Month: March 2019

The ski trail map at your local mountain was probably painted by James Niehues. Now you can see his life’s work in one beautiful book.

There’s good chance that any time you slide off the top of a chairlift, you’ll be faced with James Niehues’s work. The 72-year-old Coloradan has hand-painted the maps used by more than 200 ski resorts. But skiing’s most prolific artist says he stumbled into it by luck. In 1987, Niehues had just moved to Denver from Grand Junction, Colorado. He had a couple of kids, and he was looking for work as a graphic designer after his work at an auto-parts manufacturer dried up. He reached out to local artist Bill Brown, who gave him a one-off job working on the trail map for Winter Park’s Mary Jane Mountain. Brown, who was the only resort-map artist at the time, was looking to retire, and he passed the ski-map mantle on to Niehues. 

Aside from ideal timing, Niehues says he thinks he has an innate ability to see a whole mountain in one shot. We’d have to agree—his maps are incredibly accurate, down to the parking lots, but with a nostalgic wash of pastel color that’s instantly recognizable. 

Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that runs until January 3 (and has far exceeded its goal), he plans to release a book this summer showcasing three decades’ worth of work. Niehues told us about his book project, the mountains he’s always wanted to draw, why you can’t beat a hand-painted trail map, and how technology has changed his job for the better.

On His Process: “I always fly over the mountain and photograph it. Today I can go in deep on Google, but aerial photography gives me an idea of what it looks like that I can quote from. Then the first step is to go into a small pencil sketch. If it’s a complicated mountain, and I see different ways to illustrate it, I’ll send different thumbnails to clients. Then I’ll go into a comprehensive sketch that will be as big as the map. Once it’s approved, I’ll project the image onto my painting surface, trace every detail, and then airbrush. I start with the sky and work from the top down filling in details.”

On the Details: “It’s a puzzle to put together. I struggled early on getting the back sides of mountains right. I’m constantly trying to get all the flow lines correct and running down the page. Resorts know what they want and need, but sometimes they want to show their mountain bigger than it is. My job is to bring it back to reality. My favorite mountains are the ones where I can paint cliffs or rugged peaks and the mountains beyond. But I really like to do the mountains in New Zealand, because there are no trees there.”

On Skiing: “I learned in ski in Europe when I was in the Army. A couple of us guys took leave and went to down to Switzerland. Mine was the fastest time down, so I thought I was pretty good. When I tried to ski again at Powderhorn, outside Grand Junction, after I came back in 1969, I walked off the mountain because I couldn’t turn. On the job, I became an intermediate skier. It’s important, because I understand what other skiers go through in navigating the mountain.”

On the History of Ski Maps: “There are artists that have drawn a few maps, but there are really only two others who have done what I do. In the 1970s, Hal Shelton pioneered it here in the States. He was the first to paint trail maps, and he did it with an airbrush, because you can create subtle surfaces and lots of backlight. Bill Brown did it in the eighties, and then I took over for him. In the late nineties, everyone was looking at new technology because they thought computers could do a better job of mapping, but a lot of them have come back to my style. Now with the internet, it’s so important to have a good image. You’ve got a mountain that’s beautiful and challenging, and you’ve got to show that, and the computer images just aren’t as beautiful. This is one thing that is better done the way it was done 50 years ago.”

On Anthologizing: “Way back in the mid-nineties I started thinking that maybe I’d have enough illustrations for a book, so I started working book rights into my contract. Didn’t pursue it heavily, but then I started realizing, I’m 72 now, so it’s time to get it going.”

On Retirement: “I’ve tried to retire, but then someone will call me and I’ve always wanted to do their mountain, so I end up jumping back in. I’m doing a sketch of Mount Bachelor right now; they have 180 degrees of skiing, and I’ve always wanted to do that. An artist named Rad Smith, who is in Bozeman, Montana, is working as a protégé. He used to make maps with computers but realized he couldn’t do it as well, so he went back to painting. There don’t seem to be any others who are jumping into it. It’s a small market. It was a small market for me.”

On Art: “I think of the paintings as art instead of trail maps. In the early days, it was really about the map, but the values have shifted. Hal and Bill realized it was important to get the beauty and to give people something they could look at and dream about. I think a computer-generated map is a reflection of the office—it’s rigid. A hand-painted map reflects the outdoors. You ski to get into that environment.”

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Our advice for maintaining your nutrition and training goals this holiday season? Chill out.

There are countless ways to cut calories and maintain your training plan during the holiday season: Drink seltzer instead of a cocktail. Balance out heavy foods with salads and vegetables. Set your alarm early to get a run in before the family wakes up. But the best way to stay fit—and sane? Chill out.

“Food isn’t something you should have to think about all the time,” says Heather Caplan, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, distance runner, and former running coach. Caplan also cofounded the Lane 9 Project, a community dedicated to educating athletes about disordered eating. For performance-driven athletes and anyone with a history of restrictive eating, the holidays can lead to a lot more than a few missed workouts or indulgent meals. Here she offers her advice for getting through the holiday season without stirring up food- or fitness-related guilt or stress.

Ditch the Restriction

“As humans, we don’t respond well to scarcity. The mentality that you must limit your intake of certain foods, or that this is your only chance to eat something, provokes a sense of deprivation. It can trigger binge eating or leave you feeling dissatisfied—like you ate carrots all night while everyone else enjoyed cookies.” Caplan’s advice to clients? “Think about the foods from this season that you’re excited about, and focus on really letting yourself savor them. Give yourself permission to eat what you like and skip what you don’t.”

Practice Flexibility

“You can be dedicated to your training without totally putting your life on hold. I’ve had a couple training cycles where I had to go out for two-hour-long runs at Christmas,” she says. “We’re always going to have things that come up, planned or not. But the holidays we can see coming, which makes them a great opportunity for an athlete to try and practice flexibility. Then, when something unexpected like a family emergency or a job change happens, you’re better prepared. You can always stand to learn a lesson in giving yourself a little slack and a little grace.”

Stop Moralizing Your Food Choices

“If someone experiences guilt on a regular basis around food, telling them to go into a party and not feel guilty about what they eat is unrealistic. But in the long term, the first thing we want to work on is not categorizing foods as good or bad. If you assign morality to a food, you assign that morality to yourself when you eat that food.” Caplan suggests taking a small step: “Go into a party and say, ‘I’m going to see all foods as equal,’ instead of saying, ‘I’m only going to eat the good, healthy food.’”

