We can’t wait to check out these ten new snow-country huts, lodges, and hotels

There’s no shortage of great places to cozy up for a winter getaway, but with amenities like stargazing observatories, wood-fired saunas, exceptional taverns, and winter sports aplenty, these new mountain huts, hotels, and lodges are raising the bar. You may never want to leave.

Sister’s Cabin

Breckenridge, Colorado

A new 2,090-square-foot backcountry hut called Sister’s Cabin is opening on the northern side of Breckenridge’s Baldy Mountain. An upgrade from your typical rustic hut, this winter-only 14-person cabin comes with a wood-fired sauna and indoor bathrooms, meaning no snowy midnight treks to an outhouse. Built by the Summit Huts Association, it’s expected to open in January and will start taking reservations via Huts.org soon. Heads up: You’ll need to ski tour or snowshoe about 3.5 miles and climb some 1,500 vertical feet to get there. (From $50 per person per night.)

Mount Royal Hotel

Banff, Alberta

In 2016, a fire burned down the historic 135-room Mount Royal Hotel. This July, it reopened its doors, and the place has been completely redone, with comfortable new beds, sleek decor, phone-charging stations, gas fireplaces, and a general store for grab-and-go lunches. Oh, and you can order drinks without leaving the new rooftop hot tub. The concierge desk can help arrange outings like Banff-area hikes and skiing at Lake Louise, or you can browse through guidebooks in the hotel’s library. (From $82 per night.)

Eastwind Hotel

Windham, New York

At the new Eastwind Hotel, which opened in the Catskills in June, you can book a well-appointed hotel room, two-room suite with a fireplace and writing desk, or a tiny Scandinavian-style A-frame cabin. Each comes with access to an outdoor wood-barrel sauna and hot tub. Skiing at Windham Mountain Resort is a five-minute shuttle ride away, or head to Hunter Mountain, 20 minutes down the road. Breakfast is served on weekends, and the in-house chef whips up group dinners on Saturday nights. (From $219 per night.)

Compass Rose Lodge

Huntsville, Utah

Opening in January 2019, the Compass Rose Lodge has an on-site coffee shop, free breakfast, and its own astronomic and lunar observatory that plays host to public star parties. But the best part? Its strategic location in Huntsville means the 15-room farmhouse-style hotel has significantly increased the lodging options near Utah’s remote Powder Mountain Resort. (From $227 per night.)

The Josie Hotel

Rossland, British Columbia

The Josie opened at the base of Red Mountain in late November, adding a ski-in, ski-out boutique hotel to the otherwise low-key ski area. When you’re finished exploring the powder-choked glades off Red’s Granite Mountain, hotel staff will store your skis overnight, book you a deep-tissue massage in the soon-to-open spa, or point you toward après-ski cocktails in the hotel bar. The hotel is currently offering a package deal where a two-night stay includes a pair of lift tickets for the resort. (From $142 per night.)

Snowpine Lodge

Alta, Utah

Alta has a handful of legendary old-school hotels where every meal comes included with your stay and the shared bathroom is down the hall. When the Snowpine Lodge opens in January 2019, it’ll be the first true luxury ski-in, ski-out accommodation on the mountain. In addition to private rooms, the hotel has dorm-style bunks and everything skiers need, like lockers, a good bar, and hot tubs with views of the hill. (Bunks from $99; rooms from $259.)

Limelight Hotel Snowmass

Snowmass, Colorado

The Limelight Hotel in downtown Aspen is already a crowd favorite for its laid-back yet upscale vibe. This winter, Aspen Skiing Company is opening another property, Limelight Hotel Snowmass, a 99-room hotel right next to the Elk Camp Gondola. You’ll be treated to ski-in, ski-out lodging, a stellar European-style breakfast spread, live music and drink specials during après, and a free ride to Aspen’s three other mountains. Sign up for the First Tracks program with the concierge and you’ll be on the slopes before everyone else. (From $159 per night.)

Experimental Chalet

Verbier, Switzerland

You’ll come to Verbier to ski its world-class steeps, but you’ll stay for the party. This quaint Swiss village, after all, is home to the raucous après-ski at Pub Mont Fort and the Farinet. The new Experimental Chalet, opening in December, is your home base for both. In addition to 39 sleekly designed rooms, you’ll find easy access to the Médran lift, a restaurant run by a chef brought in from Paris, a retro cocktail bar, and a wild nightclub in the basement. (From $208 per night.)

Caldera House

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Teton Village, at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, isn’t lacking for high-end hotels, but with the debut of splurge-worthy Caldera House this summer, just steps from the resort’s famous tram, there’s a new king of the hill. Guests can rent lavish two- or four-bedroom suites. Each comes with a chef’s kitchen, a palatial living area with a gas fireplace, and private balconies. You’ll be treated like ski-town royalty with a private member’s locker room for your gear and an on-call concierge who can organize everything from caribou sleigh rides to backcountry heli-skiing. In case you’re not actually royalty, the Southcable Café, in the main level of the hotel, serves coffee, breakfast burritos, and sloshies—the frozen cocktail made famous in Jackson. (From $1,250 per night.)

