Month: March 2019

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What at first seems like an odd combination—all-wheel drive, compact dimensions, tall suspension, and a big price tag—is also proving to be a winning formula for new car sales. Compact luxury crossovers are dominating the industry right now, and this newest model might be the best one yet. The 2018 Jaguar E-Pace is, at the very least, the best-looking crossover.

Unlike SUVs, which ride on separate bodies and frames and are fitted with four-wheel drive, crossovers use unibody construction and are equipped with AWD. By eschewing dedicated off-road features, crossovers are free to be more economical, spacious, and better to drive on the road, including through challenging winter weather, where AWD serves as a better aid to most drivers. And because a crossover is a car, not a truck, the best ones are coming from companies that traditionally specialized in making good cars. Companies like Jaguar.

Based on the same chassis as the Range Rover Evoque (Jaguar and Land Rover are both owned by Tata Motors) the E-Pace is wider than competitors like the Audi Q3 and BMW X2, while maintaining a similarly short wheelbase. That gives it a spacious cabin that still retains city-friendly external dimensions.

And while rivals from Germany, Japan, and the United States have struggled to find an aesthetically pleasing design language for their compact cars on stilts, Jaguar has just nailed the looks of this new E-Pace. It’s going to sell for its design as much as it will any of its other features.

Do you live someplace where parking is difficult, but you need more interior space than a typical compact car? Like to sit up high so you can see over other traffic? Want a capable AWD system to make winter driving a little safer? Want all that, but don’t want to drive a boring appliance? The E-Pace does all that and starts at just under $40,000.

The E-Pace begins with the same lines and similar design features as the larger, midsize F-Pace and delivers them in a tauter, more athletic package. Where other crossovers are all aggressive but confused, the E-Pace is rounded, friendly, and cohesive. You don’t get the feeling its designers tried but failed to adapt a sports-car design language to SUV dimensions; rather, they set out to design a unique, appealing vehicle.

Inside, the simple, stylish interior isn’t overcomplicated and doesn’t feel cheap. But it’s not quite as striking as the vehicle’s exterior. Like most Jaguar–Land Rover vehicles, the centerpiece is a widescreen infotainment system that doesn’t work as well as it looks. Spec’ing the bright-red leather helps jazz things up in here.

With the E-Pace, Jaguar has completed its transformation from a company that makes cars for stodgy old rich people into one that makes stylish, appealing cars for younger drivers. Less country club, more loft-style condos.

The E-Pace shows its Land Rover origins through handling that’s softer and less sporty than has become the segment norm. It makes up for that with a more comfortable ride and more off-road and bad-weather capability than other crossovers typically manifest.

The new turbocharged 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine family—JLR dubs it Ingenium—is an in-house design that’s available here in 246 and 296 horsepower flavors. I drove the faster version and was pleasantly surprised by both the responsive nature—it totally lacks turbo lag—and its outright performance. Its 5.9-second 0–60 mph time is just as fast as a BMW M3 was just a few years ago.

One of the vehicle’s more interesting features is its torque vectoring system. You may be familiar with that term from some other brands like Subaru, which erroneously use it to describe a stability control system that tweaks the inside brake calipers while cornering, initiating faster turn-in. Here, the E-Pace can actually direct torque to the outside wheels, achieving a similar but more powerful benefit. Combined with a competent stability control system, torque vectoring also helps the E-Pace find traction off-road or in bad weather, where it should boast significantly more capability than any other crossover this side of the Range Rover Velar we recently reviewed.

• Sexiest crossover money can buy.
• High-end badge and quality for under $40,000.
• Class-leading AWD system.
• Comfortable ride.

• Some interior parts are overly reliant on cheap black plastic.
• Not as sporty as some competitors, with noticeable body roll and understeer.

If you’re shopping for a crossover SUV and prioritize looks, capability on dirt roads and in winter weather, and comfort over a sporty drive, then the E-Pace is an excellent option. And it’s sexy, just like a Jaguar should be.

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For 38 years, all of Therm-a-Rest’s 20-by-72-inch inflatable mattresses—the big rectangular ones you probably grew up camping with—were produced on a single machine, called the Expedition Press. Earlier this week, Cascade Designs retired that machine, and with it, a piece of its company history.

There's some debate when the Expedition Press was built, though the general consensus is that it was before 1981—definitely less than 10 years after the homegrown Seattle company’s founding in 1972, around the time that it scaled up production and moved into the office space it still occupies.  

Therm-a-Rest was founded by a trio of former Boeing engineers— Jim Lea, John Burroughs, and Neil Anderson—who wanted to make a more comfortable camping pad. At the time, closed-cell foam pads were the only ones available. Their idea: Put open-cell foam into an airtight, fabric case with a valve to manually regulate internal air pressure. In 1972, Burroughs filed a patent for their invention, which they’d named Therm-a-Rest.

With a patent filed and prototypes refined, they had to figure out how to mass-produce their mattresses. The only problem was that since no one else was making anything similar, no production machines existed. So the three founders had to invent one themselves.

Brandon Bowers, who is the company’s mattress category manager, says the original Expedition Press machine was modeled after a sandwich press. It looked like a typical hydraulic press, with a 40-pound metal frame that had a pinched edge and a quarter-inch cavity in the middle. Fabric was pinned to the edge of the frame, then bonded with the foam.

The mattress would come out hot, so line workers would carry the entire, 40-pound frame out of the press, dump the mattress into a vat of cool water, then put the frame back in the press. A pair of two workers removed the mattress from the water and started inflating it, while a second team put a new mattress into the press. “It was a very manual process,” says Bowers. “For some reason, for five to ten years, the press frame had this removable metal corner piece, which the workers would have to toss to each other. It was a right of passage that young guns would get it tossed at them when they weren’t looking.”

Over the years, the staff made minor tweaks and adjustments to the Expedition Press. By the time Bowers joined the staff in 1998, engineers had devised a way to make production faster (and safer) by installing a rolling conveyor belt, so that workers didn’t have to carry around the big, metal frame. At their fastest, Bowers says, a team of four production workers produced 500 mattresses in a single eight-hour shift. On average, the crew spent about 37 seconds per mattress. 

In the early 2000s, in an effort to refresh and reinvent its product, Therm-a-Rest launched its Prolite series, which necessitated new machines. But the Expedition Press—and the two spin-off machines it had spawned, for the shorter and longer rectangular pads—continued to churn out the brand's Basecamp pads. Not surprisingly, however, those newer machines, which were able to produce both the new, tapered Prolite pads and the old rectangular ones, began to outpace the original trio of machines. The short- and long-pad machines were both retired a few years ago. The Expedition Press was not far behind.

“It was the most efficient machine for making that one type of mattress,” says Bowers. But, he adds, by the end it had become “a bit of a Frankenstein, because it had been changed throughout the years.” (Somewhere along the line, the frame changed, eliminating the need for the tossing of the corner piece. Then came the conveyor belt). Eventually, the company couldn't justify holding on to it any more.

Earlier this week, the company held a decommissioning ceremony for the beloved rig, which had been at Therm-a-Rest longer than many of the company’s employees. “We all recognized that this was an important piece of Cascade Designs history we were looking at,” says Bowers. They ran it one last time, and passed around the Expedition Press’s last pad for employees to sign.

The machine will be dismantled; what’s reusable will be reused in other Therm-a-Rest machines, and what’s recyclable will be recycled. Bowers says that the classic, rectangular Basecamp pads won’t be going away. The new machines built back in the early aughts will continue to produce Therm-a-Rest’s most iconic camping mattress.

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Scientists have a firm grasp on the purpose of certain automatic physical functions, like blinking, breathing, or digestion. When it comes to sleep, however, researchers still aren’t clear on why exactly your body needs to shut off every night. Details aside, one thing’s for sure: When you don’t sleep, your body revolts.

The effects of acute sleep deprivation—which is more akin to pulling an all-nighter than to getting just a few hours of sleep every night for weeks at a time (that’s chronic sleep deprivation)—generally kick in after 16 to 18 hours of being awake and get progressively worse with each proceeding hour. Your mind, heart, endocrine system, and immune system are all affected, malfunctioning in ways both subtle and severe.

The consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are far worse than one sleepless night. But the decision to pull an all-nighter just once can leave some serious damage in its wake.

When it comes to the effects of acute sleep deprivation, “It’s really all about the brain,” says Steven Feinsilver, director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital and a leading sleep researcher. The first signal that your body is overtired will be a sluggish mind. Your reaction time will begin lagging around hour 18; after a full night without sleep, it will nearly triple—which, for context, is about the same as being legally drunk. Your ability to form memories will start deteriorating, and after a while, your capacity to create any new memories at all will shut off entirely.

“It’s almost as though without sleep, the memory inbox of the brain shuts down,” Matthew Walker, a UC-Berkeley professor and author of Why We Sleep, told Business Insider last year. “So those new incoming informational emails are just bounced.”

From hour 18 onward, your decision-making and math-processing abilities and your spatial awareness slowly deteriorate.

Stay up longer than 24 hours and your brain, now in panic mode, will soon take over and force sleep upon you. “You’re basically going to have microsleeps,” Feinsilver says. Though you will appear to be awake—walking, talking, eyes open—your brain will quite literally put itself to sleep for ten to 20 seconds at a time.

