Month: March 2019

The books, movies, music, and podcasts we couldn’t stop talking about

For some of Outside’s staffers, March meant exciting new places to explore (Hawaii!) and exciting new gadgets (that we may talk to a little too much). The rest of us injected excitement into our lives by reading some true crime and listening to Neil Young.

What We Read

There’s a bookshop a block from my house where I’m a regular, and on several occasions over past two years I’ve picked up Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, only to put it back on the shelf due to Everest fatigue and the book’s intimidating 600-page length. A few weeks ago, I finally succumbed—and now I feel guilty for overlooking it for so long. The fact that George Mallory doesn’t really appear for 200 pages is a good indicator that this isn’t your typical mountaineering book. Rather, it’s an incredibly reported snapshot of a generation of young British men who were either annihilated in or traumatized by World War I (the trench warfare descriptions are as gruesome and enthralling as anything I’ve read about that brutal four-year conflict) and the survivors who relentlessly threw themselves at the world’s last major adventure prize in the war’s aftermath.

—Chris Keyes, editor

I absolutely could not put down a recent New Yorker story by Jane Mayer called “The Man Behind the Trump Dossier.” It’s about Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 secret service agent who was hired by a U.S. law firm to look into Trump’s Russia connections. What he finds out is riveting, and even more riveting is how the people he conveyed the information to totally bungled it. And all this was known about by the FBI and other high-government authorities well before the election. It’s like real-life John Le Carré.

—Mary Turner, deputy editor

I’m about halfway through Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which was released last month and is about the Golden State Killer. McNamara is an absolute legend in the true-crime world, and she died in 2016 before finishing her last book. Her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt, hired a journalist to help complete it using Michelle’s notes—she’d been working on the book for five years. What comes across most powerfully to me is McNamara’s intense focus on the victims’ lives, something she was known for in her work. Reading I’ll Be Gone in the Dark feels like she’s still around, working late to uncover the truth, long after her family’s gone to sleep.

—Abigail Wise, online managing editor

I’ve been reading Mary Pilon’s The Kevin Show, about Olympic and America’s Cup sailor Kevin Hall, who was diagnosed as a young man with bipolar disorder and, later, the “Truman Show” delusion. Like the character in that movie, the person suffering from this psychosis believes they’re being filmed at all times. The book doesn’t sensationalize the condition, though. I was impressed by how deeply and empathetically Pilon describes what Hall was thinking during episodes in which he thought everything he did was being guided by a director. She also points out something I’d never considered, which is that we often hear about how bipolar disorder affects artists and even contributes to their unique work—but we never really talk about athletes who are affected. Pilon’s book pushes the conversation a little further with Hall, who is clearly a brilliant athlete and a fascinating person.

—Erin Berger, senior editor

What We Listened To

Neil Young just put out a soundtrack/collaboration album, and it’s killer. The music on Paradox was featured in the movie of the same name (which I haven’t seen), and parts of it sound like the last soundtrack Young made for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (stop what you’re doing now if you haven’t listened to that). The new album also features Willie Nelson and two of his sons and their band, Promise of a Real. If you’re into eerie reverb, listen to “Paradox Passage 2.” If you want classic Young, listen to “Cowgirl Jam.” The new version of Young’s “Peace Trail” is pretty great, too.

—J. Weston Phippen, senior editor

I realize it’s highly unoriginal for me to recommend a This American Life piece, but hear me out. The “Five Women” episode from a few weeks ago, about a group of women who all worked for the same man and experienced various forms of harassment, is one of the most compelling stories I’ve heard in a long time. The format is novel compared to other TAL episodes, and the narrative of these women’s experiences stands out, even among the deluge of #MeToo stories we’ve all become too accustomed to hearing lately. The Longform podcast interviewed producer and reporter Chana Joffe-Walt about creating the piece, and I strongly suggest carving out time to listen to the story and the interview back-to-back.

—Molly Mirhashem, associate editor

Coming from a gear editor, this may sound predictable, but I love Blister’s recently released Gear:30 podcast. Featuring interviews with pro athletes and gear designers, it gives a behind-the-scenes look at the process of designing, building, and testing gear (mostly skis). Sure, it’s techy and nerdy, but if you love gear as much as I do and want to go down the rabbit hole, I highly recommend taking a listen.

—Ben Fox, associate reviews editor

I’m not listening or reading anything interesting. But I’m listening to everything boring (OK, mostly just Reply All and This American Life because I’m pretty basic) on my HomePod, which is an incredible experience. Everything sounds better.

—Scott Rosenfield, digital general manager

What We Watched and Otherwise Experienced

Visit the page for Hawaii Forest and Trail on TripAdvisor and you’ll be bombarded with five-star reviews for tours with a guide named Taj. After the week I spent on the Big Island of Hawaii this month, I, too, must urge you to fly to Kona to hang with this man. I signed up for the Twilight Volcano Adventure, a 12-hour experience guided by Taj in Volcanoes National Park, and learned more than I bargained for. Taj is a lava nerd—as well as a rock nerd, and a plant nerd, and a bird nerd. Hiking with him isn’t exactly fast, because he stops you to point out things you’d never notice otherwise. If you’re lucky and the skies are clear, he might just point out Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky and one that you can rarely see from the mainland. Oh yeah, and ask to see his iPad. He’s got the craziest lava expedition pics you’ll ever see.

—Jenny Earnest, social media manager

I’ve been watching The Looming Tower. It’s a new Hulu series about the FBI and CIA intelligence turf wars before 9/11. It’s a total political thriller for all of us politics nerds out there.