Give Your Body a Break

“Don’t underestimate the effect of outside stress—not just exercise stress—when it comes to training during the holidays, and don’t forget that diets are mentally taxing, too. If you’re traveling a lot, changing time zones, or dealing with challenging family relationships or dynamics, give yourself a break. Take the intensity or the mileage down a little bit. Just make sure you’re not overworking your body.”

Remember: It’s Just a Phase

“Try to have some flexibility around the holidays, especially if you don’t have a race coming up and you’re not in a peak-training cycle,” she says. “Your body absolutely will recalibrate itself. Many of my clients struggle with daily fluctuations, like bloating or a change in eating habits, that leave them feeling like they derailed themselves in some way. But the idea that we can’t have fluctuations in our lives or our diets is totally misguided. So is the idea that we need to immediately correct a behavior that sets us off track. That’s the problem with the diet mentality: it asks us to see every day as a clean slate that we must fill with the perfect foods and the perfect amount of exercise. Our habits and our lifestyle ebb and flow—they don’t just stay on a straight line and move forward forever.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Real-world data shows elite ultrarunners average 180 steps per minute—and that means nothing

On the surface, the findings from a new study—among the first to harvest biomechanical data from top runners during the heat of real-world competition using wearable technology—seem to support one of the most widely cited and hotly contested rules of running form. For decades, form gurus have argued that runners should aspire to take at least 180 steps per minute. And sure enough, data from 20 competitors at the International Association of Ultrarunning 100K World Championships found that their average cadence was 182.0 steps per minute. But the devil, as usual, is in the details.

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology by Geoff Burns, a biomechanics Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan’s Michigan Performance Research Laboratory, and his colleagues. Burns recruited 20 men and women, all of whom finished in the top 25 of the 2016 edition of the 100K championships, which took place in Los Alcazares, Spain. Burns himself was one of the subjects: he finished fifth overall, in a time of six hours, 38 minutes and 34 seconds, as part of the bronze-medal-winning U.S. team.

Cadence, which is simply the number of steps you take each minute, has been a hot topic in running form debates for years, dating back to an observation made by running coach Jack Daniels at the 1984 Olympics. Sitting in the stands and counting steps as the runners whizzed by, he noted that they all seemed to exceed 180—a threshold that came to be seen as almost a law of nature. Taking short, quick steps, the theory goes, optimizes your efficiency and minimizes your injury risk by reducing the impact on your knees and hips with each stride. It’s also a relatively simple quantity to measure and change: it’s much easier to tell someone to increase their cadence than to suggest they alter other biomechanical parameters like, say, their ground contact time or the angle of their lower leg when their foot hits the ground. But it’s never been clear that emulating Olympic runners scooting along at well under five-minute mile pace makes sense for the rest of us.

The setup of the 2016 100K race was ideal for putting some of the prevailing cadence theories to the test. It consisted of ten laps of exactly 10K each, and was almost completely flat, with elevation ranging from 1 to 6 meters above sea level. Using the Garmin, Suunto, and Polar watches that the competitors were wearing anyway, Burns was able to collect cadence data from the entire race and then calculate averages for each lap. He could then figure out how cadence changed depending on speed, fatigue, and individual characteristics like height, weight, and running experience.

One of the big surprises was that fatigue didn’t seem to matter. The runners maintained relatively constant cadences throughout the race, with any variations mostly explained by changes in speed. If a runner sped up, their cadence increased; if they slowed down, their cadence decreased. That part was fully expected based on previous research, and it’s another reason why setting universal cadence goals make little sense: even Olympians have much slower cadence when they’re jogging rather than racing. But for a given speed, each runner’s cadence was essentially the same after 90K as it was after 5K.

That’s unexpected because a few previous studies have found that people tend to increase their cadence as they fatigue. Taking shorter steps, the thinking goes, may reduce the pounding of each stride when your muscles are tired, Burns explains. Think of the stereotypical “ultra shuffle.” It may be that the relatively flat, easy 100K course minimized muscle damage; or it may be that world-class ultrarunners have built up (or are born with) greater fatigue resistance compared to the recreational runners tested in previous studies. Either way, it’s a surprising new data point suggesting that cadence doesn’t necessarily increase with fatigue after all.

Among the individual variables they measured—height, weight, age, and years of experience—only height had any significant influence on cadence. It makes sense that at any given pace taller people should have longer strides (and thus a lower cadence) than shorter people, though some advocates of a universal cadence of 180 steps per minute dispute that. In the new study, every additional inch of height was associated with a decrease of just over 3 steps per minute in cadence. That means someone who is 6 feet tall would typically take about 18 fewer steps per minute than someone who is 5’6”. That’s actually a bigger difference than you’d expect from biomechanical principles, which predict that stride length should be roughly proportional to the square root of leg length. But it confirms the general principle: tall people take longer steps.

A minor aside about the link between cadence and height: previous studies have produced mixed results on this, with some evidence suggesting that cadence and height are linked more strongly in elite runners than in recreational runners. The theory is that more experienced runners have had more time to “self-optimize” their strides, so they’re more likely to have converged on the most efficient possible cadence for their body. The very strong relationship between height and cadence in this paper might hint that world-class ultrarunners have logged enough miles to really dial in their most efficient stride.

The real crux of the paper, though, is in the actual values of cadence observed. As I mentioned at the top, the overall average cadence among all runners was 182.0. But Burns and his colleagues aren’t really interested in the average. When they originally submitted the paper, their key graphs showed the cadence measurements throughout the race for each individual runner. One of the peer reviewers asked them simplify the figure by simply plotting the pooled average values for each lap rather than each runner’s values—but Burns demurred: “My response was a more polite version of ‘No, no, no! That’s missing the point and propagating the wrong conclusions! Look at each individual!’”

