Ideas - The limitless mind and body of an 83-year-old super-athlete

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Sports journalist Brett Popplewell used to dread growing old. Until he befriended Dag Aabaye, an 83-year-old former stuntman and professional skier who lives alone on a mountain in the deep forest of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. Their relationship led Popplewell to reframe his thoughts about life, death, and the limits placed on us as we age.Aabaye has run through blizzards, heat waves, and even 24 hours straight. For him, running is “life itself.”Popplewell chronicles the extreme athlete’s life from childhood to the silver screen in his book, Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past. The book won the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Last month, Popplewell accepted his literary prize and delivered a public talk at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Dag Obe is not a typical runner. I have a moratorium on two hours a day. That means I never run less than two hours. So it's between two and six. Building endurance was once a necessity for his work as a professional skier and stuntman. But those were jobs. Running is for Dag himself. When I try to explain to people about running, I try to get them to know that it's not just your legs. No, it's your heart, lungs.

So you breathe. I mean, I've never been sick, and I don't plan on getting sick. Running keeps everything in motion. Running is like dancing. Running trail is like dancing. It's life itself. Dag's life is spent in BC's Okanagan Valley. He runs there for hours each day on self-made mountain trails,

in solitude, deep in the forest. A different kind of life, particularly since Dag Obe is over 80 years old. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayaad. On a frosty Saturday in November 2015, this man led me to the top of a mountain and reframed the way I think about life, death,

and the limits we place on ourselves as we age. Journalist Brett Popplewell was intrigued and inspired by Dag Obey. He built a relationship with him and began to write a book. Outsider was published nearly a decade later. It recently won the Edna Stabler Award for creative nonfiction. The author visited Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario in April 2025 to accept his literary prize. While he was there, he gave a public talk on what knowing Dag Obey had made him think about in terms of how aging and the body are perceived in North American society.

Brett Popplewell began with a reading from his book, Outsider, An Old Man, A Mountain, and the search for a hidden past. The last of the Ubermensch runs through the nights alone. He carries no identification, but the scars on his face, hands, and body tell of an 80-year struggle to survive on the edge of society. He has been starved, abandoned, and trapped in a foreign land for nearly 50 years, unable

or unwilling to get back to the place that made him. Conceived in war, he is the aged mangled remnant of a darker time, and yet he is innocent. There is no light beyond the glow of his headlamp as he races past snow-covered hemlock, fir and pine. The sound of frozen dirt crunching beneath his feet dissipates as he nears the edge of a cliff wall. His are not the only tracks out here, but they are the only sign that a human has been here. He plants his feet in the snow next to the paw prints of a mountain lion that stalks this hillside. He knows she's out here. He has seen her eyes watching from the shadows while he runs.

But the innocent mind has no fear, even when it should. Fingers gnarled, arms bloodied, shoulders shattered, teeth broken, heels battered. The old man keeps driving his body forward, teeth broken, heels battered. The old man keeps driving his body forward, one boot drop at a time. He reaches out and wraps his clawed hand around the dormant trunk of an aspen and uses it to slingshot his body away from the cliff's edge and upwards, regaining the mountain lion's trail as he makes for a frozen waterfall that few have ever seen. To those who have seen him, his age,

coupled with his tattered boots, gloves, and duct-taped jacket, project an image of vulnerability. His face, masked in a frosted beard, is chapped and weathered by decades of cold and sun. Long-haired and scraggly, he looks as ancient as a man would having lived in a school bus parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century. And yet buried within his aging frame

is a strength that seems to keep him safe. He steps onto a snow-covered log that fell over a rushing stream a long time ago. He extends his arms like a tightrope walker and uses the log as a natural bridge. It leads him over the stream and upwards to the source of the rushing water, a 10-metre waterfall that smashes over rocks before freezing along the banks of the stream. He reaches out and touches the cliff wall beside the falls, then marks his time on the

watch that has been clocking this run. It has been 48 minutes since he left his camp in the dead of night on a quest for water. He dips his hand into the runoff, draws it to his face and drinks. Then he turns back toward the camp he has kept hidden from society ever since he decided to disappear into these woods and run, endlessly, both away from and toward death. I used to dread growing old. Then I befriended that guy, the man I just read to you about. His name is Dag Obe.

Dag is an octogenarian super athlete who once gave me seven words of wisdom that I jotted into my notebook a few years ago and have reflected on several times since. Time is a river, he said, never to return. On a frosty Saturday in November 2015, this man led me to the top of a mountain and reframed the way I think about life, death, and the limits we place on ourselves as we age.

