Huge oil paintings that cut through to the core of humanity… graphic design for the Beastie Boys’ in-house magazine… handwritten title-sequences for Spike Jonze films… melted chocolate skate video graphics for legendary skateboard videos… we could go on.

While the artist and outdoorsman known as Geoff McFetridge wields a seriously varied portfolio, there’s a certain simplicity and everyday beauty that runs through his output that ties it all together—whether he’s lending his majestic penmanship to a huge brand or he’s sketching a quick drawing in a notebook.

This approach extends to what he calls ‘activities’ too—and his pure, simplistic style can be found in the way he approaches running, cycling, fishing, surfing, skating and about 50 other outdoor pursuits he enjoys.

In this interview we scratched the surface of this passion for doing stuff, chewing the cud on such vital subjects as his early days in Calgary, making magazines for Mike D, running under moonlight, portable paint-sets and the similarities between slogging through an ultramarathon and finishing a huge painting. 

It’s cool to think, “Oh yeah if I was around in 1970s San Francisco I’d be riding old beach cruisers down Repack,”—but that was super niche. I would have been oblivious to it. It’s only later when these things trickle down. 

And then you're better off. I think I was at the perfect time for this stuff—I didn’t have to build my own mountain bike. It was the same with computers. They put them in a lab in my second year of college—so I learned all the manual stuff, but then I had a year and a half to learn how computers worked. So I was in this window. The kids after me wouldn't learn the manual stuff, and my friends who graduated ahead of me didn't know how to use computers. 

With snowboarding—I was too early. I made my own snowboard and back then they were super stiff—but for the people who were ten years younger than me, snowboarding was way better. It got really good and really fun. 

There’s always those weird years at the start of something when it's still in the primordial soup—those years where people are working things out and everything is kind of taped together. It’s cool to look at, but maybe it’s better when the bikes aren’t snapping every five minutes.

Yeah, you don't want to be in the soup. You want hands and a tail. 

Is there a sweet-spot where things have advanced a little, but not too much? 

Yeah, you want to be the salamander. You want to be like, “I can live on land, but I can also live in the water.” That’s the perfect moment—when you’re halfway. In our time this is a very relevant topic because these cultures move so fast. 

We’ve all become spectators, and we have to decide are we going to get involved—like “Am I going to be a ‘post-Satisfy’ runner, or am I just going to skip it? These things move so fast—the next thing is coming. But when it's something like trail running, it’s actually really fun—so no one should skip it—don’t be a classicist or a hater. 

It’s easy to be above it—but maybe that’s kind of dull. It’s the same with music. You can turn your nose up at modern stuff, or you can throw yourself into it and enjoy it. 

I think, in this time of things moving fast, you want to maintain a criticality, but you also want to stay an optimist, right? With this culture of consumerism and the speed of culture, you can't just look back and be like, “Oh, look, that was great, that's our model.” There's a new model and the new model is very fast, and it's kind of fun to see things evolve so quickly. In the world of outdoors, it’s not even evolution—it’s like everything is getting smashed together all the time. 

Yeah, everything is getting ‘venn diagrammed’. So you get bike-packing or splitboarding or whatever. Surely it’ll happen with trail running too—where it mixes with bouldering or parkour to become something a bit more agile.

I ran a 50-mile race put together by Michael Versteeg, and when you're experiencing the course, you’re experiencing the course for someone who is thinking like that. He created this race and it has a logo and he talks about the race in a certain way, but then when you do it, it’s like, “Oh, he's created this experience.” The first 15 miles are all uphill—and then when it ends, it’s basically what you’re saying; it’s over rocks, you’re on your hands, it’s all wayfinding. As I was in it, I was like, “Oh, this is Michael Versteeg saying what we need, and what we don’t need in running. We don’t need new shoes, we need to go to new places.

And you can’t train for that. You have these races that are super fast and runnable—getting faster and faster and faster—but what happens when you build into a race something devastating? So you have to climb and your quads are blown. I couldn’t go downhill! At one point there was this rickety flight of wooden stairs in the middle of nowhere—going down this cliff.

It’s like what you were saying about bike-packing—everything is this mash—like logo ripoffs or something. But how many times can we make use of the same materials? At some point you have to use new materials. 

There needs to be new ingredients in the mix. This is a bit of a side-step, but I need to ask you about your time doing the layout for Grand Royal magazine in the mid-90s. For a lot of people—me included—that’s the best magazine ever made, but what was the reality of working on it? 

Well, the reality was that it was the greatest magazine of all time before I got there, right?

You started a few issues in, didn’t you?

Yeah, issue three and four. I bought the first issue of Grand Royal just by chance and I was like, “This is the greatest magazine ever made,” and then issue two came out and it was like really trying to be a psychotically good magazine. So stepping into it, I knew that—but it wasn’t intimidating. We were just going to keep making this great magazine. 

I was working with Mark Lewman who came from Club Homeboy, so they had this lineage—I was working with a hero, surrounded by heroes, so I was rising to the occasion. But it was ridiculous, because there’s a lot of stuff in those issues.

It’s so dense. Every article has five sub-articles going on inside it. It must have been a nightmare putting it together. 

And I didn't know how to put together a magazine and I was sort of terrible at it. I was writing stuff and editing stuff, and really we were tiny—it was zine mentality—but with the powerhouse of the Beastie Boys behind it, who were one of the biggest bands in the world. At that time Mike D could have done whatever he wanted, but he wanted a record label and a magazine… which was crazy.

So I got to be involved with something that was the best. And for everything you put into it, you knew it was going to be seen. And it was also a time when it was a new idea to start something like X-Girl or Milkfed or make this magazine—it was our generation saying, “This is our response to DIY culture”. It was this new thing. And we got to decide what it looked like.