So let’s do what Burns suggests. Here’s the individual data from the 12 men in the study, showing their average cadence for each of the ten laps in the race:

The big thing that jumps out is the huge variation between runners. There’s one guy whose average was 155 and who never topped 160; another guy averaged 203. Those two runners actually finished the race, after nearly seven hours of running, within a few minutes of each other, Burns says. Whose cadence was more “correct?” Most of the runners certainly clustered in the 170 to 180 range, but the variability is enormous—and given that all these runners finished in the top 25 at the world championships, it argues against the idea that we should all aspire to identical cadence.

The women’s individual data paints a similar picture, with generally higher values that correspond to their generally shorter heights. (After controlling for other factors like height and speed, there were no significant cadence differences between males and females.) Note that the lines are generally flat, meaning that cadence didn’t change much from start to finish—but in the cases where cadence does change, that generally corresponds to changes in pace.

So is worrying about cadence a waste of time? I asked Burns, a serious runner who’s studying cadence as part of his Ph.D., how he uses this kind of data in his training. “I don't actively pay attention to cadence in my training or racing,” he explained, “but I use it like I use most other things that I measure (speed, heart rate, etc): post-hoc analysis.” Over time, he’s found that his cadence at a given pace tends to be a few beats lower when he’s at his fittest, perhaps suggesting that he has a bit more power in his stride (enabling him to take longer but less frequent steps) at those times. But he doesn’t consciously try to alter his cadence; instead, he might use the data as a hint about when he needs to hit the track or do some hills to rebuild that power.

As for the magical 180, my own take is that the idea has persisted because it’s a good aspirational goal for many runners. Lots of runners overstride, crashing down on their heels and putting excessive force on their joints. Telling them to increase their cadence by, say, 5 percent results in shorter, smoother strides, and reduces loads on the knee and hip. But there’s a very big difference between saying “Some runners might benefit from increasing their cadence” and “All runners, regardless of what speed they’re running at, should take at least 180 steps per minute.”

That acknowledgment of individual variability is probably the most important message to emerge from Burns’s data, and should serve as a caution against trying to impose general rules on your running form. Burns’s grand overall model tried to predict each runner’s cadence based on every piece of data available—speed, height, weight, age, experience, and so on. Altogether, those factors were able to explain about 50 percent of the cadence variation between runners. The rest, in this study at least, was unmeasurable. “That was intellectually and romantically satisfying,” Burns says. “We can explain half with science, but the other half is unique to you.”

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, is now available. For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

The social dynamics of swiping, ex-forgetting, and crush-Instagramming are harder to navigate than the backcountry

Welcome to Tough Love. Every other week, we’re answering your questions about dating, breakups, and everything in between. Our advice giver is Blair Braverman, dogsled racer and author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. Have a question of your own? Write to us at [email protected].

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This cute girl and I are playing the like game on Instagram. She’s the kind of person who’s always on an adventure, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. Sometimes we’re in the same place, but mostly we just both like each other’s posts. What can you do? At one point I called her, and she seemed really excited, and I thought it was awesome, and we talked for hours. It was a great conversation. But then it was “I might lose ya, bad signal here,” and nothing after that. That was three weeks ago. Now we’re back to liking. The last picture I posted, she liked immediately. I don’t know how to do this modern crap mixed with this adventure crap. It’s two subcultures smashed together. It seems like nature is more predictable than the human heart.

My hunch? This girl is into you, and she also has no idea if you’re interested. An hours-long conversation doesn’t happen without chemistry, but you haven’t called her since, and Instagram likes are too impersonal to be a reliable mode of flirtation. Call her again, or start a text conversation. Heck, invite her to come on an adventure in Alaska. If she’s interested, she’ll find a way to make it happen—or at least she’ll take the cue to bring your long-distance correspondence to a new level. If she’s not, she’ll politely decline, and you can go back to liking each other’s posts with renewed clarity.

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Here I am, a 26-year-old who was in a serious relationship until about two years ago. Since then my ex and I have gone back and forth four or five times, each time with him ending things for whatever reason he deemed OK. Why do I go back time and time again? Because he’s exactly the kind of guy I want: he loves all outdoor activities, we laugh a lot, and the naked time is all-time number one. We broke up because a lot of things were going on and he couldn’t take it, and he doesn’t seem to be able to commit. I have tried to get over him. I’ve dated different guys, subjected myself to a barrage of Tinder meetings, spent time alone on solo trips, and even become part of outdoor groups. I live in a town where everyone seems to have found someone, and every “outdoorsman” I’ve met seems to think that the idea of doing stuff outside means just hiking in the foothills behind our city. I’m at my wit’s end. Any suggestions on finding (and getting over) guys without moving to a new city?

Instead of focusing on finding a new guy, focus on being OK with being single. Give yourself a time period—say, three months—and pledge not to go on a single date. While you’re at it, commit to quitting all contact with your ex, and ask friends to hold you accountable. If he’s broken up with you five times, he’ll do it again, and anyway, he’s not the kind of person you want to spend your life with. Anyone can have a bit of on and off, but at this point he’s being straight-up selfish: he wants you when he wants you, he doesn’t when he doesn’t, and he doesn’t care about your feelings along the way.

For now take on projects that make you feel good, whether you’re training for a wilderness trip, learning to play a musical instrument, whatever. Try a new sport. Bake pies. Binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Volunteer at a program that gets youth outdoors. You know what you won’t be doing? Waiting for your ex to call or dating new folks for the purpose of getting over him, which will doom any fledgling relationship from the start. Each time you feel sad or lonely, do something that might be harder to do with a boyfriend, like rewatching your favorite movie or planning a trip with friends. Your goal is to set up a new normal, in which your own joys and dreams come first.

At the end of three months, if you want, you can date again. This time though, you won’t be looking for a guy who reminds you of your ex: funny, sexy, outdoorsy, whatever. You’ll be looking for a relationship that’s better than being single, better than being able to do exactly what you want, whenever you choose. After all, you already have a funny, sexy, outdoorsy person in your life—and she’s not going anywhere.

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I’m dating a guy who says my backpacking trips are “running away,” but I don’t feel like I’m running away from anything.

This dude is projecting. Time to run away from him.

Wild rice stuffing, date pumpkin pie, savory sprouts, and more

Navigating the holidays without blowing your training plan or abandoning your commitment to clean eating can feel like an Olympic sport. Turkey Trots and moderation only go so far when you’re staring down Thanksgiving feasts and weeks of holiday parties, so we asked athletes and nutritionists for their holiday staples. Whether you’re looking for a healthy side dish or a lighter take on a classic, we’ve got you covered.