I was in the Okanagan Valley, having crossed the country in search of a man who was often called the world's first extreme skier. He was 74 years old when I found him. A wild hermit and Norwegian ski legend who had lived alone in a school bus, parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century, and who was now apparently forestalling his dotage He lived alone in a school bus parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century,

and who is now apparently forestalling his dotage by reinventing himself into a trail running super athlete in British Columbia. I, at the time, was a 32 year old sports writer based out of Toronto. I found richness in retrospection. I was drawn to athletes who were well past their prime. It didn't matter who I was writing about I viewed every subject's life as an arc that rose and fell over time within a set frame.

I believed the impermanence of life forced us to seek out meaning from the days we were given But I didn't view the different chapters of life as equal. I thought childhood was important because it laid the foundation for all that followed. I viewed the middle years as the peak, and I saw old age as inescapably tragic. Time had a way of grinding people down, removing their gifts, ravaging their bodies and their minds.

I had bought into and perpetuated a narrative that told people that as they aged through life, they aged out of life itself. I had known countless people who had grown old, slown down, and ultimately died. It didn't occur to me that the slowing down bit might be optional or even self-destructive until I met Dag. Although his hair and beard were white and the skin on his arms showed the bruising that's common to older people, he was fit.

Fit enough to run for 24 hours straight, which he did on multiple occasions while competing in the Great Canadian Death Race. Every summer, Dag ran in that 125 kilometer ultra marathon, one of the most grueling on the planet. Sat in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, the race leads runners up and down three mountain summits and across a river. He trained for the race endlessly on a network of deer trails that he'd repurposed on the mountainside near his bus. He told me that he viewed age as a state of mind more than an actual number.

You should never let anyone tell you that you're old, he said, and you shouldn't ask people how old they are either. Ask them how young they are instead. I didn't know what's a make-of- of Dag or his philosophy on aging when I first met him. He didn't want to die, but he didn't want to grow old either. He just wanted to live as youthfully as possible for as long as he could. He was a senior citizen who was determined not to let his accumulating years due to him what they did to others. He refused to forfeit any of his independence not just because other people thought it was time for him to take it easy. He said that we had a learned habit of prematurely aging each

other in the West. He reverse engineered the old Oscar Wilde quote, the one about youth being wasted on the young. In Dag's version, youth was abandoned by the elderly. Dag is now 83 years old and still living very much the same as how I just described him to you. He sleeps in a derelict bus that he calls his lair, tucked in the shadow of a few cedar trees on the side of a mountainside in British Columbia. When he's not stoking the fire in his bus or writing in his journals inside the bus, he can be found cutting wood or running day and night through blizzards and heat waves.

He runs for several hours straight up and down that mountainside on hand-cut trails that he maintains himself with a chainsaw. He is, without a doubt, the fittest human being I have encountered. I say that having spent several years as a sports writer, interviewing and writing about some of the bigger names in professional sports. Time stalks everyone.

But when it catches up with a professional athlete, it can be brutal to watch. It's why so many of the greatest names in sport often fade from the spotlight once they leave the field to essentially age out of sight. Years ago, I had the privilege of following Serena Williams for two weeks when she was aged 33 and still playing tennis at the top of her game. Like Dag, she too seemed to be pushing our collective understanding of what could be accomplished with the human body, despite being widely considered an older athlete. Watching her repeatedly trounce professional tennis players a fraction her age gave me the same feeling that I got from watching Dagg compete in a 125-kilometer ultra marathon at the age of 75. In both instances, I felt I was watching someone levitate beyond the realm of what the rest of us perceive as possible.

I tried to summarize this sentiment in that profile about Serena when I wrote. It is the unavoidable human tragedy of every star in every sport that they reach a point where they can no longer compete against those with youthful knees, ankles, wrists, and elbows who slowly supplant them both in the game and in our consciousness. It's why so many greats spend the latter stages of their careers humbled by their inability to repeat the glories of their pasts. It's why our final glimpse of Air Jordan

was as a grounded man with ice packs strapped to his knees and why Muhammad Ali ended up bruised, battered, and unable to defend himself in the days leading up to his 40th birthday. It's why Serena aged 33 was special and it's why Dag aged 75 was special too. And yet neither of them was entirely unique. They shared commonalities with each other and with others who refused to be limited by their age. Have you ever met someone that when they tell you their age it just doesn't seem possible? Dag is one of those people. It's not that he looks younger than he is, he looks old.