Red Mountain Alpine Lodge

Red Mountain Pass, Colorado

Slated to open in late December, the new Red Mountain Alpine Lodge is an off-the-grid timber-framed backcountry cabin located near Silverton on the 11,018-foot Red Mountain Pass. It’s just 300 yards from the highway, making access much easier than many of Colorado’s other huts. The place sleeps up to 20—rent the whole thing, a private room, or a spot in the loft—and comes with three meals a day, hot showers, a wood-burning sauna, and guided or unguided access to some of the best out-of-bounds ski terrain in the San Juans. (From $134 per person per night.)

Click:one piece swimsuit​
The government just released new fitness guidelines, which we boiled down to a single, simple mantra

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released new physical activity guidelines for the first time in ten years. They recommend that adults get at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week, which is unchanged from the last time guidelines were released, in 2008.

This amounts to just 22 minutes per day and can include, the report says, “any form of exercise or movement of the body that uses energy,” like “active chores” or “yard work.” The main change from last decade’s guidelines is that the new ones stress the dangers of extended periods of sitting. Even just a three-minute walk around the office is beneficial, and can count toward those 22 minutes per day, according to the report. 

My hunch is that most Outside readers already meet those numbers. (You can read more from a report on the guidelines in the Journal of the American Medical Association.) 

Or, if you want to save yourself the time, just follow this rule:

Move your body often, sometimes hard. Every bit counts.

A new study suggests that hitting the gym more than twice a week is counterproductive. That seems unlikely.

There are two very different headline messages that I could have chosen for this article. One is that even a very modest amount of strength training can dramatically lower your risk of fatal heart disease. The other is that too much strength training will dramatically raise your risk of fatal heart disease. Perhaps both messages are true. Or perhaps neither are. I’ll let you be the judge.

The study in question is newly published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, from a team of researchers led by Duck-chul Lee of Iowa State University. It’s an analysis of data from 12,500 patients who received medical examinations at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas between 1987 and 2006. Among the questions these patients answered was how often and for long they performed resistance training each week. The study tried to figure out if, after accounting for various other factors like health conditions and other forms of exercise, the amount of resistance training the subjects did could predict how likely they were to suffer a serious cardiac event, die of a heart-related condition, or die of other causes during the study.

If you followed the “too much running” debate a few years ago, this setup may sound vaguely familiar. In fact, this Cooper Clinic cohort is the same one Lee and his colleagues studied to ask exactly the same question about aerobic training. Their initial results, presented at a conference in 2012, suggested that the health benefits of aerobic exercise disappear if you run more than about 20 miles per week—and, as an editorial co-authored by one of the researchers put it, that “running too fast, too far, and for too many years may speed one’s progress towards the finish line of life.” That was a message the media lapped up eagerly.

But as time went on, there was push-back, both from running addicts like me and from other researchers who criticized some of the statistical techniques used to analyze the data. The fact is that the people who report habits like running every day tend to be different from non-runners in many ways, ranging from weight and cholesterol levels to psychological outlook and socioeconomic background. The statistical techniques used to account for these differences aren’t perfect, so the results need to be interpreted with caution. Perhaps as a result of this pushback, when the aerobic exercise analysis was finally published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2014, the researchers strenuously emphasized the “even a little bit is good” message rather than the “too much is bad.”

So, with that preamble, what did the data say about resistance training? It was surprisingly similar. Of the 12,500 subjects, about 3,500 reported doing some resistance training; after adjusting for age, sex, and other factors, those who did any amount of resistance training were 55 percent less likely to suffer a serious cardiac event during the study. That’s great news. Even better is that it doesn’t take much. The study’s main conclusion is that even one session or less than an hour a week of resistance training reduced the risk of cardiac events and death from all causes during the study, no matter how much (or how little) aerobic exercise the subjects were also doing.

But if you look more closely, you see that the picture changes as you start doing resistance exercise more frequently. The lowest risks seem to accrue to those working out twice a week, and by the time you get to four workouts a week, you’re no better off than those not working out at all. And if you extrapolate to five days a week, it looks like you’re about three times as likely to suffer a stroke or heart attack and twice as likely to die of any cause during the study.

Here’s what those curves look like. In the top graph, CVD morbidity is the risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack compared to those doing no resistance exercise; all-cause mortality is the risk of dying:

It’s not hard to come up with a plausible explanation for why too much strength training might be bad for your cardiovascular system. There’s evidence that strength training may contribute to stiffening your arteries, which could result in more cardiac problems. Bolstered by this new data set, it would be easy to write that headline.

But I’m hesitant. I find it curious that this particular data set has produced very similar patterns for the response to both aerobic and resistance exercise. It may be that moderation in all things really is best and doing too much—more than a few times a week—takes a potentially fatal toll on your body. But it may also be that the particular group of people referred to the Cooper Clinic, combined with the particular statistical manipulations needed to massage away the many differences between daily exercisers and non-exercisers, produce some sort of spurious pattern.

