One Step Beyond

In an earlier life, Henk Rogers brought the computer game Tetris to the world, as you will know if you saw the movie Tetris . Following a near-fatal heart attack in 2005 just after selling a different company for over $100,000,000, he is now bringing his renowned determination, business acumen and innovative thinking to environmentalism. Mission #1: to eliminate our use of carbon-based fuels. For...

It's hard to find someone who doesn't appreciate the elephant, the largest land mammal on earth with the biggest brain, and the longest gestation period, an animal known for its sense of family, its empathy, its memory, and for being damn cuddly to boot. Yet we humans consistently sanction the murder of (primarily African) elephants for (primarily) their ivory, at a rate faster than new elephants...

Tony interviews Catskills resident Jamie Kennard about his recent undertaking of 500 5ks in 500 days – across multiple sporting disciplines, and all of them outdoors – as a means of coping with the loss of his wife Tracy to a particularly rare and brutal cancer at the age of 47. Jamie and Tracy had been together since they were 16, and married for the last 20+ of those 30 years. Compared with her...

Why do we travel? Does travel make us happier? Smarter? Braver? Or, given the current climate crisis, why should we travel? What's the difference between a tourist and a traveler? And what's a Digital Nomad and why does that term make some people cringe? These and many other key, core questions are answered by Nathan James Thomas , editor of the Intrepid Times , and author of Travel Your Way and U...

Jason Freedman and Philip Vondra are outdoorsy New Yorkers with a book just published entitled Beer Hiking New York: The Tastiest Way to Discover the Empire State. Colin Renton is an outdoorsy Scotsman with a book recently published entitled The Wine Runner: My Year of Hard Yards and Vineyards.  Host Tony Fletcher (an outdoorsy half-Scot and half-English Brit who also has USA citizenship) tal...

Turtles! Volcanoes! Caiman! Monkeys! Museums! Fumaroles! Scuba Diving! Swimming Holes! And Sunsets!  Paula is back as co-host for the first time since the Season 1 finale as she and Tony discuss their recent travel to Costa Rica, not only from an environmental and cultural perspective, but also from their uniquely different personal perspectives. Paula had not traveled outside the USA in 35 y...

In the late 1990s, Michael Dorame was a house music fanatic living in San Francisco, who became addicted to the drugs that kept him dancing all night long in the clubs. After OD'ing twice in three weekends, he found release, relief and redemption in the sport of rock climbing. Now, with producer Aaron Fong and celebrated outdoor sports cinematographer Chris Alstrin , Michael has made a film, Rock-...

Sign up for a free weekly article, links to Tony's other podcasts, writings, music and more at tonyfletcher.substack.com Is Travel Good For The Planet? This question is tackled by our return guest, the environmentally-focused, award-winning travel writer Shafik Meghji . In a conversation that includes the subject of Shafik's recent book, Crossed Off The Map: Travels in Bolivia , and host Tony Flet...

On this Episode, host Tony Fletcher is in conversation with his old London friend Richard Heard about the latter's recent Great American Road Trip from Chicago to New Orleans , setting out to trace the Story of the American Blues . Covering 1300 miles in 10 days, Richard and his American road partner also visited the Stax Museum of American Soul in Memphis, took in revered Country revue show the G...

If you have ever traveled, and if you have ever been able to string a sentence or two together in writing, you have probably thought of becoming a travel writer. After all, who wouldn’t want to get paid to travel? On this episode of One Step Beyond , Shafik Meghji , co-author of 40 travel guidebooks, sole author of the acclaimed new book Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia , and a prolifi...

Boff Whalley is an author and musician (you may remember his old band Chumbawamba and their global hit "Tubthumping"),who put "Fell Runner" as occupation on his daughter's birth certificate. Gary Devine is his mate from the Leeds punk scene of the 1980s, who is a former British champion fell runner. " Faster! Louder !" is Boff's new book, all about Gary, and fell running, and punk rock. It is a da...

For this episode, we reconnect with Ric Dragon , originally featured way back on Episode 7 of Season 1, in July 2020, shortly after he had opened Arte Sumapaz , a Centre for the Arts outside of Bogotá , Colombia . That episode focused on Ric’s middle-aged reset, in which he migrated to a new country with a troubled history and had just started this ambitious project. Now that I have been to Arte S...

