Borderlands Moves Its Headquarters from Paris to Salt Lake City

Today Borderlands moves home.

Two years ago, I moved my family here believing a trail running media company could be headquartered anywhere in the world and produce the same results.

I was wrong.

For two years, my wife and I dragged our three kids through Airbnbs across Paris, Copenhagen, Ljunghusen, and Frederiksværk. We asked them to learn languages we didn’t speak and build a life that never stayed still for long.

I started having opinions about baguettes.

I became obsessed with the Americans who came here looking for something they couldn’t quite name. Hemingway’s neighborhood became mine. I walked past the cafés where he and Fitzgerald escaped the cold over wine. Gertrude Stein’s apartment was a few minutes from our grocery store. John Steinbeck’s old apartment sat just beyond the Métro stop on the way to church.

At first I thought those places held some kind of magic.

Now I think they held something else.

Pressure.

Paris demands your attention. It compresses life. It makes you wrestle with your work, your identity, your ambitions, and your limitations. It’s a constant reminder that you’re somewhere extraordinary, but not because of you. This city has produced greatness at every turn for centuries. If you’re not great because of it, you don’t belong here.

Looking back, I don’t think I could have built this version of Borderlands anywhere else.

I think every great American-in-Paris story begins the same way. People arrive ambitious, optimistic, convinced that whatever Paris gave Hemingway or Picasso might somehow rub off on them too.

Then life.

I took my son to school in the dark and picked him up in the dark. The bureaucracy wore us down. Our kids seemed to have another school holiday every other week. The romance slowly gave way to routine.

Eventually you realize Paris wasn’t giving those people anything.

It was asking something of them.

Paris is hard. Not in the dramatic sense. In the daily sense. It asks for patience, humility, attention, and endurance. You survive it, and somewhere in that survival you become someone more capable than the person who arrived.

It’s miserable somewhere around mile 70, and only makes sense afterward. Many people who start a hundred-miler don’t finish one.

Nothing is handed to you in Paris. It’s earned without you noticing and you only recognize it once you leave. For the countryside or home.

The gift of Paris isn’t living there forever.

The gift of Paris is leaving it.

You leave carrying a version of yourself that didn’t exist when you arrived.

Paris gave me vision before it gave me results. Or more accurately, it gave me a hunger for bigger vision.

Paris didn’t build Borderlands.

It built the person who could.

Now it’s time to find out whether that’s true.