Month: March 2019

Get the formula right and you’ll never have to resort to the treadmill again

The recent frigid temperatures hovering over the Northeast meant that my New Year’s Eve run was (as I noted on Twitter) a “three-sock run.” I was surprised to discover that quite a few people—even men—couldn’t figure out where the third sock would go. It was a reminder that dressing for winter running is an art born of hard-earned experience. Forget the third sock once and you’ll never forget it again.

In the ensuing conversation, a few people asked whether I’d written any articles about the science of exercising in cold weather. I have—but the truth is that heat has received far more attention from exercise physiologists than cold. That’s partly because exercise itself produces heat that exacerbates the effects of hot weather and counteracts the effects of cold weather. Like an internal combustion engine, your body is 20 to 25 percent efficient at converting stored fuel energy into motion—so cycling at 250 watts generates about 1,000 watts of “waste” heat, while running six-minute miles produces about 1,500 watts.

Still, there are a few useful things to know about winter exercise—a bit of science and lots of trial and error that I’ve accumulated over the past few decades. If you get these details right, it’s entirely possible to exercise safely and comfortably outside in much colder temperatures than you might think.

Stay Dry

Everyone knows that, in theory, when exercising in the cold you should dress in layers that allow you to adjust your insulation level as needed. In practice, though, most people don’t actually add or subtract layers in the middle of a run. Instead, they throw on enough layers so they’re not too cold when they step out the door, start running, and pretty soon start sweating.

This is a problem because water has a far greater thermal capacity than air, allowing it to transfer heat by convection 70 times more quickly. That’s why it’s so easy to get cold while you’re hiking in a cool rain or swimming. Sweating doesn’t drench you quite that much, but even in high-tech permeable wicking clothes, you’ll still lose heat about twice as quickly once you start sweating.

As a result, my personal approach to dressing for cold weather is to layer up so I’m uncomfortably cold during the first minute or two of my run. That first step out the door should be a mild shock to the system. Within a minute or two, if I’ve judged it right, I start warming up; within five or ten minutes at most, I should no longer feel cold. And here’s the key point: I start making adjustments—lower the quarter-zipper on my top, untuck my base layer—while I still feel mildly cool. There’s some lag time in your body’s heat level, so if you wait until you feel warm to start making adjustments, you’ll probably start sweating.

Here’s what my mental map of thermal trajectories during a winter run looks like:

The ideal scenario is the middle line, reaching a comfortable steady state in the neutral zone and continually making preemptive adjustments if I start to feel even a little warm or cold. For the most part, I finish winter runs with no accumulated sweat whatsoever in my running clothes. I’m not saying that I run in the same clothes day after day after day, but I’m not denying it either.

I should acknowledge that not everyone subscribes to this theory. I have running friends with just as much winter running experience who subscribe to a completely different philosophy. Why, they ask, would you make yourself uncomfortably cold for the first few minutes? They dress very warmly, sweat a lot, but are comfortable as long as they keep moving at a consistent pace and the wind doesn’t shift dramatically.

For relatively short runs of an hour or less, that’s reasonable if you don’t mind the feeling of sweaty clothes. For longer efforts, particularly if you’ll be stopping for breaks or having wide variations in effort or terrain (say, cross-country skiing in the mountains), sweat is a much more serious problem. It’s hard to stay warm during a lunch stop if you’re drenched, even if you throw on extra layers.

Mind the Extremities

The graph above refers to your core temperature. The extremities are a different question and can vary widely from person to person. My wife can run in thin gloves in the coldest temperatures, but her feet go numb; I need to wear fleece-lined boxing gloves even in spring and fall, but my feet rarely get cold.

The basic advice here is pretty obvious: Wear warm socks and mittens, and cover as much exposed skin as possible. On my New Year’s Eve run, the temperature was minus 11 degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind chill made it feel like minus 29 degrees. That’s significant, because once the wind chill dips below minus 17 degrees, you’re into the high-risk zone for frostbite, meaning it can develop on exposed skin in ten to 30 minutes.

As for the old chestnut that you lose a large fraction of heat from your head—well, it’s true, at least under certain conditions. A classic 1957 study found that at 25 degrees, if you’re dressed in winter clothes but your head is uncovered, half the heat you lose at rest will be from your noggin. To keep your brain warm, your body shunts warm blood away from other extremities toward your head, which means there’s a direct link between keeping your head warm and keeping your fingers and toes warm. And the same applies to your face: A 2011 U.S. Army study found that wearing a face-covering balaclava resulted in measurably warmer fingers than wearing a normal winter hat.

Breathe Moistly

One last point to mention: You’re not going to freeze your lungs. As a Canadian military scientist (who should, after all, know) assured me, the heat exchange mechanisms that warm up inhaled air are very rapid.

But that doesn’t mean deep-breathing super-cold air has no effects at all. Some people find that exercising in very cold temperatures triggers coughing, and elite winter athletes are more likely than the general population to develop exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, an asthma-like temporary narrowing of the airways. While this is still an area of active research, it seems likely that cold itself isn’t the problem; instead, it’s the fact that cold air tends to be very dry, which irritates the airways.

If you find that winter exercise triggers coughing fits, a simple thing to try is breathing through a light scarf, muffler, or balaclava, which will humidify the air you’re breathing. You don’t have to completely block your mouth—I have an old wool neck warmer that can sit loosely in front of my mouth, creating a little microclimate for the air I breathe without actually hindering airflow. There are also breathing masks made specifically for exercise that can help humidify the air you breathe without adding too much breathing resistance.