It’s telling, to me, that other data sets have found more or less the opposite. The National Runners’ Health Study, for example, found progressive reductions in heart disease up to 40 miles per week and beyond in a sample of 35,000 runners. And I recently wrote about a study of 122,000 people which found that those with “elite” levels of aerobic fitness lived longer than those with mere “high” levels.

I wish I could wrap things up with a tidy bow and confidently proclaim which results are right and which are wrong. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. But these new results, suggesting that hitting the gym three times a week is somehow worse for you than hitting it twice a week, bolster my suspicions that there’s something funny going on with the results—and by extension, something funny with the earlier conclusions about aerobic exercise. On the plus side, I can be a little more dispassionate about the findings this time, because the truth is that I rarely, if ever, manage to do resistance training more than twice a week. I’d love to think that puts me in some sort of magical sweet spot. But I’m not convinced.

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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.

Result: You’ll never miss a flight again! Okay, not really, but these innovations should reassure you about flying in inclement weather this winter.   

True: Flying is safer than driving in a car. But it’s still plenty nerve-racking for some, especially when you throw in the possibility of missed connections and inclement weather. Here are six things to keep in mind to reassure the flightiest traveler about getting in a plane this month.  

Weather Forecasts Are Getting Better

We tend to think of weather-forecast accuracy in terms of raw numbers, but getting a good forecast is about so much more than that. The timing of severe thunderstorms can determine whether flights safely land and take off. A subtle shift in the rain-snow line makes the difference between a dreary day and slick, useless runways. 

The accuracy of weather models has steadily improved over the years; they’re so accurate now that high-resolution models can sometimes nail the precise location of individual thunderstorms hours before they form. This improved accuracy is an incredible boon to airlines, helping them route flights around or before hazardous weather like snowstorms or hurricanes.

Satellite and Radar See What We Can’t

We can see clouds on the horizon, but weather satellites and Doppler radar let us see inside storms. The United States’s brand-new weather satellites let us watch storms develop in real-time. Doppler radar spies on the inner-workings of a thunderstorm, helping us spot a hail core or dangerous winds.

Commercial airplanes have built-in weather radar that lets pilots see inside the clouds ahead of them. This enables pilots to determine whether to go through or around that ominous-looking thunderstorm cell. 

Better Training Helps Pilots Prepare for the Unexpected

There hasn’t been a deadly crash of a U.S.-based commercial airliner in nearly a decade. The last major crash (aside from a tragic fluke incident in 2017) occurred in February 2009 near Buffalo, New York, after ice developed on a commuter plane’s wings as it approached the airport. The ice caused the airplane to lose its lift and stall, something the fatigued pilots didn’t respond to correctly.

Pilot training, experience, and adequate rest are significant topics of debate in airline safety. All the weather-related safety improvements in the world don’t matter unless the pilot is in control of the plane. Unfortunately, things usually don’t change until after a crash. That 2009 accident led airlines to revise their training and written procedures to deal with icing and stalls, and it led to new regulations that ensure pilots are well-rested before they take flight.

Wind-Shear Detection Changed the Game

Aside from icing, the most serious threat to the average flight is wind shear—wind changing speed and direction. Airplanes take off and land into the wind. If the wind suddenly shifts around, the airplane will just as suddenly lose airspeed. If the plane is flying near its lower limits, this sudden loss of airspeed can cause a stall and potentially a crash.

This is a major problem with thunderstorms. Airplanes crashing due to wind shear or microbursts—sudden downward bursts of wind from the base of thunderstorms—was a serious issue as late as the 1990s. Ted Fujita, famous for his eponymous scale to estimate the strength of tornadoes, was instrumental in studies of wind shear and microbursts. Research led by Fujita and others led to the development of wind-shear detection systems that warn vulnerable flights of hazardous conditions ahead, making accidents caused by thunderstorms exceptionally rare in recent decades.

We’ve Made Better Instruments for Low-Visibility Flying

Driving when it’s foggy is hard, but flying in low-visibility conditions is even more challenging. Thankfully, pilots have a slew of instruments at their disposal that helps them see what’s ahead of them even if they can’t really see it at all.

Most major airports are equipped with Instrument Landing Systems that allow airplanes to track radio frequencies that guide them along a safe glidepath to the runway. Many modern airliners have displays in the cockpit that shows the flight crew the terrain around the airplane, helping them avoid terrain like hills and mountains. Procedures also require pilots to follow limits that bar them from landing if they can’t see the runway by a certain altitude along their approach.

Those Annoying Delays and Cancellations Can Be Life-Savers

As many of us get ready to travel for family visits and outdoor adventures, sitting in an airport in a sunny town while it snows like crazy a thousand miles away can make you feel angry and helpless. But those flight delays and cancellations usually serve a good purpose: they save lives. 

No matter how many improvements we make, airplanes just can’t fly in certain types of weather. Airports have to slow down operations when the visibility is low or the runways are too slick to allow for normal operations. An airplane slid off the runway at New York-LaGuardia in 2015 in part because the pilot overreacted to a coating of snow on the runway.  