In many ways he looks like you would imagine someone would if they spent their days running through a forest for decades. And yet beneath that wild man exterior is someone who appears to be ageless. I followed Dag for six years while working on this book and for two more years just to get to know him. What I concluded on this project is that the source of his apparent agelessness was not rooted in what he managed to accomplish physically day to day. It was rooted in his philosophy on life, on age, on legacy, and longevity.

I'm gonna share with you another brief passage from Outsider to try to let Dag explain to you what I'm trying to say. It was curiosity and desire, not ego, that drove Dag back to the death race again and again. Despite his advancing years, his best finish had not been his first, but rather his third, when at the age of 64 he crossed the finish line after 20 hours and 56 minutes. One minute and 54 seconds faster than he had

run at the age of 62. What he craved above all was the magical feeling he experienced most often on the trails near his bus when he would reach a marker in the bush and check his stopwatch only to surprise himself that he was running faster than he had run in several years. He lived for those moments, rare as they were now, because it was then that he felt a connection to something preternatural. It's like touching the fountain of youth, Deg had told me. Juan Ponce de Leon went looking in the wrong place, he said.

He didn't need to sail to Florida. All he needed was a stopwatch, a journal, and a pair of running shoes. I should note here that some of you may have questions about this man's chosen lifestyle. I'm going to read to you just a few more words that I wrote from my first encounter with Dag. This about the importance of independence and of the perils of our collective way of life. He is 74 years old and talking to a 32 year old version of myself in this next bit. A person cannot exist entirely on their own, he said.

They can for a while, but not for long. He had learned that from Henry David Thoreau, one of history's more famous loners. In 1845, Thoreau wandered into a forest hoping to find meaning through a simple, self-sufficient life alone with nature. He wrote about it nine years later in Walden, or Life in the Woods, a book that established the philosophical foundation that inspired generations of romantic recluses to disappear into the woods in search of their own Walden. Thoreau lasted two years, two months, and two days

in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Dag had been living a life of relative seclusion either in his bus or at this mountainside camp for 15 years, but he knew just as Thoreau did that to exist alone in nature required one to coexist with society. Thoreau was rarely alone for more than a few weeks at a time.

Dag understood why. Like Thoreau, Dag kept himself lucid by pouring his thoughts into his journals. Dag had read Walden three times in his life. The first time he was just a boy, the second time he was in his 20s, and the third time he was living in his life. The first time he was just a boy, the second time he was in his 20s, and the third time he was living in his bus. Although Walden resonated with Dag at a young age,

it wasn't until his late 50s that he began living the Theruvian existence. Alone in the forest, he surrounded himself now with countless other books he had carried up the mountainside. Dozens of books littered his tent and spilled out into the frost-covered twigs and pine needles that lined his camp. When I feel like I'm starting to get weird up here, he said, I run down to the highway and I take a bus into the city. Then I stop in at a McDonald's and I order a sandwich

and I sit down and I see these people all these people and none of them are talking to each other they just stare at their phones he looked at me for confirmation is that how people live now I nodded he shook his head I have no problem with society, he said. I just don't want to be a part of it. After my first meeting with Dag in 2015, I spent years checking in on him, trying to understand how and why he managed to do what he did. I climbed with him up and down mountains.

I ran behind him over his trails. I watched him run for nine hours, 29 minutes, and 31 seconds straight in the death race. I pitched a tent and I camped with him in sub-zero temperatures. Most of all, I listened as he spoke. At the core of his philosophy was a view that people often hastened their demise by lamenting their past, limiting their present, and dreading their future. Every day, we get to make a choice between trying to do something for what

might be the last time or not trying at all, he said. Then he added, that's what it is to age. I might never be able to do again what I did yesterday, but I'm going to keep trying I'd rather live like that than on a couch with a remote in my hand At one point he told me it's actually one of my favorite quotes from him from one point He told me old people need superheroes, too At first I thought he was trying to position himself as the superhero At first I thought he was trying to position himself as the superhero. Then I understood what he was really saying, that in popular culture our superheroes are

essentially young or ageless. He didn't understand why even when we were being creative, when we were writing comic books, we limited our vision for what we could be or achieve as seniors. Of all the ways you can limit yourself, self-definition is the most powerful, he said. The more time I spent visiting him on the mountainside, the more I began to think about age the way he did. I now view it less as something that defines us, and more as something that we define for ourselves.