Kale, Quinoa, and Sweet Potato Salad

Dietitian and ultrarunner Alex Borsuk is a big fan of this flavorful salad. Sturdy greens like kale keep well in the fridge, which makes this nutrient-dense dish a great option for a healthy post-holiday leftovers lunch.

Ingredients

• 2 medium sweet potatoes, diced into ½ inch pieces
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup quinoa, rinsed
• 1 ¾ cup vegetable broth
• 4 cups kale, chopped into small pieces
• ½ cup roasted hazelnuts
• 3 tablespoons hemp seeds

Dressing

• 6 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 tablespoons lemon juice
• 3 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 3 teaspoons honey or maple syrup
• 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. To prepare the sweet potatoes, toss with olive oil and salt and pepper. Arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes, then toss and bake for another 10 to 15 minutes, or until tender. While the potatoes are cooking, combine the quinoa and vegetable broth in a medium saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, decrease the heat to maintain a simmer, and cover. Cook until the quinoa has absorbed all of the liquid, about 20 minutes. Fluff the quinoa with a fork. To make the vinaigrette, combine all ingredients and whisk thoroughly. Transfer the kale to a large bowl. Sprinkle with olive oil and use your hands to massage for about 20 seconds. Add the sweet potatoes, quinoa, hazelnuts, and hemp seeds to the bowl. Drizzle with about ⅓ cup dressing until everything is evenly coated. Taste and add more dressing as needed. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Sedona Stuffing

Olympic medalist Deena Kastor dreamed up this stuffing on a Thanksgiving trip to Sedona, Arizona. “We wanted to create our abundant meal with foods that represented the Southwest,” says Kastor. Wild rice and bone broth make this classic dish more nutritious than your standard from-the-bag stuffing, and you can prep the wild rice and cornbread up to two days in advance to save time.

Ingredients

• 1 yellow onion, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 1 apple, peeled, seeded and diced
• ¼ cup fresh oregano, chopped
• 1 pound chorizo
• 6 cups cubed bread, dried in oven or store-bought pre-dried
• 2 cups cornbread, diced
• 2 cups wild rice
• 1 cup chicken bone broth

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In a large stock pot, sauté the onion, celery, and apple until the onion begins to sweat. Add the oregano and mix well. Remove the chorizo from its casing and add to the pot. Stir frequently until sausage is cooked through. Add the bread, cornbread, and rice and mix well to incorporate. Add about one cup of broth to keep moist. Place the mixture in a baking dish, cover with lid or foil, and bake for 45 minutes to an hour.

Mashed Yams with Sage Brown Butter

A savory caramelized sauce complements vitamin-packed yams in this recipe from Elyse Kopecky, coauthor with Shalane Flanagan of the cookbook Run Fast. Eat Slow. To reduce day-of holiday stress, prep this side up to two days in advance and store covered in the fridge. Remove one hour prior to baking to bring it up to room temperature.

Ingredients

• 3 ½ to 4 pounds orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (yams)
• sage brown butter (recipe below)
• ½ cup whole milk
• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt plus more to taste
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Pinch of ground nutmeg (optional)
• ½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
• ¼ cup raw pumpkin seeds

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wrap the sweet potatoes individually in foil and bake in the center of the oven until very soft, about 60 minutes. Remove the potatoes from the oven and reduce the temperature to 350. When the sweet potatoes are cool enough to handle, remove the skin, place in a large mixing bowl, and use a fork to mash until smooth. Add the sage brown butter, milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg and mix until combined. Taste and add a little more salt if needed. Transfer the mixture to an 8 x 8-inch baking dish, and top with the cheese and pumpkin seeds. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the potatoes are warm in the center, about 20 to 25 minutes.

Sage Brown Butter

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• ¼ cup fresh sage leaves, finely chopped
• Fine sea salt to taste
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions

In a large saucepan or skillet over medium heat, melt the butter and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the butter turns golden brown with tiny brown flecks, about four to five minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, slowly add the sage leaves, and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste.

(Reprinted from RUN FAST. EAT SLOW. Copyright © 2016 by Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky. Published by Rodale Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.)

Candied-Ginger Island Cranberry Sauce

Storebought cranberry sauce is filled with unnecessary sugar—not to mention the less-than-appetizing cylindrical shape it holds after it’s plopped out of the can. This ginger-filled twist, from ultra-endurance athlete and vegan Rich Roll, comes from his 2015 cookbook, The Plantpower Way.

Ingredients

• 24 ounces fresh cranberries
• ¼ cup filtered water
• 8 dates, soaked in water for 30 minutes and pitted
• 1 cup candied ginger cubes
• Cinnamon to taste

Directions

In a small saucepan, combine all the ingredients and simmer over medium heat until the cranberries and dates cook down to form a sauce. Adjust the sweetness to taste by playing with the ratio of tart cranberries to sugary dates. Cool and serve.

(Reprinted from The Plantpower Way by arrangement with Avery, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2015, Rich Roll & Julie Piatt)

Simple Mushroom Gravy

This healthy, modern take on traditional gravy also comes from Roll’s The Plantpower Way. Featuring antioxidant-heavy mushrooms and subbing macadamia nut oil for lard, this vegan gravy is one you won’t mind ladling all over your plate.

Ingredients

• 4 cups farmer’s market mushrooms
• 1 tablespoon macadamia nut oil
• ½ small shallot
• ½ small lemon
• 2 tablespoons tamari
• 1 to 1 ½ cups water
• 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary
• 1 teaspoon fresh sage
• About 8 pitted Kalamata olives
• 2 tablespoons white sesame seeds or ¼ cup raw cashews (optional)
• ½ teaspoon salt (optional)

Directions

Wash and stem the mushrooms. Heat the macadamia nut oil in a large skillet over medium heat and sauté the shallot until brown. Add the mushrooms and sauté until they begin to brown and release their juices, about five minutes. Remove from heat and squeeze half the lemon over the mushrooms. Add the tamari and stir. Transfer mushrooms to a high-powered blender and purée until smooth. Add ½ cup of the water, the rosemary, the sage, and half the olives. Process again until smooth. Taste for seasoning and add the remaining olives, if desired. If you like a creamier gravy or prefer a lighter color, add the sesame seeds or cashews. Process in the mixer until well blended. Pour the mushroom puree back into the skillet and add the remaining water, ½ cup at a time, until it reaches the desired consistency. If it needs more salt, add another splash of tamari or ½ teaspoon sea salt.

