Month: March 2019

For active mamas-to-be, nine months of playing it too safe feels wrong. Good news: you don’t have to give up on outdoor adventure.

It was in the exhausted, kick-back-and-drink-a-beer evenings when I noticed something was off. My friends and I were mountain biking from Durango, Colorado, to Moab, Utah, via a series of backcountry huts. After a grueling day of high-altitude gear grinding, the cold beers waiting in the huts should have been calling my name. But when we rolled up each evening, I went straight for the Pepsi. I’m usually not a big soda drinker, but suddenly I couldn’t get enough of those syrupy sugar bombs.

I also felt exceptionally tired and occasionally burst into tears at the top of a climb. Still, I didn’t think anything of it until a few weeks later when I didn’t get my period. And my boobs hurt.

My husband and I wanted kids someday, but we weren’t trying to get pregnant. I was more stoked about planning another bike trip (and then a skiing trip and after that a kayaking trip… ) than about decorating a nursery or shopping for baby clothes. I thought being pregnant meant giving up on adventuring, at least for a while. But the fact that I’d biked 250 miles and 30,000 feet of elevation gain in my first trimester gave me hope that I was wrong. Maybe outdoor pursuits and pregnancy weren’t mutually exclusive.

About a month after the hut trip, during a sleepless night when I sat by the woodstove cramming my face with peanut-butter toast, I Googled “mountain biking while pregnant.” There were a few blog posts from women who had safely biked through the second trimester (and even some enterprising souls who’d retrofitted their bikes to make third-trimester biking possible), but two of the most popular pregnancy websites in the U.S.—BabyMed and BabyCenter—were unequivocal: biking while pregnant is unsafe. While some exercise is healthy, “there are limitations that a wise mother-to-be would place upon herself,” writes BabyMed. Those include “high-risk activities such as climbing mountains or mountain bike riding.” The article suggests a stationary bike instead.  

The rationale is that a bad fall could lead to a condition called placental abruption, which could harm the baby or lead to early labor. I do not in any way mean to diminish the seriousness of this risk. But as with many pregnancy recommendations, the advice smacks of what Slate writer Ruth Graham calls the “swath-yourself-in-bubble-wrap thinking that has turned modern pregnancy into a nine-month slog of joyless paranoia.”

So I wondered: If you’re a competent biker, climber, kayaker, or whatever else-er and want to chase some endorphins that won’t send you flying over the handlebars or hurtling into a cliff, do you really need to stop for nine months?

Some ob-gyns clearly think so. But Betsy Vanderburgh, an avid cyclist and ob-gyn at Women’s Health Services of Central Virginia with nearly 30 years of experience, says the decision should be up to each individual and her provider. If your pregnancy is healthy and you’re in good physical shape, there’s no reason to quit most outdoor sports. (Activities with an especially high risk of impact, such as downhill skiing and downhill mountain biking, are the exceptions.) Plus, the mental-health benefits of being outside and doing what you love may contribute to a healthy pregnancy.

As long as you stay hydrated, there’s no harm in getting your heart rate up, getting hot and sweaty, or working your muscles hard. The risk, Vanderburgh agrees, is in falling—but “no doctor in the world is going to be able to predict at what level of exercise you’re not going to fall.” So while some doctors believe that biking exposes a pregnant woman to an unacceptable degree of risk, Vanderburgh’s view is that if you stay within your skill set, you’re just as likely to get in an accident driving your car to the trailhead.

Vanderburgh isn’t the only ob-gyn who supports preggo adventure athletes. Over the course of two pregnancies, kayaking pro Emily Jackson-Troutman saw ten different ob-gyns because of her travel schedule—and says eight of the ten were supportive of her decision to keep kayaking. In fact, Jackson-Troutman won the 2013 U.S. Freestyle Kayaking Championship at nine months pregnant.

After seeing Jackson-Troutman cartwheel her kayak in a wave, some online commenters remarked that she should have her children taken away, or that she cared more about sports than her babies’ health. She sees it differently. Kayaking is “a form of meditation,” she says. “It’s really hard to think about other things when you’re going down a river.” That focus offered Jackson-Troutman a mental break from the stress and uncertainty of being pregnant and helped her cope with the physical challenges. “I gained more than 60 pounds with both of my kids, and that was brutal,” she says. “But when I put my gear on and got out there, I didn’t feel like a 200-pound person anymore. I felt much more like myself. More alive. I could even breathe better.”

Pregnancy probably isn’t the period to try rolling a kayak for the first time or start mountain biking. But with my midwife’s approval, I biked, hiked, and nordic-skied through much of my pregnancy. I stuck to relatively gentle terrain and avoided any sections I wasn’t confident I could complete. When I finally got so big that I had to quit, it felt like a little part of me was gone. But not much later, a new little part of me was born. And a few months after that, I was back on my bike again.

What’s worse than missing a world record by one-hundredth of a second?

One of the headline stories going into the Millrose Games, which took place in New York City earlier this month, was whether Yomif Kejelcha could break the world record in the indoor mile. The 21-year-old Ethiopian, who competes for the Nike Oregon Project, was looking to improve on Hicham El Guerrouj’s time of 3:48.45, which was set 22 years ago and is among the longest-standing records in professional track and field.

It was not to be. Kejelcha ended up running 3:48.46, coming up short by one-hundredth of a second. After he crossed the line, it took a few moments for him to register just how close he’d come to entering his name in the record books. (And also, presumably, getting a fat bonus from Nike.) As grim reality set in, a frustrated Kejelcha smashed his victory bouquet against the track. 

In honor of Kejelcha’s near miss, here’s a brief refresher on a few of the more devastating moments in pro running. 