I am now a 42 year old person. As a Canadian male I am more than halfway to my life expectancy. I am aware that my body is deteriorating naturally shedding muscle mass, bone density and maximal aerobic capacity. Have you seen me getting smaller as I've been standing up there? But while I may run slower than I did when I was 30, I go farther. I've begun to view life as an ultra marathon in its own right. Anyone who has ever competed in a race knows that you have to pace yourself, sure, but you also have to push yourself to the finish. That said, I don't have the greatest genes. I come from a long line of men who have died early from tuberculosis

or dropped out of heart attacks. At 77, my father is the oldest male on record in my family, and he has been since he was 58. Several of my forebears didn't live to see 30. So knowing this, I do find myself conscious of my heartbeat when I run. But then I reflect on something Dag told me. I just want to be movable, he said.

And if I want to be movable, I've got to move every day. Dag shared with me once what he believed to be the secret to longevity. And I was grateful for it. But then I didn't know what to do with it. He said the secret is avoiding the aging effects of stress. Don't fill your life with things to worry about he said. He also suggested that everyone should always keep a journal. Without a journal he never would have known that he had clocked more hours running on his trails at age 80 than he did at age 60. His journals didn't

just keep him honest with himself, they kept him focused. He liked to start each day by looking back one year in his journals. Then he would set out trying to improve on the previous year's accomplishments. He did this because he had read articles about scientific studies that found age-related deterioration to be the side effect of a sedentary lifestyle. He liked to cut those articles out, tape them into his journals, and refer back to them as evidence to support his belief that he can modulate his decline through increased training.

He isn't just pushing the limits of his own body. He is trying to challenge our societal understanding of aging. Brett Popplewell, Dag Obey, the subject of Popplewell's book, Outsider, spoke to CBC's Matt Galloway in 2023. Dag explained that his choice to live outdoors, deep in the forests of the Okanagan, is quite deliberate. It creates a sense of daily purpose. I live outside all day. I leave at now 4.30 in the morning. I have my two hour run, then I come back,

and then I go and do firewood. And then I go for ahour run, then I come back, then I go and do firewood, and then I go for a slow run, then I have a big trail I'm building. I set myself up with work for the rest of my life, even if I'm becoming 120. So I don't have to worry about, when I wake in the morning, what to do. When people tell me, oh, I wake up in the morning, but I don't know what I'm going to do today, I don't have that problem. And today there's a big problem with people. You have to go out and make it happen. A trail doesn't build by itself, wood doesn't be cut by itself,

and the run has to be done by me. So I'm occupied all day, probably more than a person in town. Why is it that you chose to live out there? Because it's away from people. I love people, but I don't want interference. So that's why I don't have a cell phone. I don't have anything. I don't have electricity and I don't have water.

I get it all from the outside wood. I got a great wood still. But you see in life, everything getting crowded now. You go on some of the trails, the official trails. There are people with dogs. It's overcrowded. So I created my own trail system where I have all the privacy in the world. Because privacy is what creates you as a person. One of the things you say in the book is that there's a limit to how long anybody should spend entirely alone. Are there points where you feel like you've been out

by yourself too long? No, but you need to socialize. But I know people that becomes hermit, not only in the outside, nor even in that they become hermits in their own apartment in the city. They have the food brought to them, but you know yourself when it's time to go to town, I have to go and get food. And I love going down, talking to people, getting the newspapers. I mean, it's become almost a religion getting the globe in the morning, on Saturday morning, you know, the weekend papers.

And I'm very interested. But you see, when I run, you are in your own space, and there's no interference. And there's a lot of beauty there. You see animals, yeah, and you're getting better. I don't like to be called old because I don't think old, and I don't feel old. Because, I mean, in the old days, my father and mother, they died at 79, 80. But they died because people told them to slow down. When my father was 50, people said, oh, you can't go in the bush by yourself. You can't do this.

You have to have a nap. And I'm 82. And I go as hard as I ever done. Yeah, because there's nobody there to tell me. Dag Obe on The Current in 2023. He is the subject of Outsider, a book by journalist Brett Popplewell. It is the 2024 winner of the Edna Stabler Award for Creative Nonfiction. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. Stream us around the world at cbc.ca.ideas and find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Brett Popplewell was a young sports journalist when he first met Dag Obey. He witnessed the much older man running for hours each day along rough mountain trails in the forests of BC's Okanagan. But when his book about Dag Outsider was published a decade later, Brett Popplewell was older, hitting midlife. He was starting to think about his own body and health. In the second part of his Stabler Award talk at Laurier University, he reflects on the typical North American lifestyle.

He asks whether it's possible to live in a more physically and mentally conscious way. While writing Outsider, I came to understand that many of the basic tenets at the core of Deg's philosophy were rooted in cultural traditions that have long existed in other places on earth. His way of life and of seeing the world only seems alien because we have been conditioned to view him and people like him as alien. He exists outside of our fast-paced, digitized, and Dwarfen-driven modern Western society. of our fast-paced, digitized, and Dwarfen-driven modern Western society.

