance, supreme flow, monster air and gravity-fuelled mountain biking. The best mountain bike athletes in the world know that when gravity beckons, you simply say, yes mistress. I’m coming. So make sure you do.

I’m working on a story for the Crankworx event guide that will attempt to map out the history of freeride mountain biking, to chart a “progression” that took us from the 1976 Repack bike race that burned through everyone’s brakepads, to Greg Watts’ backflip double tailwhip, in 35 years.

In 1954, runner Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier. Within three years, 16 other runners had also cracked the four minute mile. Bannister later said:

The world record then was four minutes, 1.4 seconds, held by Sweden’s Gunder Haegg. It had been stuck there for nine years, since 1945. It didn’t seem logical to me, as a physiologist/doctor, that if you could run a mile in four minutes, one and a bit seconds, you couldn’t break four minutes. But it had become a psychological as well as a physical barrier. In fact the Australian, John Landy, having done four minutes, two seconds, three times, is reported to have commented, “It’s like a wall.” I couldn’t see the psychological side.

That’s how progression works. Psychological barriers get blown apart. The game-changers are the people who explode through the ceiling and next-level the game entirely.

I want to try and identify those game-changers for freeride mountain biking.

So, to kick things off, I asked a few friends and colleagues, bike-zealots and freeride fanatics, like Mitch Scott, Chris Armstrong, Martin Littlejohn, Leslie Anthony, Ian Dunn, Eric Wight and Dave Watson, to name the most significant moments.

I’ve got a list of the top 20 moments compiled – posted here. What’s missing? Whose importance is overstated? Is it possible to come up with a definitive list of THE game-changing moments, riders and events? If we could only rank 10 moments or people, which would be cut out? If we didn’t tell it chronologically, what would be the order of importance?

Some days you discover that the bike rider and the copywriter are one and the same: just a girl in search of flow.

The first time I rode A River Runs Through It (fist-pump! Cleared the bridge! Husband pushed his bike across… ), I should really have been somewhere else. I had blown off the second half of the Slow Food Cycle, an event I had organised, to switch the road cruiser for a squishy bike and go charge with some friends. It was a blissful day of riding. But it was kinda naughty.

I think that kind of punkass commitment to mountain biking should make me eligible to win Bike Parks of BC’s Ultimate Summer of Free Ride contest, that was just announced today. Alas, I work for the marketing agency that is helping run the contest, so I am automatically disqualified.

As such, I will redirect my passion to spread the word around. This is the most amazing prize. A summer of downhill bliss. I would enter if I could. You definitely should.

Here’s the low-down, culled from the most awesome press release that has ever landed in my in-tray, courtesy of Reine Communication’s Michelle Leroux, who is the PR lead on the campaign.

WHAT WOULD YOU BLOW OFF THIS SUMMER TO WIN BIKE PARKS BC ULTIMATE SUMMER OF FREE RIDE?
Get Hooked Up With Cash, Accommodation And Season Pass At Five B.C. Bike Parks

Bike Parks BC is throwing down a season pass at five of BC’s best lift-accessed bike parks – Whistler Mountain Bike Park, Silver Star Bike Park, Sun Peaks Resort, Fernie Alpine Resort and Mount Washington Bike Park – plus
$1,000 spending money, two nights accommodation at each resort, DH rig rentals, a half-day with a guide for a proper introduction to the mountain and even two lift tickets at each park for the winner’s riding buddy to be used over the 2011 summer season.

“This year we are looking for Bike Parks BC’s most fanatical and obsessed riders,” says Martin Littlejohn, Executive Director of the Mountain Bike Tourism Association. “The big question is what exactly would you blow off to take on British Columbia’s best bike parks this summer? Your grandparent’s fiftieth anniversary, your best friend’s wedding, the birth of your first born?”

So ‘fess up. What would you blow off to ride all summer long?

The second most intimidating moment on a heliskiing trip, (after the Burning Walk of Scrutiny) is not actually watching the safety video, where all the perils that face you are articulated in graphic, litigation-proof detail, but the instant where, standing atop the untracked snow of your first run, the guide says, “Okay. Buddy up.”

