a December (& November) to Remember

At the time of writing, I've gotten to ski 10 days this early season. In order, they were Arapahoe Basin/Keystone, Keystone, Eldora, Wolf Creek, Winter Park, Vail/Copper Mountain, Keystone, Steamboat, Vail, and Eldora. Tomorrow, I'm going to get another day at Vail. This is by far the most I've ever skied to this point. This is by far the busiest I've ever been at this time of year. And I absolutely love it.

For those of you who don't know, I'm arriving at the end of my first semester in college. I'm studying biomedical engineering, which is a generally difficult subject. Skiing as much as I do, maintaining my grades, managing a company, and producing enough content to have a new, engaging long-form video each week is absolutely exhausting. Let's start with the first two things.

Skiing is a privilege that I'm incredibly lucky to get to partake in. And it admittedly does affect my academic performance. I desire to eventually go to medical school. As such, I need to maintain a very high GPA. My goal is a 3.7, which is the equivalent of receiving an A minuse in every class I take throughout my time at CU. As of now, I'm doing reasonably fine. However, if my grades ever dip to a point I'm not happy with, skiing will be the first thing I'll give up. And that's where the third thing comes in. As many of you know, I'm not the only one working behind the scenes to bring you our videos. Arjun, my incredible writer, writes equally as many, if not more, of the scripts than I do. Yes, I have to narrate and edit. But if I was unable to ski, spending entire days to drive to the mountains, experience them, and return, I could still spend an hour or two each day to produce the videos that Arjun writes without it costing nearly as much in academic performance. Another safeguard that both Arjun and I try to practice is preparing everything four to six weeks in advance. For example, right now, I have every video through the new year on the channel and ready to be uploaded, and we're both in the process of writing scripts for later in the spring. That way, if either of us needs a week or two to catch up on academics, we can take that time to completely forget about YouTube and skiing, and just take care of our most pressing needs. This is a much more complex operation that some of you may realize. Between actually skiing, and then writing, recording, editing, and reviewing, YouTube takes up to 60% of my time. If we count out the actual skiing as just a hobby, YouTube can still take up to a dozen hours a week, or more if I'm working on several projects that week. We have every video through January 9th, 2026 planned, so that we can always know what's coming up, and if we have a big project we need to start early on. I'm rambling a little bit, but all this is to say: we do everything we can to reasonably balance skiing, making videos, and performing well in school. 

The reason I'm writing now is because everything has gone smoothly. Over the past two months, we've had some incredible ski days. We've produced some incredible videos, some of which y'all haven't yet seen but we're super excited to unveil. In this incredibly busy time of the year, I'm taking a few minutes to reflect on how we've succeeded, and how we're going to keep it going. I'm grateful. I'm grateful for my parents, who instilled this level of organization into me. I'm grateful for all of my friends and skiing partners. I'm incredibly grateful for Arjun for taking so much work off my shoulders, and for leveling up Hater's Guides. And I'm grateful to all of you. If you're reading this, you're either very lost or a very passionate fan. So thank you. All my love, I'm out.

-SRG

P.S. I'm tryna figure out how to add a comments section to these.