Delays and cancellations can have massive ripple effects across the country, but those flights are scrubbed for your safety. Airlines care about profits, sure, but they don’t want to see airplanes full of people put in danger just to keep their numbers up. Most of us will get where we need to go smoothly this winter. So take a deep breath and know that you’re in good hands when you take flight—even if it’s a little later than you expected.

Badass Women Chronicles

The 19th-Century Writer Who Braved the Desert Alone

Mary Austin wrote about the Mojave as brilliantly as John Muir wrote about the Sierra. Why was she forgotten? 

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Jan 22, 2019

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Jan 22, 2019

Mary Austin wrote about the Mojave as brilliantly as John Muir wrote about the Sierra. Why was she forgotten? 

To understand Mary Hunter Austin, you must first imagine her walking. She would have cut an eccentric figure, sailing across the deserts of California in the 1890s in her long, swirling dresses, following the tracks of coyotes, observing the movements of small mammals, cataloging the habits of plants and water and wind. By that time, in her twenties, the writer had probably already jettisoned the corset that bound her so that she could breathe and move. 

Unlike most women of her day, Austin traveled boldly across open country, often alone. She spirited through expanses of yucca, along dry riverbeds, and into the forests of the Sierra Nevada. She made friends with Spanish shepherds, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, miners, Shoshones, and Paiutes. She took rides from strangers to unknown destinations, claiming a freedom that, at the time, for a woman, was considered brazen at best. 

Austin’s dozen years in these harsh lands produced a small volume, The Land of Little Rain, now considered an environmental classic. “There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snow line,” she writes. “A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it.” Published in 1903, the book is a collection of intimate vignettes of the desert’s land and people that helped establish the allure of an often-maligned ecosystem—and, more broadly, of the West itself. 

Over the course of her life, Austin produced more than 30 books and 250 articles. She wrote about the mind-clearing power of open spaces in a time of rapid industrialization. She championed the rights of women on issues such as birth control and suffrage. She advocated for better treatment of Native Americans, immigrants, and other oppressed groups. But in contrast to some of her contemporaries, such as Aldo Leopold and John Muir (with whom she publicly sparred), Austin’s work was largely forgotten after her death, in 1934. 

“Mary Austin said what she thought, and people don’t like that in women—now or then,” says Melody Graulich, a retired professor of western American literature and an expert on Austin’s work and life. “There have always been these women who have pushed the envelope, but we forget every generation.” 

With promiscuous curiosity, Austin explored a diversity of topics, from water issues in the West to the mistreatment of Native Americans, producing novels, essays, plays, and children’s stories. Much of her writing reflects the currents of her own life. One recurring theme investigates how women can escape the straitjackets of cultural expectations. 

Born in Carlinville, Illinois, in 1868, Austin was an unusual child from the beginning, chafing at the rigid strictures of midwestern culture. She was observant, whip-smart, willful, and outspoken. But to her mother, she was distinctly unfeminine, homely, and not quick enough to please others. (For these offenses, her mother thought she was unfit for marriage.) Much of her life, Austin swung between her insecurities—born of her mother’s criticism and feeling as if she didn’t fit in—and her confidence in her own capacity to write with insight and originality, which some perceived as an unbecoming ego. 

In many other ways, Austin’s life was an upstream swim. She did marry, but the union was short and unhappy. She gave birth to one daughter who was severely mentally challenged and died early. In 1907, in her late thirties, Austin was diagnosed with terminal cancer and sailed to Europe to suffer out her death. In a turn of miraculous good luck, she fully recovered and lived for another 26 years. Despite the acclaim and admiration Austin’s work garnered, it never materialized into a monetary boon, and she struggled financially for most of her life. 

Between living in Europe, New York, and Carmel, California, Mary Austin kept company with some of the great luminaries of her day, including Herbert Hoover, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London (whom she implored to write a good strong female character). But she always felt called to the liberating openness of the West and the cultures of the people who lived there. In 1924, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. According to Graulich, Austin felt that her time wandering the desert in her younger years healed her deepest wounds. 

“She felt it was a way to come into her own way of thinking about the world,” Graulich says. “A fair number of her writings address that specifically—women coming to know themselves and heal themselves with physical activity and casting off corsets.” In all of her writings, Austin doesn’t talk much about her own physicality. Instead, she focuses on the importance of a connection to nature for an increasingly city-bound populace. 

“Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for,” she writes in The Land of Little Rain, “come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness.” 

Over the years, Austin’s work influenced contemporaries (Willa Cather wrote part of Death Comes for the Archbishop in Austin’s Santa Fe home) as well as subsequent generations of writers, such as Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams. 

“Mary Austin haunts me…she is a presence in my life even though she has been dead more than 60 years,” wrote Williams in an introduction to a 1997 edition of The Land of Little Rain. “I love that Mary Austin was not polite or coy or particularly accommodating. Too many women have been silenced in the name of ‘niceness.’” 