El Guerrouj Gets His Heart Broken in Sydney

Kejelcha was chasing the legacy of the finest middle distance man in history—a man who had his own trials back in the day. In addition to his indoor mile record, Morocco’s El Guerrouj still holds the outdoor mile world record, as well as the outdoor world record for the 1,500-meters. He set all of them back in the late 1990s, an era when it seemed like he was close to invincible. Going into the Olympic 1,500-meter final in 2000, El Guerrouj had triumphed in all but one 1,500-meter race since taking an unfortunate fall in the 1996 Olympic final—a streak that included two World Championship titles. It seemed like there was no surer bet for a gold medal in Sydney. You can probably guess where this is going. With over 600 meters to run, the Moroccan suddenly found himself in the lead, which would have been okay except that two of the best closers in history, the Kenyan superstuds Noah Ngeny and Bernard Lagat, were lining up over his shoulder. Ngeny timed his kick perfectly and moved past Guerrouj in the home straight, beating him by a quarter of a second. 

Julia Lucas Outleaned at the Line

There’s no need to feel too sorry for El Guerrouj. He would go on to win Olympic gold in both the 1,500 and 5,000-meters in 2004. Besides, for most pro runners, merely making an Olympic team would be the high point of their career. Just ask former Oregon Track Club standout Julia Lucas. At the 2012 Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon, Lucas was among the favorites to finish in the top three in the women’s 5,000-meters and punch her ticket to the Games in London. Although Lucas had struggled with injuries in recent seasons, she came into the 2012 Trials having run the fastest 5,000 of any American woman that year. In the race, Lucas made a bold, seemingly decisive move with three laps to go, gapping the field and opening up a lead that she would carry all the way into the bell lap. Even though she would be caught by Molly Huddle and Julie Culley going into the final bend, Lucas appeared to have third place locked up. Over the last 100 meters however, she began teetering awkwardly, as, somewhere in the distance, Kim Conley was hammering for home. In the end, Conley would nip Lucas at the line, literally catching her on her final stride. All I can say is don’t watch this race unless you want to risk having vicarious track stress dreams for the rest of your life.       

Vanderlei de Lima Gets Accosted

While we’re on the subject of stress dreams: Imagine you’re professional runner and, at age 35 and nearing the end of your career, you unexpectedly find yourself with a big lead in the final miles of an Olympic marathon. You’re closing in on athletic immortality when, all of a sudden, a deranged spectator charges onto the course and messes you up so bad that you only barely salvage a bronze medal. But this is exactly what befell Vanderlei de Lima of Brazil in Athens in 2004. Up until that race, de Lima had had few major wins in his career, but with only four miles left in the biggest marathon of all, it seemed that he was about to pull off a remarkable upset. At least he was, until Neil Horan, a defrocked priest turned agitator, attacked de Lima for no apparent reason. “I cannot explain why I assaulted that young man, put him aside like a rugby tackle,” Horan told the New York Times twenty years after the incident, before adding some Panglossian wisdom for good measure. “I believe there is such a thing as destiny, things that are meant to happen, and my only feeling is that it was meant to happen. It was providential,” Horan said. What a swell guy. 

Des Gets Outkicked On Boylston

Thanks to meteorological conditions that combined cool temps with a fortuitous tailwind, the 2011 Boston Marathon saw some of the fastest times in the race’s long history. On the men’s side, Geoffrey Mutai won in 2:03:02, in what would have been a world record on an eligible course. Among the women, Des Linden ran an American course record, running a tactically flawless race. In fact, Linden’s strategy worked so well that she found herself leading on Boylston Street, Boston’s famous final straightaway. Unfortunately, she had company. In the end, Linden didn’t have enough to hold off Caroline Kiel and finished runner-up to the Kenyan by two seconds. No matter how good a day you’ve had, losing a 26.2-mile race by two seconds is going to hurt. “As the race broke and my race plan was unfolding, it just went perfect for me, minus not winning,’’ Linden told the Boston Globe afterwards. (Fortunately for Linden, in 2018 she once again found herself leading on Boylston—this time with no challengers in sight.)    

Kejelcha Comes Up Short—Again

One week removed from coming within one-hundredth of a second of the indoor mile record, Kejelcha once again found himself on the verge of historic achievement. At the Muller Indoor Grand Prix in Birmingham, England, he appeared well-positioned to attack El Guerrouj’s indoor world record for the 1,500-meters (3:31.18), which has stood since 1997. After the pacemakers dropped out, Kejelcha took the lead at the 1K mark with the intention of pushing the final two and a half laps. However, rather than the clock, this time Kejelcha would be defeated by another, even younger, Ethiopian athlete. With 100 meters to go, 19-year-old Samuel Tefera surged by Kejelcha and came home for the win in a new world record of 3:31.08. (Kejelcha had to settle for a personal best of 3:31.58.) 

Of course, it need hardly be said that, in the zero sum world of pro distance running, one runner’s near miss is often another’s triumph. “I’m delighted with the outcome,” Terefa said after his win last weekend. “To have the world record is a special feeling.”

I mean, damn, is it too much to ask for some room on the armrest?

Airline loyalty programs are pretty complicated, and, let’s be honest—you’re never sure you’re actually getting “rewarded” for your loyalty to a certain airline. Or if it’s really worth it.

But what if airlines really had to try hard to impress us? And get creative about it? Instead of “After flying X qualifying segments or X miles and spending $X,000 on flights, you will potentially earn one possible free upgrade to somewhere closer to the front of the plane, if the flight is pretty empty on that day,” what if it was something like, “Hey, looks like you’ve flown a ton of miles with us, so we fixed that leak in the roof of your house and got your kids a puppy,” or “Thanks for booking your last 30 flights with us, we’ve arranged for you to have an empty seat next to you for your next ten flights”?