During these microsleeps, you can’t process what you’re seeing around you. “We say during sleep you are cortically blind—your brain does not process visual information,” Feinsilver says. “Your brain goes on on autopilot. So, if you’re driving, you might realize that you missed your exit and don’t remember the last ten minutes. And that’s really scary stuff, because it means you’ve been asleep for moments when you really should be awake.”

Stay up for longer than 35 hours, as Walker and a team of scientists from Berkeley and Harvard had research subjects do in a 2007 study, and your emotional mind will start behaving irrationally. When you’re up for that long, the emotion-emitting amygdala becomes 60 percent more reactive to negative stimuli or experience, while also limiting communication with the part of the brain that regulates emotion and contextualizes experiences. In other words, you’re more reactive and judgmental to the people and events around you, and your brain loses its natural ability to run things through a filter or any internal voice of reason. 

If you’re up past 48 hours, hallucinations are common, as Feinsilver experienced firsthand years ago as a medical student. It was October, just before Halloween, and while he was suffering from both acute and weeks of chronic sleep deprivation, a nearby pumpkin started talking to him. “I realized, okay, it’s time to go home,” Feinsilver says.

Stay up for longer than 48 hours and you’re looking at behavior that mimics psychosis—incoherent rambling, disconnection from reality, prone to outbursts. Push yourself longer than a few days without sleep, and the effects can be lethal. The exact ways in which sleep deprivation can cause you to die aren’t entirely understood, but researchers believe it has to do with your mind losing its ability to control life-giving processes and the total disruption of your system that results.

So, why exactly does the brain malfunction in such a profound way without sleep? Researchers aren’t exactly sure, but their best guess has to do with something they’ve dubbed “substance S.”

“The brain is a very active metabolic area. When it works full-time, it generates toxic products,” Feinsilver says. “It’s like when you work out: Your muscles build up lactate, and eventually you can’t do anything more because it hurts, and it’s time to let them relax. Your brain is kind of on all the time while you’re awake, and sleep is designed to be a time to get rid of the toxic products that build up.” Substance S—which scientists think might be adenosine, a byproduct of metabolism that builds up in the blood—might be the toxic metabolite that accumulates in the brain throughout the day, and the need to flush it could be the reason your brain demands sleep every night.

At this point, though, the daily buildup of this metabolite and whether the brain is responsible for purging it during sleep is still only a theory “It’s just a good way of explaining why people might need sleep—it’s the most efficient way to purge a toxic product,” Feinsilver says.

Mechanism aside, we know that “wakefulness is essentially low-level brain damage,” Walker said in an interview with Business Insider.

Your blood pressure rises over the course of the day, usually due to the physical and emotional stressors you inevitably encounter. Every night while you sleep, your blood pressure (as well as your heart rate) drops back down. Sleep, in other words, is a natural blood pressure medication. Without that daily reboot, it steadily rises, and your risk of heart attack, stroke, and even long-term heart disease skyrockets.

If you’re awake for longer than 18 hours, your heart doesn’t get its daily respite, and that can have lethal consequences. In fact, research has found that on the Monday after spring daylight saving time, when we lose an hour of sleep, there’s a 25 percent increase in heart attacks. Conversely, in the fall, when we gain an extra hour, there is a 21 percent reduction in heart attacks. While scientists aren’t exactly sure why this is happening, it is clear that sleep—or lack thereof—has an immediate effect on your heart.

Sleep is vital for hormone production, and if you’re up for more than 18 hours, your testosterone will slowly deplete, affecting energy levels. The good news: Studies have shown that a subsequent night of good sleep can work to return testosterone levels to normal.

Where you get into real trouble, hormonally speaking, is after days, weeks, or months of bad sleep—when you dig yourself into a hole that your body can’t get out of. Studies have shown that just one week of sleep deprivation—less than five hours per night—dropped young male’s testosterone levels by a whopping 10 to 15 percent. For comparison, a healthy individual’s testosterone will naturally decline by 1 to 2 percent per year. In other words, as far as your hormonal system is concerned, a week of bad sleep will age you a decade.

As you stay awake for longer than 18 hours, your body starts to build up pro-inflammatory proteins like IL-6, a blood marker associated with chronic health conditions and heart disease. Your number of immune cells begins to decline as well, as your body is deprived of its opportunity to make more.

Fight sleep even longer and your body will have a harder time producing natural killer cells, which fight cancer and virus-infected cells in your body. In fact, researchers have found that just one night of poor sleep reduces the amount by over 70 percent. Not sleeping will profoundly and immediately increase your risk for cancer, which is part of the reason that, in 2007, the World Health Organization deemed nighttime shift work a probable carcinogen.

If the body malfunctions, it’s safe to assume that your performance takes a hit as well, right? Yes, but the effect is more mental than physical. According to Shona Halson, senior recovery physiologist at the Australian Institute of Sport who specializes in sleep, “During exercise, you don’t see many changes in the physiological systems.” Instead, she says, “What we tend to see are changes in perception of effort. Everything feels harder, so you’ll do worse on a performance test, not because of physiological changes, but because your perception of effort has changed.”

And that’s a fact worth broadcasting, says Halson, because everyone has felt that panic after only managing a few hours of sleep before a big race. You’ll certainly feel tired, and your brain might be a little foggy, but you can still extract your fitness potential. “It’s important to tell athletes that if you get one bad night of sleep, the 20 years of training you have previously done doesn’t go away,” Halson says. “Your fatigability may have gone up a little bit after one bad night, but if it’s an important event, adrenaline usually kicks in.”

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be mindful of your performance after a bad night’s sleep. Halson says that in long endurance events or team sports, where there are more cognitive and emotional components than, say, a 100-meter sprint, a sleep-deprived brain can play tricks on the body. The best thing you can do: Remind yourself that you’ve put in the work and that the cloudiness you’re feeling is more likely than not just your brain asking for sleep.

Illustration by Bill Butcher

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I first realized I could be a great professional rider when, at age 18, I won bronze at the 2003 Junior World Championships. My coach said I was the strongest cyclist in the race, but that I still had a lot to learn about skills and confidence. I loved the idea that with enough hard work, training, and patience, I could rise to the upper echelons of my sport. But what I didn’t realize then was how many challenges I’d face throughout my career because of my gender.  

There is widespread institutional sexism in cycling culture. Women in the sport are groomed to believe that we don’t deserve as much media attention, prize money, or sponsorship investment. Take salaries, for example. The UCI, cycling’s international governing body, requires that WorldTour male cyclists get paid at least $37,000 annually. There is no such mandate for women. According to recent research, half of female pros earn less than $11,800 per year. 

I experienced much of this discrimination firsthand. A former team manager once kept me from eating at a training camp because he thought I looked too fat. I’ve had prize money withheld for violating unwritten team rules, such as wearing the wrong socks with my uniform and competing on my own during a gap in the team’s schedule. I’ve had teams not pay me at all. 

My first real contract negotiation was an important lesson in self-worth. At the time, I was on a combined top men’s and women’s professional team. It was great to have an equal level of support, but the top men were paid 10 to 20 times more than the top women. My male teammates could make up over $500,000. When the team asked me, “What do you need to be able to live?”, I estimated about $1,000 monthly. That became my salary. Now I see more clearly that the real question isn’t about what I need—it is what I deserve.

Those paychecks are a crucial part of establishing equity in professional cycling. Many people have told me, “Oh, you’re much better off than the men, they’re just in it for the money.” These fans purport to celebrate women’s dedication to the spirit of the sport, and they claim that our love of cycling is a better reward than money. But I’ll tell you what: Love does not pay a living wage. If all we receive in exchange for our pain, dedication, and skill is a bike, some racing clothes, and a handful of Euros each month, are we being treated equally as professional athletes? Or are we being defined as pretty women riding bikes? 

Today, after years spent arguing with our national federations and other agencies about remedying these economic, sexist, and sometimes even physical abuses, there is still very little organizational support for women. There is almost no follow up after we lodge formal complaints, about pay or harassment, we have no protections from retaliation, and as a result, almost no sanctions are ever carried out against managers, support staff, or even officials. No major sport for men or women has been successful without the athletes having seats and votes at the decision-making table.

I want to help make that happen. 

Late last year, I and a small board launched the Cyclists’ Alliance, the first global labor union for women pro riders. We want to help change the sport’s culture, its business model, and its public image. Negotiating a minimum salary is one of our early goals, but that's just one small step forward. When we define what we deserve, the business of the sport has to evolve economically as well.

We hope that the Cyclists’ Alliance will change the culture of women’s cycling in partnership with the sport’s governing bodies, teams, race organizers, and sponsors. We will help shape what women’s professional cycling looks like competitively on the road and how it is run in the boardrooms, so that the equality of opportunity, athlete treatment, and the minimum wage can progress hand-in-hand. Cycling isn’t just about breakaway speeds: it’s about telling a authentic story and connecting with fans. We have amazing stories to tell. Now we have a union to represent those voices at the very top levels of our sport.

The greatest progress in women’s racing will come when our athletes understand their power as a united group of talented professionals. The reforms we're seeking are the building blocks of a healthy, global team sport. We can be owners through business negotiations and governance votes. We want to make our athletes strong ambassadors for cycling and to help our teams be more successful when it comes to tracking down sponsorship dollars from a diverse group of new investors. So far, we've started creating athlete-development programs that connect experienced professionals as mentors for young riders. 