After Austin died of a heart attack, the photographer Ansel Adams also wrote of her influence. “Seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual and spiritual power and discipline,” said Adams, who collaborated with Austin on a book about Taos Pueblo. “She is a ‘future’ person—one who will a century from now appear as a writer of major stature in the complex matrix of American culture.” 

In the 1980s, scholars started to rediscover Austin’s work, and over the years, some half-dozen of her books have come back into print. College professors now commonly teach her writing in western and environmental literature classes. In 2014, William Randolph Hearst, the grandson of the newspaper tycoon, was so mesmerized by her prose that he arranged for a new edition of The Land of Little Rain accompanied by a collection of landscape photographs by Walter Feller, and plaques now commemorate her work in visitor centers in the area where she lived while researching it. 

One of Austin’s most celebrated and enduring short stories, “The Walking Woman,” appears at the end of a 1909 collection of fiction, Lost Borders, about the Mojave. In some ways, it is the fictive counterpart to her masterwork and, while lesser known, just as personal. The titular character remains nameless and wanders the desert on foot, healing herself through the simple act of movement. She drops the pretense of upholding appearances, and for that boldness, many think of her as crazy or lame. But as the narrator, an acquaintance, witnesses, the prints of the walking woman’s feet in the soil are perfectly even and measured. 

“[S]he went as outliers do, without a hope expressed of another meeting and no word of good-bye,” Austin writes. “She was the Walking Woman. That was it. She had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it.” 

Say: “Alexa, open Outside Unpacked”

We’re in print, we’re online, and now we’re on your smart speakers.

Our team is excited to announce our partnership with SpokenLayer, the company behind your favorite smart-speaker content from publications like Men’s Health, Fast Company, and The Daily Beast. With SpokenLayer’s help, we’re getting Outside stories to you at the command of your voice.

We’re calling it Outside Unpacked, a daily lifestyle briefing coming to your smart speaker every weekday morning. Here’s how it works:

Alexa Skill Users

Ask your Alexa “Alexa…

• “What’s the latest from Outside Unpacked?”
• “Open Outside Unpacked.”
• “Launch Outside Unpacked.”

Alexa Flash Briefing

Search for Outside Unpacked in your Alexa app, select Enable, and then say, “Alexa, what’s my Flash Briefing?”

Google Home Users

Tell your Google Home “OK Google…

• “Talk to Outside Unpacked.”
• “Play Outside Unpacked.” 
• “Open Outside Unpacked.”

You’ll get your burning gear questions answered, hear helpful tips from our outdoor experts, and know what’s on our radar—without having to lift a finger.

We’re creating this for you, so we want to hear your feedback. What do you want to listen to first thing in the morning? Do you want more fitness, news, gear, or adventure tips? Write in to [email protected] or tweet us to let us know.

We can’t wait to hear what you think.

Simple rules for keeping your timepiece ticking

So you decided to go old school and buy a mechanical watch—not just one with hands and a dial but one that’s powered by a coiled spring and gear train instead of a battery. Congratulations, you’ve got one of the few man-made objects that’s been built the same way for the past 200 years and will keep running for the next 200—but only if you take care of it. I’ve compiled a few pointers for keeping that watch running well and looking good, so you can pass it down one day after it accompanies you on all of your adventures.

One of the most satisfying things about owning a mechanical watch is that it requires your interaction in order for it to function. Unlike a quartz watch, a mechanical timepiece doesn’t get its energy from a battery. Instead, the power that drives the hands around the dial comes from the unwinding of a tightly coiled flat spring that is meshed with a train of gears. This “mainspring” requires regular winding, which, if you bought an automatic, will be wound up as long as it’s on your wrist (and you move every now and then). If it’s a hand-wound watch, or an automatic-winding watch that has been sitting on your dresser for a few days, you simply need to spin the crown a couple dozen times a day, which is an oddly gratifying chore.

While winding a watch is a simple process, there are a couple things to be aware of. First of all, don’t wind it on your wrist: the angle can be awkward and put lateral stress on the winding stem. Second, if it's a hand-wound watch, don’t overwind it. When it feels like you can’t turn the crown anymore, don’t. At that point, it’s good to go.

Setting the watch is equally as simple: pull out the crown and spin the hands to the desired time. If it has a date mechanism, there’s a slight caveat: avoid adjusting the date between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m., since that’s when the mechanism that automatically advances the date is engaged, and forcing it can break delicate components.

Though mechanical watches may seem fragile, they’re actually remarkably rugged, a fact that has been proven out on countless battlefields, mountain peaks, and coral reefs for the past hundred years or so. However, watches do have a few enemies, namely shock, magnets, and moisture. Wrenching on your truck or splitting wood are best avoided while wearing a mechanical watch. You should also avoid setting your watch on devices containing strong magnets, such as the TV, your laptop, or stereo speakers, as this can magnetize the movement and set your watch running too fast. If this happens, take it to a local watchmaker or jeweler, who can quickly demagnetize it.