Here’s an altogether unrealistic, but I think pretty persuasive, suggested list of airline loyalty benefits, using a simple formula:

5,000 miles

You get upgraded to a whole can of soda all to yourself on every flight for the next year, instead of five ounces poured into a plastic cup full of ice.

10,000 miles

The Wi-Fi will work for the entire flight, every flight, for the next year.

12,000 miles

You get a free beer every flight for the next year.

15,000 miles

You get a comfortable seat sized for an actual human being, like they had in the 1970s (but no one is smoking on the plane like in the ’70s), for the next year.

20,000 miles

No one manspreads into your area and you have exclusive armrest rights for a year of flights.

25,000 miles

You get to de-plane first no matter where you’re sitting, for one year.

30,000 miles

You get a whole row to yourself for every flight, for one year.

35,000 miles

No one cries, talks loudly, or uses their smartphone’s external speaker during your flights for the next two years.

40,000 miles

No one sneezes, coughs, or farts on your flights for the next two years.

45,000 miles

You receive a pizza, a whole pizza, from a pizza place not in the airport. It’s all yours. Also, the seat next to you is empty, so you can put the pizza there while you eat it. Here are some extra napkins.

50,000 miles

We answered all your emails for the rest of the month. Please enjoy a movie or a nap.

60,000 miles

You get a private bathroom on your next international flight, and—it’s clean. No one has blown it up, or flushed the toilet with the lid open, or even peed on the floor. But you can do all that stuff if you want to.

70,000 miles

A car and driver is parked on the tarmac for you, just hop out the rear exit door at the end of the flight here and go home. Your bags are already in the car.

80,000 miles

Surprise, we have re-routed your flight so instead of going to that conference for work, you’re going skiing. All your friends are there, and they have new skis for you, and it’s snowing. Also your boss is paying you to be there for four days and you got a raise.

90,000 miles

You get to sit in the cockpit for the entire flight.

100,000 miles

You are bumped up to first class and all the the other first class seats are occupied by golden retriever puppies.

125,000 miles

You are teleported to your destination this time.

150,000 miles

None of your flights are delayed, ever, for the rest of your lifetime.

175,000 miles

You will receive the ability to play any musical instrument; most people agree that you are also pretty good-looking.

200,000 miles

Here’s a private plane and pilot who will take care of all your air travel needs for the next five years.

250,000 miles

You can fly all by yourself, without a plane, like Superman.

500,000 miles

Immortality.

When it comes to the effects of temperature on performance, perception is reality

As a father, a husband, and a purveyor of training advice, one of the most valuable and hard-earned lessons I’ve learned over the years is that telling someone that a problem is all in his or her head is seldom helpful. So please don’t take this the wrong way—but when you slow down on a hot day, it’s not just a consequence of elevated core temperature or decreased blood volume. It’s at least partly in your head. It’s not me telling you this, it’s science.

The science in question is a new study in the journal Physiology and Behavior, a collaborative effort between Romain Meeusen’s research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and Samuele Marcora’s group at the University of Kent, led by Jeroen Van Cutsem, a joint doctoral student in both labs. The goal of the study was to investigate whether the subjective experience of feeling hot is enough to hurt your performance, independent of whether your body is actually getting hot. That’s a tricky thing to test, but the results are telling.

Nobody disputes the fact that heat slows you down. But it’s unexpectedly difficult to pin down the precise reasons for this slowdown. It’s not just dehydration: if it’s 100 degrees out, no amount of drinking will enable to you to run a marathon as fast you would on a 50-degree day. There are numerous ways that heat makes you less efficient—oxygen-rich blood is diverted away from your muscles to instead ferry excess heat to the skin, for example—that tell part of the story, but not all of it.

In the 1990s, a promising line of research showed that if you put someone on a treadmill or an exercise bike in a hot room and ask them to continue for as long as possible, they’ll last until their core temperature hits a critical threshold of somewhere around 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). This suggests that our brains are wired with some sort of self-protective circuit breaker that forces us to slow down or stop before we fry our circuits. But in the real world, researchers soon realized, virtually no one reaches that threshold while running marathons or doing other hot-weather exercise. No matter how motivated we are, we almost always slow down before the circuit breaker flips.

Instead, researchers studying endurance have begun to focus more on perception of effort, with the idea that your performance in the real world ultimately depends on how you feel. In a 2012 study, for example, the negative effects of cycling in 89-degree heat were partly erased when the thermometer in the room was rigged to read 79 degrees. And several recent studies have explored using things like menthol that create a perception of coolness to enhance performance in the heat. That may well be the biggest benefit of trendy sports tech like ice vests and Ashton Eaton’s cooling hood.

Still, it’s tricky to tease out the perception of heat from actual physiological responses to heat. The solution Van Cutsem and his colleagues came up with was to apply a small electric heat pad, tucked in the pocket of a specially designed shirt, to the upper back of their volunteers. The heat pad was turned up to about 104 degrees, just a few degrees above normal body temperature. Pilot testing showed that this was enough to make people feel hotter, but not enough to induce any measurable physiological changes: no increase in core temperature, no change in sweating, no shift in heart rate or any other cardiovascular parameters.

A dozen trained cyclists and triathletes completed a pair of time-to-exhaustion tests on an exercise bike at 70 percent of VO2max, with and without the heat pad. (As an aside, time-to-exhaustion tests are sometimes criticized because pedaling at a constant power output is different from racing at a freely chosen pace over a defined distance. But in this case, the advantage of a constant-power test was that it kept the level of heat being generated by each cyclist constant, rather than fluctuating depending on their pacing decisions.)

The results: subjects gave up 9 percent sooner when the heat pad was on, lasting 34:52 compared to 38:12 on average. They reported feeling hotter throughout the ride by about 1 point on a scale of -6 (very cold) to 6 (very hot). But none of the physiological measurements—blood lactate, core temperature, skin temperature, heart rate, stroke volume, cardiac output, oxygen uptake, ventilation—were different. The feeling of being a bit warmer was the only apparent difference.