Michael Anthony is the 36-year-old author of the new graphic memoir JUST ANOTHER MEAT-EATING DIRTBAG , published by Street Noise with art by Chai Simone . While Michael describes his new book as essentially a ‘love story’ between two seemingly distinct characters with different outlooks on life and death in the human and animal kingdoms, it draws in part – as did the entirety of his first two book...

What it's like to climb Mount Kilimanjaro ? Your host Tony Fletcher documented his own experiences climbing to the Roof of Africa, as narrated in real time, alongside interviews with fellow climbers and guides, and on-the-mountain 'field' recordings; these were then combined with detailed historical and contextual studio narrative to form a four-part documentary with which One Step Beyond was orig...

Claire Yandell is a 27-yr old traveler and artist who has managed to take her art on her travels and even have it help pay for her travels. She and Tony met in October 2021 at Arte Sumapaz in Colombia (check Episode 7 of One Step Beyond for more about Arte Sumapaz), a country with which Claire fell in love and lived for eighteen months, until just recently. (She intends to return in the New Year o...

The O Positive Festival , held in Kingston, New York, in early October every year, presents a weekend full of music, art and wellness activities across all genres and disciplines, for all age groups, indoors and outdoors, and all for the price of a donation. But it's behind the scenes that O Positive has the biggest impact. The festival confronts the lack of affordable and free health care amongst...

Damian Hall is a British trail runner with several Fastest Known Times to his name, including a famed record-breaking 261-mile run on the UK’s Pennine Way in 2020. A former journalist, he has become equally well known for his environmental activism, qualities that come together in his new book We Can’t Run Away From This: Racing to Improve Running’s Footprint In Our Climate Emergency. In this...

Ken Posner recently completed the 211-mile John Muir Trail in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains... barefoot from start to finish. On this episode, he takes host Tony Fletcher onto a trail in the more forgiving Shawangunk Mountains of the Hudson Valley to explain, and demonstrate, the benefits of hiking barefoot, on easy trails like this but also on the toughest parts of the John Muir Trail. Ken...

To get us warmed up on this first episode of our long overdue new series/season, Tony talks to Matt Fitzgerald , an endurance coach, nutritionist and prolific author about physiology and running, the joys of exercise, the ABCs of fitness, and the 80/20 philosophy of training that puts the emphasis on keeping most workouts easy . Matt also explains the pitfall of Superhumanization in regard to East...

One Step Beyond , the podcast all about positively engaging with the world outside our door, is back. Yes, we’ve been away for a full year, but fear not, a new season will be returning to your podcast feed as of the last week of September 2022. What can you expect from the first few episodes? Well, there’s an interview with sports author, endurance coach nutritionist and all-round good guy Matt Fi...

For this episode, the last in Series 1 of One Step Beyond , we flip the script, and allow regular host Tony Fletcher to be interviewed by guest host Paula Lucas about his recent brain hemorrhage - and how lucky he feels to have fallen into the small percentage of people who get to walk away unscathed. Paula asks the questions surely pounding away in the back of your mind (ouch!), like: How did the...

It’s not every 17-year old who gets the chance to interview Paul McCartney for three hours, especially at the point, back in early 1982, that Macca had barely been heard from publicly since the assassination of his former Beatles band mate John Lennon on that tragically book-marked day of December 8, 1980. That 17-year old was your One Step Beyond host, Tony Fletcher , and the story you will hear...

Following on from Episode 31, Running An Ultra, which featured Mike Siudy , co-Race Director of the Manitou's Revenge ultramarathon in the Catskill Mountains, this episode features a round-table discussion with five people who have all themselves completed at least one Manitou's Revenge, and were all involved in this year's event either as competitors or volunteers. Joining host Tony Fletcher are...

Have you ever considered upping your outdoor game to take on an ultra marathon? Or do you consider those who willingly subject themselves to something like Manitou’s Revenge - the 54 mile race through, or rather, up and down the Catskill Mountains , and which One Step Beyond's Tony Fletcher just completed for the second time – to be complete lunatics worthy only of an almost morbid fascination? Ei...

In this episode, host Tony Fletcher reads another short story from his Round The World, backpacking trip of 2016 with wife and 11-year old son: A Travel Day , set in Morocco . Doing so inspires him to discuss the definition and purpose of travel, to consider how the joy is to be found in the sum of its parts, not in largely mythical grand epiphanies or supposedly magical destinations. “Great trave...