Lisa Richardson Bylines

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?

One year after Jon Montgomery won his 2010 Olympic gold medal, I lower myself face-first onto a narrow metal toboggan.

Called a skeleton because its 1892 prototype resembles a human bone-rack, the 80 pound frame is more like an exo-skeleton and I am counting on it to keep all my bits properly in place, as I squeak “yes” to the man holding me by my feet who has just asked, “Are you ready?”

My track-crew guardian lines me up in the centre of the ice and pushes me into the half-tunnel, as if releasing a beached mermaid back out to sea.

Go free mermaid, go free. Amber Turnau goes for gold.

High up the walls, I can see blade marks from the lugers who train here at the Whistler Sliding Centre, like the etchings you see on a skating rink before the Zamboni comes through and buffs the ice clean.

There’s enough ice coating this track to fill four NHL hockey rinks, and no Zambonis in sight. The 8 person track-crew do the buffing by hand, in addition to pushing human guinea-pigs down the pipe for a thrill-ride and picking us up at the bottom when our legs are too shaky to operate independently, thanks to the huge and sudden jolt of adrenaline that explodes through your body somewhere around the third corner.

The public skeleton sliding program, which starts February 16 and runs until March 20, 2011, uses the bottom third of the Olympic track, so the steep (and controversial) start section is avoided. We slide through 6 corners, from just above corner 11, and though we will approach 100 km/hr and experience two and a half times our body weight in gravitational forces, we won’t come close to Montgomery’s 5 G-force, 146.6 km/hr gold medal-winning run.

with Amber Turnau and Lucy Hyslop, psyching ourself up for speeds of over 98km/hr

Which is a massive relief – it’s hard enough to keep your head up, your toes pointed,  your elbows in, your shoulders down, your arms straight, your hands holding tight, and your shit together, as the sled begins to accelerate.

The ride is thrilling. And the reality is that the only skill-set required is the aforementioned ability to keep your shit together. As our briefing team advised, “Just be a sack of potatoes.”

“Oh, and don’t let go.”

It’s really is as simple as that. If only Evil Knievel had known.

(Thanks to the amazing and fearlessly fast Amber Turnau for sharing her photos. And thanks to Tourism Whistler’s Media Relations team and the Whistler Sliding Centre’s Thunder on Ice Skeleton Sport Experience for the special preview. )

This time last year I was cursing El Nino, stalking the Weasel Workers and realising why the world has such a crush on Lindsey Vonn as I donned my best “I’m a serious sports journalist” face and joined the online reporting team covering the Games for NBCOlympics.com.

It was, in all likelihood, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I’m glad to have had it.  But we’ve eaten enough Olympic cake.

Any more cake should be sent, instead, to Erik Guay in Garmish Partenkirschen, Germany, where he just took the World Cup alpine skiing downhill Championship.

Guay, who came within 21 feet of the podium in the 2010 Olympic downhill, finished his 2010 season by taking the overall World Cup in Super-G, and has now been crowned the downhill world champion.

His performance builds on a streak of world championship podiums for the Canadian alpine team, which have unfortunately been overshadowed by their failure to leverage the supposed ‘home-snow’ advantage during the Games.

For ski racers, the Olympics is a whole lot of crazy. The most prestigious title is actually the World Cup downhill championship. Which makes it kind of a shame to think that the cake and the cameras are in the wrong place.  (Congratulations Erik.)

Dear Robin,
I was 100% in your corner last night at the Deep Winter Photo Challenge, but damn, was I nervous for you. “First woman competing for the King/Queen of Storms title.” Girlfriend, that’s a lot to carry on your shoulders.

I love that you owned that, telling the Pique “I hope I can rock it for the girls.” And I love that you resisted becoming the spokeswomen for female photographers or under-represented women in the industry generally when reporters probed for juicy quotes: “I don’t think I’m going to touch that, thanks.” I love that you spent days in the lead-up to the event, scouting locations, exploring story angles, canvassing for subjects, preparing, researching, talking to people. I love that the compressed time-frame of the contest forced you to trust your instincts and your voice. But more than anything, I loved your 5 minute show.  By choosing to feature women, you broke even more trail. The only time I’ve ever seen girls featured in Deep Winter shows was as bikini-clad pro-hos in the hot-tub scenes. Your female athletes are deeply dedicated to Winter, to skiing, to the mountains, but you also showed that they are more than that, they are also partners, supporters, wives, mothers, working just as hard when they’re off the mountain…

It’s probably because I’m a girl that I was crying watching it. But when at least half the room got to their feet to cheer and applaud when they handed over that giant cheque for 2nd place, it was a crowd full of men and women, locals and friends, all cheering because you told beautiful stories artfully, soulfully, well.