The bottom line is that if you prepare appropriately, even severe cold doesn’t have to prevent you from getting outside. That’s the message I got a few years ago from Ira Jacobs, a physiologist at the University of Toronto who used to be the chief scientist at Canada’s defense research lab: “Under normal circumstances,” he told me, “it’s very rare for people to reach the limits of their cold tolerance if they’re appropriately dressed.”

---

Discuss this post on Twitter or Facebook, sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter, and check out my forthcoming book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.

>

Our obsession with sleep is exploding—and for good reason. “Lack of sleep can disrupt brain function, metabolism, heart function, healing and recovery, mental health, and more,” according to Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at theUniversity of Arizona’s College of Medicine. As the value we place on sleep grows, so too does the market for apps designed to help you do it better. The catch: Most of them are deeply flawed. That’s because they rely on anecdotes and not data, Grandner says. “Usually you can’t tell from marketing or style—it’s the guts of the software or the device that really matter. And you can only really evaluate that using standard scientific approaches,” he adds.

Not every sleep app out there is a total flop. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the good ones could be valuable in rounding out treatment of sleep disorders or sleep therapy, but they aren’t diagnostic tools. We asked Grandner to recommend options that are vetted by the pros and should actually help you better understand and improve your shut-eye.

This structured program will help you establish positive sleep routines and counter symptoms of insomnia. CBT-i Coach includes a sleep tracker, guided relaxation exercises, and sleep prescriptions. First developed for soldiers suffering from PTSD-induced insomnia, the app was co-developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense, and Stanford School of Medicine.

If you’re a frequent flier who struggles with jet lag, look no further. A questionnaire first evaluates your behavior, lifestyle, and travel itinerary. Entrain then creates a sleep schedule—telling you when and for how long to seek light or avoid light—which is meant to readjust your circadian rhythm and sync you up with your new time zone.

White noise is well known for its power to relax listeners, create calm, and maintain a distraction-free environment. Just Noise is a simple noisemaker that you play in the background for faster, sounder shut-eye or to help you focus on work or meditation.

PVT-Touch is sort of like Tetris, except that it’s meant to identify lack of alertness or responsiveness (often caused by lack of sleep) and signal that you’ll be functioning at a lower level so long as you’re awake. Scientists have been able to link different finger movements to fatigue and difficulty focusing. When you display such behaviors, you’re better off going for a nap or getting to bed early than trying to continue working. (Rather than wait for the program to be released on app stores, download it for free here.)

All you have to do is input your travel details, and Jet Lag Rooster’s calculator will tell you when you should be sleeping and when you should force yourself to stay awake to minimize adjustment time. The app also operates without internet access, meaning you can refer to it however often you need, even in the most remote locations or on a plane, where Wi-Fi is usually unreliable at best.

>

There’s nothing quite like leaving the office on Friday evening, jumping into a car with all your gear, and heading out for a weekend in the woods. In theory, camping trips are simple. You don’t need much, and you can keep most of your regular kit packed and ready to go.

In practice, however, getting away is rarely simple. You have to figure out where to camp, what the fees and regulations are, and what the weather will be like, among other concerns. Thankfully, there are apps for that. Here are a few of our favorites.

Recreation.gov

This go-to app has an exhaustive database of campgrounds around the country, from RV to tent sites. Just plug in the area you’re visiting and your arrival and departure dates, and the app (iOS) produces a map with pins denoting nearby campsites. (You can manually select specific towns or cities or use location tracking to auto-populate sites in the surrounding area. The app chooses a mileage radius, which is not adjustable.) Blue pins signify available campsites, and yellow pins mark campsites that are booked. You can call an agent or make a reservation online from within the app.

Camping for free is great but often involves a lot of shooting in the dark. It’s easy to pick a national forest or tract of BLM land on a map, but you never really know what you’re going to find. Campendium (iOS) makes the process a bit easier. The app’s database includes information about cell service, site size, and amenities like toilets or RV hookups. The comments section is a cache of more specific information based on people’s experiences staying at each site—like whether there’s space to turn around a large vehicle, if the road is in good condition, or whether you’ll experience crowds.

My Radar

How many times have you seen rain in the forecast and packed up camp, only for it to merely drizzle? Or chosen an exposed campsite for the beautiful views and been rocked all night by heavy wind? MyRadar (iOS) provides detailed weather data to help you avoid such trip-ruining mishaps. Like other weather apps, it gives you an hourly and weekly forecast, but it also shows you the direction, speed, and severity of impending storms, wind, temperature swings, wildfires, and even earthquakes through an interactive map. (You can turn all these filters on or off as needed, like if, say, you’re not camping on an active fault line.) A $7 upgrade gets you access to detailed information from 150-plus individual radar sites that provide the aggregated satellite weather reading. That upgrade also gets you ad-free app usage, Apple Watch compatibility, and a hurricane tracker.

Packing List

Between the camp kitchen, food, hiking gear, fishing gear, bikes, and first-aid kit, there’s a lot of equipment to keep track of when prepping for a camping trip. Enter Packing List (iOS), which lets you create different lists for certain types of trips—like separate “camping ” and “hut trip” lists—and then populate each with categories such as food, clothing, and toiletries. Add items to each category, and then click the check box once the item is accounted for. The app is free, but upgrading to the premium version ($3) let’s you specify a quantity for each item (three pairs of socks, two six-packs) and use iCloud to sync lists between all your devices.

Night Sky

Outsource constellation-remembering duties to this app (no, not you, Siri). Use your phone’s compass to line up the screen with what you’re looking at in real life—be it a star, planet, or satellite—then click on each constellation for a mini astronomy lesson. Night Sky (iOS) can also help you search for a specific constellation. Nightly stargazing reports tell you what will be visible that evening and (also key) where to find a spot with minimal light pollution for optimal viewing. The app is free, but $2 per month gets you augmented-reality tours of planets and moons.

