The Power of Stoke
I just spent an hour in 42 degree water and I still can’t feel my fingertips. I’ve been in the hot tub and sauna but nothing seems to bring the feeling back. I was in Lake Judd, just above Anchorage, Alaska learning to ride an e-foil. I’ve been leading my friends into its frigid water for short plunges all week but today I was in there for 45 minutes. After spending the day heliskiing in the Tordrillo mountains, I’m surprised by my resilience but I’ve been feeding off the energy of this place and its people since we arrived.
I’ve invited a crew of friends out who all share a love of adventure and seem always to be convince-able to come on these trips (with enough notice and sometimes some spousal arm twisting). We’ve come to Tordrillo Lodge, a heli-skiing operation famous for its badass guides, rugged landscape and healthy stoke. The lodge is nestled up against the Tordrillo Mountain range in Western Alaska, and we’ve come for Kings & Corn where you rip corn snow turns in the morning and fish for salmon on the Skwentna and Chakachatna Rivers in the afternoon (mind you it only is dark for 4 hours a day).
I’ve never been to Alaska before. It has a beauty and a darkness both of which I’m drawn to. It feels like a lingering memory of what life might have been like before humankind. You rarely see an ATV track or hear a jet overhead and yesterday we watched grizzly bears stare bemusedly as our helicopter hovered 30 feet above them. But there’s also a palpable darkness here and the tacit acceptance that you are in no means in control of this place.
And that draws a certain kind of person here. I could feel it on my plane ride from Seattle. The flight was filled with boisterous oil workers and old men whose faces and hands revealed a lifetime of sun, wind and Marlboros. I sat next to a massive man whose face looked like an old catcher’s mitt. He flew supplies to the oil outfits in a C-130 Hercules and delayed our takeoff because he got caught up in the airport bar.
As we broke through the clouds on approach, we saw the Chugach mountains emerge to the North and to the west, the Arctic Ocean. Watching the ancient landscape reveal itself, I felt a deep connection to this place, like I’d been here before and a hot surge of energy ran past my balls and up through my body.
We’d have to take a float plane further into the wilderness to get there. It’s a sprawling complex of wood cabins and utility sheds perched on the stepping stone to the playground of the Todrillo mountains. Here they’ve assembled some of the world’s best guides to shepherd guests by helicopter into this remote wilderness. These men and women have shepherded both amateur and pro athletes into some of the most remote and dangerous wilderness in the world.
But in person they weren’t what I expected. They almost all had gray hair and a healthy athlete's gut. They look more like Dead Heads than adventure guides. Spotting them at the supermarket you might guess they run the snowcat at your local hill or maybe own the local fly shop (they do that too by the way) but then you hear them talk about the time they summited Everest or the last time they dropped Travis Rice onto some faraway mountain and you realize you’ve miscalculated.
These men and women are super athletes.
Most are in their 50’s and are leading clients down 20 thousand feet of vertical in the morning and rowing a 6 person raft down 10 miles of river in the afternoon. It only gets dark here for about 4 hours a day so there’s not much downtime for anyone, especially the guides. When we’re not skiing or fishing we’re firing up the e-foils on the lake, ripping turns behind the ski boat or forcing the staff to play us in paddle tennis.
From a performance perspective, they represent the highest echelon of endurance and resilience athlete. They can sustain elevated energy and focus for 12 hour days for perhaps a month or more straight. The energy they exert isn’t just physical, it's equally mental and emotional. Each carries a sidearm to protect us from the apex predators that roam freely here while maintaining the focus to guide us safely over glaciers and through avalanche zones (we always wore a beacon and repel harness while on the mountain).
Maybe the most stress comes from constantly monitoring the weather and being on call. They’re well aware that we’ve come here to ski and are always checking the radar looking for a ski-able window. Their nervous system is robust enough to endure all that stress and then quickly pivot to deep focus when a window opens. On our first day, after a rainy morning fishing the river valley below, we got the call right before dinner that the weather had briefly abated for us to get in some turns. Not 15 minutes later, the heli was loaded, packed with guests and taking off.
But their athleticism extends beyond simply endurance as all the guides can smoke any one of us in pretty much anything athletic. These are guys who are 15 years older than me and are ripping perfect turns across crusty windswept faces one moment and then sending a clean arc through a fly line across 50 feet of water the next. After watching me fall on my ass for an hour on the e-foil, our head guide, Mike Rheam, an owner of the lodge (who also leads avalanche safety in Jackson Hole and runs a fly shop in Jackson when not guiding here), jumps into the near frozen lake in shorts, immediately planes the wing and spins around the lake for half an hour with an ear-to-ear.
Now you might be asking yourself how objective my reporting on this group is and I’ll be the first to admit that there’s real bias here as I’m in awe of this crew. These guys talk casually about skiing with Doug Coombs and the time Laird Hamilton brought up a bunch of prototype e-foils to test here on Judd Lake. They’ve accomplished athletic feats I’ve only dreamed of. Shit, they lead a lifestyle I deeply admire, rooted in a love of adventure and the community that surrounds it. But irrespective of my bro crush these people objectively represent some of the world’s best athletes.