By backing ethical integrity and anti-doping policies, we can help change the global perception of cycling. We want to increase leadership roles for women in cycling not because of gender-equality rules, but because our education, experience, and professionalism can create lasting change.

Most of all, I would like the world to appreciate the beauty and power of women’s cycling. We are more than just women who ride bikes. We are professionals and role models, women of strength and conviction, and by joining together, we can change women’s racing today and for generations to come.

Iris Slappendel was a professional road cyclist for 12 years, and was the 2014 National Road Race Champion of the Netherlands. She is a UCI-certified Team Director and will be a part-time Director for the men’s Delta Cycling (Continental) team in 2018. Slappendel founded the Cyclists’ Alliance in 2017 along with former pro Carmen Small, and current pro Gracie Elvin. She currently resides near Rotterdam.

The classic design hasn’t changed much because it doesn’t need to—it’s darn near perfect

On a recent cross-country flight, I counted no fewer than five people wearing Chaco sandals. They ranged from sporty late-middle-age women to hip urban millennials with thick eyeliner and skinny jeans. Not a one was wearing fleece. The sightings confirmed something I’d begun recently to suspect: that my family’s favorite sandals—and the favorite of countless river rats, outdoor guides, and adventure dirtbags—have hit the fashion mainstream.

Invented in Colorado in 1989 by a whitewater guide who wanted a burly, open-toed shoe that was bomber enough for rapids and side hikes, Chacos broke the mold with its single, adjustable strap that wrapped around the foot and looped through the sole. This provided a superior, secure fit in slippery conditions, not to mention a badass, zigzagging tan line after a few days in the sun. Manufactured in a small factory in Paonia, Colorado, by river runners for river runners, Chacos were as core as they came.

The five pairs I’ve owned since the early 1990s have seen me through paddling trips down the Green River, slot-canyon rambles in Zion National Park, a rafting expedition down Grand Canyon, and sea kayaking in Baja, plus two serious boyfriends and my husband (who brought a matching pair to the marriage). Like any long-term relationship, though, my love affair with Chacos hasn’t been all roses. The nylon straps can be fussy to adjust, and if I yank too hard, they dig into my instep. The fit is maybe a little too good—sand and small pebbles can get trapped underfoot—and the toe loop available on some models feels less like a strap and more like a noose. But the shine began to wear off after the company was bought by Wolverine Worldwide (parent company of Merrell and Sperry Top-Sider) and outsourced its manufacturing to China.

This year, however, Chaco began building custom sandals in a factory in Michigan. Now you can design your own sandals from the soles up, choosing the model, strap patterns, buckle colors, even stitching. One small word of caution: The choices are so multitudinous that I must have spent at least five hours experimenting online with different combos before I finally pulled the trigger. (It’s hard to tell from the screen what they’ll look like in real life, but my one-off purple-and-blue Window Pane print—purposefully reminiscent of my first pair of Teva sandals, in 1989—delivered in fashion and fit.)

Even my daughters have their own pair (though custom sandals are only available in adult sizes). At ages seven and nine, they’ve been rafting rivers since they were babies, yet their water shoes—Keens, Crocs, Natives, even the snug wader slippers—invariably end up sloshing around the bottom of the raft. Their child-sized Chacos were so tiny! The straps so colorful! The girls strode around the raft like miniature river pros; best of all, they kept them on.

On a June float down the Rio Chama in northern New Mexico, all but two in our group of 16 adults and kids showed up at the put-in wearing Chacos. Good thing, because it was low water, and we were constantly having to climb out of the rafts and into the shallows to push the boats over rocks and cobbles. No stubbed toes or sore feet, and we all came home with killer Chaco tans.

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Pro road racing keeps putting too much emphasis on lowering the world record

Oh, the trials of distance running fandom! The money spent on dodgy streaming services to watch obscure track meets. The feeling of frustration when marathon broadcasts cut away from the action during the most crucial phase of the race. The heartbreak of yet another doping scandal.
 
And yet, there are moments when the fickle mistress decides to love you back. This Sunday’s Berlin Marathon would seem to be one such moment. The best marathoner ever (Eliud Kipchoge) versus the best track runner ever (Kenenisa Bekele) versus the former world record holder with five Marathon Major wins to his name (Wilson Kipsang)—competing on the world’s fastest course. It’s Kenya versus Ethiopia. It’s Adidas versus Nike. It is, as the LetsRun.com people put it, going to be a total “barn burner.”  
 
But here’s the thing: once again, the hype in the leadup to the race has been all about the world record. And it’s not just the media. The athletes have all stated their bold intentions: Kipsang (who is probably the underdog of the superstar trio) recently tweeted: “Am better placed than anyone else to break the world record. I have done it before and believe I am able to do it again. #beatBerlinWR”

 

Maybe the record will fall on Sunday. Maybe it won’t. Either way, professional road racing keeps making the same mistake of putting too much emphasis at the outset on lowering the all-time mark. This isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy to keep people interested. Yes, it’s exciting when someone runs a marathon faster than any human in history, but only a tiny segment of the population can appreciate the difference between, say, 2:05:42 (the world record in 2002, set by Khalid Khannouchi) and Dennis Kimetto’s current mark of 2:02:57. Even among the distance running cognoscenti, it’s not necessarily the fastest performances that endure, but the most competitively compelling ones; I’ll always take Salazar and Beardsley battling all the way onto Boylston Street in the 1982 Boston Marathon over Eliud Kipchoge running a 2:00:25 time trial behind a Tesla pace car.
 
I’m sorry, but I had to bring it up. Because the Breaking2 project looms large in the run-up to this weekend’s race. An hour-long documentary of Nike’s choreographed attempt to run a sub two-hour marathon was just released this week on National Geographic’s YouTube channel. Kipchoge, the phlegmatic hero of the story, is also the favorite to win in Berlin—thereby bolstering his unofficial marathon world record with an official one on the streets of the German capital.
 
Although I was taken in by the spectacle of Breaking2, its excessive focus on finishing time (indeed, that was the whole point) is precisely what irks me about the pre-Berlin hype. The race should always come first. If a record falls, fantastic, but to prioritize it at the outset is to dampen the sport’s most intriguing element: head-to-head, or, rather, shoulder-to-shoulder competition. (Coach and writer Mario Fraioli, among others, addressed this issue in his criticism of Breaking2 a few months ago and again this week.)
 
There’s even been speculation, put forth by this story in the Daily Nation and this article on FloTrack.com, that Kipchoge and Bekele might be working together to run a fast time, presumably by drafting off each other once the pacemakers fall away in the second half of the race. (They will both be representing the NN Running Team—an initiative sponsored by Nike and the NN Group, a Dutch asset management company.) Let’s hope that there isn’t anything to this rumor. What’s the point of pitting two all-time greats against each other if they’re going to be de facto teammates? (Valentijn Trouw, who manages both Kipchoge and Bekele for Global Sports Communication—another company that sponsors the NN team—didn’t respond to my email query about whether the two runners planned on working together during the race.)
 
“By improving performances on the world-class stage, it is also hoped the profile of the athletes will improve, allowing them to flourish into household names,” the NN Running Team states in the “About Us” section of its website. The assumption seems to be that running ever-faster times and breaking records will increase the popularity of the sport. This is a dubious claim at best. If you’re still reading this article, then you probably already belong to a subset of distance running enthusiasts. So, can you name the last five men and women to hold the world record in the marathon?
 
What it comes down to, at the end of the day, is that the significance of records and finishing times has become too inflated.
 
“The world now is just 25 seconds away,” Kipchoge says at the end of the Breaking2 documentary.
 
The world? If you watch the trailer for the film, it’s clear that we are supposed to think of a sub-two-hour marathon as a landmark in human striving akin to the moon landing and the first successful attempts at aviation. That seems a little bit of a stretch—particularly for an event as contrived as Breaking2. The context was too far removed from the road-racing (emphasis on racing) environment that gave the two-hour marathon its status as an “impossible” goal in the first place. (What would we consider “impossible” today if Bekele—who holds the world records in both the 5,000 and 10,000-meters—had attempted a few Breaking2-style events in his prime? 1:58:30? Can you imagine getting excited about that?) 
 
Not that Kipchoge running 26.2 consecutive miles at 4:35-pace wasn’t an astonishing feat to behold. But if Kipsang, Bekele, and perhaps an unsung outsider end up giving Kipchoge a run for his money on Sunday, it has the potential to deliver a thrill that no orchestrated record attempt will ever be able to match. If Kipchoge and Bekele are still neck and neck when they pass through the columns of the Brandenburg Gate, setting up a finishing sprint showdown against the most opulent backdrop in all of road racing—then, my friends, we’d have a barn burner indeed.

The new Watch is a more sophisticated fitness tracker than its predecessor, with an updated operating system, upgraded hardware, and cellular connectivity. But will it be enough to win over athletes?

To really understand why the Apple Watch Series 3 matters, you have to recall a bit of recent tech history: the announcement of the first Apple Watch in 2014 was a very big deal. For the first time, a leading technology company was plunging headfirst into the smartwatch space. While reviews of the Watch were mixed, consumers were enthralled. And the product sold well. Because the Watch had fitness-tracking capabilities, many analysts predicted that it would mark the the end of brands like Garmin and Fitbit. 