—Carly Graf, assistant editor

This month I watched Jane, the National Geographic documentary about Jane Goodall, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Jane has always been an idol of mine, but seeing this never-before-seen footage of her left a big imprint on me. May we all move through life with the unwavering passion Jane has. I’m going to move to the jungle to live among the chimpanzees.

—Emily Reed, assistant gear editor

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Huckberry’s Memorial Day Sale is happening today through May 27. These are some of our favorite products—all discounted right now at least 20 percent off.

Arguably the most badass growler ever made, the 64-ounce Ukeg keeps five beers cold for days thanks to the double-walled vacuum-insulated construction. The included CO2 cartridge keeps it carbonated and the proprietary dispenser tap makes pouring the perfect pint easy.

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With a waxed and baked leather outer, waterproof-breathable membrane, and Thinsulate insulation, these gloves are great for frigid resort ski days while being breathable enough for long backcountry missions. Once summer rolls around, use them to collect firewood or move burning logs in the campfire.

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Featured in our 2018 Summer Buyer’s Guide, we like this bag for its heathered exterior, plus two cavernous interior pockets that are big enough for your laptop and street clothes.

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The sleek and no-frills Fieldhouse hoodie is the valedictorian of our wardrobe. Its looks are pure classic and it’s good at damn near everything, from helping you were up a sweat at the gym to snuggling on the couch. A small internal pocket keeps wallet and keys safe when on the move. Throw it on over a white T-shirt and you’ve got a class-ready, surprisingly stylish outfit.

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The Stargaze is one of the most comfortable camp chairs we have ever tested. More like a mini-hammock than a chair, it swings effortlessly and reclines easier than a La-Z-Boy. Nemo calls the system “auto-reclining hardware,” which more closely resembles a cam and webbing system you’d rig up for rafting or climbing than something you’d expect to see on a chair. The result feels equally solid sitting fully upright and tilted fully back.

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This ultra-slim wallet, made from leather and aluminum, packs more than just cash and cards. It also has an RFID blocker to keep your information safe, plus a ten-function multi-tool.

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This fleece-lined classic marries a stylish Polartec polyester fabric outer with stretch-woven nylon contrasts on the chest and collar. The result? It buffers against wind and water, warms, and stretches while also being breathable and office appropriate. It’s the epitome of the utilitarian shacket.

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A classic dome-style tent at a great price, the Galaxi has plenty of room for two people plus gear. Add in standard features like interior pockets and a pair of doors, and it has everything you need in a backpacking tent, at a category-killing price.

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There’s no place in the world like McNeil River, Alaska. In summer, you can sit beside the falls of the river and watch as 40, 50, even 70 bears mate, fight, and fish for their salmon dinner. Together. At once. Often within feet of your chair.

“We actually saw 80 bears one time at the falls—80 bears!” Larry Aumiller, the place’s legendary former manager, told me. “That’s more bears than there are in France!” 

These aren’t just any bears, mind you, but the famous, bowel-looseningly-big brown bears of the Alaska Peninsula—that green arm of land that reaches toward Kamchatka. After feasting for weeks each summer, the most impressive males waddle away to hibernation weighing more than three NFL nose tackles. Simply put, McNeil is the largest seasonal congregation of the largest brown bears on earth.

To preserve the specialness of this place, visitors are limited to just 10 at a time, 200 people per viewing season, all of whom are chosen by lottery, with a preference toward Alaskans. TheMcNeil River State Game Sanctuary and Refuge, as it’s officially called, is one of the most protected places in the entire state, and rightfully so. Now 51 years old, the 200-square-mile sanctuary and surrounding refuge are an example of real forward thinking in a state whose politicians are not often known for putting conservation ahead of resource extraction.

Now, though, love of gold threatens McNeil.

Remember Alaska’s Pebble Mine, the massive, open-pit abomination proposed for the headwaters of two of the major rivers that feed Bristol Bay, one of the most productive salmon fisheries in the world? Remember how Pebble seemed dead, after Alaskans fought it for years?

Now Pebble is back, zombie-like, to terrorize the state’s residents and their way of life—thanks to the Trump Administration, which has yet to meet a landscape it can’t help monetize.

The Canadian-owned Pebble Limited Partnership recently submitted an application to the U.S. Corps of Engineers to tap the hugely lucrative gold, copper, and molybdenum deposit, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. The company has tweaked its former plans, and now proposes to connect its mine to the outside world by bulling several sections of blacktop through the wilderness—including laying down 35 miles of two-lane highway across the Alaska Peninsula east of Lake Iliamna. The road would connect to a massive new port in the east at Amakdedori Beach. To power this fandango, the company wants to lay a 188-mile natural gas pipeline under Cook Inlet. It would be an industrial corridor in the wilderness, as close as a few hundred yards away from the northern boundary of the McNeil refuge. Late last month, the major financial investor in the Pebble Mine project backed out of the project. But this zombie hasn’t been killed—yet.

I’m a reporter by training. I’ve been taught to keep my opinions to myself. But I’ve also spent time on the Alaska Peninsula, for this magazine and others. I visited McNeil River last summer. Sometimes in my reporting I come across a topic I know well, and a proposal so ill-considered, so criminally inept, that to hold the tongue is to be complicit in the destruction of something remarkable that does not belong to us.

So let’s talk a bit about bears and roads.

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Bears love McNeil River. The number of brown bears here can average nearly one per square mile. Why? Habitat. There’s lots to eat and lots of room to roam. And bears do roam. On the Alaska Peninsula, brown bear home ranges can extend as far as 100 square miles. Peripatetic males have been known to travel more than 100 miles in a single direction during one season.