He stands out amongst us. And because of that, I am convinced there are things we can learn from him and from others like him. I asked you earlier if you had ever met someone that when they tell you their age, it just doesn't seem possible. Someone whose age just didn't match up with your perception of what their age should be. We experience this often with

children who seem to grow up fast or who appear to be developing toward adulthood at a pace that feels out of line with our ingrained expectations. Other times we might experience this in the workplace where we encounter someone whose CV just seems to outpace their years. But have you ever met someone older who strikes you by appearance, demeanor, or some other factor to be significantly younger than they actually are, like a real-life Benjamin Button? If you have, then perhaps you've found yourself wondering if their secret is cosmetic surgery, hydration, sleep, a daily sauna, or maybe a cold plunge, or a diet laced with raw honey and Himalayan pink salt. I'm not an advocate for alternative

medicine. When I feel unwell, I go to a trained medical professional. But as a consumer who exists within Canadian society, I'm exposed every single day to a massive wellness industry offering countless therapies and diagnoses. We're all exposed to this. We have grown accustomed to being sold de-aging products by this ever-growing wellness industry, which is now valued at more than $6 trillion US. The biggest market for this industry

is here, is North America, where our life expectancies have been fluctuating in recent years. There are numerous factors that are going to lead each of us to our deaths. Amongst the obvious like cancer, car crashes, suicide, accidental overdose, heart attacks, and strokes is something statisticians refer to as lifestyle factors. This is where our sedentary lifestyles, poor diets, alcohol consumption, etc. all get linked to poor health outcomes and shorter lifespans. This is where I believe we each have something to learn from someone like Dag. Someone like Dag

who is living rough but is keeping himself mobile in order to survive in the environment in which he chooses to live. I've seen Dag just three times since Outsider came out and though I no longer trek across the country every few months to meet and talk with him I reflect often on much of what he passed on to me while I was working on this book. I now find myself trying to build off of the lessons I learned from him by incorporating some of his philosophies on time, age, and longevity with the research

and philosophies of others. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of blue zones, these five geographic regions that are said to have had high concentrations of people who live to 100 or older. Perhaps you've seen the Netflix series, Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones. If so, then you know that these places are each unique and yet somehow similar to one another. They are located thousands of kilometers apart. There's a small blue zone in Japan another in Greece one in Sardinia Another in Costa Rica and the last one is in California

If you've watched the documentary then you will have watched an untrained medical professional Indeed another author and journalist with a background in literary studies with a background in literary studies detailing his decades-long research into why and how the inhabitants of these regions appear to have traditionally lived longer than we do in our society. You might also be aware that these apparent blue zones are shrinking. The factors believed to have contributed to their populations longevity are disappearing and the knowledge and ways of being are getting replaced as a result of urbanization and globalization which is changing the local diets introducing new stresses and resulting in more sedentary behaviors

you may find the Netflix series compelling I'll admit I like I did I wasn't joking earlier when I mentioned the raw honey thing I actually eat that now I understand that that is the one mentioned the raw honey thing. I actually eat that now. I understand that that is one of the secrets to longevity on that little Greek island, Vicaria. I won't lie to you either that I try to walk up and downhill every day. There's a little hill next to my house.

And it's my understanding that that's what keeps people moving and aging in Sardinia. And I've tried to de-automize my life and lean back into physical chores every day like the 100 year olds in Okinawa. Earlier this year, my family and I spent two and a half months living in a blue zone. We chose the Necoian Peninsula in Costa Rica.

If you live here in Canada, it's a nice place to go in January. While there, we tried to consume a traditional Nikoian diet and adopted the Costa Rican Pura Vida or simple life philosophy. We adjusted our work days to better match the Costa Rican work schedule. We didn't detach ourselves from our phones, that would be kind of impossible if you're still working, but we detached our phones from the rest of the world. And we tried every day to focus on simple daily pleasures like

watching the sunrise or the sunset. I'm not naive enough to think that that experience has lengthened my life in any which way. But I will tell you that it made those two and a half months feel like the longest winter of my life in a good way. There's a reason for that too. Time moves faster when we are locked into daily routines that deprive us of new experiences. This is one of the reasons why time feels like it speeds up as we age. The clock, of course, ticks on with the steady pace

of a metronome, but our perception of time changes. Similarly, as we age, the years become a smaller fraction of our entire lives, making them feel as if they pass by faster. For my three-year-old, a year represents a third of his life. At the same time, he and other children are more likely to experience novel events, which makes time feel more stretched out in their minds.