Marcora, encouraged by the results, wants to take things a step further and try the heat-pad approach for heat acclimation. “My next study would be about using this cheap ‘fake heat’ method to induce psychological adaptations for people who compete in the heat but can’t afford training in exotic places or a climate chamber,” he says.

The study isn’t perfect, of course. Having a heat pad attached to your back could be distracting (for reasons that aren’t clear, the subjects didn’t wear the pad during the control ride). And it wasn’t blinded, so expectations may have played a role: in the crucible of an all-out test, we all look for excuses, and knowing that there’s an electric pad pumping heat into your body might serve as a tempting reason to stop a bit earlier than usual.

In a sense, though, the role of expectations is baked into the results. If you decide to alter your thermal sensations by swishing menthol in your mouth, or by wearing a cooling headband, then does it matter whether the cooling effect is acting on you consciously or unconsciously? Either way, if it makes you feel cooler, it may have the potential to help you push on in hot conditions. This does not, I hasten to point out, mean that you can run through Death Valley under the midday sun at the height of summer just by chanting to yourself “La la la, it’s all in my head, I’m not hot.” Thermal physiology, and its effects on human performance and safety, are real. But so is thermal psychology.

---

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.

New research parses the different effects of exercise on anger as an emotion versus anger as a mood

In my house, it’s well understood that missed runs and snippy exchanges are causally related. That may seem obvious—after all, there are big piles of evidence about exercise’s mood-altering power to reduce feelings like anxiety and depression. But, as a new study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise points out, there has been very little research on the links between exercise and anger. And that makes me very, very angry. (I’ve been injured and unable to run for a few weeks.)

Researchers at the University of Georgia decided to address this gap by showing a series of “emotionally evocative” pictures—soldiers firing at children, a Ku Klux Klan rally—to volunteers before and after a 30-minute “moderate-to-vigorous” bike ride (or, in the control condition, 30 minutes of sitting quietly). They assessed their volunteers’ anger levels with questionnaires and by measuring brain activity with EEG electrodes. The results are more nuanced than I expected.

The first thing to note is that there’s a difference between moods and emotions. This may seem obvious, but it’s something I hadn’t really thought about in this context, and it turns out there’s a long and complicated academic literature arguing about the precise differences between the two. In broad strokes: moods tend to be longer-lasting, they are less strongly associated with an immediate trigger, and there’s nothing you can measure in the brain that reveals them. In contrast, emotions are shorter, are a response to a specific triggering event, and are linked with consistent and measurable patterns of brain activity. You can be in an angry mood, and you can also experience anger as an emotion.

The Georgia study, which was led by former graduate student Nathaniel Thom (now at Wheaton College), started out by screening 430 students in order to select 16 men with a high propensity for getting angry. (This approach makes it more likely that you’ll see significant changes, much like testing blood pressure meds on people who have high blood pressure.) During the picture-viewing, EEG brain activity and questionnaire responses measured the subjects’ anger as an emotion in response to each scene. Before and after the sessions, they also completed psychological questionnaires to check whether the overall experience had put them in an angry mood, and whether that was affected by the presence or absence of exercise.

The results, which were first reported at a conference several years ago, showed that the 30-minute bike ride did indeed have two positive effects on angry mood. The volunteers felt less angry immediately after the bike ride; and the post-exercise picture-viewing session was also less likely to put them in an angry mood. In other words, exercise both reduces your anger levels and helps immunize you against getting into an angry mood in the first place.

But when you consider anger as an emotion, the picture changes. Exercise had no effect whatsoever on the intensity of emotions reported during picture viewing—not just for the anger-inducing pictures, but also for pictures chosen to induce feelings of fear and pleasantness. And the EEG data also showed no difference in emotional intensity. Exercise may put you in a better mood, but—in this particular study, at least—it didn’t seem to dull or prevent passing emotions.

It will take a lot more research to tease out these subtleties and figure out how generalizable they are. For now, it’s interesting to see some apparent confirmation that exercise really can function as a sort of prophylactic against irritation—but not an all-powerful one. Even after a run, things that make you angry will still make you angry. Just remember that the transient emotion will pass, and your Zen-like post-exercise good mood will return.

---

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.

A playlist that both parents and children can enjoy

This winter, my husband, Steve, and I took our two daughters to the Grand Canyon, an eight-hour haul from our home in Santa Fe. Our road-trip game has evolved over the years. When they were infants, they napped to Baby Mozart on the CD player for hours on end (and no stopping for gas, or else they woke up). As toddlers they passed the time watching Little Einsteins episodes or giving monkeys perms on Toca Hair Salon on the Kindle. But ever since they learned to read, we’ve deliberately gone screen-free in the car. Now, at ages eight and ten, they pack their own art supplies and books, play car bingo, do homework, or—best of all—daydream out the window.

On this latest trip, we upped our game and finally joined the 21st century by cuing up some podcasts. The girls are mature enough now to listen to 45-minute shows with substance and heft that also interest Steve and me (or that at least won’t bore us into a mind-numbing delirium). The best family podcasts are the ones that we can all enjoy. Our audio diet tries to hit the big categories—art, science, humanity, adventure, mystery, and nature.

Short and Curly

Best for ages: Four and up

Produced by ABC News Australia, Short and Curly is an ethics podcast for kids and parents that poses moral dilemmas and probing—or in Aussie lingo, “curly”—questions and gives listeners time to discuss them together. On the way home from the Grand Canyon, we listened to a show about pugs (is it humane to breed dogs whose short snouts make it hard to breathe?) and, in a compelling mock reenactment of the Titanic, the morality of saving kids’ lives over adults’. Cohosted by award-winning science journalist Carl Smith and Australian actress and filmmaker Molly Daniels, Short and Curly addresses subjects ranging from science to sports, wildlife to technology. And at just about 20 minutes long, it’s succinct, as advertised, never preachy, and funny. Bonus: an Aussie ethics expert chimes in with helpful perspectives.