Yet the bears keep returning every spring and summer to the sanctuary and its buffet of sedges, its creeks and river with their differently-timed runs of salmon. Drew Hamilton, president of Friends of McNeil River and a former staffer at the sanctuary, likened McNeil to a “truck stop,” with big guys and gals always coming and going, sitting a spell, fueling up. The refuge managers can identify 100 different bears by sight.

The first thing you notice when you land at McNeil for a visit is the almost complete lack of a human footprint, beyond a few cabins hunkered on the shore. That’s no accident. The language establishing the sanctuary in 1967 put the welfare of the animals first, even above research or viewing. Bears aren’t even tagged here. Larry Aumiller, who managed the place for 30 years, and his successors have been meticulous stewards of that mandate.

Here, the bears rule. And you play by their rules. The guides and small groups keep to predictable trails, at predictable times, in predictably small groups, day after day. With the decades, the bears have grown to understand this routine. The result is that the bears see humans neither as threat, nor as source of food. They feel safe, which makes them feel comfortable, and so they let humans move closer, and they also move closer to us—sometimes very close. It’s not uncommon for a bear, sated with fish, to fall asleep right beside humans on the ground-level viewing pad at McNeil Falls. “It is the crown jewel of wildlife viewing,” says Hamilton. “I would put it on par with anything in the world.”

When I visited late last June, not yet highest season, we saw perhaps 40 bears a day. Bears were mating, wrestling, fighting, feeding. I’m not a mystical person, but when a mother bear and her cub saunter past you, not a dozen feet away, your innards feel that they have been brushed by some bright wing. This relationship of trust that has been nurtured over decades between humans and bears may be unique in the world. A few days spent at McNeil will make you recalibrate how it is possible for humans to find their place again in the natural world.

But this relationship is seriously threatened by the mining company’s proposal. The transportation corridor proposed by the company “literally kisses the edge” of the refuge, Aumiller says. 

Here’s why that matters: As we said, bears roam. The bears that come to McNeil later disperse. Some will head north, some west. They will encounter the road, and people on that road. After all, it will be built through prime bear habitat, where there is nothing else right now.

Roads fragment a landscape. They fracture habitat. They bring in other influences and invasive species. They encourage other roads, and still more human development. Many studies have shown this happening elsewhere. Most of all, they will change the way the bears interact with humans. “Most of the bears, the only humans they experience is us. And that’s gonna change” with a road, Aumiller told me.

Hamilton added, “The sanctuary is going to be giving out one message, the same one it’s been giving out for 50 years, and then you have this industrial complex that is going to be giving out the complete opposite message. They’re going to be hazing bears. They’re going to be hitting bears with trucks. In some cases, bears are going to become food-conditioned.”

There will be more hunting and more poaching, these critics predict. All of this adds up to bears that are more uncomfortable around humans. And that means the dynamic at McNeil River—a balance between human and bear—will change irrevocably. “They’ll stay away,” Aumiller said of some of the bears. And those who do return possibly will avoid us.

This change, said Hamilton, also could reduce safety at McNeil, a place where no one has been injured or killed by a bear, and no bear killed by a visitor, in the more than four decades since the permit system went into effect.

And yet: in its application, the mining company doesn’t once mention McNeil River, or its bears. 

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One could write a chapter-book on the breathtaking array of additional bad ideas contained within the new Pebble Mine application. (Here’s another: the destruction of gorgeous Amakdedori Beach to dredge and build a deepwater port and airstrip that would be seen from bear-viewing spots within the sanctuary.) For an overview of the whole proposal, check out this site, and also here for more critique.

“What can I do?” you ask.

Submit a comment to the Corps of Engineers here by June 29. Tell the Corps that the project’s impacts on the world-class population of bears, and the unique McNeil Sanctuary, must be considered in an assessment.

Next, contact Alaska’s senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and voice your opinion about the mine’s route and its effects.

Don’t give a foreign mining company the last word on the future of your country. You may never get to McNeil River. But as Wallace Stegner said of wilderness, sometimes it’s enough just to know that places like this still exist—whole and untamed, and apart from us.

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A team of international rescuers has found the12 missing Thai boys and their soccer coach alive nine days after the group became trapped in a cave by floods. The team of 11- to 16-year-olds and their 25-year-old coach are said to be healthy, although the rescue isn't over yet.

The team was found about two miles deep into the Tham Luang Nang Non cavern, located in the Chiang Rai province in the country’s north. And while rescuers have drilled a hole in the side of the cave and have pumped out muddy water for days so divers can reach the boys, some passageways are still flooded. 

The governor of the Chiang Rai province, Narongsak Osottanakor, told the AFP that the plan now is to find a way to get the team medical help and to stabilize them by sending in a doctor who can dive. None of them are believed to be in critical condition, but they've been without food for nearly ten days now. “We will take care of them until they can move,” Osottanakor said.

The soccer team, called the Wild Boars, disappeared into the caves on June 23 for a group outing. A park officer notified rescuers after seeing the boys’ bicycles, soccer shoes, and backpacks near a cave entrance that was supposed to be off limits. During the rainy season from July to October, the four-mile long cave can be flooded with up to 16 feet of water. Caving and diving experts from the U.S., China, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Thailand’s own version of the Navy SEALS had all spent days trying to reach the team. But because it has rained almost nonstop since they went missing it was too dangerous. On Monday, the downpour let up briefly, and rescuers were able to pump out enough water to find them about 1,000 feet from an elevated sand bar inside the cave called Pattaya Beach. 