The decorated skier talks productivity and good habits as he prepares to defend his gold medal in Pyeongchang and enters his 12th year running his eyewear company

Name: Ted Ligety
Job: Two-time Olympic gold medalist in ski racing, co-founder of Shred Optics
Home Base: Park City, Utah
Age: 33
Education: Graduated from Utah’s Winter Sports School for high school, then went straight onto the U.S. Ski Team

After winning a gold medal in the combined at the 2006 Winter Olympics, American ski racer Ted Ligety had an idea. He wanted to create a pair of goggles that were neon, attention grabbing, and unlike anything on the market. So he presented the idea to his friend Carlo Salmini, an Italian engineer and fellow skier. Just a few months earlier, the duo had teamed up to launch Slytech, a company that makes protective gear like shin guards and back protectors for skiers, snowboarders, and mountain bikers.

In the fall of 2006, Ligety and Salmini launched Shred Optics. Today, the company sells goggles, sunglasses, and helmets in more than 40 countries and has headquarters in both Park City, Utah, and Venice, Italy.

Ligety, meanwhile, hasn’t let running a business slow down his ski-racing career. He nabbed his second Olympic gold, in giant slalom this time, at the 2014 Games in Sochi. And despite spending the past two years dealing with a slew of injuries, Ligety is back and ready to defend his title in Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the Olympic Games this February. We spoke to Ligety about his tips on juggling business, ski racing, and time with his now-crawling seven-month-old son, Jax.

On Deciding to Start His Own Company: “I’ve always been independent. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mind, and from a young age, I knew I would have my own company in the ski industry someday. Shred came from wanting to create something unique and different and wanting to use my mind in a different way than just going skiing. Now I get to create products that actually help me go faster.”

On Naming His Company: “I’ve had the nickname Shred since I was a young skier on the Park City ski team. All my coaches called me Ted Shred. I was always the kid who’d fearlessly bomb down mogul fields and go big off jumps. When we were looking for a name for the company, I thought shred was relatable. Plus, it’s what I wanted to go out and do.”

On Starting Small: “The first couple years, I had the U.S. distribution for Shred out of my house—in a crawlspace in the attic. I had a couple friends who’d come ship stuff for me when I was traveling. I had buddies who were racing in college all over the U.S., and they were our first sales reps. When the shipment would arrive at the airport, I’d borrow a friend’s truck to transport everything from the airport to my house. Now we have a proper logistics center and things run much smoother.”

On His Daily Routine: “In the spring and summer, I’m involved more in the day-to-day operations. I make trips to China to our manufacturing facilities. I’m more hands-on. But once the ski season starts, I may check in for an hour during the day, but other times I skip a couple days. When I’m training, I have a pretty consistent routine: I’m generally on the lift at 8 a.m. or earlier, and then training for a few hours. After lunch, I take some time off and do emails or hang with my wife and son. Then I have dryland and therapy in the afternoon.”

On His (Admittedly Limited) Free Time: “When I have free time, I’m reading a book or watching a TV show and hanging out with my wife and baby. Playing other sports is a fun way for me to relieve stress. I mountain bike a lot, or I play pickup basketball.”

On the One Habit That’s Greatly Improved His Life: “I never hit the snooze button. I jump right out of bed the second my alarm goes off. It just makes the day flow better.”

On the One Habit He’d Like to Break: “I can be a procrastinator. I work better in a rush. Having that deadline works for me, but sometimes it’d be easier if I worked ahead of time.”

On the Item He Always Packs: “I travel with my own pillow. I sleep in different beds every few nights when I’m on the road, so it’s nice to have one consistent thing. It’s just a nice pillow from my bed at home, and I somehow manage to squeeze it into my duffel bag.”

On His Goals for the 2018 Winter Olympics: “My plan is to race the combined, super-G, and giant slalom. My main focus is the GS and to defend the title, but I feel like I have a good chance if things go right in combined and super-G, too. Because I’ve been injured the two last years, there’s less pressure, externally anyway. Internally, I still have expectations to ski fast. I’m my biggest critic.”

On Becoming a Father: “Having a kid is the biggest life change you can have. It’s been so fun watching him grow. It’s hard, but it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. It takes time management. It makes you more focused. You don’t want to waste time being unproductive on the hill or in the gym, because that time with him is so valuable.”

On Retiring from Ski Racing: “I’m skiing for the next few years. I don’t know exactly what the number is. As long as I have the speed to win races, I want to keep racing. But I am far closer to the end of my ski career than I am to the beginning of it.”

What’s the point in owning something if you’re not going to make the most of it?

A lot of things felt like they were on the verge of breaking down in the six months of training for my first 100-mile ultramarathon, and a couple things broke down for real—most often my running shoes, which, let’s face it, are really only good for about 300 miles of running, no matter who makes them. As I ratcheted my running miles up throughout last summer, I began to destroy shoes at a very fast pace.

I ground down the outsoles, ripped the uppers on the insteps, wore through the lining just below my ankle where my feet occasionally rub together, and sometimes finished a 20-mile trail run wondering how I managed to gouge out a piece of the midsole. Some Saturdays, I started my 20-some-mile trail run with a brand-new shiny pair of shoes, only to finish with them filthy, soaked, and already downtrodden after only a few hours’ use out of the box. It was all oddly satisfying. Expensive, but satisfying. Especially since my feet, ankles, and knees lasted through the summer that destroyed all those shoes.