The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel

Best for ages: Eight to twelve

Winner of the 2016 Peabody Award, this serialized mystery podcast is performed by kids for kids. The namesake protagonist, an Indian American middle schooler, teams up with his friends to investigate the link between missing children and a shady billionaire. Plenty of sci-fi elements keep the mystery moving forward, ensuring that kids—and their grown-ups—will be hooked from the start. Now in season three, the audio episodes are short (15 to 25 minutes long) and fast-paced, ideal for action-obsessed listeners.

Invisibilia

Best for ages: Tweens and up

As a young girl, I was obsessed with the television series In Search of… about eerie natural phenomena like Pompeii, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. Kids these days are just as hooked on the weird hidden forces that shape our lives. Enter Invisibilia, NPR’s narrative storytelling podcast for grown-ups that’s chockablock with strange-but-true tales about the unseeable things that affect our behavior, beliefs, and assumptions—like the latest neuroscience research on emotions; ways in which we see reality (and in one story, bears) differently; and “I, I, Him,” about the stories we tell about ourselves to overcome difficult obstacles. Cohosted by Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel, of This American Life and The Atlantic, respectively, this 45-minute show is clever and compelling.

Storynory

Best for ages: Four to ten

The younger set will groove on this read-aloud podcast, which features original stories about birds, pirates, and plucky monkeys, as well as classic fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop, and the Brothers Grimm. Only 15 to 20 minutes long, the dramatic tales suit shorter attention spans or those who tend to doze off midstory for their nap (guilty).

On Being

Best for ages: Eight and up

For older kids asking bigger questions, Krista Tippet’s On Being may just be the answer. On a recent backcountry hut trip in Colorado, we listened to Tippet’s 2015 interview with the late, great poet Mary Oliver. Some of it, including allusions to Oliver’s difficult childhood, was over their heads, but Tippet, who covers mindfulness, spirituality, science, and art, approaches her subjects with thoughtful consideration, humility, and a lot of heart. Afterward, I asked the girls and their seven-year-old friend to share something they’d learned. Oliver lived in Florida and loved nature, one of them said. She stood at her door every morning with her notebook in hand and wrote, another recalled. She collected shingles at the dump on the day she won the Pulitzer. The message of this episode, and much of On Being, is that if you pay attention, you’ll see that life is filled with ordinary, beautiful moments—many of them beautiful because they are so ordinary.

I learned the hard way that lying to your kids backfires

Raising active kids requires patience, stamina, and ingenuity. Many days simply getting out the door with a full complement of mittens, hats, and boots feels like an exercise in futility. Fortunately, there are tricks for mitigating the logistical and emotional breakdowns:

1. Minimize transitions, which are a major time and energy suck. If you don’t absolutely need to go home before going to the climbing gym, don’t. Pack their harnesses and just roll from one activity to the next.
2. When in doubt, always bring an extra pair of socks. You’ll thank me later.
3. On ambitious outings, bring plenty of snacks, preferably sweets, and give the littles full autonomy over when, what, and how much to eat. Let’s face it, bribery has a place in the outdoors.

And so, too, does fibbing.

I’m not proud to admit this. I strive for honesty in my life and relationships. But occasionally it helps to bend the truth in order to get kids outside and keep them there for longer than five minutes. In my decade on the job as mother, I’ve told my fair share of white lies, including but not limited to:

It’s not that far.

The water’s not cold, it’s just the air!

It’s not very steep.

The top is just up there.

One of the first fibs my husband, Steve, and I told our girls, Pippa and Maisy, was that Disney World had closed indefinitely. This was when they were much smaller and begged us to visit, when standing in line at an amusement park with hordes of other people was an abstract idea for them and the wrong kind of “adventure” for us. “Maybe your grandparents will take you!” we’d say encouragingly. Meanwhile, we’re going rafting.

When I try to rationalize the deceit, I think of that old existential saw: If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? Telling kids that the conditions suck automatically biases them against cold and wet weather, and hearing us whine gives them permission to gripe, too. If they have the proper gear and it doesn’t feel cold to them, is it actually cold? If we know they’re strong enough to handle the hike and aren’t in any apparent danger, isn’t it OK to downplay the challenges to keep them motivated and moving forward?

As an ultrarunner, I’ve been lied to plenty of times. It’s one of the sport’s time-honored traditions and a mindset that keeps me from quitting in the middle of a grueling effort. Sometimes the one lying is me: You’re doing great, I say to myself. It’s not that far to the next aid station. Sometimes it’s my friends and family who are crewing for me, or people I’ve never met, who lie. Once during a 50K race, a kindly volunteer handed me some pretzels and told me cheerfully, without batting an eye, “The last two miles are just rolling!” when it was a hellish two-mile climb to the finish.

As a parent, though, I’ve discovered that there’s a fine line between omission and deception. A big part of raising children who are competent, independent, and confident in wild places is teaching them to assess risk and effort based on their own barometers. This will help them develop an internal dialogue that works for them, whether as the sweet-talking cheerleader or the tough-talking truth sayer. They can’t manage their own expectations and output if you’re always narrating the story for them. Sooner or later, you have to get out of their way.

Over the holidays, Steve and I took Pippa and Maisy, now ten and eight, to the Grand Canyon for the first time. I’d managed to score a last-minute cancellation for a cabin at Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon. Our hike in would entail a seven-mile trek down to the Colorado River and nine and a half miles and nearly 5,000 vertical feet back up the next day. I knew the girls were physically capable. We’d spent the late summer and fall doing long hikes to high elevations in New Mexico, and we’d learned that nearly every outing has its low point—sometimes several. The trick is to recognize them when they come, stay as positive as possible, and push through till things get better.