Instead, the opposite happened: the Apple Watch made entire wearables market better. Sales of smartwatches and trackers surged. Garmin introduced the Forerunner 225. Fitbit launched the Blaze. Meanwhile, software developers like Strava made wearable-friendly apps.

A similar scenario played out in 2016, with the release of the Watch Series 2. Apple added health and fitness capabilities, but once again the competition responded with their own upgrades, most notably improving build quality, continuing to roll out optical heart rate monitoring, and adding smartwatch features. 

After a week of testing the $399 Watch 3 on an abbreviated fitness circuit—bike rides, long walks, navigating cities—I can safely say that Apple will once again have an outsized impact on the smartwatch industry. The Series 3 isn’t perfect, but at least in the short-term, it’s going to make every other smartwatch on the market feel obsolete. 

What Is This Thing, Anyway?

In our preview of the Series 3, we declared it a watch that athletes will want. This earned us scorn from some Facebook readers who were underwhelmed by the Watch’s battery life and insisted that it should not be categorized as a high-performance fitness tracker. 

They’re right. But Apple has never presented the Watch as the most sophisticated fitness tracker on the market. The first version was a smartwatch with some solid fitness-tracking features. In version two, it became a bona fide fitness tracker with strong smartwatch capabilities. Version three is a stellar fitness tool, and hands down the best smartwatch available for iPhone owners. 

By design, the Watch is not supposed to be the perfect gift for your Ironman-obsessed sister-in-law. There are some great high-end, sport-specific products that already do things like sync with SRM power meters. Instead, it’s meant for the much larger number of us who want a device to track our hikes and rides but that can handle smartwatch functions like streaming music and responding to texts. This review is written with those readers in mind. If, like some of my Outside colleagues, you demand a tracker that holds a charge for five days and has tactile buttons for workouts, feel free to stop reading here.  

The New Hardware

The Series 3 looks and feels just like any other Apple Watch, and it's compatible with all your old bands. Complete details are on Apple’s website. And you’ll find them thoughtfully dissected and explained on sites like The Verge. For our purposes, there are two main considerations: 

Cellular connectivity. That’s the big headline. You can now (actually, coming next month), stream music from your Watch, make calls (directly on the Watch or by using Apple’s AirPod earbuds), receive texts, and let friends and family track your location without your iPhone. This all happens seamlessly from your current phone number. And it works better than advertised: the calls are crisp and the Watch is responsive. I expected that I’d find myself missing my phone. I rarely did.

(Note: Other reviewers experienced significant issues with the Watch's cellular connectivity. In our experience, a few texts did fail to send on the Metro and Siri wasn't talking back. But calling worked just fine in D.C. and Santa Fe.)

Beyond the cellular upgrade, there’s the addition of a barometric altimeter. This tool helps the watch accurately measure elevation gain. There isn’t much else to say beyond: it works, and that’s something that will make athletes happy. You can now ride and run without your phone and get accurate climbing data.

What about GPS and the heart rate monitor? Given the well-established credentials and limitations of the Watch plus its performance throughout the test, we won't be touching on those previously reviewed feature. We will however briefly praise the new Sport Loop. It's comfortable, looks fun, and it allows you to wear the Watch more tightly around the wrist. That snug fit helps the optical heart rate sensor perform at its best.

The New Software

The biggest fitness upgrades come courtesy of watchOS4, the new operating system available to all Watch owners. This is a radically simplified interface that puts your health at the center of the experience. Practically speaking, it means you get a refreshed Workout app, plus some exciting new heart-rate monitoring features:

• Heart-rate variability tracking. This stat can be used to understand how well you’re recovering and if you’re about to get sick. The Watch measures this when you initiate the Breathe app (Apple's mindfulness tool) and during other times the Watch detects to be suitable throughout the day.
• Resting heart rate: The beats per minute of your heart at rest, a measure of overall fitness and fatigue.
• Walking average: A new tool from Apple that measures your average heart rate while walking.
• Heart rate recovery: How your heart rate responds after a workout, another potential measure of fitness and fatigue.
• Elevated heart rate: An opt-in system designed to notify you if their your rate goes above a self-selected threshold when you've been inactive for ten minutes or longer

The above upgrades are significant enough to warrant a software update.

How Does It Work?

For this review, I went on a handful rides and spent several days trekking around Washington, D.C. on a trip. I didn’t get a chance to test the Watch in the pool or on a trail. For our long-term test, we’ll be putting the Watch through a more thorough battery of workouts. 

Exercising with the Watch 

I got the watch at about 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, September 12. I jumped in a car with Outside executive editor Michael Roberts at about 6 p.m. While he drove away from the Apple Park to escape traffic, I set up the Watch, gossiped about coworkers, and ate an energy bar. By 7:30 p.m., I was ready to ride. And while my original Watch died partway through the excursion, the Series 3 kept its charge.

During our hour-long ride, I simultaneously tracked my activity through the Workout app and on a secondary phone (that wasn’t paired with the new Watch) using Strava. I didn’t listen to music or text my friends while riding, but the Watch’s new hardware was a difference maker. It made me feel that I would have been comfortable exploring without a phone. And it allowed me to track an elevation gain of 1,200 feet. These seem like small things, but a product like this is about small advances and upgrades.

On my second ride, back in Santa Fe, the Watch showed an incorrect elevation gain recording, likely the result of a thunderstorm that blew in while I was out. The drastic change in air pressure would have have affected any barometric altimeter. As expected, it was an issue I didn’t experience on any other rides or walks.

Choosing between using Strava and Workout is a common Watch experience, and one that predates the Series 3. You need to think about how you’re tracking your workouts and storing your data or you’ll end up with a confusing training log. There are also real tradeoffs to be made depending on what app you use.

Let’s start with the Apple ecosystem. For those new to Watch, it works something like this: on the Watch you record your workouts in Workout and track your overall activity (hours of the day with standing, overall movement, and minutes spent exercising) in Activity; on the phone, all your data is presented in Health with workouts specifically appearing in Activity. That makes Health your default training log. If you’re new to training or activity tracking—or if you’re comfortable storing everything in Health—this isn’t an issue. Your data is all in one place. 

For people with years of data stored in apps like Training Peaks, or for folks who want a robust desktop interface for reviewing their stats, it’s a bit problematic. Apple doesn't have a web app or any desktop interface for viewing Health data (and because of the company's privacy stance, there likely isn't one on the horizon). And while exporting your data is doable, it isn’t convenient—a sizable drawback for a device designed to make health and wellness easy. Practically speaking, it means that if you want to record everything through Workout—because you prefer the interface or just like keeping everything within Apple—and then have that data automatically export and sync to, say, Strava, you're out of luck. How big of a deal is this? For Outside readers, it hasn’t been a frequently voiced concern. And for me, it just means that I should eventually pick one primary platform. 

Overall, the Watch—from a sensor and software perspective—accomplishes what I currently need from a fitness tracker on the bike. It shows me distance and duration in real time. And if I'm using Strava, it uploads my ride when I’m done. It has replaced my Garmin computer in almost every situation (save for ultra-endurance death rides). But the Watch form factor is not the ideal tool for cyclists. To view any of the stats, I have to raise my wrist from the handlebars. And to adjust music or fiddle with settings, I have to take both hands off the bars. To be clear, these are criticisms of all watches. But they’re more pronounced with the Watch. Some watches have an always-on screen that make the glancing easier. And other brands come with handlebar attachments. Runners I’ve spoken with have expressed skepticism about the lack of buttons and the screen’s ability to respond in rain and through sweat. This is a valid concern, but one I haven’t really noticed on the bike (except while wearing long-finger gloves). The touchscreen always—even in light rain—has worked fine for me. I've also found it to be visible under bright sunlight.

(As someone who once fancied himself a decent cyclist, the most Watch-specific issue is that it doesn’t currently sync with ANT+ devices, such as power meters. That pertains to a small subset of cyclists, but if you don’t leave home without your power meter, the Watch will not be your all-in-one fitness tracker.)

Texting and Calling on the Watch

I underestimated just how impactful the Watch’s cellular connectivity would be. On short rides, it gives me the comfort to go without my phone. If something were to happen, I’m confident that I could call for help. When paired with the AirPods, the call quality was clear. Likewise, being able to quickly send a text was a surprisingly important feature. Running late? Instead of leaving someone on the other end worrying, I could quickly shoot a message. While I didn’t test the GPS mapping functionality on the bike, I did use it to get home from a concert after my phone died. And I could see it helping me navigate a new city while on a run or ride. 

Music on the Watch

There are legitimate reasons to stay within Apple’s ecosystem. On the Watch, their apps tend to just work a little bit better, at least right now. The biggest example of this for me is the integration of Music and Workout. When I ride on quiet roads, I like to keep one earbud in to listen to music and the other dangling so that I can better hear approaching cars. My AirPods plus Watch have replaced a full suite of devices I used to ride with: a phone for connectivity, wired headphones, and a Watch for fitness tracking. In Workout, it’s simple to change the song or volume: just swipe and then use the controls as usual. You stay within Workout the entire time. It’s not so easy in Strava. You have to exit out of the app, open Music, make the change, and move back in. Again, it’s a seemingly minor complaint. But when you’re in the middle of a run or ride, those inconveniences matter—both in terms of pacing and also keeping your attention on traffic. Again, pay attention to the apps you use and how you like to use them. Spotify offers an app for AndroidWear but doesn’t have one yet for the Watch (though there is one coming).

