Fellowship and Fractures
On the downside of activity-based friendships
A reader recently emailed me some thoughts about an imminent move to New York City. After a visit, he decided to relocate there due to the unmatched density of smart, ambitious, and interesting people. He said it was “like everywhere else, just more so.” Colorado, and the scene that I’ve written about in Boulder, he observed, seems to provide “the exact same thing for all of the outdoor recreation-obsessed… Instead of just gathering and talking about nonsense, you actually get to share in the activities you love.”
While I still talk about plenty of nonsense (at this point, good friends know to avoid bringing up eating bugs around the campfire), the reader had a point about NYC. I do appreciate the distinct social and cultural advantages New York City provides, despite how all of my friends in the City love making fun of how I’d never make it there. I acknowledge (and prefer) that I am built for a place with walking access to climbing at the Flatirons rather than walking access to an effective subway system. What has caused me to keep thinking about this email, though, is his highlighting of my friendships being activity-based.
I have my skiing friends, my climbing friends, my running friends, my biking friends, my Dungeons and Dragons friends, and, not to be forgotten, my drinking friends. There is plenty of overlap between these groups, but the activity-based context in which I primarily spend time with a person is one of the first ways I characterize them in my mind.
Building your social life with activities as the foundation is a beautiful thing; I much prefer a morning run or afternoon bike with friends to the endless coffees, happy hours, and dinners that seem to inundate my friends in D.C. and New York. It can feel like being social in a big city is synonymous with “spending money” whereas, once you’ve got some gear, a lot of these activities are free.
Going skiing or climbing with new people is the primary way I’ve built new friendships since I moved to Colorado almost four years ago. Since friendship is a function of time and intensity, ripping down a steep, rocky chute full of powder or hanging off the side of a cliff with someone is a quick way to build new relationships, provided that things go right.
Things don’t always go right.
Many (most? All?) of the activities that bring my friends together entail accepting some amount of risk. Climbing, skiing, and mountain biking all present acute dangers that are self-evident. So does drinking, for what it’s worth.
Off the dome, though, I can recall a number of serious incidents involving close friends just this year. My friend Maggie tore her meniscus during a 40-inch snowstorm in Steamboat in January: out for the ski season and much of the summer biking season, surgery required. A couple months later, Jacob, Maggie’s boyfriend, hit one too many flat landings while skiing and found himself battling herniated discs in his back, taking him out for the remainder of the season. Jinks broke his finger mountain biking during our spring Moab trip. Another friend, Leah, was sport climbing last week in Clear Creek Canyon when, while clipping the second bolt on a climb, her foot slipped and she whipped into the wall, banging her head (we <3 helmets!) and breaking her arm: out for two months, surgery also required. Who knew all this stuff we do is dangerous!
An injury doesn’t even have to be all that serious to take you out of commission for a bit—running last week down Sunshine Canyon, on the easiest section of a ten-mile run, I somehow tripped on a pebble, careened face-first into the dirt, and carved up my forearms and hands in the process. No more crack climbing for me until my hands heal!
Not all injuries are acute. Tendonitis, old injuries that never healed quite right, and those random aches and pains that begin to appear after you turn 25 often put me and my friends on the bench too. We keep our friend Blaise, who is a physical therapist, busy with pro-bono work requests.
These anecdotes surface the most distinct downside of these activity-based friendships: if you can’t participate in the activities, you can’t socialize.
That’s a bit hyperbolic. We don’t JUST rock climb and bike. But when you’re going on ski trips all winter and spring, and climbing trips all summer and fall, when someone is hurt you necessarily spend less time with them. They aren’t on the bike trips to Fruita or the backpacking trips to the San Juans. They can’t join for training rides and gym sessions during the work week.
I’ve written before about my rocky relationship with rest. So, if I’m hurt, and under forced rest, I’m already going to be chomping at the bit to get back to things. Couple that with injury-induced social isolation and you’ve got a recipe for distress. Another consequence of injury I’ve explored in conversations with friends is how, in seeking out socialization when you can’t engage in your normal activities, you might find yourself engaging in habits that your normally-active lifestyle precludes you from doing (i.e. partying more). That’s okay in moderation, but I’ve spoken with friends who describe this dynamic like a feedback loop that can be challenging to escape from even as the injury heals.
In closing: if your friend group is like mine, and someone gets hurt, be deliberate about spending time with them. Reach out and see how they’re doing. Create opportunities to spend time together that are inclusive to their injured state.
I may not be much of a New York guy myself, but I’ll give it to them that they’re the experts in non-activity-based socializing. Set up some dinners, some coffees… Yes, maybe even some happy hours.
Interesting commentary, Michael. As someone whose lifestyle revolves around similar activities, this prompted a considerable amount of reflection on the friendships in my life, and what fuels and strains them.
While I've been fortunate to avoid season-ending injuries thus far (knock on wood!), work-related travel takes me away from the People's Republic for upwards of four months per year, resulting in a physical disconnect from the activity-based communities that you speak about. While I try to keep in close contact, my efforts are often futile (example 1: our current game of phone tag), and it's common to go from April-September without speaking with many folks.
When I get back home, re-entry is a mixed bag. While social joy dominates, and many friendships start exactly where we left off, some require some priming before they're back to their full intensity (a bit like a liquid fuel stove). Sometimes my departure makes certain friendships untenable, and people fall off the radar.
Heck, that doesn't even cover the perpetual long distance friendships. Some are tighter than a figure eight that just took a 20 foot whipper, some are lukewarm, and some are in the process of petering out, even if I'm actively fighting against that current.
I don't believe that the dynamic you're describing is at all unique to an activity-based friendship, but is more emblematic of the challenges of building community in a culture that advocates for quantity against our desire for quality. There's a tension between this article and "The Highest Impact Thing You Can Do in Your Everyday Life". While there's so much beauty in the "friendship cascade", we each have a social carrying capacity, and quality surely takes a hit when we stretch ourselves too thin for the purposes of quantity. Without a substantial foundation of quality to undergird a social connection, the introduction of external disruptions (e.g. an injury, move, breakup, etc...) is easily enough to knock the train off the rails. Where and how this quality originates, whether it's from biweekly high density days, monthly phone calls, or an annual trip, doesn't necessarily matter. What matters is that the friendship's anchor is built in a fashion to be unquestionably strong for the anticipated load, plus a margin for error. We can't do this for everyone our modern, massive social networks, but if culturally we work towards building robust social support networks rooted in quality, people might be less likely to fall through the cracks.
The bottom line is... you should call me :).
Like you, my friend groups form mostly around sports: my cycling team, friends from the local pool, the trail running scene. (Ideally, I’ll get back into climbing this year.) Another upside of activity-based friendships is that just about anywhere I travel to, someone will tell me that they have a cycling/swimming/running friend who I should meet.
My friends in NYC complain of loneliness while they are surrounded by millions; my cyclists friends have an immediate tribe no matter where they are.
But the downside is that my social life can feel divided based on what I’m doing and, like yours, can wither if I’m injured. So I’ve tried to add a couple of non-active social institutions to the mix: First, the good old fashioned picnic. (Come when you can, bring a dish and drink and friend.) And second, “backyard coffee,” which I learned from my friend, Hack. Every Friday morning from 8-10 am: invite all the friends over for something baked and whatever magic comes out of the home espresso machine. That way even if I separate my shoulder again (please no), I still see the homies on a regular basis.