For nine days, a crowd of relatives and friends have held a nightly vigil near the entrance. On Monday night, when Governor Osottanakorn shared the news that rescuers had found the boys alive, the group erupted in applause. Weather permitting, rescuers hope to have the boys safely out of the cave by Tuesday. ”Our mission [is] not done yet," Osottanakorn told reporters. “We will work all night."

https://www.facebook.com/ThaiSEAL/videos/1631228493667210/

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On January 18, 2017, five black women in Harlem took their first steps toward D.C. Talisa Hayes, Marquita Francique, Kim Rodrigues, Alma Nolasco, and Alison Désir ran252 miles as a relay over 60 hours, averaging ten-minute miles. They arrived the morning of the Women’s March and ascended the steps of the Capitol Building at dawn, having raised more than $100,000 for Planned Parenthood and gained plenty of press attention. This year, Désir, the leader of that group, is organizing the Midterm Run to raise money for candidates who are campaigning to flip a district.

For Désir, 33,running started as a way to cope with depression in her twenties. The experience may have saved her life and prompted her to create Harlem Run, and has unexpectedly transformed her into an advocate for civil rights and mental health.

There were early signs that Désir was a natural leader. In elementary school in Teaneck, New Jersey, she was once assigned a project celebrating the town’s centennial. She looked at photos of people who lived there in the 1950s and ’60s, after Teaneck was named a model town by the U.S. government in 1949. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, every single person in this photo is white,’” Désir says. “So my project was about what it really means to be a model town when people of color are excluded from representation. I was in third or fourth grade.”

Désir’s father is from Haiti and her mother from Colombia, and they ensured Alison knew where she came from at an early age. They talked about politics and anthropology as a family, bought her books about the Haitian Revolution, and scheduled reading time. Her parents nicknamed her “powdered feet,” which comes from a Haitian Creole saying to describe a super-active person—you never see her, just her footprints. Désir explains that she earned her nickname by being all over the place and never sitting down. “I think initially the nickname had kind of a self-destructive connotation.”

At 27, Désir was living in New Jersey and having a hard time. “I wasgoing through a period of depression. I was unemployed and taking care of my father, who had Lewy body dementia,” she says. “I was really suicidal and overdosing on pills.” She often couldn’t get out of bed and would scroll through social media for hours. That’s where Désir first came across her friend’s feed. He was training for his first marathon and raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Désir describes him as “not your typical runner. He’s not a skinny white guy. He’s an average-size black dude.” She was intrigued by his story and the selflessness of the fundraising component. She signed up for her first race, the Rock n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego. For Désir, the marathon was a sliver of hope during a dark time. “I figured I had nothing to lose,” she says.

Soon she was training for the Rock n’ Roll Marathon. Each week, she was doing more than she had ever done before—the training plan, raising money, having a reason to leave her house all helped her start to feel better about herself and start to discover the mental impact of running.

After completing the race, in June 2012, Désir wanted to share the transformative, and in her case life-saving power of running with others. “I started getting curious about psychology, sports psychology, counseling psychology. I realized other people actually use running to help with their depression, or after family members have died, after they’ve had divorces,” Désir says. “This first marathon was what created a shift in my mind about what I was capable of and what was possible through running.”

To learn more about the link between mental health and running, Désir went back to school to pursue her second master’s degree in counseling psychology. She also started a blog called Powdered Feet. But the blog wasn’t enough—Désir craved the human connection she had while fundraising and running with others. In November 2013, she launched Powdered Feet Run Club, a running group that she hoped would serve communities of color, which eventually became Harlem Run.

“Nobody showed up for, like, four months,” she says. Every Monday, Désir would arrive at the designated meeting spot, and sometimes her best friend would join, but no one else. There was more at stake for Désir. At the time, there were no other running groups in the area. Désir wanted her group to cater to people of color and talk about the connection between running and mental health. She knew her group needed to exist and that she was the one to foster this community.

One day, someone did show up. Within a year, more than 100 people had joined, and over the next four years, many of them became committed enough to be captains and pacers. Harlem Run still meets twice a week for free group runs, welcoming “runners, walkers, and joggers of all sizes, ages, and abilities.”

Désir has run 22 more races since that first marathon, and she’s garnered recognition from publications like The Root, Runner’s World, and Self. She never wanted Harlem Run to be centered around her personality, though—instead, Désir aims to create spaces that genuinely reflect community. “I was really just intent on making sure that the most people could experience what running had done for me,” she says. Désir’s Harlem Run community became the foundation she would need to set out on her next conquest—the presidential election.

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, she thought, “I could sit there and despair, posting angry rants on Facebook with all of my friends about the state of the world, or I could do something.” Then Désir had a crazy idea: She’d run from Harlem, New York, to Washington, D.C., for the Women’s March as a show of resilience. “I had this community in Harlem Run, and I knew that I could use that community to send a message and really impact change after the election.”

She called the only black female ultramarathon runner she knew at the time, Talisa Hayes, to see if her idea was even possible and if Hayes would run with her. “When she said yes, that’s when this [Run 4 All Women] really materialized,” Désir says. As an initiative of Harlem Run, they launched Run 4 All Women with a GoFundMe campaign, asking for $44,000 in honor of the 44th president, Barack Obama, with the funds going to Planned Parenthood. They blew past their original goal in four days and made $69,000 before they even started the run.

The race was Désir’s first overnight relay, and during three days and nights, she ran more than 80 miles. “You’re running mileage sometimes in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., and then you’re jumping into a van. You can’t stretch your legs, and at times there were eight or nine of us in the van, and we were constantly being greeted by strangers on the street who were there to support us,” Désir says.