Testing the Battery

Everyone wants to know about battery life. The problem with measuring battery life is that usage can vary dramatically between people. To provide the most accurate possible assessment, I conducted a variety of tests: 

• Go-till-you-die with heavy use: Almost 16 hours. I started using a fully-charged Watch at 7 a.m. I used it all day while traveling to respond to Slacks and texts. I turned it off at night for about eight hours. I turned it on the following morning and it made it until about 11:00 a.m.
• Go-till-you-die with Workout: About three hours. This was the most surprising result of the test. I started a walking Workout, used the Watch to text and navigate, and played music. It didn’t last long. To confirm the result, I tested it again but spent less time playing with apps on the Watch. In that case, I got over four hours of Workout tracking—in the context of a full day of use while traveling—before getting the 10 percent battery remaining warning.
• Workout Power Saving Mode: Full day. I launched this mode, which disables the cellular connectivity and optical heart rate monitor (but maintains GPS functionality), and initiated a walking Workout. I kept the session going for about five hours. Then I turned off power-saving mode and went about the rest of my day without running out of charge. 

If you’ve owned a Watch previously, there isn’t much new here. Using more features drains the battery more quickly. Expect this Watch to last about as long as the old one, so long as you’re not constantly calling or texting people. If you’re new to the Watch, though, some explanation: for most workouts longer than two hours, I use an external heart-rate monitor and disable the optical HRM. That helps preserve battery. 

What do I make of the above? For 95 percent of my use cases, the Watch will have enough battery to make me a happy user. Long rides? Check. Long hikes? Check. Ironman triathletes won’t be in luck, but they may want another device specifically tailored to triathlons anyway. 

In-house, we’ve devised a holy grail test for fitness trackers: riding to a campsite, camping out, going for a short hike, and then riding back home. The Watch should theoretically be able to hold a charge for that (something I’ll confirm in the long-term review). More than any other aspect of the Watch, this is one that I am eager to continue testing.

Activity and Workout 

If you already own an Apple Watch, the new software will dramatically transform your device. The changes to Workout and Activity are subtle, but they reveal so much about Apple’s understanding of health and wellness.

When I interviewed Jay Blahnik, Apple's director of fitness for health technologies, in 2015, he synthesized Apple’s wellness stance as follows: there are three key trackable elements to activity, including standing, all-day movement, and exercise. The Watch is designed to measure all three—and to nudge you into making smarter choices. To track each element, the Activity app features three rings, one for each of the above elements. Your daily goal is to close all three rings. 

In recent years, Apple has added sleep, nutrition, and mindfulness to their health mix. While the Watch now has a built-in Breathe app to encourage mindfulness, sleep and nutrition are notoriously difficult to track and absent from the Apple native app ecosystem (save for third-party apps). Many studies and anecdotes have shown sleep tracking to be, in short, a sham. And calorie counting requires user active user participation: you have to actually input what you’re eating. 

This understanding of health is surprisingly hack-free and accurate. That’s where the latest version of watchOS comes in. The device is slowly but steadily gaining the ability to influence behavior. Until now, Apple largely accomplished this through the ring interface. But with smarter Activity coaching, Apple is taking a big step forward. In the morning, the Watch will prompt you to stay more active by identifying a streak you’re on and urging you to keep it up. If it can’t find something forward-looking, the app will pick out one good thing you did the day before and urge you to do it again. The smarter coaching shows itself in two other situations. If you’ve closed your ring on a run, the app will give you an in-the-moment notification. This brings the reward a lot closer to the action. And, perhaps most importantly, if you’re not on track to close your rings, the app will prompt you to get up and go walk at a brisk pace. It’ll also tell you the exact amount of time you need to move to hit your goal. Apple picked walking because it’s something almost anyone can do in almost any situation. (It sends the notification early enough in the day that you can take action. There’s another notification if you’re a hair away from hitting your goals.) 

I admit that the above doesn’t sound particularly impactful. Will a notification actually make anyone healthier? In my experience, the answer is yes. While I know some Watch owners who never took to the rings and don’t find them motivating, I’ve had the opposite experience. The Watch helped me become the healthiest version of myself, in a time period when it was most difficult to stay fit. And on the flip side, when a broken band kept my Watch out of commission for over a month, I found myself gaining weight, moving less, and ignoring my body. Coupled with the experiences of so many others, I firmly believe that the Watch can have a significant impact—if your personality is primed to respond to its prompts. For this population, I think the new notifications will be a significant step forward. They’re gentle enough to not be annoying, but also actionable enough to change the trajectory of a day. Their impact is something I plan to track carefully over the next few months of long-term testing.

It bears mentioning that while Activity is the epicenter of change in watchOS4, the Workout app is also much improved. You can move from workout to workout seamlessly (say, if you’re transitioning from running to biking). And the app itself is just much cleaner and easier to use. 

Heart Rate Monitoring

It’s too early to say how helpful and influential Apple’s foray into sophisticated heart-rate monitoring will be. But I get the sense that it’s about to turn a large subset of Watch users into biohackers.

Historically, the Watch did essentially one user-facing thing with heart rate: it provided an average following workouts. That was it, and it was a lot less sophisticated an output than what most other apps and watches provided. With watchOS4, Apple has opened up so much more data. For the purposes of this review, I’ll segment it into two buckets: performance and health data. 

Let’s start with performance. Measures like heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, and recovery heart rate have long been used by athletes across an entire spectrum of sports. When in serious training, I’ve found recovery heart rate and resting heart rate to be surprisingly effective tools. In combination, the two measures have predicted common colds and helped me tailor my training load (in conjunction with measuring training stress score through Training Peaks). I’ve also found the measurements to be helpful for athletes I’ve coached, particularly in convincing them to listen to their bodies (people tend to trust a heart-based number more than perceived exertion). While I never before had access to Apple’s walking heart rate average, I did have my own version of it. I’d start each indoor workout with a 10 minute interval at 200 watts, or a brisk pace. Tracking my average heart rate during this interval and then measuring the recovery period afterward was the single most effective metric I had in training. And it’s something that Apple is trying to replicate with walking heart rate. 

When it comes to evaluating these metrics, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind: there isn’t consensus on their use, but plenty of people find them helpful. That may be why Apple has chosen to steer clear of providing actionable insights from the stats. If your resting heart rate has risen for a week and your heart rate isn’t recovering like it used to, the Watch won’t tell you to take a preemptive sick day. But there’s nothing stopping an app-maker from using that data to provide such insights. While I’ve criticized fitness-trackers for the lack of useful recommendations in the past (possibly due to FDA restrictions), I think Apple made the right move. This type of biometric data is too likely too personal to provide population-level takeaways from. I’d prefer for a third-party app that specializes in this type of analysis take the lead. This is better for the Watch’s credibility and for users.

Given the above, the following may come as a bit of a surprise: I’m very excited to see where Apple goes with its Heart Study and the elevated heart rate notification system. The former is a study designed to help spot things like irregular heart rhythms. The latter is something you can start using now. If you opt into the monitoring, Apple will notify you if your heart rate goes above a set threshold of 100 to 150 beats per minute during a period in which you've been inactive for 10 or more minutes. This is designed to help you flag potential health issues like panic attacks and tachycardia. In a team meeting post-keynote, a handful of Outside editors debated the merits of such a system. Would it create a wave of false positives leading to needless and expensive testing? Would people simply ignore it? 

The exercise and health sources I reached out to about the technology were cautiously optimistic about the functionality, but were hesitant to go on record without using the device or speaking with Apple. In my experience with the Watch, I had one notification. After looking at the surrounding data, I concluded that it was an odd mix up versus something to call my doctor about. Given that the warning is opt-in and relatively muted, it’s hard to imagine the technology leading to a series of false positives and needless interventions.

The Watch as Your Phone

Will the Watch allow you to go all day without your phone? If you use your iPhone largely as a phone, the Watch is a perfectly good all-day replacement; if you use your iPhone as a smartphone, you will want to use something more powerful than the Watch at some point during the day. Essentially, the Watch does things like responding to quick texts, placing calls, and surfacing urgent email really well. In many ways, it works better than the phone. Many users set up the Watch to screen out all but the most crucial notifications. This brings the important into greater relief. Because the only folks who can reach me on my watch are immediate family and my boss (and his boss), I jump when it buzzes. Since anyone can reach me on my phone, I don’t pay as much attention to the notifications. But for most everything else, the phone is unsurprisingly a better device. 

The Bottom Line

When the Series 3 was announced, we put together a brief post with our initial thoughts. Essentially, we tried to locate the product’s audience by saying: it’s good for the health and wellness set, really good for the fitness set, and OK for the hard-core athlete set. We stand by that overview. This Watch is a device that most readers could benefit from. If you’re still using an original Watch or are looking to buy your first wearable, the Series 3 is the tool Apple always wanted to build: a fitness tool with smartphone capabilities too useful to take off.