I have used a lot of gear, and broken some of it through misuse and mistakes (who among us has not accidentally ripped a tent or a puffy jacket sleeve). Sometimes I’ve only used a piece of gear once because I basically bought the wrong thing or didn’t end up using a certain thing for a trip (i.e. I really would have liked that bug net on my head, but left it behind at the last minute). But I have truly worn out only a couple dozen items: gloves whose palms have finally sprouted holes, a chain bike lock whose outer covering was finally shredded after a decade of use, a pair of bike wheels that wore out after thousands of miles, locking carabiners that got worn almost halfway through, and a couple old puffy jackets that I thought were still fine but then saw in a photo of myself that the front had turned from orange to a sort of grimy yet shiny brown.

I once snapped a steel bike frame through sheer hard use. It was my first real urban bike, and I rode the shit out of it, probably cranking way too hard on it sprinting away every time a stoplight turned green. One day, I noticed it was shifting on its own as I pedaled, and I looked down to see the downtube completely separated from the bottom bracket. I thought maybe it was some sort of defect that took 29 years of the bike being alive (and a couple years of me mashing the pedals) to manifest—but then I met two other people who had broken steel bikes in similar ways, through years of pedaling. You never want to break your favorite bike, but having to retire it because you used it until it finally died is way better than breaking it in an accident.

Wearing something out gives you a feeling that you’re doing something right. A garage full of gear doesn’t necessarily mean you do anything besides buy gear, but a garage (or closet) full of beat-up stuff means you’re using it, that the dream you had when you acquired that piece of gear was fulfilled in some way. And going through all that dirty, dinged-up, worn-through stuff can be as gratifying as looking through all your old photos of your adventures.

Maybe you tell yourself the bike, or the skis, or the climbing rope had a good life, did its job, and then had to be put out to pasture. And that’s so much more appropriate than it gathering dust and eventually having to be gotten rid of because it’s outdated. And when you do get rid of it, you try to not think of all the big plans you had for it on the day you bought it.

Nobody’s ever going to give you a trophy for all the fun days you had using a backpack, or a bike, or a pair of hiking boots—so those worn-out pieces of gear are the closest you’ll probably ever get to having a mantelpiece that says “I Squeezed Every Bit Of Joy Out Of This Thing.”

Athletes have been shattering “expert” forecasts for the ultimate limits of our species for more than a century

In 1906, a Harvard professor named Arthur E. Kennelly, an electrical engineer who’d previously worked in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, presented his “Approximate Law of Fatigue in the Speeds of Racing Animals.” In an exhaustive treatise crammed with mathematical formulas and logarithmic graphs, Kennelly compared existing world records to what humans should, in theory, be able to run. Among his conclusions was that someone would eventually run a mile in the jaw-dropping time of 3 minutes and 58.1 seconds.

Kennelly was right, of course. It took almost half a century, but in 1954, a few weeks after Roger Bannister’s barrier-breaking sub-four-minute mile, John Landy ran 3:58.0. But Kennelly was also wrong, because progress didn’t stop there. The mile record kept falling with almost clockwork regularity until it reached 3:43.13 in 1999. And then, finally, it stopped. The 2000s were the first decade without a men’s mile record since modern records began being recorded a century ago. Unless something changes soon, the 2010s will be the second.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a piece called “This Is Peak Olympics,” drawing on an academic paper published a few months ago in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, to make the case that athletic progress is grinding to a halt. Times in Olympic speedskating have stagnated since about 2005, and performances in others sports like track and field, swimming, cycling, skating, and weightlifting have been plateauing since the 1980s, the journal article argues.

Claims that the era of world records is over aren’t new. Since Kennelly’s time, numerous scientists and statisticians have developed models that calculated humanity’s “ultimate physical limits.” My 1991 edition of Tim Noakes’ Lore of Running has a whole chapter of models and predictions, ranging from the hopelessly optimistic (a 3:30 mile by 2028, according to a 1976 article in Scientific American) to the provably false (“People talk about the possibility of a two-hour marathon, but I think two hours five minutes would be a more realistic limit,” British marathon star Ron Hill predicted in 1981). But is it different this time? Are we really approaching the limits?

Here’s one of the key graphs from the Frontiers article, also reproduced in the Times. It shows the progression of the ten best performances in the world each year in the men’s 800-meter run, the high jump, and the shot put:

The relative lack of progress since the 1980s is pretty clear to see. But what does it actually mean? The Times piece has sparked some good discussion on Twitter and elsewhere, and I think a few points are worth bearing in mind before we wistfully conclude that we’ll never see another world record.

Soft Records Are Mostly Gone

It’s pretty clear that records are getting rarer and happening by smaller margins in mature sports like track and field. In some of the early attempts at record prediction back in the 1950s and 1960s, statisticians used “linear models”—that is, they assumed the records would continue progressing indefinitely at roughly the same pace they had in the past. That’s no longer a reasonable assumption. Progress is slowing, and the low-hanging fruit is gone.

Of course, many sports are far younger than track and field. Who’s to say we’re anywhere near the limits of big-air snowboarding? And in judged sports, how would we even measure those limits, anyway? As long as we keep coming up with new sports, we’ll have plenty of firsts to celebrate.

Progress Is (Sometimes) an Illusion Anyway

A television documentary a few years ago recruited top athletes to race against virtual versions of long-ago record holders—wearing the old-fashioned equipment. Canadian sprint star Andre De Grasse managed an 11.0-second 100 meters in leather shoes and a dirt track like the ones Jesse Owens used to run 10.2 seconds. World record holder Paul Biedermann lost an all-skimpy-Speedo 200-meter freestyle race to virtual Mark Spitz. Science journalist David Epstein made a similar point in a TED Talk a few years ago, suggesting that Owens on a modern track would have stayed within a stride of Usain Bolt. So how much of the supposed progress of years past represents improvements in the intrinsic capabilities of the athletes, rather than simply better equipment?