Having traveled solo, you look around as friends and partners acknowledge their official ski-buddy status with a nod. You try to repress the childhood sports team memories as the genetically gifted, sporty-spice kids get skimmed off first and you try to craft an expression on your face that is simultaneously cool and endearing.

Fortunately, the moment passed quickly. 10 minutes later, I was thanking the gods, shouting “it’s International Ski with an Olympian Day, woohoo” because the other solo skier in our group was this guy:

who, (apparently), underneath that ski gear, looks like this:

Mike Smith is a CBC commentator, three-time Olympian and Olympic flag-bearer, and two-time Commonwealth gold medallist, who spent a decade ranked amongst the top 10 decathletes in the world, and still holds the record for world’s best performance for the three combined throwing events. For all his accomplishments on the field, he was so gracious and chill in the pow that I confronted him at dinner: “You must be competitive, but you do not give off a very competitive vibe.”

But Mike doesn’t have to compete any more in order to get his ego-kicks. He’s already been ranked best in the world. When he’s out skiing, he doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone. He’s just trying to have fun. And last the distance.

One of the wonderful things about sport is that it allows us to express ourselves, realise our strengths and to explore our weaknesses.

Later, via email, he elaborates, to help me with the article I’m writing: “Years of decathlon bring a built-in humility. I knew I would not win all the events and I know I won’t always be the fastest and don’t need to be at this point. If you go alpha for all 3-5 days heli-skiing becomes more of a battle of endurance.  I’ve learned from experience there’s plenty of vertical and powder to be had.”

It’s the kind of attitude that, despite the drawer-full of medals and 150 pounds of muscle he has over me, made Mike Smith the most sympatico ski-buddy I could have asked for.

Pemberton Feature Promo from Randy Lincks on Vimeo.

From trailhead to tailgate, farmgate to dinner plate, a million adventures await. Choose Pemberton. It’s where your next adventure begins.

Last summer, photographer Randy Lincks invited me to collaborate with him on a project for Tourism Pemberton, to storyboard a narrative arc and develop a script for a promotional video for Pemberton. The final product benefits from Randy’s cinematic style and his obsessive and dedicated light-chasing last summer and fall, showcasing Pemberton as a place where “there is no excuse to go hungry or be bored”, and has me pencilling various drafts of Top 10 Pemberton bucket-lists in my spare time.

The project was entirely home-grown, and reveals Pemberton to be a small town with a big pool of talent, including Betsy Linnell Marketing as project manager, the Tourism Pemberton committee providing overall direction, Darryl Palmer editing, Gord Rutherford lending his voice, and a host of locals volunteering as models. Growers, makers, movers and shakers, all. The above and beyond contributions from everyone involved made the tagline “going the extra mile is always worth the effort” all the more true.

There’s nowhere else that men will look you over so aggressively, quite as overtly, as when you walk into a heliskiing operation. They are trying to suss out if you are one of the support staff – a cook, a massage therapist, an assistant – because that’s what most of the women are. (Of the 104 guides at the world’s largest heliskiing operation, CMH, this season, 11 are women. Of the 5200 skiers who went out with CMH this past winter, 19% were women.) They are trying to ascertain whether they might end up skiing with you, whether you might ruin their day. The chemistry of a ski group is a delicate thing. And no one wants the balance to unravel due to girliness.

I’m not particularly girly. I have spent my adult life chasing after a man. (I already had him from the outset, but on skis I can’t keep up.)

That’s been good training. Because it means that, unless you’re a professional sponsored skier, I can keep up with you. Pretty much guaranteed.

That reality doesn’t shake the niggling feeling of doubt, the lurk of worry in the pit of my stomach when a bunch of grizzled alpha males stare me down as I do the Pollyanna-two-step from the parking lot into the Regent Hotel at Revelstoke, and mentally tally how few days I’ve had on the hill now that I’m a desk jockey.

The “fuck, I hope I’m not in over my head here” fear-flash that burns through my whole body is an intimidation hurdle that keeps a lot  of women away from heliskiing. I’m here to dig into that, to research and write a story about how yin-friendly heliskiing is. We’re off to a shaky start.