Two Walks Off the Well-Marked Path

What a 10,000-mile hiker and a credit card points cosultant have in common – and what it means for the rest of us.

If you had told me, when I started the On Adventure podcast, that two of my favorite recent conversations would be with a long-distance hiker who walked the equivalent of more than four cross-country trips in a single calendar year and a Midwestern dad who built a thriving business around airline points, I would have raised an eyebrow. On paper, they have almost nothing in common. But spend an hour with each of them and you start to hear the same note ringing underneath the very different music.

Madison Blagden and Colin Stroud both did something that scared them. They both stepped off a well-marked path. And they both came back changed – not because of the mileage or the revenue, but because of what those experiences taught them about who they actually are when the safety rails come off. I think there is a lot in their stories that the everyday explorer – and frankly, the everyday investor – can put to work this week.

Madison: Walking 10,000 Miles, Planning Almost None of It

Madison Blagden spent last year on her feet. Through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail in a single calendar year is itself an audacious goal – only a handful of people have ever done it. Madison didn’t stop there. She set her bar at over 10,000 miles, walking from Florida to Newfoundland and weaving the three big trails together into a feat that no woman had previously completed. She finished. She also raised the women’s record by a couple thousand miles in the process.

What surprised me most, though, was not the scale of the accomplishment. It was her relationship to planning. Here is someone who built her year around weather windows, snowpack, and resupply logistics – and her advice to anyone considering something hard was, in her words, plan as little as you have to. Whatever you think it will cost, double it and save that much. Then go.

Her reasoning is worth sitting with. So many things will happen that you cannot predict, she said, that the energy you spend trying to control them is energy you will need later for the things you actually have to face. The hikers who do best on a long trail are the ones who can pivot – who do not get emotionally locked into a schedule or a route. The ones who white-knuckle a plan tend to suffer more, finish ragged, or quit. Madison described last year’s mid-season injury as the moment she finally let go of the last bits of control she was still holding. From that point forward, every setback, every weather change, every wrench in the gears became something she just folded into the trip.

If you have ever opened a financial plan and felt the urge to nail every variable to the wall – the exact return, the exact retirement date, the exact tax outcome – Madison’s advice translates directly. A good plan is a flexible one. Whatever you think things will cost, plan for more. Then walk.

Colin: The Quiet Quit That Wasn’t Quiet at All

Colin Stroud’s adventure looks nothing like Madison’s, and that is the point. A few years ago, Colin was sitting in an insurance brokerage in Indiana, watching his wife and two of his brothers-in-law build real audiences on the internet. He was good at his job, but it bored him, and he had been passed over for a promotion he wanted. Around the same time, he had stumbled into the world of credit card points and travel rewards as a way to take his young family on a vacation they otherwise could not afford. He started writing about it on LinkedIn, mostly to see if anyone would care.

They cared. The Washington Post quoted him after one of his earliest posts. People started asking if he would get on the phone for an hour to walk through their points strategy. He charged forty-five dollars. Then a little more. Then more. About fifteen months later, he resigned from his W-2 job and went all in on a one-person consulting practice he calls Go Somewhere. Today he is running consulting calls, building a private community for business owners, and partnering with another points expert to scale a white-glove travel-research service. He does not yet know how big it gets. He does know that nothing in his prior career – the standardized tests, the promotions he did not get, the jobs he was not great at – comes close to what he is feeling right now.

What hooked me in our conversation was Colin’s description of why entrepreneurship lit him up the way it did. It was not the income, though the income matters. It was the daily measurement. Every day he gets feedback on whether he is where he thought he was. Every post, every sales call, every new client tells him something true about his actual capability. He used the word ikigai – that overlap of what you love, what you are good at, and what people will pay you for – and said for the first time in his life, every part of him feels activated at once.

Colin also said something I want every entrepreneur and every parent listening to this to take seriously. He has experienced more dopamine, more excitement, more flow from building this business than from any travel destination he has ever been to. And his family life, while quieter, is the most meaningful thing he does. Travel, in other words, is not the adventure. The adventure is the life he is building around the people he loves. The travel is just a way to bring them with him.

What the Everyday Explorer Can Take Home

Different as they are, Madison and Colin pointed me toward the same three lessons, and I think they apply just as much to the way we manage money and build a life as they do to long trails and online businesses.