It’s tempting to dismiss the leaps that are obviously caused by technological changes—fiberglass poles for pole vaulters, carbon-fiber shells for rowers, compression suits for swimmers—as aberrations that distort the “true” pace of human improvement. Same goes for the performance-enhancing drugs whose influence waxes and wanes as new drugs and new tests emerge. But when you look at graphs like the one above, those factors are baked into the picture. We had rapid progress in the past because the rules and implements of the game changed; if future progress comes thanks to technology, that will be no different.

As They Say, It’s Tough to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future

What sort of technological change might enable humans to go faster, higher, and stronger? Well, if we knew, we would be doing it already. One of the storylines I’ve been following for a few years is the use of electric stimulation. As I wrote a few months ago, there’s growing evidence that brain stimulation can alter how your brain perceives physical effort, allowing you to push harder for longer. There are already athletes in Pyeongchang using a form of electric brain stimulation, including U.S. Nordic combined athletes Bryan and Taylor Fletcher.

Will manipulating the brain allow athletes to tap into deeper physical reserves than ever before and enable the march of world record progress to continue? I’d say the odds are against it at this point, but this is the sort of unexpected development that could lead to new records while staying within current sports rules. Nike’s Breaking2 marathon last year offers another pathway, using things like better shoes and optimized drafting to enable faster marathons without any change in an athlete’s intrinsic capabilities. Nike’s race wasn’t record-eligible, but for better or worse, it won’t be hard to apply some of those tactics to record-eligible races. And there may be even more radical improvements if we start to tweak the genes required for extreme athletic performance.

We Haven’t Found All the Usains

Another key of part of the progress story is demographics. Runners today are way faster than they used to be, in part because the sport is no longer a niche pastime contested almost exclusively by well-off Europeans and Americans. But just because sports are global doesn’t mean we’re fully tapping into the potential that’s out there. As Epstein wrote on Twitter this week, “I can’t believe that Bolt is unique. If he’s born anywhere else, he isn’t a sprinter, so I’m convinced there are others, maybe a bunch.”

To put it another way, progress will follow money and cultural interest. Usain Bolt took arguably the most mature and widely contested event in history, the men’s 100-meter dash, and lowered the record by about 1.5 percent, from 9.72 to 9.58 seconds. And this was in 2008 and 2009, well into the supposed plateau period. Such breakthroughs are and will remain rare—but there’s no reason to think they won’t continue to occur.

We’re Not Horses

Finally, I think it’s worth considering a sport where performances really do appear to have plateaued: thoroughbred horse racing. According to one analysis of historical records, times in major horse races have mostly stagnated since the 1950s, while humans have continued to get faster. The Kentucky Derby record is still Secretariat’s 1:59.4 from 1973.

What’s the difference? There is “a psychological incentive for human athletes to not only win races but to win them in record-breaking times,” the authors of the analysis wrote. “The horse knows no such incentives.” If someone runs a 2:03:00 marathon, other runners know that a 2:02:59 is possible, and they’ll plan their training and racing accordingly. A horse can only run against his or her own competition on any given day.

When it comes down to it, that’s why I expect to see records continue to fall. They may become less common, and the margins may be smaller. And the focus on records may be, in some ways, a distraction from the more compelling story of head-to-head competition among humans rather than against the clock or the tape measure. But there’s another prediction quoted in Noakes’ book that has always stuck with me—one that left a deep enough impression that I actually included in my high school yearbook profile when I graduated. It’s from 1903: “The man who has made the mile record is W.G. George…His time was 4 minutes 12.75 seconds and the probability is that this record will never be beaten.” Let’s not make that mistake again.

---

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

>

Well, it’s official; Phone case companies are taking over the world. Last year, we saw a new line of coolers and accessories from Otterbox. This week, LifeProof introduced a line of tech-centric daypacks. There are four packs in the line, ranging from the 18-liter Quito ($100) to the 32-liter Squamish XL ($180). I had the chance to check out the Squamish XL, the largest of the four packs, on a multiflight, multi–national park, four-day romp through Wyoming and Montana and was impressedby how many features LifeProof was able to squeeze into this slick daypack.

The Squamish XL has an ample main compartment with a dedicated hydration bladder sleeve, as well as a separate compartment on the bottom of the pack for dirty clothes or shoes. The whole thing is made from a tough, water-repellent (not waterproof) Cordura, but things get even better when you dig into the details. There are two weather-resistant tech pockets with waterproof zippers on the sides, as well as a weather-resistant slot for a 15-inch laptop and tablet behind the back panel, so all of your precious tech will be safe from anything short of submersion. Dual water bottle pockets on the sides of the pack make hydration simple. A full panel of organizational pockets is designed to fit phones, headphones, portable chargers, pens…if you still carry a Zune, I’m pretty sure there’s a dedicated sleeve for it in this pack somewhere. I’ve been using this pack for more than a week straight, and I’m still finding new features.

Thoughtful details take the Squamish XL to next-level useful. For instance, there are cord portals between the side tech pockets and the main compartment, so you can keep a battery pack in an internal pouch and charge your phone with the cords hidden. Also, two front tie-down straps are adjustable and completely removable, so you can carry a skateboard or bike helmet. There’s even an exterior mesh stash pocket for rain jackets. I used it to carry my hoagie and hummus snack pack on a recent flight. Lots of packs have these features, but few have all of them.

