The perfect email

What a thrill!

We received the perfect email from a potential client: Short, charming, and packed with only the essential information. Optimistic, but not Pollyannish. A real tour de force. What an update! I’m still riding high. I’ll be carrying that energy with me for a long time, and trying to capture the same confident and kind sentiment in all my official Three Point Four Media emails for the rest of time. Be good to people. Be upfront. It goes a long way.

Onto the links.

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An article

I wrote a story during the 2018 Olympics about why cross country skiers collapse like this at the finish line.

Terrific profile of American cross country skier Jesse Diggins in the Times Magazine. Her pain tolerance is very well documented, yet I never tire of hearing her talk about just how deep she can dig. Even she knows it’s kind of excessive:

“This is the healthiest sport in the whole world—except at the very top of the sport. The way we do it is maybe not that good for us.”

She bruised her rib in her first race at the Olympics. Look at her wheezing in agony at the finish line of the 10k, where she won bronze.

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Another article about an American cross country skier

Ben Ogden capturing silver in the classic sprint.

‘He’s got that farmer’s strength.’ Ben Ogden, and a silver medal long in the making.

Ben Ogden won the first men’s Olympic medal in cross country skiing in 50 years this week. The Washington Post spent some time with Diggins, Ogden, and some other American skiers at their training base in Ogden’s home state of Vermont over the summer. I love this anecdote about how he was inspired to get stronger because of a 70-year-old dude who could throw bails of hay really far at the farm Ogden worked on as a teenager:

“I was young and strong, and I did a lot of pull-ups and stuff,” Ogden said by phone Wednesday from Predazzo, Italy, a resort town just up the road from the Olympic cross-country venue in Val di Fiemme. “But there was like a 70-year-old guy that worked there who could throw hay like four times as far as I could. It kind of bothered me.

“Who knows how old he is now? And I’m that much stronger and fitter, and I guarantee he could still throw a bale way farther than I could. That was kind of the world that I grew up in. I always respected the people who just want to put their head down and get s--- done.”

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A book

I read Lauren Rothery’s Television in two sittings. The novel is told through three narrators navigating the film and television business in Los Angeles. There is drama and ennui and drunken scenes at the Sunset Tower and long meandering sentences. I loved it the same way I love Bret Easton Ellis or Joan Didion’s novels about seemingly empty Californians. It’s a world far away from my Midwestern upbringing and I enjoyed inhabiting it for 239 breezy pages.

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A grammar lesson

I have some Mexico travel booked this year, so I’ve been working with a tutor twice a week to brush up on my Spanish skills. I studied Spanish in college and then worked in a restaurant my first year in New York a very long time ago. But, over the years, my Spanish has deteriorated. It’s always been perfectly effective in Spanish speaking countries, but mostly to talk to cab drivers about LeBron James and servers about mezcal.

I found Gustavo, a Mexico City native, on the website Preply and he has dramatically improved my Spanish in four weeks. I had a solid foundation but forgot essential things, like conjugating verbs in the past or future. It’s incredible how much more productive a conversation is when you can talk about something you did and something you’re going to do.

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A ski

Does not get much better than this.

It has been a truly remarkable winter in the upper midwest. After a recent ridiculous cold snap we’ve been treated to bluebird days and ideal conditions. My favorite big dumb race of the year is next weekend: The American Birkebeiner (also a TPF client).

If you missed it last week, please read this most excellent Q&A with the most fabulous Megan Angelo.