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If irony is the hygiene of the mind, then it’s also the scourge of Tom Painter’s sinuses. Painter, 52, a NASA scientist allergic to both dust and soot, is laid low by migraines when he inhales either one. But here’s the ironic bit: Painter is the world’s authority on light-absorbing particles like dust and soot—schmutz, in Painter’s parlance—and how they are corroding mountain snowpacks everywhere. Schmutzy snow, Painter says, lowers snow’s reflectivity, or albedo (rhymes with libido). While high-albedo snow reflects upwards of 90 percent of earthbound solar energy back into the atmosphere, dusty low-albedo snow causes snowpacks to melt nearly two months early.

Schmutz’s deleterious effect on snow is widespread and is increasing at an alarming rate—so much so that Painter and his NASA colleagues believe that climate change has likely been given too much credit for the diminution of mountain snowpacks and particulate matter too little. To wit: In 2013, Painter published a study showing how black carbon particulate from the industrial revolution’s smokestacks snuffed out Europe’s Little Ice Age. His most recent work shows that high-dust years lead to a rise in melt independent of temperature.

If you’re a skier or a water drinker, schmutz matters—especially if you live west of the Great Plains. The American West’s water delivery system assumes water melts from mountains come spring and trickles into reservoirs during spring and early summer, where it’s then stored for use throughout the year. Precipitation, much of which comes from snow, is the source of 75 percent of that water. Premature runoff means shallower ski runs, sure, but also less freshwater for table and crops.

Eolian dust, or windblown silt, such as the grains of sand transported from the world’s great deserts, has always found its way into mountain snow. But Painter is seeing a greater prevalence of dust stirred up by humans. The steady creep of desertification—the stripping of plants, nutrients, microbes, and crust from the earth’s surface—stems from overgrazing, over-farming, clear-cutting, land development, recreational off-road vehicle use, and even hiking off-trail. One estimate puts the global rate of desertification at about 30 million acres of arable land a year, or a football field every second, and the United States isn’t immune to its ravages.

Drought equals dust. In 2015, farmers in California’s Central Valley abandoned crops due to diminishing groundwater stores caused by a four-year drought and an anemic snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Ground that should have been green was brown and vulnerable to wind transport atop the scanty Sierra snow. In the mid- to late-2000s, a series of extreme dust storms began to boil up from the Colorado Plateau and coated the southern Rockies in a patina of rouge. “It’s literally snowing dirt,” says Mike Kaplan, president and CEO of Aspen Skiing Co. “It’s almost like out an apocalyptic movie. You go from glorious majestic white mountains to these dirty-looking mountains, and a whole winter’s worth of snowpack changes overnight.”

Soot is essentially black carbon, and that side of the equation is a bit more straightforward. Soot is produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels from, say, diesel engines, industrial emissions, and burning biomass, like wildfires, which are on the rise because of climate change.

Despite their potential for harm, dust and soot weren’t acknowledged as a scourge of snowpacks until a little more than a decade ago, when Painter and extreme skier turned scientist Chris Landry ventured into southwest Colorado’s Senator Beck Basin to calculate the effects of dust on the timing of winter runoff. Their findings? “Not only does dust bring peak runoff several weeks earlier at the Colorado River’s Lee’s Ferry,” Painter says, “but it also has decreased the annual flow by about 5 percent each year.” Painter figures that 5 percent is enough to satisfy the water requirements of Las Vegas for 18 months.

Painter and Landry looked at two key metrics: snow albedo’s effect on the timing of the snowpack’s runoff, and the volume of pure water lurking in entire sub-basins. Snow scientists call that latter measurement the snow water equivalent (SWE). To the Department of Agriculture, SWE means “the depth of water that would theoretically result if you melted the entire snowpack instantaneously.” Join SWE and snow albedo in one algorithm, and you get a dream come true for municipal water managers, who can now determine how much and when the snowmelt will hit their reservoirs. “Water managers don’t have to commit to billion-dollar decisions with really, really fuzzy information,” says Painter. “They now know how much SWE there is in every sub-basin.”

If the Senator Beck Basin calculations laid the groundwork for everything Painter does now at NASA, his method of data acquisition (by hand, in the field) and mode of travel (by ski) did not. He collects his metrics at 20,000 feet from the belly of a Beechcraft King Air twin-turboprop. Onboard lidar measures SWE, and a spectrometer measures snow albedo. Officially, it’s called the Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO). Unofficially, it’s Painter’s brainchild, and it has disrupted the business of measuring the volume and timing of mountain meltwater. Every western water manager wants a piece of it: Oregon, Colorado, and Wyoming. “It’s crazy,” Painter told a group of water scientists two years ago at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The phone is ringing all the time.”

I don’t ring Painter’s phone; I text it. We meet in the austere concrete-and-glass surround of Mammoth’s Black Velvet coffeehouse to talk snow and water and feedback loops. “We’re finally starting, as a community, to understand this,” he says, referring to the way schmutz and temperature are wrecking the global snowpack. “There were a few of us that really had this first glimpse into it. But the broader community is starting to understand that, yeah, this is actually really, really powerful in a lot of places that we hadn’t realized it was powerful.”

That realization is evolving, says Painter, simply because no one’s had the technology to efficiently measure snow albedo on a global scale. Scientists still can’t tell us, for example, precisely how much water we’re losing to light-absorbing particles in the American West. “There’s much to understand in the West and across the rest of the globe,” Painter says.

But that could change in about ten years, when Painter hopes to hitch radar and a spectrometer to a satellite. The scientist in him knows better than to opine on data he hasn’t yet collected, but key clues point to grim news, even on the globe’s highest snowfields. “The few ice cores extracted from the Himalaya, for example, show dust deposition dating back to the 1850s and climbing steadily ever since,” Painter says. Data rolling in from the Andes, the Alps, the Caucasus, Antarctica, the Cascades, and the Sierra show increased loads of both black carbon and dust dating back to the Industrial Revolution. “So I think we’ve kind of gotten past the surprise stage,” he says.

“The ski experience is beside the point,” Kaplan says. “This is about these mountain watersheds. They’ve got to maintain their integrity, or we’ve got much bigger problems to solve.”

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Stefan Ytterborn doesn’t have a background in motorcycles—or any real affinity for them. “When there’s a guy passing me in the street, roaring by on his Ducati, I’m like, ‘Don’t. Get off my back. Don’t disturb me,’” he says. The Swedish-born entrepreneur, best known for founding safety-gear innovator POC Sports, is drawn more to surfing the bone-tingling waters of the Baltic Sea and tending to his rose garden.

This would seem to be a liability for someone starting a new motorcycle company, as Ytterborn is doing. In January, his startup, Cake, introduced a new electric off-road motorcycle at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Denver. Called the Kalk, it’s half as hefty as a regular motorcycle, weighing just under 155 pounds, and it can travel—silently—up to 50 miles on a battery charge.

With Cake, Ytterborn is attempting to create a new category of product, à la the iPad, the SUP, and, of course, the mountain bike. Whether a new type of motorcycle rider will emerge, drawn to the diminutive frame and lighter environmental impact, remains to be seen. And whether women, who are riding motorcycles in increasing numbers, will flock to the Kalk is also an open question.

Despite the rise in female ridership, there’s been a decline in efforts to market motorcycles to women, says Genevieve Schmitt, founder of female-focused motorcycle site WomenRidersNow.com. That may be in part because women still comprise just 14 percent of the motorcycling population. The industry’s sales overall have plummeted by half in the past ten years, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.

And, in fact, Cake is not explicitly trying to woo female riders. The bike is for “anybody who’s attracted to it,” Ytterborn says. “I don’t believe in genders. I don’t believe in age. I believe in neutrality.” But the Kalk’s slight stature and a marketing approach that’s female-friendly—though inadvertently so—might just help recruit women riders.

The Kalk looks like the love child of a mountain bike and a motocross bike that was conceived at an Ikea store (a former Ytterborn client from his pre-POC career in design and branding). The frame, body, and chainstays are metallic; the stanchions are golden; and the saddle, fork, and fenders are white. The bike is noticeably sleeker and less burly than its moto predecessors but not as svelte as its mountain forebears. Whereas Alta Motors’ Redshift bike, perhaps the closest counterpart, has distinctly motocross DNA, Ytterborn considers the Kalk to be 70 percent downhill or enduro mountain bike and 30 percent motorbike.

The Kalk was designed to minimize environmental impact, with its carbon fiber body, alloy frame, lightweight suspension system, and tires that are fatter than a mountain bike’s but without the sharp, soil-shredding edges of a motorbike’s. The electric motor shaves off weight, further reducing the Kalk’s impression on the trail and making for a simpler ride. Instead of changing gears and clutching, you choose from three driving modes—for easy riding, long-distance cruising, and, well, going bananas. “If you want to do double flips, you go for button number three,” Ytterborn says.

He compares riding the Kalk to the sensation of skiing (he’s a former racer) and says others have likened it to surfing between trees. Since the Kalk is noiseless, a couple riders can, for instance, negotiate singletrack at a relatively high speed while carrying on a conversation or accelerate to 50 mph (the bike’s maximum speed) without disrupting the peace at all.

Since the Kalk does have a motor, it won’t be welcome on trails that ban motorized vehicles—a fact that makes the bike more appealing to anti-e-bike stalwarts like Mike Kazimer. Conflicts arise when electric mountain bikes show up on trails designated just for hiking and mountain biking, says Kazimer, technical editor of the mountain biking news site Pinkbike. “People say, ‘I can pedal this, it’s not motorized,’” he says. But with an electric motorcycle, there shouldn’t be ambiguity or misunderstandings. “It can go where motorcycles go, end of story.”

