No Snow. No Powder. Just People.
You Show Up Anyway.

Last weekend, I attended Adaptive Spirit—an event my family has been part of for decades. I’ve volunteered for years. It’s a weekend in Vail that raises money for the U.S. Paralympic Ski, Snowboard, and Nordic Teams. It’s a weekend for skiing.

Except this year… we didn’t.

Vail closed the mountain two days before the event. There was no snow and the driest winter in 47 years.

We didn’t ski in Vail, but we showed up anyway, and that was for the better. This weekend isn’t really about skiing. It’s about grit, resiliency, the power of the human spirit and what happens after everything changes. People whose lives are split into before and after, and those who kept moving without a clear path back.

I sat with Andrew Kurka. At 13, an ATV accident severely damaged his spine. He became a monoskier and competed in World Cup races. He qualified for the US Paralympic team and in Sochi, he crashed and broke his back again.

Seriously? Again?! That’s where most stories stop but Andrew didn’t stop. He won gold and silver in PyeongChang and bronze in Cortina. Now he’s mentoring younger athletes.

No big speech about resilience. Just the work.

I spent time with Josh Sweeney: Marine Corps Scout Sniper in Afghanistan.

In 2009 he hit an IED and lost both of his legs. Some people would call that the end, but Josh found another way to serve his country; as a Paralympian. He medaled in gold in sled hockey in 2014 and recently won the gold in Italy for the biathlon relay.

And then there is Patrick Halgren, a silver medalist in Cortina. He looked at the patchy conditions in Vail and decided to hike up the ski hill. Patrick has one leg, and Vail is steep, but he hiked up anyway and skied down.

No crowd. No podium. No reason to do it other than the fact that he could.

And I realized something in spending time with people who keep getting up. It’s time to move forward, because I’ve been waiting:

Waiting for things to feel manageable.
Waiting for some version of normal to return.
Waiting for the last year to make sense.

It doesn’t.

There is no clean arc, no moment life resolves into something meaningful. Sometimes, things are not meaningful.

What is meaningful is what you do next, and rebuilding without a map.

It takes resilience to be resilient, but here’s what I’m starting to see: I can’t wait for things to feel right before I start moving. I can just start to move.

Maybe resilience isn’t something you feel.

Resilience is behavior:

when there’s no snow…
no powder…
no plan…

You go anyway.

Because staying still doesn’t change anything.

And in the end, it is never about the snow.

It is always about the people.