As we pulled up to the South Rim just before sunset, I was so giddy for them to witness the canyon’s majesty for the first time that I found myself saying, “The Grand Canyon’s not that spectacular.” It was a dumb joke, the kind that just sort of slipped out in the excitement, exactly the sort my dad would have said in his exaggerated, goofy voice, the one that always told me he was kidding. I thought my strategy would make them gasp with even more amazement when they peered over the edge. I didn’t think they’d believe me.

But when we got to the rim and looked down, they were both weirdly subdued. Maybe it was because they were cold and had left their hats and down jackets in the car, or because it was dusk, all the colors muted, or they were tired and apathetic after our seven-hour drive. Or maybe my silly gag had backfired.

The next day, during our three-and-a-half-hour hike down to Phantom, Pippa told me she thought I’d been telling the truth. That there would be something better, more spectacular in her lifetime, that the Grand Canyon wasn’t the single most breathtaking spectacle in practically the whole world. She’d lowered her expectations because of me, and I’d taken away that unforgettable first impression and made it ordinary and underwhelming—and no matter what I did or said now, I couldn’t give that moment back to her.

I vowed then that from then on, I would level with my daughters. If they were cold, I’d admit that it was cold. I would give them my best estimates on time and effort and distance. I’d warn them that they might suffer but that sticking with it would almost definitely be worth it. Right there on the trail, I told Pippa that the hike out would be long and hard, maybe harder than anything she and her sister had ever done. But I had no doubt—zero—that they could do it. And this truth was more powerful than any lie.

The sun was just beginning to creep down the canyon walls when we left Phantom Ranch the next morning. It was barely 40 degrees and our hands were cold, the climb in front of us daunting. “Pleeease let us ride the mules,” the girls begged more than once. I’d like to think it was our honesty that powered them up the long ascent, but it might’ve also been our incentives: any dessert they wanted if they made it out without crying, and TV in the hotel room when we finished. It was easy to bargain with them. They are still so little, and despite their occasional whining, still so game. It might not always be this way.

Motivated, they turned on their motors and cranked through the switchbacks, stopping only a few times for snacks and water. Four hours in, with less than two miles to go, they began to tire. But rather than downplay the effort, together we did the math. At our pace, we calculated, it’d be another hour to the rim, maybe more. Knowing the facts didn’t make them freak out, as I’d feared. Instead, it helped them strategize. They decided to rest briefly every 30 minutes until they got to the top. Every step would bring them closer.

After five and a half hours, they crested the last switchback and barely paused for a celebratory picture. It would be another day, and two helpings of chocolate-mousse tacos for dessert, before they would stare over the edge, awed by the canyon and their own stamina, neither of which needed any interpretation from us.

A new documentary is telling the story of the immigrants who keep ski towns running

On a clear blue day in Utah, 22-year-old Diana Zuniga is stripping her skins and clicking into her skis, but her mind is somewhere else. “I might not have a job in two years. I’ll have to leave the country, it’s scary,” says Zuniga, a Dreamer. She’s unsure of her immigration status under the Trump administration, because her family moved to Utah from Mexico in 1998. “But you have to focus on the positives,” she says as she glides off along a snowy ridge, carving powder turns.

That hard-to-find freedom is what Hilary Byrne and Sophie Danison capture in their film The Quiet Force. The documentary shows how immigrants are woven into the economic and social fabric of ski towns, why immigration reform is so complicated, and that regardless of where people come from, we all want fresh air and a place for our families to move their bodies and feel safe.

“Teton County would shut down without an immigrant workforce,” says Noah Novogrodsky, a law and ethics professor at University of Wyoming who published a 2018 report on the impact of immigration on Jackson Hole’s economy. “Young ski bums don’t want to do the work that it takes to run a resort community—citizens born in the U.S. aren’t cooking in restaurants or cleaning hotels rooms.” It’s a powerful statement, backed by the fact that the U.S. stands to lose $900 million in ten years due to deportation, according to the Center for American Progress. The film’s impact comes from the stories of the people working those jobs, keeping those towns running, and trying to make a life in the mountains. Zuniga, who learned to ski at Alta through SheJumps, is working through physical therapy school. An unnamed undocumented Mexican carpenter in Jackson Hole wants a community for his kids. America Hernandez, a naturalized U.S. citizen who also immigrated from Mexico, supported Trump and then realized his policies might take her away from her family and community. 

The film tells a bigger story about policy, too. Danison and Byrne, who met in Jackson Hole while working on the 2014 ski film Pretty Faces, had been brainstorming about how to use their experience with making outdoor films to address bigger issues. They spoke to Emily Coombs of the Doug Coombs Foundation in Jackson, which takes low-income kids skiing, and writer David Page, who wrote a 2016 article about ski town labor for Powder, both of whom connected them with people impacted by immigration in Jackson and Mammoth Lakes.

“It’s relevant to what’s going on in our country, and it’s an industry we know,” Byrne says. They settled on the idea in October 2016, right before Trump was elected, and the film took on a more immediate tenor. “It started around skiing, but as the year and a half went by, we realized it was a bigger story, and that we needed to go for it.”

They went to the Mexico-Arizona border and to Washington, D.C., to talk to Sarah Pierce from the Migration Policy Institute about what potential pathways to immigration reform might look like. They talked to business owners, immigration lawyers in ski towns, and children of immigrants who are learning to ski (in part through the Coombs Foundation) to show the concrete ways people who are a big part of the economy and community of ski towns are impacted. The film shows the fear that follows immigrants who work in the service jobs that hold up tourist towns, or skiers like Zuniga, whose immigration status is in the air. “It’s not radical,” Danison says. “We wanted to propose things that are rational and maybe resonate with people who are a little more in the middle.”