(Reprinted from The Plantpower Way by arrangement with Avery, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2015, Rich Roll & Julie Piatt)

Sautéed Brussels Sprouts

Deena Kastor’s favorite side dish is a flavorful take on brussels sprouts. “This recipe is a family favorite, especially during the holidays,” she says. Brussels sprouts are packed with nutrients like vitamins A and C, folic acid, calcium, and iron. Enjoy as a side dish or as a main vegetarian meal over rice with broiled tomatoes.

Ingredients

• 1 pound brussels sprouts, sliced in a food processor or by hand
• 1 teaspoon butter
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 2 small shallots, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon agave nectar or maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1 teaspoon capers
• Toasted sliced almonds

Directions

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, melt the butter and olive oil. Add the shallots and sauté until translucent, then add the garlic and brown sugar. Cook for one more minute and add the brussels sprouts. Sauté and continue to stir for about six minutes or until tender. Stir in the vinegar and capers. Transfer to a serving dish and top with toasted almonds.  

Date-Sweetened Pumpkin Pie

This spin on the traditional Thanksgiving pie comes from Megan Landrum, a registered dietitian at Alavita nutrition clinic in Portland, Oregon. She substitutes a butter-laden crust for one made with dates, pecans, and oats. The goal, Landrum says, was to make a pie healthy enough to eat for breakfast.

Ingredients

Crust:

• 1 cup pecans
• 1 cup dates, pitted
• ½ cup rolled oats
• ¼ cup flaxseed meal
• ¼ cup water

Filling:

• 1 can pumpkin
• 1 cup medjool dates, pitted
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup unsweetened almond milk
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon ginger

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Soak the dates for both the crust and filling in boiling water for ten minutes, then drain. To make the crust, combine the ingredients in a food processor and pulse until thoroughly mixed. Place the mixture in a pie pan and press to cover the bottom and sides. To make the filling, combine the ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth. Pour the filling into the crust and bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Let the pie cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least one hour before serving.

Get-up-and-go capability with dress-up good looks

For the record, I don’t consider myself a trail-to-town gear evangelist. To me there’s nothing wrong with stopping home after skiing or cycling to change before meeting friends at the bar. But there are times when I just want to head straight from the office to the trailhead without having to bring a spare pair of shoes. Even though I have a stack of shoeboxes sitting next to my desk, as my colleagues here at Outside can attest, it’s often nicer to be able to just get up and go. And that means having footwear that’s handsome enough for the office but capable on trail as well. Enter the Timberland American Craft Moc Toe boots ($365).

The Horween leather upper is classy, a little less chunky than the signature style of Tim’s Icon, but still waterproof. And I’d be hard-pressed to describe how supple it is without using the word buttery. That also makes it more forgiving, which is especially appreciated by someone with wide feet like myself. Its thin profile contributes to the boot’s light weight, too, another departure from the beefiness of other Timberland shitkickers. The high top and lacing afford lock-down security, which means I don’t show any sock or skin if the cuffs of my jeans ride up.

Beneath the shoe, the Vibram outsole, which the company describes as medium soft, provides traction and grips rocks and other hard surfaces without feeling like a board strapped to the bottom of my foot.

If I boil it down to one sentence: the Timberland American Craft Moc Toe boots have technical chops and loads of comfort in a damn-fine-looking package.

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New research finds weightlifters have stronger tongues and runners have better tongue endurance—and that matters

Whenever I hear about researchers on the cusp of developing an “exercise pill” that would replicate the benefits of physical activity, I think of this 2009 study of 30,000 runners, which found that long-term risk of glaucoma was inversely proportional to weekly running mileage and best 10K time. Other studies of the same cohort found similar relationships for brain cancer, sepsis mortality, and gallbladder disease. Someone may eventually develop a pill that boosts my VO2max—but will it also preserve my joints and stave off macular degeneration?

It’s in that spirit of “But wait, there’s more!” that I present the latest addition to my hypothetical infomercial on the benefits of exercise. A research team led by Heidi VanRavenhorst-Bell of Wichita State University has demonstrated that exercise is associated with greater tongue strength and tongue endurance. And not all exercise is created equal. Weightlifters have greater maximal tongue strength; runners have greater tongue endurance. (Running author Scott Douglas already made the requisite kissing joke on Twitter, so I’ll pass on it.)

I’ll admit that this initially seemed mostly like a novelty good for a few laughs. But I read the study out of curiosity, and came away with a greater respect for the importance of tongue muscle research—which, it turns out, is a burgeoning field with hundreds of studies in recent years.

Good tongue muscles are crucial for “upper airway patency,” which relates to your ability to keep your airways open while you’re asleep. If the slow-twitch muscle fibers at the back of your tongue lack endurance, it will raise your risk of mouth breathing and sleep apnea. And tongue strength, particularly in the fast-twitch fibers toward the front of the tongue, is also crucial for swallowing. Most people’s tongues get weaker as they age, which can eventually lead to dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing. So in a perfect world, you’d maintain great endurance at the rear of your tongue to avoid airway problems, and great strength at the front of your tongue to avoid swallowing problems.

In a 2016 study, VanRavenhorst-Bell assessed tongue strength and endurance in 48 volunteers, and found that those classified as highly active scored higher on the tongue measures than their sedentary peers. The effect was more pronounced in people in their 60s than people in their 20s, suggesting that regular exercise helps stave off the usual age-related decline in tongue muscle.

How do you assess tongue muscle, I hear you wondering? Using the Iowa Oral Performance Instrument, of course. This basically involves sticking an air-filled bulb in your mouth and using your tongue to press it against the roof of your mouth; the machine measures how much pressure you’re able to exert. Endurance, in VanRavenhorst-Bell’s research, is assessed as the length of time you can sustain 50 percent of your personal max pressure. You can position the bulb in different places to assess the strength of different parts of the tongue. There’s a nifty little GIF illustrating the device in action on this page, which I promise is worth the click.