In fact, Ytterborn foresees entirely new trail systems for the Cake breed. “The bikes will need their own trails, unless there is unlimited access to the backcountry and no crowds,” he says. “It’s not our ambition to promote the use of noisy combustion engines in the wild. We are against disturbance and pollution.”

Ytterborn’s interest in motorized two-wheel off-road vehicles was sparked several years ago at a sports trade show, where he discovered an innovative new Swiss bike. “I could see myself quietly exploring the Outback” with it, he says. Then, in 2015, he became fixated on lightweight electric motorbikes and started buying up every such bike he could find, amassing a collection of about 14. They were composed of a homemade part here, a manufactured part there, as he remembers it, welded together by young entrepreneurial companies “in love with the idea of taking electric to a new level,” Ytterborn says. (He declined to name the companies.)

Ytterborn took these bikes on meditative, solitude-filled journeys that helped fuel his growing conviction that the days of the combustion engine are numbered—as in, he thinks it will be obsolete in just ten to 14 years. “It’s not my belief or my dogma,” Ytterborn says. “It’s going to happen.”

(For context, legislation is pending in European countries that would ban cars and combustion engines by 2025 to 2030. But in 2017, just 200,000 electric vehicles were sold in the United States, according to the electric vehicle news site InsideEVs. And California Governor Jerry Brown’s new plan to get 5 million zero-emissions vehicles onto roads by 2030 is roundly considered ambitious.)

These electric-bike rambles coincided with the end of Ytterborn’s 12-year run at POC Sports, the company he founded out of concern for his sons’ safety during their ski-racing days. Investment management firm Investcorp bought POC for a reported $65 million in 2015. Ytterborn had stayed on as CEO, but quickly “everything became a little too corporate and too political for my personal agenda,” he says.

When his involvement in POC came to an end, in September 2016, Ytterborn threw himself into zero-emissions worldwide domination. Since existing mountain bike parts weren’t sturdy enough and moto parts were too heavy, he decided to have the Kalk designed and manufactured from the ground up. The drivetrain is made from European parts, the lithium-ion batteries are from the Czech Republic, and all other parts are manufactured in China.

Ytterborn used nearly $1 million of his own money to finance Cake for the first year; he then raised an additional $3 million from outside investors. He is now in the midst of raising another $9 million to $12 million (also from third parties) and says he’ll also continue investing his own money. Ytterborn predicts the company will be profitable by 2022.

An initial crop of 50 limited-edition Kalk bikes, priced at $14,000, sold out last week and will be delivered to customers beginning in June 2018. Cake is now going into full production of the bike. Street-legal versions of the Kalk are expected to roll out in fall 2019.

The Kalk’s price tag is significantly higher than most electric bikes—and even many motorcycles. Ytterborn points to the technology in the motor, battery, and controller to explain the expense. That said, the Kalk is only slightly more expensive than Alta’s Redshift ($10,495 to $13,495) and the off-road offerings from Santa Cruz–based electric motorcycle maker Zero Motorcycles ($8,495 to $13,995).

To help spread the word about the Kalk and get butts in saddles, Ytterborn says he’s in discussions with ski resorts to set up off-season rental programs—akin to downhill mountain bike rentals but with the added capacity for long-distance forays into adjacent swaths of wilderness.

The company also plans to establish “hubs” in several suburban areas of the United States and Europe, where prospective customers can visit showrooms and take bikes for spins on practice tracks. California, Tennessee, Munich, and London are all possible sites, Ytterborn says. The hubs will send “satellite” trucks—rolling showrooms loaded with bikes for the public to try out—to cycling shows, music festivals, and sporting events.

It’s possible that marketing the Kalk as a new category of product could hasten Cake’s success. In this era when we’re hit with hundreds, if not thousands of marketing messages each day, “the need for categories is more important than it ever has been,” says Al Ramadan, co-founder and partner of Silicon Valley–based category design firm Play Bigger and co-author of Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets. (Ramadan also co-founded the now-defunct online adventure sports site Quokka.)

To succeed in pioneering a new category, an entrepreneur must identify a problem that plagues people, Ramadan says. Our advertising-addled brains filter out the noise by asking, “Do I have this problem?” If the answer is no, we move on. If it’s yes, and the entrepreneur can anchor the conversation around that issue and offer a solution, “the category takes off,” he says.

Language is also key to luring customers to a new product category, Ramadan says. Names should be buzzy, like iPad or smartphone or 5-Hour Energy. Here, Ytterborn might run into trouble. The goal should be: “‘I don’t even know what it is, but it sounds so cool that I’ve got to have one,’” Ramadan says. Electric off-road motorcycle? Not so much.

And the problem Cake is tackling—emissions reduction—could prove too broad and too popular among other entrepreneurs. Several companies are aiming to take on the same issue, among them Zero Motorcycles, which takes its name from the zero-emissions concept. On its website, Zero touts its bikes’ ability to reduce “CO2 and noxious fumes emissions while also saving oil reserves.” (Alta, on the other hand, insists it created an electric motorbike purely for performance reasons.)

But fortunately for Cake, there’s another pressing concern it holds a unique solution for: “Getting 30 miles away from society without having a 50-pound backpack and three days’ time,” as Ramadan puts it. “That is a legitimate problem people have.”

An additional conundrum for women is that off-road motorcycles are typically more difficult for them to ride because the bikes have longer suspensions and higher seats. Since women are, on average, 5.5 inches shorter than men, according to the CDC, they often can’t comfortably keep both feet on the ground when their off-road bike is stopped, says Schmitt of WomenRidersNow.com. At 36 inches of standover height (the distance from the ground to the top of the top tube), the Kalk’s seat is notably high—perhaps even intimidatingly so for women, she says. (Women’s pants inseams typically range from 30 to 34 inches.) But the bike’s slight profile and weight could offset the height issue. Experienced female riders, in particular, would likely be able to keep one foot on the ground for balance when the Kalk is stationary, Schmitt says.

The Kalk might be poised to cultivate a broader female ridership as well. The company’s website prominently features video of a pair of riders zipping along the Swedish coastline, one of them a woman with blonde wisps tumbling from her helmet. This bodes well, Schmitt says. “Women come to the sport when they see other women doing it.” The image of a petite woman on a bike, for instance, is more likely to help recruit smaller women. “If she’s petite, I might be able to handle the bike, too,” is how Schmitt describes the effect.

Despite Ytterborn’s gender-neutral bent, he is convinced women will be drawn to the Kalk partly because it happens to be less overtly masculine. Whereas traditional motorcycle are “loud, aggressive, macho, dirty,” as he puts it, Ytterborn believes the Kalk is more approachable. “It’s light, it’s clean, it’s not complicated to ride, and it’s totally silent. It doesn’t have that roaring, don’t touch me, get off my back vibe.”

These same qualities may well lure a surprising contingent of men. Kazimer of Pinkbike is open to the Kalk despite his aversion both to e-bikes and off-road motorbikes, which he finds too noisy and full of hassles. “An electric motorcycle like this, it’d be pretty fun,” he says. “It’s quiet. You can zip around. I totally understand the appeal of it.”

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I’m standing on the deck of a ship somewhere in the vast Norwegian Arctic. Although it’s 3 a.m., the sky is incandescent, a muted gold. It is the last night of our seven-day voyage in the remote archipelago of Svalbard, and my friends Patty, Nina, and I have vowed to stay up so we can experience the surreal magic of an Arctic summer night. Twenty-four hours of light. We laugh, sip glasses of champagne. The air temperature is 36 degrees, but I’m wearing a long-sleeve shirt, tennis shoes, and jeans. No down jacket, furry hat, or thick gloves. I want to feel everything. As I look out to sea, icebergs the size of tanker trucks glide past.

Two years ago, I could not have imagined feeling this happy. After a brief and brutal illness, my youngest brother had died. I was moored in grief. A year apart, we had explored the natural world together from the time we could walk. If not for Jim and his love of the ocean and our childhood stomping grounds of San Diego, a paradise with miles of beach and perpetual surf, I might not have become so wild and free. I might not have dared to be who I was—an athletic, independent girl. I was the youngest of four children, the only female, and in the 1960s, girls were not exactly encouraged to explore the world. We could roam only so far before being yanked back, constrained.

I remember being furious at a young age, perhaps seven or eight, because I could not play baseball like my three brothers. The same when I was 12 and wanted to surf. My brothers were typical Southern California surfers, brown and broad-shouldered with hair kissed by the sun. Our house was littered with sand and damp beach towels. The smell of resin permeated the air. I often went with Jim and his friends to Ocean Beach, a grubby hippie enclave. But when Jim and his friends paddled out past the break, I did not join them. I had been taught that girls did not surf. We were supposed to lie on the sand in our bikinis, work on our tans. Merely watch.

This exclusion infuriated me. I had been swimming in the ocean since I was four and felt as comfortable in the churning waves as I did on land. I had swum out of rip tides that threatened to pull me far out into the Pacific. I was a passionate body surfer and could catch six-foot waves and ride them easily into shore. It is no mystery why, years later, I would write a story about the explosion of California surfer girls in Carlsbad. I wanted to be one.

