This is play. Not work.

Brendan Leonard’s day job is to remind outdoorsy folks to have a little more fun

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When Brendan Leonard found the Banff Mountain Film Festival — and Denver’s Paramount Theatre — filled with puffy coat-wearing people cheering to outdoor exploits, he declared, “Yes, these are my people. I found my people. I imagine some people feel that at a Broncos game or whatever, but that was it for me.”

His life as a mountain guy was born. A few years later, he started writing a weekly blog at www.semi-rad.com to share some of his stories and have an outlet for writing something more creative than his day job called for. But rather than write trip reports — we went; we climbed; we suffered; we eventually crushed for our particular scale of crushing; we had beers after — Leonard wrote satirical commentaries on the lifestyles and habits of those who like to vacate their warm beds to sleep on the ground and other such illogical undertakings. He’s written illuminating pieces such as “How to Talk Shit to Your Climbing Partner,” “The Masochist’s Guide to Bushwhacking” and “You Don’t Have to Clip That To The Outside of Your Pack.” His eye for human nature and his willing honesty are both measured and dosed out carefully so that it’s clear we are laughing together, at our selves and each other, for worries like helmet hair, coping with the bro-hug and the laughable ability climbing has to reduce a functional adult’s vocabulary to that of a teenager. Sick, brah.

But here’s the thing. This flurry of funny actually does illuminate the level of seriousness so many people bring to their outdoor sports undertakings and asks, “Is that really necessary?” 

“You started these things because they look like fun, you know, you don’t need another job, but a lot of us treat it like a job — how am I training for this activity, or this completely contrived activity where I’m measuring my performance against a grad ing scale and then all the other people I see doing the same thing?” he says. “It’s like, come on dude, we don’t need more work. We need more play.”

Now, he’s compiled the best of the roughly 200 blogs he’s written into the selfpublished book Funny Shit in the Woods and Other Stories: The Best of Semi-Rad.com. It might make a little money, he says, but really his hope is that it could be a handbook for explaining the outdoors lifestyle to a not-so-outdoorsy person.

“It’s a thing where people can hand it to someone else and say, ‘Hey, I’m into the outdoors. This is kind of about me. This is what my life is like,’” he says.

An example of that instance is outlined in his first chapter: “The Rules For Dating a Dirtbag,” which outlines such woes as the search for someone who actually sees an attractive quality in a guy living in a van loaded with climbing gear or wanting to climb with your romantic partner, until you realize that allows them to see you at your most terrified, and the effort to balance the principles of chivalry in an undertaking that requires both parties to carry at least some portion of the gear.

“I’m not that goal-driven either, I mean, less and less so,” he says. “But I’ve never had a goal like I want to climb 5.12, which would be, I feel like that might take the fun out of it for me.”

Leonard sets little goals such as going to the climbing gym with a plan to climb 10 5.10cs for his workout that day. But if at the seventh climb he’s feeling like he can’t hold on to anything, well, maybe it’s just time to go get a donut. He doesn’t need it to be another job. Nor, he says, does he want to quit eating donuts and ice cream so he can drop a few ounces of body fat.

What’s inspired him to lead a life outdoors aren’t goals as much as people.

“There are people who are very, very good at goofing off a lot and what they do is beautiful in a very nontraditional sense,” Leonard says.

And spending time with those people rubs off. 

“I think, as a person, if you do it right you’re this combination of the best things about your friends,” he says.

He can name people, and their various virtues, he’d like more of in his life, like the friend who seriously bikes everywhere, but never takes it seriously and has gathered a group of fellow riders equally inclined to pack beers for hydration.

“I realize that out of four people, I’m the only one who brought water on a 22-mile mountain bike ride,” Leonard says. “This stuff is so casual for them. They’re not out there trying to set a record or improve their Strava time. They’re like, ‘We’re playing. I’m stopping for another beer.’” 

For him personally, the motivation to mountain bike came from a friend’s axiom: “You’re just going out hiking with your bike.”

“That changed everything for me,” Leonard says. “Now I just explore on my bike. Wow, what a revelation. Sometimes it just takes the right person to say the right combination of words to you.”

On Jan. 29, when he comes to Neptune Mountaineering, the slideshow he plans to give will be focused largely on those people whose level of unwavering enthusiasm has been personally inspiring to him. They’re not superstar athletes as much as individuals willing to, for example, set a date any time to go do a particular trail or bike ride or climb, or weld a grill to a bike frame before bicycling across the country.

“We’re kind of told that our identity or what we’re supposed to do besides work is consume things, which is just not buying products or consuming media. Whether you become a football fan or you watch 500 shows every week or you’re obsessed with Breaking Bad or The Voice or whatever, this is what you do, you get done with work, kick up your feet and you consume media,” Leonard says. “If that makes you happy, that’s fine, but I think that some of us need something to do, like literally do, and for a lot of people it’s climbing and kayaking and skiing. 

 “Living out West is really great because you’ve become part of this peer group, whether or not you’re actively in it every day. You see all these people and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not skiing enough.’ They remind you that skiing is fun, like why am I not doing this?

“And so you get out more because of that. I think that’s a good thing.”

Of course, inspiration comes in many sizes, some as large as Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s recent ascent of the Dawn Wall on Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan.

“Do I have any hope of ever even climbing the easiest pitch on that route? Hell no, but something about that story is so … it’s this guy with this dream he just will not give up on, it’s like pure American dream,” Leonard says.

While the Dawn Wall may be the territory of a rare few, anyone headed outdoors can climb new routes and try new adventures — growth, improve, change, one might even say.

“For me, it just means finding new places to do things and finding new things to challenge you,” Leonard says.

Maybe that’s just making a moonlit run up one of the Flatirons.

And yes, it can mean stepping up to a challenge. Caldwell and Jorgeson, he says, probably think the Dawn Wall, that seven-year project to put up what’s being called the hardest climb in the world, they probably think that was the most fun thing they’ve ever done.

“If you can’t have fun pushing yourself then you’re definitely doing it wrong,” he says.

His forthcoming adventures will see him biking Arizona’s Black Canyon Trail, four-wheel drive roads in the Maze in Canyonlands and perhaps even on an island-hopping tour across Norway, and there’s talk of climbing in Croatia and backpacking in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. He’ll continue to write, and has started to work on films, too.

For Leonard, finding that crowd at Banff was about more than being in company where people understand why you’d walk around in a couple inches of quilted, feathery down — and it’s not for the fashion statement, and nor are those duct tape patches on your elbows.

“For me as an adult, I needed something else as an identity. I think where I grew up, your identity is your job and the family that you raise, like, ‘I work for this company and I do this, and I have two kids,’ and that didn’t really appeal to me,” Leonard says. “I feel like there’s something else, maybe, and I didn’t really have any idea what it was until I started going to the mountains and doing stuff and then I got this image of myself as a mountain climber — like, ‘How cool would that be?’ And I started doing stuff that gave me that identity when I was in my mid-20s — OK, this is what I am.”

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