We are all but fish in a pond or in the sea. We are the product of our circumstances, we might imagine ourselves independently thinking, autonomous, conscious beings, but we are really just animated sacks of pressed sausage meat being guided around by the remote controls of our pasts. It is for this reason that I can’t really be that proud of me for hating banal motivational quotes and the cookie-cutter, you-can-do-it-ism of FitSpo – I was just born this…
It was exhausted in thinking about who we were and what we did. It was used up by the insatiable energy of squabbling and shitting on each other. It was suffocated by bans. It was sideswiped by change. It was burnt in the fires. I saw a photo the other day and it had a question with it; the fires, have they sucked the psych out of climbing for anyone else because they have done for me, it asked. There…
I have taken for granted the pleasures of a tactile world: dragging my hands along a cold steel balustrade, cupping porcelain whilst drinking a coffee, skin torn by sandstone gripped too hard. Instead, I find myself shying away from everything like a vampire fleeing an upraised cross. Where is this place that we are? We are not where we were and we are not where we are going. When I wake up in the morning it feels like nowhere, off…
Vertical Lifers – the Virus has upended everything. Lives are upside, economies are inside out. Amidst the tumult we have put together a new issue and we hope that you read it and like it. Because of The Virus we’ve gone back to the 1s and 0s to save money on printing in the face of collapsing advertising. This is a bummer, but we’re hoping VL can survive the downturn on its metaphorical digital ventilator and we can return to printing the…
Not all End-of-Days scenarios present the same challenges and success in each variation demands its own training regime. You just gotta look at Zombieland, where Rule #1 is cardio, in The Virus lockdown the only zombies will be the doubts that haunt our minds and they cannot be simply outrun. Ergo, cardio should not be your priority numero uno. What you should probably do is get ballistically strong. Hangboard, TRX, do bodyweight exercises, calisthenics and lift whatever heavy things you…
If in 2004 someone told you that the media’s biggest growth area in 2020 was going to be radio you’d have thrown your Motorola RAZR flip phone at them, but hey, here we are listening to the wireless more than ever. Amanda Watts and Tom O’Halloran are the brains and the brawn behind Baffle Days, an Aussie-focussed podcast that is one of our faves at VLHQ. We caught up with them in their home in the beating heart of Australian…