Your watch is likely rated for some measure of water resistance, which is plenty for almost anything you could get into. But before you go dive the Andrea Doria, make sure that your watch’s crown is pushed in all the way. Most dive watches have crowns that screw down tight to the case for an extra measure of safety. A 30- or 50-meter-rated watch is fine for swimming, sailing or snorkeling, but if you plan to go scuba diving, 100 meters is considered the minimum safety margin for water resistance. And if you spend a lot of time in the water, it’s a good idea to have the seals replaced annually and the water resistance checked.

If you wear your watch frequently, it’s bound to get a little dirty and, like any other piece of gear, should be cleaned. Make sure the crown is pushed or screwed in, then have at it with an old toothbrush and some water. Try to avoid using soap, as it can compromise the watch’s gaskets.

Leather straps look great and last many years, but they can get pretty gnarly from sweat or moisture, so if you’re wearing your watch in the water or sweat a lot, consider a steel band or a rubber or nylon strap. Changing straps is an easy task: simply get yourself a small forked tool and pop off the spring bar, then swap in the new strap. Changing straps is a great way to change the look of your watch without spending much and can become fairly addictive.

Some regular maintenance for your watch is a good idea. Given that a typical mechanical timepiece ticks almost 700,000 times every day, those gears and springs need attention eventually. So every five years or so, it’s a good idea to have a watchmaker clean and lubricate the movement. Ask them to swap out the gaskets while they’re at it.

A mechanical watch is still one of the most reliable devices you can own. There are countless watches from the middle of the last century still in common use today, keeping time as faithfully as the day they were bought. I can’t think of another everyday product that can claim that record of sustainability and longevity. So wind it up and wear the hell out of it, but take care of it. It will reward you by collecting the time of your life.

You feel like you’ve got it together. So why haven’t you found the person for you yet?

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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I will attempt to communicate my circumstances and do not mean to sound vain or pretentious, but context is necessary to explain my situation fully, I believe. I feel that I am a person with high morals, a great amount of integrity, and very well educated. I am 25, and I comanage an international real estate brokerage firm in Southern California, pursuing my passions through a career that allows me both freedom and flexibility. I consider myself an outdoorsman and adventurer, and I am very blessed to be able to travel and take time off from my firm to thru-hike some of the most beautiful places the world has to offer. I yearn for the innate beauty that life has to offer, like spending time with my beloved family and friends.

My question is fairly simple. I have many friends who are in happy relationships and seem to be truly experiencing some of the most beautiful things in life. Unfortunately, I have not found anyone who makes me feel this way. I am extremely comfortable being alone and am self-sufficient, but perhaps this keeps me from branching out further and taking risks with girls and love. I believe that I don’t yearn for an intimate connection, because I developed an independent mentality at a young age. (I went away to boarding school when I was 15.) Is this why I haven’t found someone? Is it a matter of complacency or lack of drive, or has the right person just not come along?

As people spend more time with one another, it’s natural that they begin seeing similarities in their mannerisms, characters, interests, etc.; by my understanding, this is how relationships develop. Is it simply a matter of evaluating what my personal interests are (hiking, traveling, backpacking, photography) and then placing myself in the path of success by finding other people with the same interests? If that’s correct, then other people who share similar interests will also be spending their time doing those things, and perhaps we are bound to meet someone we are attracted to.

I tend to overanalyze things, but I am trying to understand. It empowers me and helps me make the best decisions I can in every aspect of my life. I intake information, process and analyze it, then output decisions and move forward. Any advice would be appreciated.

It sounds like you’ve given this a lot of consideration, and it’s nice to see someone approach life, and love, so thoughtfully. You’re a young man who has established himself in his career, takes time to follow his passions, and cares deeply for his friends and family. I understand the thought that love is your next step, that there is surely something you can do to align this part of your life. But that’s what’s tricky about finding love: there’s no formula. We refer to lovers as having “chemistry,” that intangible spark that draws certain people together, but the wonders of science are far more predictable than love. We can work to protect an existing relationship, but we can’t earn a new one, and finding the right person can feel, at moments, like a miracle of circumstance and timing.

Instead, love is a gift we give each other. But there are things you can do to make yourself open to it and be a better steward should that gift arrive. And if you live your life with generosity and kindness, you’re more likely to encounter those things in return.

So let’s talk about how you can make your life more open to the gift of love. Your first decision: Would you rather be proactive or passive about finding a relationship? Neither practice comes with guarantees; it’s just a matter of what’s right for you at this time. It’s wonderful that you’re comfortable with independence, because that will serve you throughout your life, whether you’re in a relationship or not. If you’re happy as you are, you can just decide to sit back and see what happens. But let’s assume, for the sake of this column, that you decide to be proactive.

You’re right that pursuing interests—taking a photography class, say—can be a good way to meet friends and potential dates, as long as the activity is something you enjoy in its own right. If you meet someone, that’s great, and if not, you’ll have improved your photography, a skill that brings you joy and satisfaction. But remember, too, that in relationships, shared interests aren’t as important as shared values—and odds are high that no one in that photography class is looking for a boyfriend. So if you’re serious about trying to find a relationship, I recommend a method with a little less guesswork.