The first is that uncertainty is not the enemy. It is the proof that you are doing something real. Madison built her year around variables she could not control. Colin walked away from a paycheck without knowing what would replace it. In both cases, the willingness to live with not-knowing was what unlocked the experience. We tend to treat uncertainty in our financial lives as a thing to be eliminated. It cannot be. The better question is whether your plan can absorb a surprise without breaking – and whether you have left yourself enough margin, financially and emotionally, to keep walking when the weather turns.

The second is that the people who do the most talk about it the least. Madison observed that on trail, the loudest people in the room have usually done the least. The ones with the real accolades sit quietly in the corner. I have seen the same dynamic in money. The truly wealthy people I have worked with rarely tell you anything about it. The ones loudly counting their wins are usually the ones with the most to prove. If you are doing the work, the work will speak. You do not have to.

The third – and this is the one that has stuck with me longest – is that the cliff edge is the whole point. When I asked Madison what she would say to someone standing on the edge of a decision that scared them, her answer was just, do it. Not because every adventure works out. Some do not. But because nobody she has met in the trail community regrets going and finding out it was not for them. The ones with regret are the ones who stayed home. Colin’s version of the same line was that everyone has a hundred-thousand-dollar idea sitting in their Google Drive, and most people will never act on it.

You probably have a version of this too. A trip you have been talking about for five years. A career move you keep telling yourself you will make next year. A conversation you have been avoiding. A plan you have been afraid to commit to on paper. The everyday explorer is the person who, knowing they cannot control the outcome, takes the next step anyway – and trusts that whatever shows up next, they will figure out how to keep walking.

That, more than anything else, is what I keep hearing from the guests on this podcast. And it is the kind of mindset I want for the people I am lucky enough to work with at Ridgeline. A flexible plan. A long view. The honesty to admit you cannot know everything in advance. And the willingness to walk into the unknown anyway, because the alternative – staying parked at the trailhead, indefinitely – is not actually safer. It is just stiller.

What Hurricane Helene Taught a Free Solo Climber About the Life You’re Already Living

Most of us will never free solo a 3,000-foot cliff on the Napali Coast or spend a night alone in the Appalachian wilderness with nothing but a pair of shorts. But Robbie Lenfestey — wilderness survival instructor, ecologist, and founder of Mandala Springs retreat center — would argue that every one of us is already standing on a ledge of our own. The question is whether we’ve trained our nervous system to meet the moment.

In his return to the On Adventure podcast, Robbie shared what happened when Hurricane Helene tore through his corner of the North Carolina mountains in the fall of 2024 — and how a lifetime of deliberately pushing his edges prepared him for the worst night of his life. Alone on his tractor in the pelting darkness, digging channels to divert floodwater from his structures, he felt massive boulders rolling in the creek bed and heard entire mountainsides give way in explosive cracks above him. Landslides were happening on every side. There was nowhere to go. And yet something inside him remained still.

That stillness, Robbie explains, is flow state — the same theta brainwave pattern found in master meditators and elite athletes. He first discovered it as a young man doing things most people would call reckless: free soloing without ropes, walking into the forest at night to navigate by sound and feel alone. What he learned is that when the stakes are absolute, the mind quiets itself. Thought drops away, and all that remains is the next move. Over decades, he turned what was once a byproduct of extreme risk into a skill he can access at will.

What the Everyday Explorer Can Learn

So what can the Everyday Explorer take from someone who has mastered the extreme?

Start with the Breath

Robbie points to one of the simplest and most underused tools available to any human being: conscious breathing with an emphasis on the exhale. Inhaling activates the sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight accelerator. Exhaling engages the parasympathetic system, the body’s built-in brake. Simply slowing down and lengthening your exhale in a tense moment can shift your entire physiology. It’s kindergarten-level entry into something profound, and it works whether you’re standing on a cliff or sitting in a difficult conversation.

Build Emotional Intelligence Like a Muscle

Drawing on Internal Family Systems therapy, Robbie described the practice of stepping back from a triggered emotion rather than being consumed by it — creating enough separation to ask the feeling where it started. That flash of anger when your partner says something pointed? It probably has nothing to do with what was said and everything to do with a protective pattern wired in childhood. Working through those patterns doesn’t bury the emotion. It dissolves the hook so the emotion no longer hijacks the moment.

Protect Your Attention

In a world engineered to capture and commoditize human attention, Robbie sees reclaiming it as a quiet act of rebellion. Walking in the woods without a phone, practicing peripheral vision, engaging the senses in unfamiliar ways — these aren’t esoteric exercises. They expand the attentional capacity that makes flow state, presence, and deeper experience possible in ordinary life.