After the run, Désir found that she’d become something of an accidental celebrity. Run 4 All Women had gone viral, and in just 20 days they raised more than $100,000 for Planned Parenthood. Publications were reaching out for interviews, and fans were messaging constantly; Désir appeared on the Joy Reid Show, and Women’s Running named her one of 20 women changing the sport. Rather than getting distracted, Désir responded to the flood of attention by setting boundaries and made space for solo runs so she could continue doing her activist work.

Désir’s presence is growing: She has more than 10,000 followers on Instagram and started her own podcast called Find Meaning (On the Run), where she interviews people like Rahaf Khatib, the first runner in a hijab featured in American magazines. In December, Désir released a documentary about Run 4 All Women. She remains candid about her battle with depression.

Since the 2016 election, many women and men are stepping into the spotlight for the first time by running for political office, and Désir is lacing up her running shoes once again. The goal of Midterm Run is to run 2,018 miles across the country with a team and raise $3,000,000 for 11 candidates across six states. The campaign’s tagline: “They’re running for us, so we’re running for them.”

Her mother still worries, especially after the attention that Run 4 All Women stirred up, that Donald Trump will tweet at Désir one day. But what are a few detractors when you’re willing to run hundreds of miles for your beliefs? When I asked Désir what her parents thought about her grade-school presentation on representation in Teaneck, she imagined what they might have been thinking and inadvertently came up with just the right motto: “She’s going to be somebody who continues to cause trouble, but in a meaningful way.”

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The founder of Sweden’s high-end snow and cycling protection brand POC is branching out and building a new generation of electric dirt bikes. Light, fun, silent, friendly, and clean, the Cake Kalk is nothing like the motorcycles of the past and may even be the machine that gets you riding.

The new electric motorcycle company’s headquarters is in downtown Stockholm, but its heart and soul can be found in the tiny fishing village of Hallshuk, on the north shore of Gotland, a bucolic island in the Baltic Sea.

Founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn has a summer home there and visits with his sons Karl and Nils, who are co-founders in the new company, to explore trails, surf the small Baltic swells, and fish its waters. This is where I visited to test their new motorcycle.

Their barn is filled with surfboards, fishing poles, protection equipment, and a motley assortment of electric motorcycle-bicycle hybrids that the family collected in the run-up to designing the Kalk. Trails snake from the property, up and over limestone cliffs and into the surrounding woodlands and pastures. Kalksten is Swedish for limestone, hence the bike’s name.

Blurring the lines between a gravity bike and a motorcycle, the Kalk weighs 100 pounds less than the next-lightest electric motorcycle, the KTM EX-C. At just 150 pounds, it’s far lighter than any gas-powered bike.

Over the past decade, dozens of small companies have attempted to build something similar, but their components were an odd mix of heavy stuff pulled from the motorcycle world and too-fragile parts from bikes. Cake has avoided that dilemma by making its own purpose-built components in-house and partnering with legendary Swedish suspension maker Ohlins to create the Kalk’s unique forks and monoshock.

By designing its own components, Cake is able to maximize this electric motorcycle’s low-impact qualities. The 24-inch tires are made from a unique rubber compound/tread pattern combo that’s meant to create low rolling resistance as well as high traction to avoid tearing up trails. The company offers a solar charger that can recharge the Kalk’s 2.6 kWh battery pack in 90 minutes.

The 65-degree head angle and 205 millimeters of suspension travel also split the difference between mountain and dirt bikes. The Ohlins suspension is as good as it gets, with high- and low-speed adjustments for compression damping and a three-stage air-spring front fork that you can dial in for ride height and bottoming resistance.

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The Kalk’s visual elegance and simplicity is complemented by an equally straightforward riding experience. Predictable, intuitive, and enjoyable, this bike is unintimidating and loads of fun.

One of the chief advantages of electric power is that its components have no fixed arrangement like the cylinders, induction systems, exhausts, and gearboxes of internal combustion engines. That means designers of electric motorcycles are free to cluster heavy batteries and motors however they want. On the Kalk, that results in a low center of gravity and a slim width that combine to make its svelte 150-pound weight feel even lighter, making it easy to maneuver and control over almost any terrain. Despite its dirt-bike-tall 35-inch seat height, the Kalk remains remarkably friendly for smaller riders, thanks to that ultra-low weight and slim dimensions.

That ease-of-use is accentuated by the simple controls. Without the need for a gearshift lever or a clutch, the Kalk has hand controls only, with the rear brake on the left and the twist throttle and front brake on the right. All your feet do is stand on the foot pegs. If you want to switch to a bicycle-like lever setup, you can just swap those around.

The only noise comes from the whir of the electric motor—think cordless drill on steroids—and the tires interacting with the surface you’re riding over. Anyone with a motorcycle background will be shocked by how quiet this thing is.

Three preset riding modes—Discover, Explore, and Excite—allow the rider to dial in throttle response, while another setting lets you tweak how strong the artificial “engine braking” actuates. This allows you to achieve the freewheeling feel of a bicycle or the strong deceleration you achieve when you let off the throttle on a four-stroke dirt bike. This feature also provides regenerative battery charging.

I spent a couple days riding the Kalk through Gotland’s tight forest trails and on Cake’s motocross track. It felt like nothing else I’ve ever swung a leg over. Once up to speed on tight singletrack, it felt like descending on a mountain bike, no matter if the trail was going up, down, or staying flat. Flicking the rear around requires only a touch of throttle, and the tires lift off the ground over even the smallest bump. The slack head tube and short wheelbase combine stability with agile turning, and the large brake discs and hydraulic calipers make scrubbing all that speed a breeze.

