Caroline Paul

My name is Caroline Paul, and I'm a writer.

And my expertise is that I am postmenopausal.

I'm 61 years old.

Called Tough Broad, from boogie boarding to wing walking, how outdoor adventure improves our lives as we age.

You know, I think when I was young, I was really interested in metrics.

So I wanted to be the first.

She's specifically this like very adventure-y kind of lady.

Sometimes I was the first down a river.

I was the first to mountain bike through the Bolivian Andes.

It was almost like someone had like killed your dog and given you a weird acid drug at the same time for extended periods.

I was crying all the time and eating at weird hours of the night.

The other thing that kept happening is that I would go to parties and I wouldn't remember anybody's face.

And all of this went on for like... I think it was like four and a half years.

Jeez.

But I just remember around 57 suddenly realizing that I felt really different.

There was no more sudden crying jags.

I remembered everybody's name, everybody's face.

Oh, now I'm in menopause.

Narrowing life, not opening it up.

We have to watch our brain.

Our cognitive health is on decline.

We're told that as we age, we're losing things.

For menopausal women, women over 50, 60, we don't have a script anymore.

There's a big gray area.

I mean, Harrison Ford is still running through tombs.

Tom Cruise is jumping off some high building somewhere.

So she set out to write this book, which became... The quest to understand whether I should have outdoor adventure in my life.

From base jumping as a grandmother to sea kayaking to BMX bike racing.

I went birdwatching with someone in a wheelchair.

instead of closing down their life, had found new aspects of themselves.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a time of great exploration that we should be grabbing hold of.

There are new permutations and very valuable ones of us as we age.

And I wonder if one of the sort of uses of us, if we're gonna be that, let's say, scientific about it, is simply to show the younger generation that life is gonna get better.

I have seen personally that when young people see how our lives are at this age, I think all that is of great value.

So we don't really have to put a lot of work into that.

We can just go and be our best selves.

We should be sitting in that tree, being fed delectable meats, and doing whatever we want.