As for me, I was cheering because I was proud of you. And because your show was so strong and subtle and resonant. And spoke to some deep place that I’ve kept shut off from the light and tried not to feed.

The first time I wrote an article about the female energy in the mountains, someone told me I was a man-hater who should leave town. The next time I wrote an article about women working on the mountain, my boss, who had never commented on any other article I’d written, pulled me aside and suggested I’d made some people uncomfortable. That was the last time I wrote about girls. That was 2005. Which is a shame. Because this town is full of amazing stories, and at least half of them are stories about women. Thanks for owning that. So that we all can.

I wrote a rant for Skier magazine recently, arguing that ski days should be app-less and device free. I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I really do think that app-games, of which Vail’s new Epic Mix is the Grand Poobah, take away some fundamental aspect of the mountain experience. But as I wrote,

If you need a gadget to navigate around the mountain, post an effusive woo-hoo! to a virtual audience of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, coordinate après plans, insulate you from the tedium of chitchatting with strangers, and/or to have more fun on the hill, then I have to put it out there: maybe this isn’t the sport for you…

my tenure out on that tech-refusenik limb felt lonely and precarious.

The limb got less lonely this week, when I watched Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist, address the recent TED Women conference. Our contemporary tools, the mobile technological ones, are not extending the reach of our physical selves anymore. Case says they’re actually extending our mental selves. And the speed and scale at which that is happening means that we’re at risk of not balancing the benefits of the tools out by slowing down, taking time for mental reflection without external input, doing the long-term planning required to “figure out who you really are,” establishing what your core self is in real space.

The mountains used to be that real space. What struck me as unique and even sacred about going skiing was the way it forced that mental down-time on us. We stepped out of our bubbles the minute we stepped into our bindings and slid over to the lift-line. We stopped thinking about all the Monkey Mind shit, because skiing is technical enough a sport to require real mental focus.

It’s the mindset, the way we look out at the world. If we continue to elevate ourselves as the highest part of this whole system then we’re in deep trouble. Economics is a human creation, borders are human creations and nature doesn’t give a damn about these things. So if we really intend to be here in the long run, the mindset has to shift from human-centred to one in which we’re a part of this bigger system.

The mobile app that tells you how many vertical you have skiied, which chairlifts have the shortest lines right now, and what weather is moving in, is a kind of mental crack-candy. It tricks us into thinking we are connecting to the bigger picture, while we simultaneously shut out the real cues – the clouds scudding overhead, the person sitting next to you, and the happy-happenstance and small-world buzz of ski serendipity.

We’ll need those tools, too, but used judiciously and with some restraint, understanding how seductive and powerful they are, and that unchecked power is the dangerous human invention ever.

I cried most of the trip back from SIA in 2008. I had just heard that Kathy Barnett was dead, and was imagining the long and lonely flight her husband, my editor, must have been making home from their holiday in New Zealand, without his partner. Not the plan.

Rob Montgomery, The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You

Bob and Kathy Barnett published my first article in the Pique in October 2002. It was tempting to frame the cheque. But I cashed it, just as happily.

I’m sitting down today to write my 51st feature for them.

If the best learning comes from doing, the Pique has been my best education, a forum to workshop my way into long-form journalism, something few emerging writers get a chance at.

Given an opportunity to pay back and pay it forward at the same time, I leapt. Send the elevator back down, as it were.

The mission is to keep growing the Kathy Barnett Memorial Fund. It’s the best way I can think of to invest in my peer group and engage in a long-term upstream philanthropy, that does more than just put band-aids on urgent immediate needs, of which there are plenty.

The Kathy Barnett Memorial Fund is an endowment fund held by the Community Foundation of Whistler, that provides annual grants for women in the Sea to Sky corridor to pursue a personal and professional development opportunity, in partnership with a local charity.  The return comes back to the community, because, let’s face it, the girls are the glue.