Jim understood my need for adventure better than anyone. My mother, because she was terribly sick after doctors removed a tumor from her brain, could not advocate for me. My father, a doctor, was mostly absent because of long work hours, but also because he had fallen in love with a nurse in his office. When he was home, he and my mother fought. Lonely and neglected, Jim and I reached out to each other. We found joy outside.

I did not know the word “wanderlust,” but even then I had a severe a case of it. I followed Jim nearly everywhere he went—down steep canyon slopes on pieces of cardboard on our bellies, over tall fences and up fragrant pepper trees, off high diving boards into the deep end of swimming pools. And he happily obliged. “Come on,” he’d say, plunging into the waves, where stingrays, jellies, and other sea creatures lurked. “Come on,” he’d say, handing me his skateboard, so I could understand the thrill of barreling down our street on a narrow slab of wood.

Those early experiences taught me to take risks. Because I desperately wanted to travel, they gave me the confidence to explore. When I was 19, I left San Diego for good to attend college at Berkeley. I traveled whenever I could. When I was 20, I took the train from Berkeley to Mexico City with some friends, standing happily in the sweltering third-class car because I thought it would be exciting to be in the lively Mexican capital during Christmas. (I was not disappointed.)

A few years later, I drove up the Alcan Highway in a battered pickup truck with my college boyfriend through Canada and Alaska. Camping in the Alaskan wilderness, I saw a gaggle of moose and my first grizzly bear and not a single person for four days. By the time I was 28, I was working as a writer, a job that took me first to the countryside in Nicaragua and then to a newspaper job in Los Angeles, where I have lived ever since.

Jim moved around, too, eventually settling in Colorado Springs. Despite the distance, we stayed in frequent touch. We called each other often, wrote letters, visited when we could. We got married within a year of each other, attended each other’s weddings. Then, because our children were the same age, we continued to have adventures. During winter breaks, we piled into a condo in Breckenridge and skied in the glorious Rockies. Despite my wish to be so, I wasn’t exactly fearless—I had learned the consequences of being an adult. But I loved floating down the mountain in the bright alpine sky, making my way through the pine trees to the lodge. I loved watching our kids, two boys and two girls, fly down the slopes on their tiny skis, and later on their snowboards. They were fearless. Most of all, I loved watching Jim, a gifted athlete. He bombed down the steepest runs and the biggest, iciest moguls, snow spraying out behind him. The mountains were his element, his canvas, just as the ocean had once been.

And then he got sick.

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In November 2010, I got a call from one of my brothers. Jim had been rushed to the hospital in Colorado Springs in excruciating pain. During an emergency surgery, doctors discovered he had advanced colon cancer. Although they removed much of the tumor, Jim’s prognosis was grim. He might have two months, a month, to live. He was 58. I got on a plane and flew to Colorado.

Jim was a good-looking guy. Six-foot-two, with chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and a killer grin. But when I first saw him in that hospital bed, he resembled a shadow of himself. My heart shattered, and I struggled not to cry. He grinned. “Hi, hon,” I said, taking his bone-thin hand in mine.

Soon came another shock: Jim also had tested positive for Huntington’s disease, a rare and fatal genetic brain disorder. Because of the sensitivity of Jim’s diagnosis, at first only a few people knew. Jim never knew. He was already suffering enough. What good would it do to tell him?

As his condition worsened, Jim begged to be freed from the hospital. One night, as I was leaving his room, he asked, “Can I stay with you at your hotel?” He was in a wheelchair then. “You can’t, sweetie,” I said.

After he was released that November, I flew back and forth to his home in Colorado Springs, watching him sleep, offering him food he could not eat, putting my headphones to his ears so he could listen to the Beatles on my iPod.

I was determined to be cheerful. As Jim sat propped in bed against a wall of pillows, I reminisced about our childhood, our crazy adolescence. I remembered the long hours we played kickball and hide-and-seek, poked around in the tide pools at Ocean Beach, how we’d stayed outdoors on our bikes until the last sliver of light was gone. I remembered the awful cheap wine we drank, the dope we smoked, listening to the Doors and Led Zeppelin on his record player, the hours we spent cruising Sunset Cliffs. “Remember how my friends thought you were the cutest guy in school?” I said. He grinned and then fell back asleep.

As the days passed, though, I could feel myself coming apart. It was snowing in Colorado. I shivered constantly, despite wrapping myself in layers of down and wool. In an effort to blunt my pain, I began drinking a lot and didn’t especially care. Late one night, after a sad and chaotic afternoon talking with the hospice workers, I returned to my hotel. I called my husband, sobbing so frightfully that a man knocked on my door to ask if I was OK. I realize now that this was the beginning of something hard and unyielding: grief.

Jim died on Christmas Eve 2010. I was standing in my living room in California, lighting candles on the evergreen-draped mantle, when the phone rang. My breath caught. I knew he was gone. I had been expecting the news for days. After I hung up, I sat on the sofa in the family room beside my teenage daughter and wept. But for all my sadness at losing Jim, I was also grateful: he was no longer suffering.

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In the coming months, I was paralyzed by grief. I missed him terribly. With our similar looks and our childhood bond, I had always felt like Jim was like my twin. I missed his sense of humor. I missed our arguments about politics. I missed hearing his voice. I would pick up the phone to call him, only to realize that I couldn’t. Months passed.

When I was depressed, I usually found comfort in nature. Even before Jim got sick, I ran regularly at the Rose Bowl, beneath the dark San Gabriel Mountains and billowy white clouds. Or I trekked along the dirt trail in the arroyo, under the shady eucalyptus and sturdy California oaks. Sometimes, when I was restless, I’d even drive to the ocean. Nature is where I could breathe, find calm. But for months I’d stopped doing even that. Most days I didn’t want to leave the house.

After nearly a year and a half, I knew I had to do something. I was tired of being unhappy. I was having trouble writing. Out of desperation, I decided to take a writing workshop. While I’m not much for groups, I thought it might help nudge me out of my despair.

The workshop was held in a bungalow in breezy Marina del Rey, which, considering my inability to leave the house, was exotic enough. Like me, the other people were longtime writers, looking for, as one person so eloquently put it, “a kick in the ass.”

As we sat around a long table, sipping coffee and nibbling on bagels, we did a series of creative writing exercises. One of them was jotting down work aspirations we secretly held. Ones that were out of the box, grand. The idea was that by writing them down, and then saying them aloud to the group, we could make these aspirations real, will them into coming true. I was skeptical.

In my usual self-denying way, I listed the stories I thought I should be doing, the book I thought I should be writing. At the bottom, I impulsively scribbled a long-held wish. Go on a National Geographic photography expedition. I thought nothing more of it.

A few weeks later, I was scrolling through my email when I saw one from David, the workshop leader. The subject line said something like “Want to go to the Arctic?” When I opened it, David’s email said he’d been invited to go on a voyage to the Norwegian Arctic with several National Geographic photographers, but he wasn’t able to go. Did I want his spot?

I think I might have screamed. Just to be sure, I read the email again. A month later, in June, I flew to Oslo, the Norwegian capital. I spent the afternoon wandering the waterfront, where Vikings once harbored their wooden ships, and the city’s vertiginous opera house. In the strong Atlantic air, thousands of miles from home, I began to feel like myself.

But it was in the Arctic, in a mesmerizing wilderness of teal-colored icebergs and giant walruses and regal ice bears, where I truly came back to life. The second day, I pulled on my Muck boots and climbed into a Zodiac, going ashore for the first time. I was thrilled to be on the tundra, and we trudged up a rocky slope overlooking a ring of glaciers. On the way, I saw my first wildlife: a scraggly Arctic fox, six tawny reindeer, a bevy of orange-beaked puffins snuggled in the cliffs.

As the ship moved through the black Barents Sea, I came to love the isolation, the feeling of being removed from everyone and everything I knew. I loved standing at the railing on the bow, hearing the ice below me crack, the engine groan. Except for the piercing cries of black and white gulls called kittiwakes, the Arctic was almost silent. The stillness seemed to calm me, too. Bundled in a fur hat, down parka, layers of fleece, and snow pants, I’d stay outside until I was shaking. Then I’d duck inside the map room, where there was coffee and hot chocolate.

Standing on that deck, I saw polar bears in the wild, a dream I’d had since I was a girl. One bear was roaming from one ice patch to the next in open water, only 40 or so yards from the ship. He was massive and beautiful. He had just killed a seal, and its carcass lay in a pool of crimson blood on the white snow. At one point, the bear stood up, turned his head in our direction and sniffed the air. He watched us intently, swaying on his big wide feet. He was so close that I could see the black skin peeking through his thick white fur.

I spent hours shadowing a National Geographic photographer, who taught me the intricacies of shooting in an all-white landscape. I probably took thousands of photos: walruses plopped on slabs of ice, polar bears buried in snow, birds nesting on soaring cliffs. Skyscrapers of ice. I wrote every day.

One afternoon, I stood at the railing on the bow. No one was around. I looked out at the sky, the thick plates of ice shaped like a jigsaw puzzle, the dark Barents Sea. I stood there for a long time, the wind stinging my cheeks, overcome with wonder. I thought of Jim, but I no longer felt unmoored. I thought of how much I loved the Arctic, and how much he would have loved it, too.