The Kalk does without the brush guards that are standard on dirt bikes. This keeps it visually clean, but without that protection, your hands get slapped by passing branches. Depending on what types of trails you ride and how fast you want to tackle them, you’ll probably want to add hand protection. The Kalk also does without a side stand, but even the smallest rider in our group (110 pounds) had no problem picking up the bike after laying it down flat.

The Kalk really shines on Cake’s small motocross track. Thirty pound-feet of torque is a lot on a 150-pound bike, and it’s delivered immediately, at any speed, with a simple twist of the throttle. Being able to ride without shifting really helped me maintain speed, and the suspension soaked up the whoops and landings, even when I cased the tabletops. The bike’s top speed of 50 miles per hour is more than enough on a track like this or through tight trails.

Ytterborn says he wants Cake to be “more Patagonia than Kawasaki.” But given the $13,000 price tag, it’s hard to imagine someone without motorcycle experience picking one of these up on a whim. The Kalk’s strong performance, even in the mildest throttle setting, will also be a lot for a new rider to handle. It accelerates much faster than, say, a scooter, or 125cc learner motorcycle.

But if you already know how to ride a motorcycle, the quiet, clean, and ultralight Kalk will offer you a completely new riding experience. It makes even the tightest and most technical trails much more manageable. It gives you the opportunity to encounter wildlife while you’re out riding. On it, you can explore the woods without disrupting them.

If that sounds like fun, and if you want to burn fewer fossil fuels and don’t want everyone within a mile to hear you riding by, then the Kalk will change how you feel about motorcycles. Cake is hoping this describes more than a few of you.

• Elegant design.
• Flawless engineering and quality.
• Amazing suspension.
• Strong performance.
• Near-silent operation.
• Extremely lightweight.
• Incredibly easy to ride.
• Low maintenance.

• Only 50 miles of range on a trail.
• Not street legal (yet).
• Expensive.
• No headlight.

Every time I test a new vehicle, I try to imagine owning one. I could strap this thing to the front of our military truck when my wife, son, and I set out on an overland adventure, charge it from our onboard solar panels, and use it to explore the areas outside our camps, ride it into town for supplies, and rely on it as emergency transportation, since that LMTV breaks down a lot. Honestly, I think it’d be ideal in that role.

But that’s admittedly a niche use case. Cake’s first motorcycle is a dirt bike for people who don’t like dirt bikes. Given the quality of the product, I think the company will be able to find a strong if small following for such a thing. But it’s what comes next for the new brand that’ll be its real challenge. Will Cake move closer to the motorsports world or find new ways to put electric motorcycles in different hands?

If the Ytterborns can figure that out, then I think they might really be on to something.

Buy Now

Our bikes may be better now, but what about the world in which we ride them?

About a year ago Bill Gates unleashed an epic tweetstorm about how, for all the mishegas out there, the world is only getting better. His conclusion:

“This is an amazing time to be alive.”

It’s human nature to romanticize the past, but vaccines, smartphones, and being able to rent movies without having to rewind them are all things most of us would never want to live without. On the other hand, it’s not romantic to lament the fact that humanity will never again know the pleasure of eating a mercury-free fish. Also, Bill Gates has roughly eleventy billion dollars, so when it comes to how good the rest of us have it, he may not be the best person to ask.

Still, it is indeed an amazing time to be alive. It’s also an amazing time to be a cyclist. Cresting a climb recently, I shifted into the big ring with the tap of a button, my electronic front derailleur flawlessly hoisting the chain into place. Then I lowered myself into my ergonomic drops and began my descent. My middle and index fingers were more than sufficient to operate my precision braking system, leaving the rest of my digits securely and comfortably wrapped around my tactilely pleasing synthetically engineered bar tape.

“Surely this is the best time in history to be a cyclist,” I caught myself thinking.

Is it though? Are we in fact living in the Golden Age of Cycling? Or am I just a spoiled person on a fancy bicycle, blissfully unaware of all the mercury I’m eating?

Certainly as far as equipment is concerned the answer to the Golden Age question is an emphatic yes. Only the most stubborn retro-grouch would dispute the fact that, overall, cycling is constantly improving in that department. Sure, the going rate for a high-end plastic racing bike is something like $10,000 now and that’s kind of ridiculous. But frothy reviews in glossy lifestyle magazines notwithstanding, nobody’s making you buy any of this stuff, and you can easily get pretty much the same riding experience from a much cheaper bike.

 

More crucially, no matter what kind of riding you want to do, there’s a bicycle for it—not one you have to painstakingly customize yourself, but an off-the-rack, ready-to-ride bike. City bikes run from fixie to Dutch, and cargo bikes from front-loader to longtail. We get a new bottom bracket standard every week, yet if you’re a retro-grouch you needn’t get your beard all in a tangle over it, as there are various companies dedicated to keeping your bicycle frozen in your time period of choice. There are so many different types of road and mountain bikes now that the distinction hardly matters anymore, and if somehow you still can’t find a stock bike to your satisfaction, it’s easier than ever to find a custom builder who will make one for you. At the same time, walls between cycling disciplines are eroding. It’s like gender fluidity, but with bikes.

On the other hand, you’ve got the cars. Some call them “freedom machines,” others call them destroyers of cities and harbingers of impending environmental apocalypse. But no matter how you feel about the automobile, there’s no getting around the fact that cars and bikes have an intensely symbiotic yet ultimately disastrous relationship. They’re like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or that couple at the party who are always one more cocktail away from either hurling crockery at each other or having hate sex on the dining room table, and you never know which until it happens.  