I never studied physics. I'm a journalist with degrees in political science and history. But I understand these internal perceptions of time to be linked to Einstein's theory of relativity. in political science and history. But I understand these internal perceptions of time to be linked to Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein was only 26 years old when he hypothesized that time moves relative to the observer. What that means is that an object in motion

experiences time dilation, meaning that when an object is moving very fast, it experiences time more slowly than when it is at rest. As a journalist, I've spent much of my career trying to move fast, trying to move fast in order to meet revolving, crushing deadlines. I've spent the last 19 years looking for interesting people with interesting stories to tell. Dag is just one of them. At times it feels I've been doing this job forever, but usually it feels like I'm just getting started.

I increasingly believe that the novel interactions and experiences that have punctuated points in my career have helped to shape my perception of time as a reporter. Early in my career I worked in a newsroom in Rwanda. I spent my 27th birthday shadowing Nepalese peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Weeks before my wedding, I covered a plane crash in Russia. I trained with bullfighters in Mexico and boxers in Toronto in pursuit of other stories. At one point, I followed a climber to the southern base camp of Mount Everest

to explore the allure that mountain had on him and others. I've written about a lot of interesting people along the way, and though some of them I can no longer remember at all, I have pocketed wisdom from others. I find myself reflecting at times on some of the lasting takeaways of the people I have met in this job.

I remember how Secretariat's jockey Ron Turcotte told me that no one has ever truly forgotten, even if fewer and fewer people remember the things they once did. And I recall how Rocket Rashard's former linemate Elmer Locke, who at the age of 97, could no longer remember scoring the 1953 Stanley Cup winning goal. It was just one of 215 goals he scored over the course of 664 games, but he could remember his first skates, which he borrowed from a neighbor, and he could remember his mother who told him don't get hurt as he stepped onto the ice for the first time.

Back in 2023, one of my favorite podcasts, Radio Lab, devoted an entire episode to the secret to a long life. In their show, one of their reporters challenged herself to try to make a week of her life feel like two weeks by packing every waking moment of that week with completely novel experiences. In doing so she managed to trick her brain into making more control saves, making that week feel longer than it was. I was doing one of the most routine and forgettable things

imaginable when I listened to that episode. I was driving down Highway 401 but I was inspired by it to try to follow that reporters lead and pack as many novel experiences as possible Not just into a week, but into an entire year Perhaps it was the fact that I had recently turned 40 when I heard that episode or that Outsider had just come out and I was feeling a bit lost as to how I might continue to explore different ways to extend time and life in general. Filling your days with novelty is a different approach to longevity but shares parallels with some of Dag's philosophy on never sitting still long enough for time to catch up with you or even worse pass you by. When I became a father, it was explained to me

by other parents that the days we spend with our children are long, but the years are short. I won't bore you with the laundry list of novel activities that I have on my agenda for 2025, but I will say that lately my own personal effort to inject more novelty into my days has drawn less inspiration from the secret life of Walter Mitty than it has from my own children who seem to experience something new and novel every single day.

I will share with you that when I depart you today, I will be returning home to two young kids and a couple overflowing jugs of maple sap. This week's novelty trick is to try our hand for the first time at making maple syrup. And though it does feel like time moves slower when you're watching maple sap evaporate, it is the challenge and the experience of converting water drawn from a tree into syrup that we then pour on our yogurt together that I hope will help my children and me to make a lasting control save together. Soon after sugaring season is complete, I am scheduled to board a sailboat as crew

for a planned journey from Bermuda to the Azores. And though I expect that transatlantic crossing to be unique, memorable, and really really really slow. I am not convinced that it will do more to lengthen my concept of time than all the summer days I intend to spend experiencing as many of life's little novelties as I can with my kids. Be it the simple exploration of a new park, a picnic lunch in a canoe, an afternoon spent in a tent on our lawn, or a quest to collect green pine cones from a forest floor. Like that 97-year-old hockey player who remembered his first skates better than his Stanley Cup

winning goal, perhaps these simple little novelties will do more than just make the spring and summer feel longer. Maybe they will stick with me to the end of my time here. I will leave you now with a question and perhaps a challenge. If you have reached a stage in your life where time seems to be flying by, what might you do in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead to slow your perception of time going by. What novelty might you inject into the remaining hours before you go to bed in order to help your subconscious make a control save on your own day? You don't have to

move into an abandoned bus on the side of a mountain and start running endlessly in order to slow time or lengthen your life. Novelty doesn't have to be exceptional in order to be memorable. What new experiences or new people might you engage in order to enrich your day within your own capabilities? Maybe it's as simple as taking a different route home or preparing something you've never eaten for dinner. Sometimes it's just the little things that become the things we remember most. Like those seven words that an ageless man once said to me in a forest, time is a river never to return.