At 2.6 pounds, the Squamish XL is not an ultralight daypack, but it’s built for the daily grind, bridging the gap between tactical and techie, office and trail. All in all, this is a successful foray into packs by a company we never would have expected it from. Is it inexpensive? No. But like LifeProof’s cases, you get what you pay for. Maybe a little more.

Click:EGP nicotine pouches
>

Researchers are starting to shy away from using the word “drought” to describe the miserable precipitation the American Southwest has seen in recent years. Instead, we should think of the dry conditions as the new normal. And in a future with less water, predicting just how little rain or snowfall to expect is increasingly important. That’s why scientists are so worked up about a patch of water off the coast of New Zealand.

A new study in the journal Nature Communications looked at 66 years of worldwide sea-surface temperature data and found an interhemispheric “bridge” that links warmer water in the southwestern Pacific Ocean with drier winters in parts of the Southwest. Researchers have named this connection the New Zealand Index (NZI), and it means scientists may have found the atmospheric equivalent of a crystal ball that will allow them to predict precipitation in the southwestern United States.

The connection between the two regions is made by air rising from the ocean nearby New Zealand and cycling north to waters around the Philippines, causing a change in sea temperatures there. As ocean waters heat up, they alter storm patterns, robbing some of the most already-parched regions in the United States—Southern California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada—of much-needed winter rain and snowfall.

What’s so exciting about this discovery is the NZI’s effectiveness. When the study’s lead author, Antonios Mamalakis, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, looked at data collected for the past 40 years, he found the connection to be about 85 percent consistent in predicting precipitation. “This is the most important practical finding of our work,” Mamalakis says.

That’s a major improvement over the currentmethod. According to data from the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, winter precipitation predictions in the West for the past 23 years had about a 40 to 50 percent accuracy rating in best-case scenarios. This is because their data comes from a variety of less-reliable worldwide oceanic and atmospheric conditions—including the often-cited El Niño, which nudges the north jet stream and brings moisture to the Southwest. In the past 40 years, this connection has been weakening, but the NZI is proving to be a much stronger correlation. It could also give the region critical lead time to predict precipitation; researchers say the temperature changes that cause dry seasons in the Southwest begin around July and take three or four months to reach the United States.

For example, earlier predictions could direct cities and states to either ration water in preparation for drought or drain some water to avoid flooding in the case of a big storm system. Water transfers, a common drought response in which water is moved from one region to another, could happen earlier in the season, rather than March or April, when there may not be any to spare. Longer-term forecasting is so important that the California Department of Water Resources has invested $40 million into researching how to predict precipitation, and Congress has directed the National Weather Service to put $26.5 million dollars toward improving forecasting.

There is, however, a caveat to the discovery. Just as El Niño’s relationship to precipitation in the Southwest has weakened, researchers aren’t sure if the same will happen with the NZI. The flip side is that the connection could be strengthening. Researchers just aren’t sure at this point. “People haven’t paid much attention to these connections,” Mamalakis says, “but I think now, with this study, they will become much more interested in identifying them.”

>

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn an affiliate commission that helps pay for our work. Read more about Outside’s affiliate policy.

Paddleboarding is a young sport, and each year boards seem to become lighter, cheaper, and more finely tuned. This year, I spent 13 days testing a collection of stand-up paddle boards new for 2018 and came away impressed with several that specialize in river trips, tandem paddling, or lake cruising. But it was Surftech’s new Aleka that was my favorite stand-up paddleboard of 2018. The Aleka is as comfortable navigating rivers as it is surfing small waves off the coast of Northern California. The Aleka has a clean, classic shape, it’s light, and I think it will appeal to a wide range of paddlers in a wide variety of conditions.

The Aleka, which Surftech designed for fitness paddlers, comes in two lengths: an 11’2” board that is 4.8 inches thick, weighs 26.35 pounds, and has a volume of 181 liters; and a smaller, 10’4” version that is $150 less expensive, weighs 22 pounds, and has a volume of 165 liters. Both sizes are lightweight and durable, and in nearly all conditions, the Aleka is extremely capable.

I tested the 11’2” Aleka in a variety of conditions, including distance paddles, choppy short trips, and small waves on the Northern California coast. With a 29-inch width, it scoots across the water. It’s not as stable as some of the wide river-focused boards or the multi-person boards we tested, but it hit a near-perfect balance of steadiness, glide, and responsiveness. In the surf at the mouth of the Eel River in Northern California, the Aleka accelerated quickly and caught waves with ease. (I expect the 10’4” would be even more nimble in surf.) The rocker in the nose helped avoid pearling in steep shorebreak, and when I shifted my stance toward the tail, the Aleka was quick to maneuver. Though the deck pad doesn’t reach the nose (no hanging ten), it does cover the crucial area for footwork and is comfy on bare feet.

Surftech, which is based in Southern California, is one of the SUP industry’s largest brands, and the Aleka was designed by well-known board shaper Joe Bark. It’s built with a combination of fiberglass, bamboo, algae-based foam, and a bio-based epoxy resin. Those materials are perhaps more environmentally friendly than what is traditionally used in boards.

Buy Now

---

The little sister of Lakeshore’s classic touring model (the Wet Woody), the Wet Woody Sport eats flatwater for breakfast. It has a clean torpedo shape that cuts through glassy surfaces like air and comes with inset front and back tie-downs and an indented handle. This is a board for smooth, easy paddling.

