This Is My Job Now

The state of ‘The Storm’ headed into year 3 as a paid enterprise

My 8-year-old was aghast last week when his school, as he put it, “forced” his third-grade class to watch “baby-ish shows meant for a second-grader” during a rainy-day recess. Though second grade ended eight months ago, to him it’s his “little kid” time, too distant to identify in the fossil record.

As adults, our worlds tend to feel more stable, final even. I met my wife 12 years ago. We made a kid and moved to a different borough, but I don’t feel substantively different from the Lite Beer Bro who swiped right on Tinder in 2013.

But man sometimes the universe smashes that fast-forward button, and everything seems to change so rapidly and so completely that life can never go back to whatever it was when you were your own adult version of a little kid.

Such events have hit me with regularity over the past five years: in 2020, a violent resurgence of a vasovagal (sudden passing out) condition that had plagued me as a teenager; in 2022, an incinerated tib-fib that in a previous era would have left me with a wooden leg and a “Stumpy Stu” nickname; in 2024 a blocked artery that was engraving my headstone until a lucky intervention that started with a tummy ache at Jackson Hole.

If you’ve only known me since The Storm’s debut, you may wonder why I undergo a life-threatening health crisis every 12 to 18 months. This is not, in fact, my norm, and I’m hoping we’re all finished here with the near-death experiences until I reach a more appropriate age for sudden mortality.

But I do have one more life-changing, non-traumatic event to tell you about: The Storm is my job now.

I mentioned this in my five-year anniversary post last October. It wasn’t the main point of the post, but a lot of you caught that and reached out with congratulations. And thank you, all, for those.

But these messages were freighted with something else: a sense of pride and ownership, of satisfaction at being part of a successful thing. Self-validation, yes, that you were not the only one who wanted ski stories untethered from halfpipes and hella-deep gnarlies, that ski news about the ski areas where you actually ski is more compelling than a list of the 10 best organic garlic bars in Telluride. You liked the product and were happy to pay for it. But beyond the transactional, I felt something else: Storm subscribers were rooting for me. They were fans as much as customers, as aligned to the product as they may be to the Cubbies or the Red Sox.

Perhaps that’s overstating it. But people care about The Storm and, by extension, it seems, about me.

So I want to use this third-year anniversary of adding The Storm’s paywall to give you what amounts to an investor update, a snapshot of the newsletter and the not-dead-yet dude who makes it. And since the two are inextricable, I’ll focus on the three things that readers ask me about the most and how they’re all tied together:

My leg

If you missed the memo, I spiral-fractured my lower left leg into sawdust three Februarys ago at Black Mountain of Maine. I mention this for two reasons: 1) readers still ask me about it constantly, and, 2) this was the catalyst for paywall activation.

First, the leg, improbably and to my everlasting shock, more or less fully healed. This is amazing to me because, well:

stormskijournal

A post shared by @stormskijournal

A plate and 13 pins remain and always will. That leg fusses a bit when it’s very cold, barks when I hook a hard right on a steep run, remains a little less forceful and dynamic than its twin. But I’ve skied, as of this writing, 139 days since Operation Break-and-Scream. I’m counting that as a full recovery.

The leg’s importance to Storm lore, however, is that when I found my ski season over on Feb. 11 and my world limited to a couch, I had nothing to do but write, and after two years writing The Storm for free, it was time to activate the paywall.

My heart

In case you missed the second memo, a cardiologist discovered a 100 percent blockage in the anterior descending artery of my heart last January. Doctors call this “the widowmaker,” because people who have a heart attack with that pathway blocked have a habit of dying. Which I had not added to my family calendar.

“The bad news is, this could be fatal,” the cardiologist said as he shuffled me out the door to the ER. “The good news is, we know exactly what’s wrong, and exactly how to fix it, and once we do, you’ll live a normal life.”

He was right. Everything was fixed by dusk the following day. Back home, I reset my diet, drank less, slept more, exercised almost every day. I’m down 30 pounds, to a weight I haven’t seen since my Marathon Bro days a decade ago.

So I’m fit and feel good, but 2024 was a rough year mentally. Post-stent, I was always tired, sometimes grouchy, often overwhelmed. Even though I sat down to write every day, I had a hard time getting to and through things. Chronic migraines – some of the worst of my life – descended, shutting me down for a day or several days each time. I had a pile of pills for my stent and a separate, ever-shuffling and growing pile of pills for my mind, which could never quite seem to accept how close it had all come to going away.

The Storm

In some ways, The Storm had a big year five. I published 40 podcasts; launched The Storm Store; signed a big partnership with Slopes and renewed my relationships with Executive Search, Aspenware, and Hotronics; launched my first digital ad campaigns with an assist from outdoor digital marketing agency Bonfire Collective; broke some big stories, including the news that Powdr was selling Killington; evolved the podcast to include video and launched a YouTube channel; spoke at several community panels and industry events; appeared on a bunch of podcasts (including one where I tell the heart story); and acted as an expert ski source in places like The Washington Post and The Economist. Paid and free subscriber numbers continued to grow.

But I didn’t hit my 100. And that annoys me. I’d blown past 100 articles per year each year from 2020 to 2023 without even trying. So certain was I in my own reliability that I launched my whole paywall on that content promise: 118 articles in 2020, 102 in ’21, 140 in ’22, and 115 in ‘23. But I fell behind early in 2024 and could never catch up. Even as I realized this, I thought I could get there, but as I watched the doors swing closed in slow motion over several months, I could never activate the turboboosters.

This slow year doesn’t seem to bother most of you as much as it bothers me. The few inquiries I’ve gotten into the sclerotic content cadence have come attached to check-ins on my health. The paid subscriber renewal rate has remained pretty much exactly at 90 percent, a phenomenal stat.

The only way I can explain this subscriber reaction is to go back to my earlier point: The Storm’s paid subscribers are advocates and fans and supporters of the newsletter as much as they are customers. They expect something for their money, but they will support me through a down year.

That, I suppose, is a very human and humane response. Allow me this comparison: I’ve been a Michigan football season ticket holder since 2009, a 5-7 campaign that ended with the sixth of seven consecutive losses to Ohio State (it does end, Buckeye fans, though for my sake hopefully not for a while). But as disgruntled Wolverines fans abandoned their season tickets in 2009 and ‘10, I kept buying more, upping my allotment from two to four to eight (the max), knowing that Future Stu would benefit. Future Stu had to wait a while, through nine more losses to the Buckeyes in 10 years, and then through Covid. And then, starting in 2021, Michigan went 40-3 in three seasons, beat Ohio State three times in a row, and won the team’s first national championship since 1997.

I don’t think The Storm had a 5-7 year in 2024, but we didn’t win the natty either. We needed more recruits. And in my case, those recruits were the meds and the counseling to pull myself out of whatever mental fog I’d stumbled into post-stent.

I feel good now. The content is flowing. I think we recruited well. But I don’t take your support for granted, and I know when The Storm hasn’t delivered to its potential. I hope you believe that where there are valleys, there are hills, and that I’m chugging back toward the summit as fast as I can.

Thank you for your support.

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