Thank you for spending your time with me today. Brett Popolam, author of Outsider. After his talk, the writer and journalism professor took questions from the audience at Laurier University. The first was about how Dag Obe is doing two years after the book was published. Not only because Dag lives rough, outside in the mountains, sleeping in an old school bus, but also because Outsider is Brett's investigation of Dag's difficult childhood as an adoptee in Nazi-occupied Norway.

The research turned up some facts that Dag himself did not know. He is very much living the same life that he was living at the start of the book and at the very end where I left him. He is 83 years old now. He will be 84 on May 15th and he just spent another winter in the bus in the Okanagan. The book itself, every time that I have spoken with him, he has told me that he has not yet read it. I mean, his life story is there for everyone to read now. And then they will see him and they will interact with him. And I think that that is a positive and can also sometimes

be a negative. If all you want to do is go to the grocery store and buy your food and head back into the forest and someone stops to want to talk to you to tell you what they thought of your childhood, as it was presented by me in the book. But at the same time, I know that he has had a lot of interactions with readers who have told him and have reached out to me to say the same thing, that they found his journey to be inspiring. And so I cling to that and I hope that he clings to that as well. You said you interviewed a lot of people and you can't remember lots of them. What was it about this fellow that particularly drew you to him? First, what drew me originally was the novelty of his setup.

The concept that somebody could live that way and do what he was doing just seemed impossible and because it seemed impossible, I wanted to explore it very deeply. That stuck with me, but so did a lot of the things that he had said to me in our first encounter, which had me then trying to do a background sort of story to try and understand more who he was, how he ended up there,

and why he was running day and night to essentially stay alive. Yes. Thanks for that great talk. It was really wonderful. One of the things that struck me about the book was that you do more than just report. You do more than just befriend.

You actually become an active intervener in his navigation of his own mysterious past. He was adopted in Norway. And there were all kinds of questions about the people who adopted him, and you took it on yourself to actually arrange for him to go back, to help him navigate all of that. How did that fit?

Because he hadn't taken that initiative himself, right? How did that fit with his sense of himself in the whole context that you've described today? And is this something that you would have done again, that you would have said, yes, I want to take this kind of interventionist role in this man's life? It's a really good question. And I think that as a journalist, it put me in uncomfortable territory. At least when I was trained, I was trained to try and stay out of the story. You are to report what you see and then present it. This book would not have worked that way.

One of my editors explained to me that the questions that I was posing, what was driving this narrative more so than the answers that he was able to provide. And the solution to that issue was that I needed to be more present in the book itself in order to to make it work as a book. As far as sort of the interventionist element to it, I mean it's it's it's always an ethical question. It's an ethical question in journalism. Like if you are covering a disaster and someone's in parallel right next to you but you're reporting the story, what do you do? We pose those questions, we present those scenarios to students and it's a real scenario. It happened to Anderson Cooper in Haiti. If you're covering like the police or something or if you're covering

a war and you know that some snipers are going to go up over that hill and kill some people, and you know that. What do you do with that information? Do you get in the way to share it so that people, that lives are saved? I try to go about this work kind of like I'm in Back to the Future, and I'm in, you don't want to touch something or disrupt something to change what's going to happen because you don't want to change the story but it is impossible because your presence there changes the story. Me being in the forest running with Dag or talking with Dag

keeps him in the forest longer than perhaps he would on a certain walk with me or run with me. It's a journalistic challenge. As far as would I do anything differently, would I be so involved in this story and sort of helping to uncover the backstory of Dag? And just I'll share a little bit of this with you in case you haven't read the book,

and I didn't talk about it in the talk, but in my first meeting with Dag, I came to understand that Dag was an orphan. He was born in 1941 in Norway and that he didn't know his parents and one of the things he said that he that he wanted out of life and this came from a question that I that I had where I was going along down the line of sort of this Therovian concept like you don't have but like you don't seem to care about stuff, about

things, about belongings. So I posed the question, is there anything that you wish you had, any object? And his response was, I wish I had a photograph of my mother. And that's when I started to really, you know, to answer the previous question. That really sort of, something got buried in me at that time that I might be able to actually help him find that photograph, because I've been trained as a journalist. I know how to use the archives. I know how to dig. Would I do that again? I think I would. I think that if someone said that to me, again, I might start doing some research even if there is no book project there, just because I'd be curious to see how far I could take it.

