Next Level Skiing S7 E6 | Staying Balanced with Brody Leven
Next Level Skiing S7 E6 | Staying Balanced with Brody Leven
Brody Leven is committed.
Brody Leven doesn’t dabble—he commits. Once a dedicated park skier logging 100 days a season, he shifted gears completely, trading high-flying tricks for 100 days a year climbing and skiing mountains. It’s now been over a decade since the Fischer-sponsored athlete last rode a chairlift.
A lifelong vegetarian and passionate climate advocate, Brody has never eaten meat. During the pandemic, he made a commitment to exercise outside every single day—a streak he’s kept alive for more than four years. As he puts it, he's “obsessed with ideas and doing things that are hard.”
In this episode, Brody reflects on growing up skiing in Ohio, chasing untracked snow, and redefining what it means to be a ski mountaineer. His unique approach doesn’t always align with traditional labels—whether those of professional skiers or mountaineers—but that’s exactly the point.
Topics
1:10 - An after-school ski program in Ohio
4:00 - Moving to Salt Lake City in 2005 for the skiing
12:10 - Going from 100 days in the park to 100 days in the backcountry
14:20 - Ten years without riding lifts
15:40 - Principled skiing
24:00 - Perfecting turns without ever skiing on a groomer
28:30 - Climbing and skiing peaks in Uganda, Romania and Georgia
30:10 - The “thief of credibility” in the culture of ski mountaineering
36:00 - The light and fast ethos in ski mountaineering
41:00 - Jumping into exercising outside every day
49:00 - Tackling climate change is like coming to a mountain with lots of little steps.
Quotes
“When you're back there, you're listening to what the mountains are telling you and what your intuition is telling you and the frequency with which you do it, you know, getting out there so regularly and, you know, kind of higher risk terrain, you develop that fluency, right? And you push yourself to a spot where you have an intuitive fluency.” - Jason Blevins
“I'm not like a woo-woo person, I'm very logical. And so when I say the essence of skiing, I do not mean that in any sort of woo-woo way. I mean, literally, it's how you move around the mountain on skis.” - Brody Leven
“There's this culture of doing cool things and being quiet about it but secretly hoping other people hype you up in the parking lots. And like that's, it's just so weird for me. It's uncomfortable for me. I don't know. So I hype it up myself because I get back and I'm proud of it that part of my job is letting people know what I've done.” - Brody Leven
“In hindsight, I didn't know it at the time, but I think in hindsight, finding that consistency was some way of having control over such an otherwise out-of-our-control situation. And so much of my life seems to lack that control.” - Brody Leven
Resources
For more listening, check out our full collection of "Next Level Skiing" podcasts here.
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Next Level Skiing Recorded by Jason Blevins.