Apart from a few brief lulls, the number of motor vehicles in the United States has been rising consistently since the 1960s. It’s pretty tough to argue that this is a good thing for cycling. At the end of the 19th century, however, we had it pretty damn good. Cycling was wildly popular. We’d moved on from the pennyfarthing and were now riding safety bicycles, which were a technological leap greater than any that has come since. If you think your dropper post improves your riding, just imagine going from doing a faceplant off a high wheeler to riding a bike with two equal-sized wheels, a chain drive, and pneumatic tires.  

We also owned the roads. Cars were thin on the ground, still playthings for the rich and at least a couple of decades away from mass production. Horses feared us. Cycling clubs made for the countryside on runs and centuries so popular that newspapers like the New York Times regularly reported on their exploits and published route suggestions. So formidable a force were we out there that it was our velocipedist forbears who compelled governments and municipalities to pave the roads for our cycling pleasure. We put entire towns on the map, macadamizing the roads that led to them, and bringing them our business with day trips and overnights.

Then there was the social transformation the bicycle helped power. As Susan B. Anthony wrote in 1896:

I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood.

In light of all this, it’s hard to say that we’re living in the Golden Age of Cycling just because we can use a battery to move a derailleur or order a French porteur bike over the Internet. In fact, well over 100 years after Susan B. Anthony, a stubborn gender gap in cycling remains. You could also argue that the bicycle’s evolution is increasingly driven by our need to avoid cars. After all, isn’t driver avoidance the entire basis of the adventure bike trend? It’s anti-predator adaptation, and bicycle-to-vehicle communication and other forms of supplication are the opposite of free, untrammeled anything. Plus, if you try to recreate those century rides chronicled in the newspapers of yore, you’ll find out it’s pretty much impossible to do so now as many of the routes have long been subsumed by car traffic.

So while our bicycles do keep getting better, and while I do maintain that the bicycle still has the power to transform both landscape and cityscape, it could very well be that our Golden Age is behind us.

For now, anyway.

Illustration by Taj Mihelich

Before last month’s Boston Marathon, a big win had eluded her for years. This changes everything.

Last month, Desiree “Des” Linden became the first American woman to win the Boston Marathon in 33 years. For the 34-year-old Linden, who trains with the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project, breaking the tape in a major race was a long time coming. Despite being a two-time Olympian and one of the most accomplished American road runners of the past decade, Linden has never won a national title. She came in second at the 2016 USATF Half Marathon Championships, adding to a résumé rife with runner-up finishes: the 2016 and 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon, the 2011 Boston Marathon, and the 2010 Chicago Marathon. According to Linden, the biggest win of her career prior to Boston was “probably a New Year’s Eve four-miler in Central Park.” Talk about an upgrade.

Regardless of what the rest of her career may hold, Linden will go down as a World Marathon Major champion. I spoke to Linden about the psychological impact of having such a weight lifted off her shoulders.

Everything Is Gravy

The post-marathon blues are real. But after coming away from so many marathons with a podium or top-five finish but never a win, Linden says Boston 2018 feels almost like “a relief victory.”

“Last year [when I finished fourth], I went through that low depression where I just didn’t know if this was going to happen and wondering whether my career was done and so on. This time, everything is just gravy. I’ve gone through so many ups and downs that I have a very good head about it. I know that if this is as good as it gets, I’m totally cool with that,” Linden says.

She Can Take Risks

It’s a sports cliché that athletes have to remain hungry as a condition for future success. In this narrow sense, Linden’s recent triumph might seem like it could dampen her competitive fire. After all, how do you top winning the Boston Marathon? But Linden feels that, conversely, achieving her longtime goal of winning Boston is more likely to work in her benefit.

“I tailor all of my training for Boston and do my four-year buildups keeping that race in mind,” she says. “Having won, it does allow me to race differently. I can take risks; it’s okay if it falls apart. I can chase a PR. I can chase another major. Whatever it may be. I can do it with different tactics than before, because now I’ve done the one thing that I really wanted to do.”

Competing Is What Counts

As far as what’s next on her competition schedule, Linden says she intends to be “really picky.” (It was announced earlier this week that Linden is running the NYRR New York Mini 10K in Central Park in June.) Future races may include a few flat-course events that would give her a shot at notching a PR in her mid-thirties, but Linden will always prioritize competing in marquee events like the New York or Boston Marathon over chasing a fast time. For her, it’s all about racing.

“The Boston win was probably one of the slowest marathons of my career, but it’s the most special,” Linden says. “I’ll never really care about what time it was won in.”

She Needed That Win

I asked Linden how important a major victory really was in terms of validating her marathon career. After all, she is a two-time Olympian who has shown remarkable consistency as a world-class racer. She could have run just as hard over the final miles of last month’s race and still potentially placed second if, for example, the wheels hadn’t come off for Ethiopia’s Mamitu Daska.

“It was what I was chasing, especially as I’m kind of at the point where I know I can only do this a couple more times,” Linden says. “I wanted a win just to say that I’ve won a marathon—even if that would have meant stepping back and doing a smaller race. That was really important to me, in terms of just having that one highlight on my résumé. I feel like I was just chasing baseball stats for a really long time, like ‘top five in every major when it was over 65 degrees.’ Just silly stats that are great when you look at them, but you still need that highlight. So it was good to get it done. I don’t know what I would have thought if it didn’t happen, but I’m glad I don’t have to answer that question.”

She Can’t Sit on the Sidelines

Her competitive nature notwithstanding, Linden admits that she briefly entertained the notion of retiring after Boston. “Initially, I was like, ‘I’m just going to hang them up because it can’t get any better than this,” she says. That thought didn’t last long.