And every page looks different. There’s so many different design things going on in there. Was there a specific thing you were going for, or was it just a case of throwing everything into it?

I was trying to make new stuff. I was working my way towards not being referential. I had gone to Cal Arts, so I was like, “The high can handle the low.” Design is personal expression—so this was design, but I wasn’t just going to pick up an old issue of Creem magazine and reference that. It was about what was new. It was digital. It was collaged. It looked different. And every page looked different. So it was excruciating! I didn’t have an overarching idea—I just wanted it to look new. 

And was there complete trust in you? Did you just have free reign? 

Yeah—no one ever said anything. I would just decide what the cover was. No one was going to tell me that the iron-on transfer had to be a certain way—I think because I was spending so much time on it, I kind of intimidated them.

And also you were young. You were making a magazine about youth, and you were straight out of college. You weren’t a 50 year old guessing what 20 year olds were into. 

Yeah—they were looking at skate culture, and I was skate culture—that was me and my friends. We truly were that. 

It shows. Okay, now back to the outdoor stuff… when did you start running?

I ran cross country when I was a little kid. I just remember running through parks and that was running to me. I don't know what I was doing, but I did some races where I would go with my dad to Montana. But I was also not a competitive person, so I just didn't understand. My parents were runners and they always ran, so I think it was in my head that running was normal. I don't know why I just always ran. It was something to do—hiking was too slow, so I'd run. 

And then once I had our first daughter, who's now 22, I would run with a stroller. We had one of those mountain strollers that are super lightweight ones with three wheels.

One of those beefy ones with air in the tyres?

Yeah—it was dope. I’d do real trail runs with this stroller—I’d fill it with snacks and books—and it was really good training. And then some of my cycling friends started running trail races. 

From what I’ve seen it seems like you go for the long distance endurance side of things. What’s the draw with that stuff? Do you enjoy the struggle?

Yeah—doing things that are hard—I think I grew into that. I think I grew into self-management. I didn't know how to manage myself, so I developed different tools. I grew up sort of not drinking or doing drugs or smoking or anything—I needed structure in my life. When I think of being in my 20s going for runs, I look back and think that was a good idea. I’d be having a nervous breakdown, and I’d go for a run.

That was your blowout? Instead of drinking to shut off you’d run for three hours?

Yes, exactly. That's why I bring it up—it’s also a little bit antisocial—because if you go out drinking, you’re drinking with your friends. A lot of self-destructive behaviour you do in public, whereas, early on, my running was done in isolation. 

I think that I realized that I was in the business of clear-headedness. My best work was done with a clear mind—a clear perspective, or a new perspective. And all of these things come out of being clear headed—I’m not going to be wasted or under stress, teetering on catastrophe. Some people do that, but I’m the opposite. I need to clear the table and reduce everything to some sort of clarity. 

So it’s not like the outdoor stuff was purposeful—it was already there, but I realised it was a tool that I had. I think I’d learned it a little bit already through skateboarding—because that was the first way I met people outside of my neighborhood . Then road cycling and racing cyclocross was a big connector to like-minded people.

Definitely. And I suppose maybe the obsession with numbers gets in the way too. Like you say, these are experiences, but they’re often reduced to numbers. How fast were you? How far did you go? We need to talk about sun-rises and wild animal sightings and the locals we chat to. Is that where the Moon Ruun [a mail-art calendar which encourages running on the full moon] came from? 

Yes, the MOON RUUN is very special to me for those types of reasons. I'm interested in perspective change—can an experience change your perspective on yourself or the world around you or your practices or anything. So for MOON RUUNers to run under the full moon every month, this might be the first time they’ve run at night. Maybe they run after dinner or they run in the middle of the night—I’ve done all those things. I’ve been travelling so I’ve ran in Vans in New York through Central Park because I didn’t have running shoes. So there’s that, and the big thing is how it affects your sense of time—there’s that thing of, “Oh my god, it’s the full moon again!” 

And also on a basic level I don’t think adults think about the moon that much. My daughters are always pointing it out, but I maybe wouldn’t notice it otherwise. 

Yeah—it was really fun when I was surfing all the time to just know the tides and the winds and start to get acclimatized. But I had this blind spot for the moon—I just ignored the moon, but now I’m so in tune with it, thinking about where I’ll be, where it will appear in the sky when travelling, and of course the full moon. And there are so many things like that. We ignore our own feet! 

Is the paint-set a similar thing? I’ve seen you take a portable paint set out on trips—is that a way to keep things fun and not too serious?

Yeah—I have a mini painting set that comes out when I’m camping or bike-packing or surfing. It’s for slowing down because I can get too into stuff. With surfing I can get obsessed, so it slows it down. 

It heightens the experience if you stop and do a watercolor on a bike tour. It is a hassle sometimes—say I’ve made breakfast and I’ve got this little period of time—it’s hard not to just veg-out or fish—but I’m glad to do it. You want to come up with ways to make things more fun—it’s like the things I write on the Moon Run card—”Best done on dirt” or “Best done with friends.” It’s to do with style—it could be wearing a fun shirt when you’re going fishing, or buying gloves in Japan for my run this morning.

That style thing is really hard to define—but it’s maybe more than just ‘wearing the right stuff’.

Yeah—what does style mean? True style is more like handwriting. There’s not ‘the best handwriting’ where you might say, “Virginia Woolf had such beautiful handwriting,” or “Winston Churchill had horrible handwriting,”—it's all good, because it’s handwriting.

It’s honest. I suppose that maybe applies to something like endurance running too. You can’t fake something like that. There’s no posing 40 miles into a race.

I love stuff where there's no faking—whether it’s because no one would bother, or it's too hard. I’m totally drawn to those experiences.