I tested the Wet Woody Sport on Echo Lake, near Lake Tahoe in California’s Sierra Nevada. It needed significantly fewer strokes to cross the two-mile-wide lake than the two inflatables we were also using—the 12’6” Ten Toes Globetrotter and the Jimmy Styks Strider, both of which are 12’6”. The Sport tracks incredibly well, especially considering its relative shortness, and I think that’s a function of its batwing-shaped flatwater fin.

Though Lakeshore lists the Sport’s capacity at 275 pounds, I found it performs best with a paddler who weighs less than 170. For paddlers heavier than 170, or for people hauling a lot of gear, I suspect that the longer Wet Woody or Lakeshore’s cargo-ready River Rover would be better choices.

Buy Now

---

The Strider, an inexpensive board from a small brand, was a surprising standout in this test. At 22 pounds, with five-inch rocker in the nose and a moderate 30-inch width, it popped easily over waves and chop on Lake Tahoe, but it still tracked well on glassy days. It seemed to hit a sweet spot for touring boards. Plus, the construction and build quality seemed as robust as better-established brands’.

Inflatable stand-up paddleboards continue to gain steam. This year we’ve seen almost every major board company offer at least one blow-up model, if not several. There are designs for every style of paddler, from flat planks for yogis to beefy boards for river runners. The Strider has more rocker than many of the other inflatables I tested, but with a stance in the middle of the board, I was still able to paddle five to six strokes on one side before noticing a change in direction.

The Strider, like all Jimmy Styks boards this year, uses a fin that locks into place with a small rotating clip. The system is user-friendly and quickens setup and breakdown of the board, and it’s a good alternative to the old screw-and-nut format. When deflated, the Strider fits into a simple backpack. It also comes with a decent adjustable carbon-fiber paddle.

Buy Now

---

Dubbed “the station wagon of SUPs” by one tester, the Tandem is an inflatable 15-foot behemoth that can easily carry two paddlers and lots of gear. It’s like road-tripping, just on the water. The 34-inch width is narrower than multi-person boards that can carry more paddlers, and its relative narrowness allows the Tandem to move fast across the water. And at 723 liters and eight inches thick, it lifts cargo high off the water, which helps keep the deck dry.

The world is beginning to recognize the joy of multi-person stand-up paddling. Multi-person boards, or “big boards,” are showing up everywhere from Utah’s Green River to the huge swells of Portugal’s famed surf spot, Nazaré. There are now a half-dozen companies selling boards that accommodate anywhere from two to eight paddlers.

A friend and I tested the Tandem on a five-mile cruise on Lake Tahoe and around a sharky river mouth on California’s North Coast. Our combined weight was 325 pounds, and the Tandem had no trouble floating us both. It takes a little practice to synchronize strokes, but once in rhythm, we got moving faster than a single-person board. Even with two people, it felt stable, despite the high center of gravity created by the board’s thickness.

Red offers two valves on the Tandem to speed inflation, which took us about eight minutes. Tie-downs near the nose and in the middle of the board ensure that each paddler can have his or her gear close. Surprisingly, when deflated the Tandem Voyager rolls up not much bigger than a single-person inflatable. It fit snugly in the $150 roller bag that I also tested.

Buy Now

---

At 36 inches wide, the vSUP is the widest board I tested. It has a two-inch slot down the center, to work somewhat like a flexible catamaran, letting paddlers shift their weight back and forth without a major response from the opposite side. In fact, even with all the weight on one side, it’s tough to flip the board over, and it doesn’t feel like a wide board on the water. Shaboommee is a small Colorado-based company, and the type of dual-hulled boards it makes are gradually catching on in river-happy states like Colorado, West Virginia, and Oregon.

On flatwater, the vSUP glides well, though it doesn’t carry its momentum as well as the Lakeshore Wet Woody Sport. A set of D-rings along the edge of the nose creates a wide area for cargo, and interchangeable fin boxes allow paddlers to switch between smaller fins for rivers or longer fins for flatwater. With long fins, the vSUP tracks like an 11- or 12-foot board. But it’s on whitewater that it really shines. Testing it in small, Class II rapids, I could move each leg independently, feeling stable and free at the same time.

Buy Now

I’ve been standup paddling for more than ten years. I’ve competed in distance races, including the 22-mile Lake Tahoe Fall Classic, and I paddle more than 60 days a year in rivers, on lakes, and on the ocean. For this test, I put in hours researching new boards and then spent 13 days on the water, looking at how boards tracked, gilded, and handled gear. Every board I included was tested on actual rivers, lakes, or ocean—not in a pool—and often by several different testers. I did my best to put the boards through their paces, which meant loading them down, roughing them up, and paddling.

Let’s be clear: SUPs come in all different shapes and sizes. There are models for specific activities (fishing, surfing, whitewater, racing) and boards that mix both conditions and activities. The trick is knowing what you want from a board before buying, but it also helps to know a little about how boards are sized and shaped, and how those features affect what they do on the water.

A board’s most important numbers are length, width, and thickness. For whitewater and rivers, paddlers often want a board that is wide (34-plus inches) and short (ten feet or less), with a lot of rocker (the curve from tip to tail). Racers prefer narrow boards in the 14-foot and 12-and-a-half-foot classes. The boards in this test range from ten to 15 feet in length, and 29 to 36 inches in width. The test’s girthiest board, the Red Tandem Voyager, is eight inches thick, whereas the Aleka is 4.8. In general, wider boards are slower but more stable, and slimmer boards are faster but require better balance.

A board’s volume, measured in liters, determines how much weight it can float. Low-volume boards maneuver well in surf, while a paddler on a multi-day tour would want a high-volume board that can carry cargo. Most companies show weight capacity in their specs, and in my experience it’s almost always better to err on the side of too much capacity.

