I have what I consider to be the best job in American journalism. Unfortunately, when I tell people just what it is that I do for a living, it sounds like something an imbecile would make up to impress women in a bar. I can tell you, from bitter experience, that females are not overcome with desire when I tell them that I am a travel writer and that I specialize in remote and difficult locations: the swamplands of the Asmat, the icebergs of Antarctica, the mountains of Iran. Mostly, when I tell women that I am an adventure travel writer, they say things like, "puh-leeze."
Guys react about the same way. I could tell them that I was an international man of mystery and get about the same reaction. Not, mind you, that I'm complaining. I love this job, and have been doing it for more than a quarter of a century and am actually starting to get pretty good at it. Among my eight published books, five are essentially collections of stories about my travels to various places.
These days, I mostly write for magazines. I should have an article or column in National Geographic Adventure magazine every issue for the next year or so. Occasionally I do articles for other magazines and expect to publish an article about kettlebells in the next issue of Best Life, a Men's Health spin off. The editor of that magazine, erroneously assuming that I must be in some kind of great shape given my job, asked what it was that I did to keep fit.
Well, until the last couple of years, not much. I was swimmer when I was young and attended the University of Wisconsin on an athletic grant in aid. I thought, in those years, that I had a shot at the Olympics. I was 20 when it occurred to me that I wasn't getting any faster and that swimming five hours a day every day of my life was becoming…boring. Worse, I had two more years of this horror and giving anything less than 100 percent could cost me my scholarship. Graduation, for me, meant, among other things, no more work outs. Not ever.
As it turned out, I was fantastically good at not working out, and even better at undoing the benefits of twelve years of continuous training. In San Francisco, I got a job with a small counter cultural magazine called Rolling Stone. That was in 1969. This job required diligent indulgence in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We also put out a pretty damn good magazine in the early 1970s.
About 1976, Rolling Stone moved to New York and I stayed in San Francisco to help design and write for a new magazine called Outside. Our concept, unique at the time, was to publish a literate outdoor magazine. No one else was doing that, and we were an object of great sarcasm in the world of journalism. People who liked to go outdoors, the pundits pointed out, were moronic knuckle draggers who couldn't read.
We believed the knuckle draggers in question were not moronic, that they would read us, and buy us. So I started my career as an adventure travel writer, working for Outside, the magazine critics said would never sell. I trekked through the mountains of Peru where my party found the remains of ancient cities dreaming in the cloud forests. I dove with sharks of all varieties, including great whites. Outside sold very well indeed, and it eventually became the most critically acclaimed outdoor magazine of its time, winning the National Magazine Award for General Excellence three times in a row. The knuckle draggers won. All the while, I was having the time of my life, and I was having that time all over the world.
Once I found myself on a Russian ice breaker called the Yamal. We were stopped at the exact geographic North Pole. I could turn 360 degrees and everywhere I looked was south. The Yamal had plowed a track through the ice --- the ship was the size of a ten story building and was powered by twin 25,000 horsepower nuclear reactors. At the pole, we stepped off the ship and onto the ice. In the icebreaker's path I could look down and see the water, six feet below. It was black, under all that ice. Snow fell monotonously. The Russian crew affixed a ladder to the ice so that any fool who wanted to take a swim could climb out, provided the water didn't kill him out right.
Dares were thrown out. A certain amount of vodka was involved. I was a fine drinker with great endurance and I could swim like a fish. This was my event. The dive was perfect and when I hit the water, things all began to sloooooww…doooown….as if I was moving through a thick pudding and I swam ever so slowly for the ladder, then hit the ice in my bare feet and accepted the vodka offered all about. We all dove in several times. We all drank a lot of vodka. I did not embarrass America in either event.
Some of the stories I did involved long jungle treks, or marches through various deserts, and even serious mountaineering. Once, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, friends of mine who introduced me to the sport of hard core caving, decided to toss a rope off El Cap, in Yosemite. We'd climb the rope as we did in the caves, then rappel back down. Now, for those who haven't seen it, El Cap is a half mile high cliff face that looks like the bow of a ship. The rope was anchored off the prow and dropped free for 2700 feet. We climbed with technical gear that married us to the rope --- seat harnesses and Gibb's Ascenders and Jumars --- but it was still a six hour ordeal for me and while I was climbing a stiff wind sprang up so that I able to enjoy merry 70 foot wide pendulum swings that bounced me off the cliff face now and again.
I recall that the photographer on that one --- Michael K. (Nick) Nichols: you've seen his work in National Geographic --- was climbing above me, shooting down. In his professional opinion, a shot of my terrified face with the earth falling out below was a better picture than one of my butt against the sky. Just so. But there was a problem. Nick needed to carry his camera gear, and decided to hydrate big time before the climb so he wouldn't have to carry so much water. He drank a gallon of water, at a guess. Predictably, about 30 minutes into the climb the distinguished photographer started whining about his urgent need to urinate. This was not something I, as the bottom climber, wanted to hear.
The face of El Cap is not far off the road, and dozens of people had stopped to watch us climb. Some of them had binoculars. I pointed out to Nick that he would be exposing himself to the public and subject to arrest. He didn't care. He had to go and he was going to do it right now.
"Wait," I said. "There's a way to do this." I climbed up to Nick, and began manipulating my gear in such a way that I could clip into the rope above him with my feet just below his. He was facing away and I had my arms around his chest. And it was in this manner that Nick relieved himself. It took a long time to void that gallon of water and we spun about ever so slowly, rather like a revolving fountain. I feared a conviction for public lewdness. I feared we would fall to our deaths. We escaped on both counts.