For the new study, VanRavenhorst-Bell and her colleagues recruited 21 weightlifters and 23 runners, each of whom engaged in their preferred activity at least four times a week. They hypothesized that the rhythmic panting of endurance runners would produce greater tongue endurance, particularly toward the back of the tongue which is responsible for maintaining open airways. The weightlifters, in contrast, would predominantly use the front of the tongue to produce forceful inhales and exhales, resulting in greater strength at the front of the tongue.

And that’s more or less what they found, as it turns out. When you look at maximum tongue strength, there’s no significant difference between the groups at the posterior (back) of the tongue, but the weightlifters are stronger at the anterior (front) of the tongue. Here’s what those results looked like:

For tongue endurance, which again was the length of time the subjects could maintain 50 percent of their max pressure, runners had much better endurance at both the front and back of the tongue:

There are a few caveats to point out here. One is that the slightly greater tongue strength in the weightlifters may simply be a result of “the size of orofacial features.” In other words, weightlifters tend to have bigger heads and bigger mouths than runners, so maybe that’s why their tongues are stronger. Further research awaits, no doubt. Another is that the endurance measurements may be skewed by the fact that the weightlifters were stronger overall, meaning they had to sustain a greater pressure during the endurance test. But the strength differences were very subtle compared to the endurance differences, so that’s unlikely to be a major factor.

So what, other than storing it up for cocktail-party season, do we do with this tidbit of information? We can now say a little more confidently that exercise, particularly endurance exercise, may be useful in preventing and perhaps treating conditions like sleep apnea and dysphagia. But we already knew that for other reasons. Knowing that dropping my 10K PR might lower my risk of glaucoma never altered my training, and I doubt it changed anyone else’s habits, either. I suspect the same will be true of our newfound understanding of runner’s tongue.

Still, I think that adding to exercise’s but-wait-there’s-more list is worthwhile, because it reinforces the message that there’s way, way more to physical activity than we’ve yet grasped. Forget about shortcuts; skip the pharmaceutical alternatives. Your tongue, like the rest of your body, was made to move.

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, is now available. For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

What the new data says about how long the average hiker takes, what they drink, and how tired they get

On busy weekends in spring or fall, more than a thousand people will set off from one of three key trailheads to hike the Grand Canyon from rim to rim—a number that has been climbing steadily for years. They’ll cover a total of 21 to 23.5 miles, depending on the route they choose, dropping some 6,000 feet to the canyon floor, where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees and sometimes hit 120, then climbing back out. On peak weekends, so many rim-to-rim hikers will call for help that every paramedic ranger in the national park has to be called into action.

For that reason, the park’s Preventive Search and Rescue team has been trying get a better handle on who undertakes R2R crossings and what their typical behavior patterns and physiological responses are. A new study in the journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, by researchers at the University of New Mexico working with park staff, offers some data that will be useful for anyone who’s contemplating doing the hike.

On two weekends in May and October 2015, typically the busiest months, the researchers hung out at three trailheads (the South Kaibab and Bright Angel trails on the South Rim, and the North Kaibab trail on the North Rim), as well as the midway point at Phantom Ranch on the canyon bottom. A total of 617 hikers filled out forms giving information on their preparation, demographics, fatigue levels, and other factors. Here are some highlights from the data.

The hikers had an average age of 43, were 65 percent male, and (perhaps surprisingly) had a mean BMI of 25.3, right at the border of overweight. A lot of them had prior experience: 40 percent of them had done the R2R hike before, and 33 percent had done it at least 5 times. One person reported 46 previous crossings.

The median time taken to cross the canyon was 11.9 hours, with most people starting around sunrise (average time 5:30 a.m.) and finishing just before sunset (average time 5:30 p.m.). You can get a sense of the range of starting and finishing times from this graph:

Interestingly, that median time was identical for northbound and southbound hikers, even though the north trailhead is about 1,000 feet higher than the south trailheads. The split times, however, were quite different. Southbound hikers took 5.8 hours to go down, then 6.1 hours to go up; northbound hikes zipped down in 4.3 hours, but then had to slog upward for 7.6 hours. Neither descending nor ascending for hours on end is easy on the body, so it’s not obvious which is harder. Pick your poison.

There’s quite a bit of analysis of hydration strategies. About half the hikers used both a bottle and bladder, while 20 percent used bottle only and 31 percent used bladder only. The researchers aren’t fans of the latter approach: “We consider the singular use of hydration bladders in the desert to be high risk because the tough and spiny desert environment has ample opportunity to pierce the sides of a hydration bladder.”

Overall, the hikers drank an average of 3.3 liters (112 ounces) of fluid, but there was quite a wide range. A quarter of respondents drank less than 1.1 liters, while a quarter drank more than 5.1 liters. Interestingly, women drank at a relatively consistent rate regardless of how long they took to complete the hike, averaging 5.5 milliliters of water per kilogram of bodyweight per hour. Men, on the other hand, didn’t necessarily drink more if they were out there for longer.

That difference shows up in the graph below, where the rate of fluid consumption for women is a relatively straight line as a function of total crossing time, while for men it’s a line sloping downward:

This graph also shows that the fastest hiker in the study took just over six hours. (For comparison, ultrarunner Taylor Nowlin recently ran R2R2R—that is, all the way across the canyon and back—in a new women’s fastest known time of seven hours, 25 minutes, and 58 seconds. The men’s record of 5:55:20 is held by Jim Walmsley.) And it also shows that several people, all men, seem to have drunk next to nothing for the entire hike, even if they were out there for 18 hours. You kind of have to wonder whether those guys understood the question or knew the dimensions of their water bottle.

Finally, how hard is this hike? On a scale of 1 to 10, the median level of self-reported fatigue was 7, which corresponds to “strong fatigue.” But there were some nuances. Here’s how the levels of fatigue at the end of the hike panned out depending on how well-prepared the hikers reported being:

It’s tiring for pretty much everyone. But not surprisingly, it’s most tiring (as indicated by the bigger bars on the right-hand side) for those who were the least prepared. So if you’re going to hike R2R in the Grand Canyon, do yourself—and the poor overworked rangers—a favor by getting fit, planning well, and wrapping your hydration bladder in a cactus-proof protective coating.

