​Published in ATTN: 

Hurricane Patricia, which made landfall on the southwest coast of Mexico, is by all accounts a monster storm. Between Thursday and Friday, Patricia swiftly grew from a category one hurricane to a category five tempest, with sustained winds that peaked at 200 miles per hour and gusts of close to 250 miles per hour. When it made landfall the winds had slowed slightly, blowing at 165 miles per hour, according to the New York Times. It’s the strongest and most rapidly intensifying hurricane on record, and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate from Mexico’s Pacific coast as Patricia barreled towards the shore. Could it also be a product of climate change?
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While most scientists are hesitant to directly link this particular hurricane to our greenhouse gas emissions, Patricia could still be a preview of the storms that global warming will set the stage for in the years to come. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, “[I]t is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”

Published in ATTN:

As a Forbes contributor who covers personal finance, you might think Laura Shin has always been money savvy. But Shin says budgeting was in no way her thing when she was in her 20s. In fact, she spent the decade amassing big debts, without a savings account or a plan to pay them off.
Shin turned 34 before she made her first budget. And, she says, that’s what turned her whole life around.
“People tend to groan when they think of their budgets, like it’s a diet or something,” Shin tells ATTN:. “But for me [making a budget] ended up being super empowering and enabled me to start achieving my goals.” Goals that include being a successful freelance journalist, which she now is—and one who writes about money management, at that.

“I think without my mistakes, I’d have a lot less wisdom to impart,” Shin wrote in her ebook for Forbes, "The Millennial Game Plan: Career and Money and Secrets to Succeed in Today’s World." Luckily, she’s shared some of that wisdom with us.
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Published in RootsRated.

It’s still dark on the drive to the cliff, but the climbers in the car are already wide awake in anticipation of the morning’s session. Seattle-based climber Audrey Sniezek is behind the wheel, calmly steering as she chats with her partners—the “morning crew”, as they call themselves—en route to Little Si, their favorite sport-climbing crag. When they pull into the parking lot, theirs is the only car in sight.
With multiple 5.14s under her belt, Sniezek, 42, is one of the top female climbers in the country—and she gets it done while maintaining her career as a high-level software engineer. Hence the pre-dawn start just to climb at the local crag: It’s Sniezek’s way of fitting in the time she needs to stay on top of her game.
Sniezek has been climbing in the early mornings at little Si since 2005. “It’s the perfect training cliff, it’s relentless,” she says. “Every time I come here I learn something new about myself.” At this point she has ticked off many of the crag’s hardest routes, but Sniezek says she had been climbing for 10 years before she realized her full athletic potential—and figured out how to reach it while still balancing climbing with a demanding career.

RootsRated had the chance to talk with Sniezek to get her top tips for climbing at your best, even in the throes of a busy life. Here’s what she had to say.

Published in RootsRated. 

When Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run became a national sensation, its star, ultrarunner Micah True, also known as Caballo Blanco, or “White Horse,” went from unknown recluse to household name—and his fame was further heightened by hisunexpected death in 2012. But beneath the legend of Caballo Blanco was an authentic, down-to-earth man, a story that Seattle-based filmmaker Sterling Noren aims to convey in his new documentary, Run Free: The True Story of Caballo Blanco, which offers a fascinating look into Micah True’s real, yet no less remarkable, life.
As part of its U.S. tour, Run Free will show at the Capitol Theater in Olympia on Oct. 6, and at The Mountaineers in Seattle on Oct. 7, the second of which will be followed by a live Q&A with Sterling Noren and Seattle-local “Barefoot” Ted McDonald. RootsRated had the chance to sit down with Noren about his favorite local places to run, how he and True met, and the film’s backstory—including how he carried on after the tragic passing of Caballo Blanco midway through the project. Here’s what he had to say.
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