But that is the way things are solved in the field. Those of us who do this kind of work for a living --- guides, photographers, writers --- call it BFI or "brute force and ignorance." A few years ago, for instance, I was walking across the Ndoke forest in the Congo Basin. There were thirteen pygmies along on this trek. The forest was so thick it was impossible to see more than ten feet in any direction. It was necessary to hack out a trail with a machete every step of the way. I did a lot of the leading and hacking simply because I am a little over six feet tall, which was well over a foot taller than any of the pygmies. These men sauntered though my cutting with a certain irritating ease. When the pygmies led, they cut out little pygmy tunnels and I was obliged to crawl or do what is called a Groucho walk. Eventually, using BFI, I simply stepped in the tunnels and bulled through the foliage above using my forearms. I still have the scars.
I had started that two month trip at about 230 pounds and came home somewhere around 190. That had been my system for years: don't get in shape for the trip; use the trip to get in shape. It worked pretty well for fifteen years or so, and I enjoyed my reputation as the overweight guy who came into camp on the first day half drunk and smoking like a chimney. Within a couple of days, I'd run out of cigarettes and booze. In the end, I'd drop maybe 25 pounds and come out of the expedition feeling almost buff while the others were dragging. Looking back on it, I think I was coasting on my career as an athlete.
Or that's the way it used to happen. About a decade ago, when I turned 50, age grabbed me by the collar and started slapping me around. I was more than once the slowest guy on the expedition, the one who was slowing everyone down, the one who people complained about. It occurred to me that if I wanted to keep the best job in American journalism, I was going to have to start working out again.
Cigarettes were the first to go. It was surprisingly easy to quit. I've also cut down on my drinking considerably, though I'd appreciate it if Girevik readers would keep this to themselves. I have a reputation to uphold.
So I returned to physical workouts after a break of, oh, 35 or 36 years. I played racquetball for a while, ran some, walked steep trails around my home in Montana, and eventually discovered kettlebells. I liked the compact nature of the beasts, the idea that I could carry them around in my car, stop at a trail head, do some snatches and presses, take my dogs for a walk, come back and do a few swings.
I tend to lift lighter 'bells for repetitions. I've found that I've felt fit and in some cases was able to keep up with professional outdoor athletes on my last trips. (By "keep up" I mean that I wasn't completely humiliated.)
My assignments are varied. They come fairly quickly, one on top of another, so I seldom know much in advance what I'm going to do next. I was kayaking in the glacial lakes of Patagonia in December and crawling around in the caves of northern Thailand in January, for instance. I don't often have the opportunity to practice the skills involved, so I go into the expeditions rusty in technique but pretty strong, pretty fit. That's the aspect of kettlebell lifting that most appeals to me: the idea that it is good general preparation for many sports and outdoor activities.
I do have a pair of two pood 'bells that I toss around a bit. Mostly, I use them for farmer's walks an exercise that paid off handsomely in terms of specificity last year in Namibia, in south west Africa. We were scouting a canyon deep in the Namib desert when a guy behind me broke his ankle, badly, on a single bad step. The victim was a doctor. He said, "Tim, you have to set my ankle."
"I do?"
The foot was hanging off his leg at a stomach wrenching angle. I took the boot off. The doctor's ankle felt like a bag full of marbles. He said, "pull it gently and firmly toward you." I did, turning it ever so slightly until I felt it slip "in." I knew it was right, just the way you know you hit "drive" on your automatic transmission.
The ankle, I learned later, was broken in seven different places. We needed to get the doc out of that canyon. A search turned up some sticks, which we used with a tarp and some rope to make a stretcher. There were four of us who had to carry the doctor who wasn't a little guy. He weighed about 210 pounds. I've heard most men bear two thirds of their weight above the waist. So when I was one of the front stretcher bearers, I was handling about 70 pounds. Two poods! I think I was one of the strongest on that particular ordeal and I believe that farmer's walks I'd done had helped. A lot. How's that for specificity?
Nevertheless, I do not consider myself a particularly skilled or strong kettlebell lifter. I imagine seasoned gireviks feel something of what mountaineers or cavers feel when I write about their sport, which is a kind of awed wonder that a dipweed like myself got the assignment in the first place. A guy who can do, what, like maybe 5 snatches with the two pood? He's writing articles about kettlebells? What's that all about?
So, okay, I'm not setting the kettlebell world on fire. I must say, however, that since I've been tossing the bells around, I've lost about ten pounds and --- get this --- nearly four inches off my waist. This latter is not impressive as it might be. There are a lot of inches there to lose. But my wind is good. I'm stronger, faster, and have more endurance than anytime in the last decade and I didn't slow anyone down on my last few assignments.
Kettlebells also keep me out of the gym. Few of my colleagues in adventure have ever seen me working out. Editors, who only see me eating and drinking, must think I persevere and survive in some enchanted world where the power on high protects drunks and fools. This is good: I want to maintain the fiction that I never workout, and that I just stumble through life using brute force and ignorance. It gives me and my writing a certain mystique.
I'm still at a loss, however, to answer the question so often heard at social events (read: bars): what do you do? I've considered simply telling people that I'm a girevik. Not a very good one, but a girevik all the same.

Click here to see a larger picture of Tim wielding his kettlebell. If you are interested in hearing more of his adventure stories, be sure to check out his new book, Hold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss. It is available at Amazon and all major bookstores.