Danison says that they felt pressure around how to shape the film, especially as two white women. “I don’t think there was a time we were scared by the story, but the topic is big and intimidating,” she says. “We’re coming from this teeny tiny town of Jackson trying to tackle this big question that’s dense and rapidly changing. Everyone is going to have their own story about it.”

They were surprised at how ready people were to tell their stories. “It’s incredible that some of the characters wanted to open up on camera, but I think they were feeling like they haven’t had a space to talk,” Byrne says. They made sure to be sensitive to the fact that appearing in their documentary could negatively impact their sources, but it was harder to talk major brands out of being scared off by potential blowback. After trying and failing to find sponsorship, they decided to self-fund the film. Through an Indiegogo campaign and fundraising events, they raised $50,000 and pulled in staffers who could help with logistics like website building and event planning.

“A cool added piece of it being community funded is that we knew that people were ready for this story,” Byrne says. “The industry wasn’t ready for it, which was discouraging in some ways, but by not having any corporate sponsors, we could go out on a limb, touch on policy, and tell a story that felt true.”

The women say that the response been positive so far, with the film winning the People’s Choice Award at 5Point Aspen Film Festival. Byrne says it’s resonating in mountain towns, because the scale and importance of an immigrant workforce is clear in places like Jackson and Mammoth, where people’s neighbors and coworkers are impacted. They filled the Center for the Arts in Jackson on their first showing, and a slew of people have reached out to bring it to their community. They’re hosting panel discussions about how people can be involved locally. Byrne says those discussions will take a different form in each community. In Jackson, for instance, the conversation turned to ICE raids and how business owners can respond to them. “We just want more people to go tell the story they see in their backyard,” Danison says. “It’s seemingly radical for people to start talking about this.”

Find out where you can see the film on tour here.

A new study prompted misguided reports suggesting that digital technology is just fine for kids. It isn’t.

In recent years, a rash of studies have suggested that digital technology can be extremely unhealthy for children. In particular, researchers have indicated that mobile devices and social media may be to blame for a steep rise in anxiety and depression among kids. Media outlets have responded by claiming that American youth faces a public-health crisis, and parents and educators have reacted to all this with varying degrees of hysteria.

Now comes along a new study that, if you believe the headlines, says there’s really nothing to worry about after all. As Forbes put it, “Screen Time May Be No Worse For Kids Than Eating Potatoes.” “Mental health risk of screens ‘no greater than wearing glasses,’” crowed the Times of London. But while the two Oxford University scientists who completed the study did conclude that it’s too early to craft policies in response to existing research on how new technologies are impacting adolescent well-being, they also didn’t say that any and all screen time is just fine for young people. Experimental psychologist Amy Orben who coauthored the study for the journal Nature Human Behaviour with Andrew Przbylski, the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, told me that part of their goal was to move researchers and the media away from blanket statements about screen time and children’s health.

Naturally, this inspired a lot of blanket statements.

“I’ve been trying to take it all with some humor,” says Orben. “This project was really motivated by a sense of disillusionment that researchers could go and publish something and get huge press attention just because it’s about social media use.”

Orben told me she had grown concerned after noticing how studies looking at the relationships between digital-technology use and adolescent well-being could come to vastly different results despite analyzing identical data. She and Przbylski found that scientists looking at the same massive compilations of participant surveys were making opposing conclusions and claiming patterns of statistical significance due to the amount of data. Researcher bias was clearly playing a role. In their new project, Orben and Przbylski sought to neutralize those biases by applying a method called specification curve analysis across three very large sets of data collected from teens in the U.S. and UK. This method can reveal all of the possible ways one might combine and interpret variables, as well as the wide range of findings that could arise as a result. In other words, instead of walking one path through the proverbial forest of data, you can head down all the potential paths at the same time.

Looking for evidence of a correlation between adolescent well-being and digital-technology use—as reported by kids as well as caregivers—they found that overall, there was a small but statistically significant negative association, explaining at most just 0.4 percent of the variation in well-being. Using the same methodology, they also looked at the impact of other behaviors such as smoking marijuana, binge drinking, and getting bullied, all of which showed stronger negative effects on wellbeing. Eating breakfast and getting enough sleep, not surprisingly, had extremely positive associations with well-being. (And, yes, they also looked at eating potatoes, which apparently has a slightly negative effect.) Ultimately, Orben and Przbylski conclude that given the conflicting studies out there and their own findings, it’s premature for any group to make specific policy recommendations around youth and screen time.

“This is an incredibly important paper,” Candice Odgers, a psychologist who studies adolescent health and technology at the University of California, Irvine, told Scientific American. “The message … is painstakingly clear: The size of the association documented across these studies is not sufficient or measurable enough to warrant the current levels of panic and fear around this issue.”

Maybe so. But Orden and Przbylski are not telling us it’s fine to allow our teens to disappear into their phones. “Asking whether technology influences well-being is way too broad—it’s like asking whether sugar causes depression,” Orben says. “Reading a book on your Kindle, playing sudoku on your iPad, and spending eight hours a day on Snapchat are not the same. But it’s important for scientists to speak up and say we don’t actually understand this yet.”

That’s a crucial point that was lost in the hype around the study’s findings. The reality is, there are still a lot of good reasons to be cautious about how much technology we let our kids use. “First of all, we don’t even know what the long-term implications are going to be. We don’t have that data yet,” says Diana Graber, author of Raising Humans in a Digital World: Helping Kids Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology and founder of Cyber Civics, a curriculum for middle schoolers taught in more than 40 states. “Smartphones are made to capture and hold our attention. For a child, it’s a pull that’s impossible to step away from.” Graber doesn’t recommend sequestering kids from technology. Instead she argues that we need to teach them the benefits and pitfalls, so that they can manage their own use.