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, is now available. For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

Colin O’Brady thinks it’s possible—but just barely—to haul enough calories to traverse the continent. Here’s how.

Two days before Colin O’Brady flew to Antarctica to attempt the first solo, unassisted crossing of the earth’s most inhospitable continent, I asked him about the definition of a perfectly planned expedition. He was frantically dashing around his hometown of Portland, Oregon, checking off the final logistical details of a project he’d been obsessing over for most of the year, so the topic resonated.

“I’ve asked a lot of people this question,” he said. “Is it a successful expedition if you get to your very last day and you’re eating your last day of food? Or is it a successful expedition if you get to the end of your project and you’ve got, like, five to seven days of food left on your sled? And it’s funny, because people come really strongly down on either side.”

This isn’t an abstract debate about the aesthetics of a beautifully planned trip. In the Antarctic, the nuances of exactly how much you pack dictate success or failure, and sometimes life or death. On November 3, a Twin Otter dropped O’Brady off on the Ronne Ice Shelf. Over the next two months, he’ll be trying to make it 921 miles across Antarctica, via the South Pole, to the Ross Ice Shelf, roughly approximating the route that British adventurer Henry Worsley was trying to complete when he died, 900 miles into his trek, in 2016. (You can track O’Brady’s trip here; one of Worsley’s former expedition mates, Louis Rudd, is currently attempting a similar feat.)

Others have crossed the continent in teams, or with the aid of animals or sails or machines. But a solo, unassisted trip is a different matter. “It’s straight-up impossible to take enough calories with you to get across the continent of Antarctica,” a Wired article asserted after Worsley’s death. O’Brady’s training, fitness, and psychological resilience will undoubtedly be pushed to their limits in the coming weeks. But in some ways, his biggest challenge is much more fundamental: it’s thermodynamics.

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I first met O’Brady at a hiking event in Vermont last month. As it happened, I’d just returned from visiting a cousin of mine who has spent the past ten years designing a single-stage rocket with the goal of setting a new altitude record. As my cousin showed me his trajectory simulations, I’d asked a dumb question about why he didn’t just add more fuel. That would add weight and also require a bigger rocket, he patiently explained, so the rocket would actually reach a lower peak altitude. Same thing if you took away fuel to lighten the load. The reason he’d spent a decade designing the rocket was to find that perfect optimum where either adding or subtracting fuel made things worse.

As I chatted with O’Brady while we ambled up Mount Stratton, I realized that he was wrestling with exactly the same challenge. The more food you bring with you, the heavier your sled becomes, the more calories you burn pulling it, and the slower you move, meaning that you have to bring even more food to cover the extra days. Conversely, a lightly laden sled allows you to move more quickly and efficiently, but you’ll run out of food sooner. Somewhere in the middle is a theoretical optimum—a peak range, like the rocket’s peak altitude—where either adding or subtracting a single energy bar from your sled will reduce the distance you’re able to cover. The question that has remained unanswered so far is whether that peak range is greater than the width of Antarctica.

While there is plenty of accumulated lore about how to maximize your range on polar man-hauling expeditions, O’Brady is taking a dramatically different approach compared to those who have gone before him. He’s been working closely with a “whole food supplement” company called Standard Process, regularly visiting their Nutrition Innovation Center in North Carolina for batteries of tests to figure out exactly what combination of foods will fuel him most efficiently. The result: a bespoke 1,150-calorie creation, tailored to his unique metabolic and physiological needs, known as the Colin Bar, that will supply more than half of his 8,000 daily calories. It’s the size and shape of a gold brick, and it comes in one flavor (a subtle hint of chocolate, which the scientists have kept as neutral as possible so that he hopefully won’t hate chocolate bars for the rest of his life). O’Brady started his trip with 280 of them lashed to his sled: four a day for 70 days.

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Back in 2012, a century after Robert F. Scott and four companions reached the South Pole and then died on the way back, a pair of scientists asked a poignant question in the journal Physiological Reviews: with modern knowledge and equipment, could Scott and his team have survived? In exhaustive detail they analyzed the challenges facing would-be Antarctic explorers, and what we know now that Scott didn’t. It’s not just the cold, which frequently hovers around -40 degrees Fahrenheit even in the summer, and forces the body to consume precious calories just to stay warm. There’s also the vicious wind, and the desert dryness that forces travelers to drink around five liters of water per day. And the Antarctic plateau has an average elevation of about 7,500 feet above sea level, which in terms of oxygen content feels like more than 9,000 feet due the effects of extreme cold and wind on atmospheric pressure.

There are innumerable details that could have been improved on Scott’s expedition, but the fundamental problem was that they were woefully short on calories. Scott’s rations added up to between 4,200 and 4,600 calories per day. No one really knew how many calories a polar expedition like this burns until Mike Stroud—one of the authors of the 2012 paper—and Ranulph Fiennes made a two-person unsupported 1,600-mile crossing of Antarctica in 1992 and 1993. Careful measurements of energy consumption using isotope-labeled water showed that they were burning an astounding 7,000 calories a day for 96 days. During one ten-day period while they ascended the plateau, they averaged 11,000 calories a day. Even though they were eating 5,000 calories a day, they lost 48 and 54 pounds respectively during the trip. 

The solution—take more calories—seems obvious, but the problem once again is the weight of additional food. Stroud and Fiennes tried to maximize the amount they could carry by relying on calorically dense fat. Stroud’s description of their diet: “porridge fortified with butter in the morning, soup with added butter during two brief stops in the day, a flapjack with butter after stopping in the tent, and a freeze-dried meal with butter in the evening.” It still wasn’t enough.

Beyond quantity, the type of calories also matters. After all, Henry Worsley still had plenty of food when he finally called for help, leaving some uncertainty about what killed him. In a general sense, he’d pushed himself beyond the limits of his endurance. In a specific sense, the cause of death was massive organ failure secondary to a bacterial infection in his abdominal lining. What sequence of steps connects those two facts? “We think it was a poor immune system response that affected his gut function,” says John Troup, vice president of clinical science for Standard Process, the company behind the Colin Bars, “so that’s part of what we’re trying to stabilize with Colin.” 

