Tough Broad

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl, a funny, inspiring, deeply researched exploration into the science and psychology of the outdoors and our place in it as we age—now in paperback.

Caroline Paul has always filled her life with adventure: From mountain biking in the Bolivian Andes to pitching a tent, mid-blizzard, on Denali, she has never been a stranger to the exhilaration the outdoors can hold. Yet through it all, she has long wondered, Why aren’t women, like men, encouraged to keep adventuring into old age?

Tough Broad is her quest to understand not just how to live a dynamic life in a changing body, but why we must. She dives deep into the current research on aging, and highlights the results with the stories of women like ninety-three-year-old hiker Dot Fisher-Smith, eighty-year-old scuba diver Louise Wholey, fifty-two-year-old BASE jumper Shawn Brokemond, sixty-four-year-old birdwatcher Virginia Rose, and the many septuagenarian Wave Chasers who boogie board together in the San Diego surf. These women aren’t experts. But their experiences and the scientific studies that back them up offer important insight into our own physical and emotional health as we age, showing that growing older is no reason for women to sell themselves short.

Tough Broad is a high-spirited call for women to embrace the outdoors, not back away from it, in our fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond, casting our own futures in a new and dazzling light.