The Grief That Waited

Perhaps the most striking insight from the conversation is what happened six months after Helene, when a neighbor led a bonfire gathering and asked everyone to name what they had lost. Robbie — the man who had held everyone together through weeks of crisis — sat down on the ground and wept. The grief had been there all along, waiting for a safe moment to surface. Mastering the extreme doesn’t mean bypassing the human experience. It means developing the tools to move through it fully, on your own terms, when the time is right.

The real frontier, Robbie suggests, isn’t a cliff face or a hurricane. It’s the edge of what we’ve habitually come to believe is possible — and the willingness to step beyond it.

Highlights from Recent Episodes of the On Adventure Podcast

By Josh Self

There are lessons that only come at a cost. They show up in the middle of something hard—when you’re out of breath on a ridgeline, sitting across from a family receiving the worst news of their life, or listening to thunder echo through a gorge from inside a tent. In our two most recent episodes of the On Adventure Podcast, I sat down with a neurosurgeon and a bishop whose stories remind us that the edge—wherever we find it—is where the real formation happens.

The Surgeon Who Learned to Stop

Dr. Hilal Kanaan is a neurosurgeon in Greenville, North Carolina and the son of Palestinian immigrants who rebuilt their lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan after his father was expelled from the West Bank. Hilal grew up with hardship in the background—never the whole picture, but never erased. His parents walked a fine line between honoring their roots and letting their boys be fully American.

That tension shaped his own approach to fatherhood. When his kids asked for a book about religion, Hilal didn’t hand them the Quran. He wrote them one—eight pages, hardcover, titled A Book About God. Its message: be kind, express gratitude, and know that people of different faiths are simply using different languages to say the same thing.

But the moment that stopped me cold was a story from early in his career. He’d taken on a tough surgery, made a decision that made it tougher, and suddenly found himself guiding a patient toward death. He told himself: stop. Ask for help. You’re making it worse. The surgeon he called came in without accusation, focused entirely on the patient, and saved a life. From that day on, Hilal said he wanted to become the doctor others would call when they were in trouble. He still walks the hospital thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be like him.”

That kind of humility—the willingness to stop and ask for help—is one of the hardest skills to develop, whether you’re in an operating room or on a mountain. And when I asked Hilal what he’d say to someone in a season of real hardship, his answer was simple: your feelings are valid. This is not the rest of your life. And you are not alone.

The Bishop Who Kept Walking

Bishop Mark Beckman, the fourth bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville, has been pairing faith and the outdoors since a young parish priest took his youth group hiking at David Crockett State Park. Early in his priesthood, on a Good Friday, he walked into a forest at Radnor Lake and found the floor carpeted in spring wildflowers. He thought: where have I been all my life? That was over thirty years ago, and he has never stopped walking.

His greatest physical journey was the Camino de Santiago—500 miles across Spain over six weeks. He learned that the first third is a physical challenge as your body adapts to the pain. The middle, the Meseta, is flat and monotonous, and the struggle becomes spiritual: enduring the ordinariness. His daily prayer was simple: God, help me to see today with my eyes. Help me to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch. When someone later asked if he’d just picked the best days for his photos, he answered: every day had its own beauty.

One of the most striking moments in our conversation was a story from the Grand Tetons. Bishop Beckman was sitting on a bench with an agonizing toothache, and his first instinct was self-pity. But as he kept breathing and looking, something shifted: if I’m going to be in pain, I’m grateful I can look at something this beautiful while it’s happening. That night, instead of fighting the pain, he simply noticed each sensation—breathing in and out—and found a peace deeper than the suffering. It’s a lesson I keep coming back to: suffering equals pain plus resistance. Lower the resistance, and something opens up.

What the Edge Teaches Us

These conversations left me with a few lessons I keep turning over. Humility is strength—knowing your limits and acting on that knowledge is one of the bravest things a person can do. The best lessons cost something—a family’s displacement, blisters on the Camino, a failed surgery. Monotony is its own wilderness, and the answer isn’t escape but presence. Community makes the summit possible—Bishop Beckman wouldn’t have reached that Colorado fourteener without friends beside him, and Hilal wouldn’t have saved his patient without the willingness to call someone. And if you’re in the middle of something hard: you are not alone, and this is not forever.

Stay safe and stay on adventure.

— Josh