Even the World Bank understands that “The empowerment of women is smart economics.” Kathy Barnett got that too. Our community was richer for having her. Long may it be so.

A ski mag was my rabbithole…

How else does a girl from Brisbane wind up in Whistler?

I took the direct route, falling through a copy of some neon-flecked Australian ski magazine with Glen Plake on the cover, circa July 1994, to land in Whistler five months later into what would become a completely different life. (Upside right?)

So, high-fives SBC Skier, on the event of your 10th anniversary – no mean feat considering the carnage of abandoned ski publications that litter the highways to the hills. (RIP: Freeze, Boards in Motion, Axis, Ski Press and Skiing.) You covered bold terrain: banning use of the word “progression” (so interviews with athletes had 75% of the content bleeped out), liberally endorsing hoserdom, (which infused the book with genuine Can-con that made its humour impenetrable to anyone south of the 49th), and running editorials and features dosed with irony and wit that it would seem you actually believe skiers (and hosers) have some critical thinking skills.

I’ve had the chance to create a few wormholes in the universe with SBC Skier - probing Mike Douglas, the applicability of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers thesis to TJ Schiller and the Vernon crew, and the gnarly world of freeski events… And if any of those tears in the fabric of the cosmos helped a snow-sick kid sitting in the suburbs find their way to germ-infested share accommodation in a ski-town somewhere, then I have paid it forward.

And so the bull-wheel turns, with many happy returns.

I didn’t decide to wrap up my 4 year tenure as the Communications Director of the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival because PR is dead. (Although Mat Wilcox closing down her firm rang like a bell from the heart of Vancouver : ding, dong, the the game is forever changed. Start over. Start over.)

Since TIME magazine declared that God was dead, great and unkillable things (that were never actually alive to begin with, to wit: print, the book, the web) have been declared rigor mortis so frequently, that I’ve stopped paying attention to the headlines, and started paying attention more to my gut. (If it smells bad, it’s not a good sign.)

The challenge was not so much the potential death of traditional PR, but the premature death of this PR chick. PR is never done. The wheel never stops spinning. Waking up at 3am thinking, “I haven’t called Outside magazine yet.” “I wonder what MissSnowItAll is doing in April?” “Why can’t I get that Classified song out of my head???” is ultimately a recipe for complete alienation from powder days…

What always fuelled my stoke for the Festival was the way it served as a vehicle for such amazing things – for Kalina Hornsby to launch her fashion career, or for a young local photographer like Geoff Jansen to meet an editor in the Superpipe pit and sell his first image, or for Cathy Jewett and Dano Pendygrasse to spin an online promotional gimmick into a meaningful way to honour fallen friends. That’s what inspired me to work so hard for four years…

But when all your creative effort goes into promoting a vehicle for other people to do amazing things, there is a big bucket of amazing things you’re not doing yourself…  And with La Nina bringing her sexy snow-dousing way to the ‘hood this winter, untethering from my computer and turning “mountain” into a verb, took on a degree of urgency.

The drive-to-work Magic 8 Ball says: a beautiful November 10 day in Whistler

So I sit back as the @wssf twitter feed goes quiet. I make a note in my day planner to buy Pro Photo Showdown tickets on-line as soon as they go on sale. And I’m tuning my skis, getting fresh batteries for my transceiver and pulling out my WB pass, in anticipation of plenty of quality time with Ullr. I’m stoked to have half-a-grown-up-job, as a 3-day-a-week copywriter with Origin Design + Communications. And to otherwise open-wide my calendar to live, breathe, eat and sleep winter in the mountains, all the better to tell stories with, my dear. Because whatever happens to PR, print, the book, journalism and the web, our appetite for great stories will never die.

Honest. I’m not an egomaniac. That’s why I thought it was so funny to tell Stella Harvey, the Whistler Writers Festival director that I would present a session called “Me! Me! Me! How to build your social media savvy for wanton self-promotion.” But now the gig is imminent, (and even has a presenting sponsor in Street to Peak) I’m starting to feel that skin-crawling feeling I get when I realise I’ve committed to make a presentation. Self-promotion? Good God. Well, here’s the USP: if I can do it, anyone can.

Excited to check out the other sessions tomorrow including Mike Berard and Allie Jenkinson on Twitter for Writers, and Brian Brett on Writing Your Life.

You can check out my cheatnotes on slideshare…