That would sit well with Orben. “I do feel like previous coverage about smartphones destroying a generation has been shaming parents,” says Amy Orben. “I hope this research empowers parents to really think about their child’s technology use and make their own judgments, because they are the people who know their children the best.”

Two kids and one adult put the Finnish brand’s new winter wear through its paces

As a parent who regularly exposes her offspring to wind, rain, snow, and sun, I’ve done my best to clothe them appropriately, despite my oldest son’s preference for wearing sport shorts and a T-shirt—even in a blizzard. But I had yet to find gear that kept my kids protected from getting too cold, wet, or sweaty until we tried Reima. I had long admired Reima, a Finland-based company that makes kid-specific outerwear and clothes. I thought of it as the more rugged version of other cool European kid brands like Boden or Jacadi Paris, complete with bright, bold colors that call to mind images of Finnish storefronts in a fishing village painted red, blue, yellow, and green. So when I heard Reima was making headway into American markets, I reached out to see if it wanted some Colorado kid testers, and my boys spent the early-winter months skiing and playing outside in Reima wear.

About the Testers

Me, Rachel Walker, Age 43: I want my kids’ clothes durable, high-performing, and recognizable. I’m less concerned about fashion and more concerned with being able to pick them out of a crowd or a crowded ski slope.

Henry, Age 8: Built like an ox, Henry looks more like a 12-year-old ski racer than a geeky third-grader. He runs hot (when we ski, he lets me warm my hands on his bare stomach) and couldn’t care less about how things look. He can be sloppy, so the fewer bells and whistles (in his opinion), the better.

Silas, Age 6: A spitfire redhead who rarely stands still, Silas is a lean, muscular kid who is both particular and precise. Once he decides against something, there’s little changing his mind.

Northern Fleece Jacket ($75)

Forget everything I said about functionality. I fell in love with this fleece-lined sweater for its looks.

Henry’s Take: It’s nice on windier days, but when I’m forced to wear this sweater on sunny days, it gets way too hot. I do love the pockets, because they’re big enough for a ball, my bike lock, and a few Pokémon cards.

Silas’s Take: The best thing about this sweater is the zipper. It zips up and down easily. Also, it’s not scratchy, and the hood is big enough to fit over my bike helmet. (Mom’s note: no, it’s not.)

Buy Now

---

Brisk Reimatec Jacket ($170)

Hunting-jacket orange immediately appealed to me, as did the three-in-one configuration of this piece. I thought the kids would love the removable fleece liner and appreciate the combo for warm, early-season ski days. Plus, the hood is expansive and fits over both their ski and bike helmets.

Henry’s Take: This jacket is going to get me in trouble. Every time I take it apart I’m afraid I’m going to lose one of the pieces. Still, it’s great for sunny to light, breezy days.

Silas’s Take: Reima should have something stronger to snap the liner to the outer shell. It’s really frustrating that I can’t take it apart and put it back together easily. This wasn’t my favorite jacket, but it’s a good jacket to have when your mom is going to make you wear one.

Buy Now

---

Regor Reimatech Winter Jacket ($180)

The mother of all ski jackets, this insulated parka has been keeping the boys warm ever since our downhill season started around Thanksgiving. The seams are sealed and the waterproofing works. It’s warm, comes in colorful, eye-popping patterns, and offers a relaxed fit.

Henry’s Take: I love the wind guard on the collar, because I zip it up for chairlift rides and it helps keep me warm when the wind blows. On the downhills, sometimes I unzip the jacket all the way so I don’t get hot. I wish the pockets were bigger so I could actually fit snacks and a walkie-talkie in them.

Silas’s Take: It has a powder skirt that’s amazing, because when I fall on runs, it blocks snow going down my pants. I wish all my jackets had a powder skirt.

Buy Now

---

Takeoff Reimatech Winter Pants ($110)

Did I mention Henry is big for his age? While a lot of active eight-year-old boys are whippet thin, he’s not, and that’s made finding athletic bottoms occasionally challenging. These pants are insulated just enough to keep him neutral to warm but not so much that he overheats. They are loose in the waist and legs but not too baggy. And the suspenders are easy to manage.

Henry’s Take: These are much more comfortable than other ski pants I’ve had, and the lining feels nice and soft. The suspenders slip too much and then fall off my shoulders, and that’s not the best. If I could, I’d fix that. Otherwise, no complaints!

Silas’s Take: My mom said these pants would be too big for me.

Buy Now

---

Trick Jeans ($75)

Everything I said about finding ski pants to fit Henry’s solid, muscular frame also applies to jeans. These pants check every box. Plus, they’re supersoft, and they look great. Better yet, so far nothing he’s done can rip them, not even sliding around on the soccer field, falling off his bike, crawling across the blacktop on his knees (his choice, not mine), or scrambling on big rocks.

Henry’s Take: These are really nice and flexible. And the inside is so soft, like as soft as the ear on my new stuffed dog.

Silas’s Take: I don’t like jeans. I won’t wear them. I don’t care if Mom thinks they make me look cute.

Buy Now

---

Lhotse Thermal Underwear ($85)

This is the product that sent me to the measuring tape, frantically trying to figure out if I could fit into kid’s sizing. Alas I can’t, which means these artful, durable, merino-polyester-blend layers (50/50) are out of my reach. That’s a shame, because the Lhotse elevates long johns to pajama-level cute, wool-level warm, and don’t-need-to-wash-them-for-days odorless.

Henry’s Take: They’re so soft. They don’t scratch me at all. And they feel wild because of the mountains and trees on them. I stay warm but don’t get too hot in them.

Silas’s Take: They don’t stink or itch, and the design always makes me want to go skiing. I have about seven pairs of long underwear, but I only really wear these.

Buy Now