Caroline Paul: How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age

Why slow down as you get older?

Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren’t women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age?

Now she is sharing her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body, but why she says we must. She dives deep into the current research on aging and highlights the results with the stories of women like 93-year-old hiker Dot Fisher-Smith, 80-year-old scuba diver Louise Wholey, 52-year-old BASE jumper Shawn Brokemond, 64-year-old birdwatcher Virginia Rose, and the many septuagenarian Wave Chasers who boogie board together in the San Diego surf. These women aren’t experts. But their experiences and the scientific studies that back them up offer important insight into our own physical and emotional health as we age, showing that growing older is no reason for women to sell themselves short. She’s chronicled it all in her new book Tough Broad, a high-spirited call for women to embrace the outdoors, not back away from it, in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond.

Bring your taste for adventure and hear this New York Times-bestselling author share her funny, inspiring, deeply researched exploration into the science and psychology of the outdoors and our place in it as we age.

MLF ORGANIZER: Denise Michaud

A Grownups Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of Commonwealth Club World Affairs, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

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