Your friends know you best, and they may have a talent for matchmaking. Let them know that you’re interested in dating and would be open to meeting new people if they have someone in mind. You can also join a singles group (check meetup.com for “singles” and/or “outdoors” in your area) and try online dating, which allows you to say up front what you’re looking for in a relationship and a partner. If your hopes and goals align with someone else’s, and she seems interested in chatting with you, you can ask her out. For first dates, I recommend suggesting an activity (in a public place) rather than taking on the pressure of simply talking over the dinner table. The best way to come up with date ideas is to think of things you’d enjoy doing—then invite someone else along.

You will go on dates that don’t work out, and that’s OK. Nothing is wasted; you’ve had a chance to connect with a cool person, and you both learned a little more about yourselves. Remember that taking the time to wait for the right fit is an accomplishment, not a failure. After all, you’re unique among billions. You’re looking for someone who’s unique in complementary ways.

Finally, one of the greatest ways to open your life to love has nothing to do with dating at all. Try to build and nurture a practice of appreciating people—men and women alike—without expectation of returned sentiments. You already value the innate beauty in life, which is a wonderful trait in and of itself; now try to pay extra attention to the beauty in other people. Notice when someone makes you laugh or tells a story that moves you. Look for kindness in the world and think about how you can add to it. Aim to give three compliments and do five acts of kindness each day, whether it’s leaving an extra-generous tip for your waiter, picking up trash when you pass it on a hike, or helping a friend who’s in a pinch.   

It’s important that you apply these practices to everyone, not just people you might be interested in dating. A woman can tell from a mile away if you’re complimenting her in the hopes that she’ll reciprocate romantically. (Also, unless you’re dating someone, you should be careful about complimenting a woman’s appearance. Since women often deal with unwanted attention, this can feel uncomfortable and even threatening for the recipient.)

If you do these things, if you nurture appreciation and generosity, you’re making the world around you better; you’re building a community that’s kinder and stronger because you’re in it. Does it guarantee you a girlfriend? Nope. But when you’re waiting for a gift from the universe, it helps to give some gifts yourself first.

A push-up test outperformed a treadmill test for predicting cardiac health—but it’s not all about your pecs

If I didn’t currently have a painful bruised rib (thanks, pick-up basketball!), the first thing I would have done upon reading a recent paper in JAMA Network Open was drop to the floor and start doing push-ups. It’s pretty much irresistible. The study promises a glimpse into the crystal ball, predicting your likelihood of future “cardiovascular events”—things like being diagnosed with clogged arteries or, say, dropping dead of a heart attack—based on how many push-ups you can do. How could you not be curious?

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and several other institutions analyzed health records from 1,100 male firefighters in Indiana who completed baseline physical tests between 2000 and 2007. One of those tests was how many push-ups they could do, to the rhythm of a metronome set to 80 beats per minute (one beat up, one beat down, meaning 40 full push-ups per minute), until they either gave up, fell behind the pace, had three consecutive attempts with incorrect form, or hit 80 reps. Their subsequent health was monitored for an average of 9.2 years after the baseline test, to see whether their push-up score predicted the likelihood of a cardiovascular event (of which there were a total of 37 during the study).

As you’ve probably guessed, the push-up score did indeed have predictive power. The headline result was that those who completed more than 40 push-ups were 96 percent less likely to suffer a heart problem than those who completed fewer than 10. That’s an enormous difference. More generally, each additional 10 push-ups tended to result in a lower risk, even after taking into account factors like age and BMI.

Here’s what the survival probability looked like over time depending on the number of push-ups subjects managed:

Given the small number of cardiac events, the relationship isn’t perfect: those who did 31 to 40 push-ups actually fared a bit worse than those who did 21 to 30. But the trend is pretty clear, and it’s very obvious that those who managed less than 10 push-ups were at significantly higher risk. (These numbers, unfortunately, are specific to men in their 30s and 40s like the firefighters in the study. As is so often the case, we’d need a broader study to figure out useful benchmarks for the rest of the population.)

Still, when my rib settles down, I’m eager to see whether I can eke out 40 push-ups at that 40-per-minute rhythm. It could go either way, but I suspect there’s a pretty good chance I’ll drop off the required pace somewhere around 30. Here’s the crucial question, though: if I don’t make it, but then spend a month or two focusing on push-ups so that I can hit 40 in 60 seconds, will I really have changed my long-term cardiovascular prognosis? Or will I have simply cheated—and thus invalidated—the test by cramming for it?

The reason the push-up test is interesting is because it’s simple, easily accessible, and free. There are plenty of other ways of assessing heart health, including treadmill tests, but they take more time, equipment, and money. As it happens, the firefighters in this study all completed a submaximal treadmill test that estimated their VO2max based on the speed they reached at 85 percent of their estimated max heart rate. This type of test isn’t as accurate as true maximal tests, where you go until you fall off the back of the treadmill, but it gives a decent estimate of cardiovascular fitness. Amazingly, in the firefighter study, the push-up score provided a slightly better predictor of cardiovascular risk than the submaximal treadmill test.