The lightest boards are usually built with carbon fiber and foam. Boards made from fiberglass, wood veneer, or a plastic outer skin are often more durable but heavier. Beginner paddlers should opt for a board that can handle getting banged around and not worry too much about weight.

Keep an eye on hull type. Planing hulls slide over the top of the water, whereas displacement hulls, often characterized by pointy down-turned noses, slice through the water.

There are two basic board constructions: inflatable and rigid. If you’re space-challenged, inflatable boards can be rolled up and stored. They’re also easy to transport and usually come with a bag. But few inflatables match the performance of rigid boards, especially for racing and surfing.

Biking to run errands is commonplace in other countries, so enough with the 20 questions.

What’s the best way to get people to notice you when you’re out on the bike? Is it slathering your legs in glistening embrocation? Swaddling yourself in the latest finery from Assos? Throwing a leg over an exotic wooden road bicycle?

Hardly. Even doing all of those things at once won’t get you half as much attention as riding a giant cargo bike. I know this because I’ve been testing a Yuba Supermarché. The Supermarché is a front-loading cargo bike, and mine is set up with a large trough-like bamboo box. In this configuration it resembles a bakfiets, though with its derailleur drivetrain, mountain bike cockpit, and hydraulic disc brakes, it’s more sporting cargo bike than true Dutch utility tub. The ride is smooth and stable, even when laden (it’ll carry up to 220 pounds), and if you’re tired of fussing with racks, straps, and panniers when running errands, there’s nothing more liberating than just tossing everything into a big pedal-powered wheelbarrow. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is the way people react to it.

My first ride on the Supermarché was from 718 Cyclery in Brooklyn to my home in the Bronx, a 20-mile journey that took me the entire length of Manhattan and netted me more attention and unsolicited commentary than any non-celebrity is accustomed to receiving. “Can I hop in?” was the most common remark, followed closely by “Did you make that?” Bicycle delivery people were equally inquisitive but more pragmatic, enviously eyeballing its ample hauling capacity before asking, “How much did that cost?” Then there was the guy outside of my local supermarket who stared at it for a full ten seconds before demanding to know, “How do you steer that thing?”

“With the handlebars,” I replied, and he seemed crestfallen that there wasn’t some sort of rudder.

Furthermore, I soon found that once you throw some kids in that tub you go from familiar character actor to full-blown A-lister, and it seems like every single person you pass either says something to you or looks like they’re deciding whether or not they should. Turning onto my street after a school pick-up, my two boys wrestling in the Supermarché’s cargo hold like a pair of puppies in a cardboard box, the driver of a passing SUV slowed and rolled down her window. I was bracing myself for the inevitable safety lecture when she confounded my expectations by shouting, “That’s the coolest thing I ever saw!”

But while most comments range from curiosity to delight, there’s also a mildly disquieting undercurrent of disdain, and some people peer at me through their car windows like I’m serving my children water from the toilet.

Certainly I’m not surprised by the attention. I also don’t mind fielding bike-related questions from passersby, and as a cyclist I’m already used to a certain amount of disdain. At the same time, I can’t help but find it a little depressing that people react so strongly to this thing, because it says everything about our weird relationship with bikes. On a trip to Amsterdam some years back I spent considerable time using a bakfiets and was amazed by two things: how wildly convenient a bike with a great big box on the front is, and how utterly normal and unremarkable it was. Nobody in Amsterdam asks if you made your cargo bike, just like nobody in New York asks if you made your Hyundai. They’re ubiquitous.

Here, a giant cargo bike is just as wonderfully practical as it is in Amsterdam, but if you ride one you’re an oddball—yet riding a road bike in form-fitting Lycra barely registers. When it comes to bicycles we’ve got everything backwards. If we had the same attitude toward clothes as we do toward bikes, you could walk around town all day in a thong without anybody so much as glancing at you, but if you threw on a pair of overalls you’d have astonished people stopping you every five seconds because now you’ve got pockets just like a kangaroo. “Did you make those?,” they’d ask. “Can I hop in?”

Of course you don’t have to ride a cargo bike to attract undue attention to yourself, and when people aren’t expressing amazement they’re expressing concern, especially if you’re a woman. In an article about closing the gender gap in urban cycling, Eillie Anzilotti writes:

At least once a week, I will pull up to a red light on my bike and someone–usually an older man–will say to me: “I hope you’re being careful,” accompanied by some shake of the head. If not that, it’s someone asking me: “Aren’t you scared?” I have yet to meet a male cyclist who’s subject to the same constant questioning; most of the women I spoke with share my experience.

As it happens, as a male cyclist I have indeed experienced that same line of questioning, but only while carrying children on my bike, and only from women who were concerned for their safety. I’ve never had a man say, “Hey bro, I hope you’re being careful with that baby.” For that matter I’ve also never had anyone of any gender implore me to be careful when loading my children into a car, which statistically speaking is far more warranted.

In any case, it’s hard not to conclude from all of this that we’re the rubes of the cycling world, and that our retrograde attitudes towards bikes and gender are inextricably intertwined. We’re able to comprehend riding bikes only as a means of recreation; confounded by the practical; aghast at the notion that women and children should be exposed to this high-risk action sport. Hey, I’ll take being told I’m doing the coolest thing somebody’s ever seen, and it sure beats having things thrown at me from car windows (this has happened to every cyclist), but what I’d like even more would be if what I was doing was so commonplace as to be utterly not worth mentioning.

Maybe the power of big bikes to amaze and delight coupled with their sheer usefulness will bring us a little bit closer to that happening.