I can’t tell you about any workout tricks or nutritional insights that I’ve learned from these guys (honestly, I’m too embarrassed to ask them too directly about how they’ve built the capacity they have) but I have observed one shared trait they all share–which is an incredible stoke. They’re maybe more stoked than we are to catch a weather window, gear up and head to the heli (which includes hauling all our shit out there, orchestrating all the logistics and shepherding all the guests).
You could define ‘stoke’ as a mindset of positivity and excitement but it’s advanced beyond just a frame of mind to a palpable energy they embody. You can feel their excitement and joy as we head out into the mountains or plunge into the icy spring water. It’s a reservoir of resilience that rebuffs the constant baseline stress of their job as well as allows them to overcome short term obstacles like inclement weather, poor fishing conditions or pain in the ass guests. The stoke lets them tap into preexisting joy that lives separately from whatever external conditions surround them so they can find fuel and drive, not to mention refuge.
Popular wellness talks a lot about mindset and for good reason. How you frame your experience is essential to elevated performance. Seeing every obstacle you encounter as insurmountable will result in decreased motivation and resilience and likely will result in you tapping out early when you start feeling overwhelmed. But a mindset that instead looks at every moment as a solvable problem supported by the underlying belief that you have the tools to overcome whatever’s in front of you will result in elevated resilience allowing you to stay in the pocket longer, maintain focus and positivity and perform at peak (here is my favorite take on the power of mindset).
You want to be consistently primed to find flow whenever and wherever you need it. Having the resilience to not be overcome by adversity is an essential ingredient. But equally important is the skillset to elevate above emotion and thought on demand to tap into a flow state be that when leading a group of clients through an avalanche zone in the Tordrillos or giving a key presentation at work or even when being fully present with your kids.
And mindset is essential to both being able to tap into that flow state in the moment (‘I can do this’) and in building the resilience to be primed to find flow (‘I’ve been here before and have overcome this’). Evolving your mindset is a powerful first step you can take in moving towards elevated performance (I really like Michael Gervais’ take on this). But finding stoke is another powerful tool (and perhaps a shitload more fun). If you can tap into deep joy consistently it will become a renewable resource powering you through both highs and lows while often putting a smile on your face.
The guides at Todrillo are perhaps the best example of constant stoke that I’ve seen and it has taken them to the heights of performance. Here are my takeaways on how they cultivate stoke:
Community - when asked, every guide I talked to about why they work here says, ‘Because (TML owner Mike) Rheam’s asked me to. I love that guy.’ This is a community of friends who are connected far beyond just the community of work and truly enjoy being together. They feed off of each other’s energy and pool a collective stoke that’s more powerful than any one of them.
Awareness and respect for stress - this crew is aware of the dangers of stress and its effect on performance. They talk about locating individual stress levels on a continuum from red to green to understand each individual’s current state and determine how to manage that. Jamie Weeks, who also trains Teton Gravity Research athletes on stress management and emotional health, takes one week off for every 6 weeks working to ensure he de-stresses and recovers.
Power of nature - the influence of nature on wellbeing can’t be denied, especially here in Alaska. Whether this is an active choice or not, this crew is fueled by the power of the environment around them. There are endless studies linking exposure to nature and elevated health and these guys absolutely benefit from that. When not in the wilds of Alaska they’re in Wyoming or Idaho constantly drawing energy from the greatest reservoir of stoke, mother nature herself.
Embrace of joy - finding balance between stress and recovery is a common theme with me. Chronic stress leads to poor performance and burnout and needs to be balanced with recovery not only to get back to baseline but to expand capacity. Seeking out (or simply embracing) joy is a powerful lever for recovery, performance and a good fucking life. Making space for joy in the mountains, with friends and in stressful situations is foundational to elevated performance and wellbeing. If you have trouble (I do) making space for joy I highly recommend Robert Poynton’s book, ‘Do Pause’.
Sauna + Cold Plunge - you know I couldn’t not mention this. There are 2 saunas (that I know of) on the property and an icy mountain lake next door that has a hole cut out of it in the winter for plunges. Rumor has it that Laird Hamilton made a 50ft swim under the ice here one winter which is just filthy. Regardless, contrast therapy is a regular part of the wellness regimen here helping accelerate emotional and physical recovery as well as expanding these athlete’s capacity for resilience.
Bottom line, I’ve been granted a tremendous gift to be able to visit this place with my closest friends to see its raw power and beauty all under the protection of the TML guides. But I’ve also been granted the gift of witnessing the elite athleticism of the guides themselves. What a treat to watch them drop a fly on a river seam 75 feet away while guiding a raft downstream or catching them grin as they rip a wide arc over an untouched alpine face. Like a nuclear sub they’re powered by a renewable energy source that drives them through this dangerous wilderness (and also at times deep into the night at the lodge bar ponied up to a hard charging guest). Their passion for this place, their friends and this lifestyle provides an engine that lets them tap into flow consistently while weathering the many obstacles this place can put in front of them. Stoke is often misunderstood as simply an emotion but it’s actually a mindset that can be cultivated. If you surround yourself with the right people, in places that are inspiring and with attention to your inner state of both stress and joy you too can cultivate a deep stoke that can propel you to the highest levels of performance.