That doesn’t mean that upper body strength is the most important predictor of heart health, though. Instead, the push-up test has a lot in common with other tests of functional capacity. For example, there are dozens and dozens of studies showing that grip strength is a powerful predictor of future disability and death, including from cardiovascular disease. Same with self-chosen walking speed, and even, in older populations, the time it takes you to get up from a chair.

You can come up with arguments for why these tests make sense—maybe poor grip strength means you can’t get the peanut butter jar open, so you waste away. But overall, deliberately trying to improve any of those parameters probably isn’t the best way to go. In fact, there’s some evidence that typical strength training routines don’t improve your grip strength anyway. Instead, all of these tests likely reflect a larger constellation of healthy traits and behaviors: people who walk fast, have a crushing handshake, and can do a lot of push-ups probably tend on average to eat well, stay active, pay attention to their health, and so on.

So, by all means, check your push-up prowess. But remember that it’s just one among many indicators of your general robustness, along with others like, say, how easily you get injured while playing basketball. The best defense? Focus on the whole picture, rather than the details: do hard things, find new challenges, and don’t stop just because you’re getting older and feeling more fragile—because that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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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.

Including, but not limited to, films on taxidermists, Olympians, and one very scary night for a park ranger

Every spring, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, is a sounding board for what the media cool kids are into. Over nine days, they screen more than 100 films, from cute animated shorts to gory feature films, and the award winners are some of the most creative, thoughtful, and challenging films you’ll see over the next year. Here are five films premiering at the festival that we have our eyes on.

‘Stuffed’

“I tell people I’m a 3-D wildlife artist. That goes over better on the first date than ‘I stuff dead things,’” one of the taxidermists in Stuffed explains about his job. That’s the biggest takeaway of the film—things get more interesting if you fight through snap judgment.

Director Erin Derham wanted to tell a story about conservation in a nonpreachy way, and she does so by tapping into the dorkiness and dutiful presentation of natural beauty that’s at the heart of taxidermy. The film challenges the stereotypes of what it is (not just dead deer heads on a wall), paints a giddy, gorgeous portrait of the people who do it, and shows how preserving animals can help preserve species and the spaces that sustain them.

‘Olympic Dreams’

We love following Alexi Pappas’s film career as much as her running career. Olympic Dreams, which she and her husband, Jeremy Teicher, produced (they also collaborated on the feature film Tracktown), is the first scripted film to be shot in the athlete’s village during the Olympic Games. It follows Pappas (who was an artist -in-residence at the 2018 Winter Olympics) as a fictional nordic skier navigating the awkwardness and emotion of being at the world’s biggest sporting event.

Pappas, who was a Rio Olympian in 2016, gets into the complicated feelings of being a top athlete and how fleeting that sensation can be. At the end of the Games, do you keep training, or do you let go of the experience, especially if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted? It’s quirky and goofily touching without being too earnest, and it’ll resonate with anyone who’s questioned their own obsessive drive in sports. Plus, two of our favorite Olympic athletes, Gus Kenworthy and Jamie Anderson, make cameos.

‘Any One of Us’

When mountain biker Paul Basagoitia crashed in what arguably could have been the winning run of the 2015 Red Bull Rampage, he shattered his T12 vertebra, leaving him paralyzed. Any One of Us tells the story of what happened after the crash, how he worked toward recovery, and what happened to him mentally when his riding career and sense of self crumbled.

The film is produced by Red Bull Media House, so it’s solid on the strength of its optics alone, but it also pulls on Basagoitia’s recovery footage and stories of other spinal-cord-injury sufferers to dig into how fragile our ability to move is, and what it might take to regain it.  

‘The River and the Wall’

It’s 1,200 miles from El Paso, Texas, to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the entirety of that distance the border between the United States and Mexico. A group of five river guides, conservation biologists, and wildlife advocates traveled the length of it by boat, foot, and bike to try to understand just how remote and wild the borderlands are, and what might happen if the proposed border wall ran through the landscape. It starts as a story about place and becomes a film about people. The on-the-ground footage shows what might be lost if the land is physically severed and how fragile the largely untouched places are. The deserts and rivers of far West Texas are stunning, but so are the international interconnections they find. 

‘Body at Brighton Rock’

If you’re someone who spends a lot of time alone outside, and you never want to sleep again, Body at Brighton Rock might be just the ticket. Part-time park ranger Wendy (played by Karina Fontes) stumbles across a dead body in the backcountry and is forced to spend the night alone with the corpse until help comes in the morning.

Filmmaker Roxanne Benjamin says her time spent solo wandering through national parks inspired her to dig into the creepy aloneness of feeling very small in a big wild space, as well as the resilience and toughness that comes from proving that you’re brave enough to handle the elements, real or imagined. Which is something a lot of outdoorspeople can probably relate to, even if they haven’t had to guard a dead body through the night.