“I try to picture myself just watching Boston, and I just can’t. I don’t care if I ever win again, but I can’t imagine having the ability to compete and deciding to just watch instead. I love getting in those really big races and matching up with really great runners to see where I fit in.”

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A few years ago, REI’s product design team started to go all in on their apparel line, making budget-friendly pieces that perform as well as those twice the price. We've loved most of what we've tested this far—I recently ranked their Tilt tights as one of the best leggings of 2018. The Birch Spring top falls into a similar category of budget-friendly, function-forward pieces. This top has been in my closet for a few months and it is in regular rotation in my wardrobe. It pairs well with jeans, skirts, or even leggings, while maintaining a clean, tailored cut that looks good enough to wear to theoffice. 

The fabric is made up of 52 percent merino wool and 48 percent polyester, so it feels great against the skin and has the wicking and antimicrobial properties of wool. The back hem drops lower than the front, which I love for work settings or when I’m layering over leggings, and a pleated back helps it drape nicely across the body. The bottom hem is split in the front, which allows the shirt to wrap around my body comfortably when sitting at my desk all day. After upwards of 15 washes, the shirt hasn’t shown any signs of pilling or wear and has only gotten softer the more I’ve worn it. 

New research explores how ultraviolet light can trigger the production of health- and performance-boosting nitric oxide

The only vitamin pill I take these days is vitamin D. Over the years, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that an isolated micronutrient is generally a poor substitute for the richly complex food it was extracted from, so I try to stick to the original sources for my vitamin needs. Of course, living in Canada makes it hard to do that with vitamin D for much of the year, so I’ve clung to the hope that sunshine can, in fact, be bottled.

Perhaps predictably, an interesting new study just published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology from a group led by Chris Easton of the University of the West of Scotland, hints that there’s more to the picture. Apparently, exposure to sunlight can also affect levels of nitric oxide in your body, which may have interesting implications for both health and sports performance.

The study involved shining two different doses of ultraviolet light (specifically UVA light—wavelengths between 315 and 400 nanometers) on ten volunteers, then measuring its effects on a range of outcomes like blood pressure, resting metabolism, and nitrite and nitrate levels. It’s this last bit that caught my attention, because the rise of beet juice as an endurance-boosting supplement is due to its high levels of nitrate. The body converts that nitrate to nitrite and then to nitric oxide, which seems to make your muscles work more efficiently during endurance exercise. These studies have also found that boosting levels of nitric oxide has other health benefits, like acutely lowering blood pressure and regulating blood sugar. (In fact, one recent study found that using mouthwash twice a day or more, which wipes out the oral bacteria that convert nitrate to nitrite, was associated with a 50 percent increase in the risk of developing prediabetes or diabetes.)

It turns out previous studies have shown that the skin contains a lot of nitrite, and when it’s exposed to sunlight, this nitrite is released into the blood and ultimately (like beet juice) leads to an increase in nitric oxide levels. So this study aimed to see how much UVA light is necessary to produce this effect.

The two doses they used were ten and 20 joules per square centimeter, with the higher dose chosen to be equivalent to “approximately 30 min of Mediterranean summer sunlight.” The results were a bit of a mixed bag. Both doses of light successfully lowered resting metabolic rate, which was assessed by measuring oxygen consumption (VO2), but only the higher dose significantly increased nitrite levels. Neither dose affected blood pressure, in contrast with previous findings. A bunch of methodological details may explain these discrepancies, such as exactly how the light was delivered and when the outcomes were measured.

Still, the overall data, according to the authors, suggests that “exposure to sunlight has a meaningful acute impact on metabolic function.” And that’s intriguing, because there are all sorts of seasonal patterns in health, like increases in heart attacks and strokes during winter months. These patterns are commonly attributed to a shortage of sunlight-induced vitamin D, but the link between ultraviolet light and nitric oxide levels may offer another explanation.

When I asked Easton, the study’s lead author, about this, he mentioned that he and his colleagues are just finishing collecting data to see if there are seasonal fluctuations in nitric oxide bioavailability in people living in Scotland, much like the seasonal fluctuations seen in vitamin D levels. Given the seasonal change in heart and other health conditions, “it is possible that a reduced availability of nitric oxide contributes to this additional risk,” Easton said, “but we don’t know for sure.” In the meantime, he figures focusing on getting more nitrate-rich leafy green vegetables than usual during winter months is a good plan.

The other question I asked Easton was whether UV light might enhance endurance performance. His answer: “Possibly.” The amount of nitric oxide you get from sunlight is small compared to what you get from food sources like beets, and it’s also highly variable, depending on factors like skin tone and prior sun exposure. But he and his colleagues did a study in 2015 that combined real (or sham) UVA exposure with real (or placebo) nitrate gel before a ten-mile cycling time trial. In the particular conditions they tested, neither the UVA light nor the nitrate gels on their own boosted performance by a statistically significant margin—but the combination of UVA light and nitrate gels did, suggesting that the additional nitric oxide contributed by the light exposure had a measurable effect.

Please, please, please do not interpret this as a suggestion that you should rush out and get a tanning bed. For now, there are more questions than answers in this research, and we’re a long way from thinking about practical applications. And if you think this study confirms that Alberto Salazar was onto something when he shipped a Whole-Body Light Pod to Brazil for his athletes to use before the 2016 Olympics, think again: That gadget delivers red and near-infrared light rather than ultraviolet light. To me, the takeaway is much simpler—a reminder that getting outside is good for you in ways that we’re just starting to unravel. Accept no substitute.

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