I think I would do this the same way again. Thank you very much, Brett. I am an octogenarian. I'm 84 years old. And as I sat there listening to you, it reminded me of when I crossed the stage at Brock University at age 82 to get my PhD. Wow. Age is not, it's just a number.

And I started thinking about my PhD when I was 75. And I thought I couldn't do it. But your stories are yours, empower people to realize that learning doesn't stop at a certain age. Your potential to pick up learning goes on forever. And I'm wondering how you're spreading this wonderful story about old people and the potential that they have, because in our social media of today, all we hear about are young people's stories and so on and so forth. Could you answer that question for me, please? Thank you. Thank you. I will try.

I'm inspired by what you accomplished. I do not have a PhD. I teach at a university. I'm a professor in journalism. And my father points it out to me, maybe you should go and get a PhD sometime. And I do sort of, in my mind mind I think perhaps I might do that when I am retired. That's something to keep me kind of young. I will speak to anybody about my understanding of DAG, of age, of time. I would give this talk to a room of 20 year olds. The readership, the people who are drawn to this story and come to talk more about it and engage more with it

are from an older demographic. I do believe there is a lot that I would have learned from Dag in my 20s, but I don't know how well I would have listened. Hi, I'm the principal actually of a local school and I've read your book, love the book. I wondered if you have advice for young people, advice for young writers, students who love to write, maybe love to write about sports for example.

What inspired you to jump into it's a little more creative than reporting on sports? I think writing is a lot like music. Like if you've played piano, if you've learned how to play piano, you know how this goes. Like you start with chopsticks and you work up to Tchaikovsky. And that has been my experience with writing as well. If any of your students are interested in journalism, get used to talking to other people and asking them

why and then the other big question like and then what happened but really I I say that because those are the questions that I lean on the most but the whole focus that I'm always having my head goes back to a quote that I heard said on a stage in Dallas the quote was all a profile is is figuring out the central complication of someone's life and how on a daily basis they go about solving it. And when I heard that said, I was like, wow, I've been doing this for a long time, and now I get it.

So if I was talking to your students, I'd encourage them to look at each other and look at anybody you're trying to write about and write like an honest story about who this person is, what they're trying to do, what they're dealing with, and figure out what is the central complication in their life and how on a daily basis they're going about solving it. Thank you very much Brett, Congratulations. Thank you. You've been listening to Ideas and to a public talk by author Brett Popplewell. His book is called Outsider, An Old Man, A Mountain, and The Search for a Hidden

Past. It won the 2024 Edna Stabler Award for Creative Nonfiction. Thank you to Bruce Gillespie and Carolyn Morrison of Wilfrid Laurier University, where this talk was recorded. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Technical production by Will Yar and Danielle Duval. Senior producer Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. And I'll leave you now with a few more minutes of a 2023 CBC interview with Brett Popplewell and the subject of his book, Dag Obe.

Dag had known that he was adopted in Nazi-occupied Norway, but knew little about his origins until Brett researched his birth parents. I didn't really know anything before. And, you know, I grew up on a farm. There's lots to do. There was no time to go looking for something in the past. When I first met Dag, I asked him what he understood of his parentage and he understood

that his mother was a Norwegian woman. He believed that she had died in a car accident in Sweden. He wasn't sure when. And what he understood of his father was that his father had been a German soldier. And he actually, he told me that he believed that his father had been a U-boat captain. So I wasn't sure that the context of his birth, I initially, actually I knew enough about the story of the singers of Abba to know that one of them had been what was called a Liebensborn child. So a child who was born into this program that the Nazis had set up to mate SS officers with Norwegian women. And I asked Dag in that first meeting if he had any inkling or any suspicions that he might have been one of those children. And he said, I don't know, but it was a possibility. So I started down

that road to try and see, because one thing that the Germans did is they documented all of this stuff. So I was trying to access to see if there was a file for him. And Dag did know what his birth name had been, Eric Hansen. I was curious if sort of some of that childhood trauma of being born into the war, not knowing exactly your origins, if that had some sort of an impact on sort of the man I came to know and respect and ultimately become really close friends with, Dag in the present. Dag Bjergsen It's actually, it didn't influence me because I'm always too busy to let things interfere with me. You go into the day and say, today I'm going to work harder than tomorrow.

And you don't think of an end game. You go to fall off the cliff in life, but you keep living it.