One of first things the scientists at Standard Process did was run a series of tests on O’Brady’s blood samples to determine his response to various foods, looking not for overt allergies but for subtle variations in the inflammatory response they triggered in him. They came up with a list of about 20 foods to avoid, with the most significant being ginger, tuna, beef, oranges, peanuts, and flax seeds. “If he’s going to be really stressed out there, it’s going to be because he’s hyper-inflamed and couldn’t recover from it,” says Troup. “More simply stated, it’s a reflection of immune response.” Since butter and other dairy foods are also among O’Brady’s triggers, the Colin Bar is laden with coconut oil and filled out with nuts, seeds, dried fruit, and other whole-food ingredients that his system responds well to.

His overall diet will be high in both fat and carbohydrates, with 40 percent of calories from fat, 15 percent from protein, and 45 percent from carbohydrate. In comparison, Scott’s rations during the hardest part of his trip were 24 percent fat, 29 percent protein, and 47 percent carbohydrate. Stroud and Fiennes opted for 57 percent fat, 8 percent protein, and 35 percent carbohydrate. You can quibble about the relative pros and cons of these various macronutrient breakdowns, but the biggest different is simply the the sheer quantity. While Scott maxed out at 4,600 daily calories and Stroud and Fiennes took 5,000, O’Brady is taking 8,000 calories per day, including oatmeal in the morning and Alpineaire freeze-dried meals in the evening.

That means starting out with a sled weighing 375 pounds (Worsley’s, in contrast, weighed 330 pounds). Unlike Worsley, he’s not bringing cigars or a bottle of Royal Brackla Scotch whiskey to toast his progress. In fact, he admitted, “I’m not bringing a second pair of underwear.” That ruthlessly pragmatic approach contrasts with the swashbuckling tradition of polar exploration pioneered by the British—but this particular challenge, O’Brady believes, simply doesn’t allow any margin for whimsy. The starting load of food was about 245 pounds, with another 55 pounds of fuel, which is needed to melt the necessary five liters of water daily, and 75 pounds of equipment and clothing.

Four days into his trek, O’Brady acknowledged in an Instagram post that the sled’s weight was pushing him to his limits: “Today was the first day I haven’t cried into my goggles,” he wrote. Still, as he’d explained to me before he left, this was a calculated risk: “I’m banking on the fact that, by actually feeding myself enough calories, the slightly additional weight that I’m putting in my sled is made up for by the fact that my body doesn’t break down as quickly.”

As for the great debate about how you should finish a perfectly planned expedition, O’Brady falls in the cautious camp. He hopes to reach the Ross Ice Shelf after about 65 days, with five days of food still tucked in his sled. But he knows that Antarctic conditions, and how he responds to them, will be almost impossible to predict until he’s in the thick of them. His mega-calorie approach does give him some wiggle room. He fared reasonably well on 5,500 calories a day during a recent expedition in Greenland. “If it starts to look like it’s going to take 80 days to do this expedition,” he says, “I do think that I have the ability to switch some of those calories and stretch the expedition to 75 or 78 days.” After all, most Antarctic travelers before him made do with less. And some of them even survived.

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, is now available. For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

Books, music, and pretty things to put on their walls

It can be hard to be nice to people. Especially if you have people in your life who you love but who are impossible to shop for. Perhaps a brother who is deeply nonmaterialistic, incredibly picky about what he wears, and, somehow, frustratingly good at giving gifts. Perhaps. Not that we’ve got anyone like that in our lives, but for those who do, we’ve got some ideas.

Art with a Sense of Place

Wanderwide’s prints, like its Seven Summits Register, are both beautiful and practical. They come with a stamp, so you can tick off your accomplishments. Climber and artist Jeremy Collins puts out a yearly calendar, which is a mash-up of elegant line drawings of places like Longs Peak in Colorado and temporal reminders of events like National Polar Bear Day. For some throwback appeal, give vintage-style Parks Projects National Park posters. And if you’re really nice, stick an annual parks pass in with them.

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Things to Put on Their Walls

One of the reasons social media isn’t total trash is that it can expose you to artists you might not encounter otherwise and give you a way to pay those artists for their work. Scroll Instagram to find art that aligns with your loved one’s taste, like eerie environmental prints from Portland, Oregon, or ethereal beachscapes from Maine. Is that the gig economy? I’m not entirely clear.

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Slow Jams

A Spotify link is a lame present. Instead try Cat Power’s first album in six years, The Wanderer. Its spare, subtle storytelling is loungy and thoughtful at the same time. The baby blue vinyl version is worth giving for the visual alone.

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Beautiful Coffee-Table Books

Does anyone buy themselves coffee-table books? Hell no, that’s what holidays are for. And this year there are a lot of good ones to give. Like The Wall of Birds, Jane Kim’s smart, epic, and beautiful hand-drawn evolution of 375 million years of bird life. For travelers, Gestalten’s The Hidden Tracks feels like the best of low-toned Insta-lifestyle shots distilled. Polymath Jason Lee put together a book of large-format photos of his adopted home state of Texas, the result of which is called A Plain View. It’s perfect for the skaters in your life who grew up to own coffee tables.

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Books to Spark a Sense of Adventure

Mountaineers might be fascinated by Chasing Denali, Jon Waterman’s account of one of Denali’s biggest controversies—whether or not four gold miners managed to climb the mountain in a single day in 1910. Anyone thinking about thru-hiking could probably use a dose of Beth Jusino’s hilarious Walking to the Ends of the World, about her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. If your babies are already into bucket lists, Atlas Obscura just released a kids’ book. Its Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kids looks at bizarre sites in 47 different countries. For exploratory chefs, Sarah Glover’s Wild, about cooking outside in Australia, is a feast for every sense. Poet Tony Hoagland, who passed away this fall, had a beautiful, nonstuffy knack for showing how the human and natural worlds reflect each other. It’s not new, but his 2003 book, What Narcissism Means to Me, is clear and true.

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A Mug to Go with All Those Books

They’ll buy themselves a Yeti if they really want one. Give them beautiful, hand-thrown pottery that’s meant for sitting, reading and CTFO, like Coco Barrett-Tormey’s subtle, layered mountain mugs.