Month: March 2019

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The phrase “fashionable running sunglasses” is oxymoronic: Running shades are typically characterized by dorky-looking aerodynamic frames and oversized lenses. Some companies make more lifestyle-oriented athletic sunnies, with basic ovular lenses, like the Native Penrose. But the concept of fashion-forward, stylized frames that are durable and stay put on your face while running? Ridiculous.

Not any more. On Thursday, Boston-based running brand Tracksmith—known for high-end construction and simple, classic designs in athletic apparel—launched its first pair of shades, a limited-edition collaboration with U.S.-based high-end eyewear maker Article One. Their co-creation, the Charles ($255), is designed to marry top-end Italian construction and trendy design with the secure, fogless fit and durability runners need. At first glance, the combination of craftsmanship and quality materials suggests they may live up to that goal, as well as the high price tag.

The Charles look like the kind of glasses you’d see lining the shelves of a fancy eyewear shop, featuring a subtle cat-eye shape with a decorative cutout at the nose. They sit farther away from your face than typical running sunglasses, too—no wraparound or bug-eye lenses.

But a closer look reveals a host of features ideal for sport. The frames are made out of flexible Swiss thermoplastic that bends rather than breaking under pressure. They’re so light I barely noticed them on my face, but grippy, adjustable rubber nose pads and small rubber strips on the ear pieces helped them stay put during a morning run.

These shades certainly aren’t as protective as a tight-fitting, aero frame that hugs your face, and they wouldn’t be my first choice for long, mountainous trail runs that involve lots of jostling and peripheral glare. But the sleek styling and breezy, away-from-face fit make them great companions for fast runs or casual hikes. 

Tracksmith may not be offering new, groundbreaking optical technology or aerodynamic design. But it has created something revolutionary in a different way by offering runners a pair of good-looking sunglasses that can pull double duty.

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Why drive when someone else can do it for you?

The reasons you should take public transportation are many: It’s better for the environment. You’ll spend less time navigating traffic and more time taking in the scenery. You’ll waste less cash on a bus ticket than you would on a few tanks of gas. And while it may take a little longer to get where you’re going, you’ll enjoy the trip along the way. Here’s how to get out of town and let someone else take the wheel.

By Train

New York City

Board the Metro North at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal and you can be in the quaint riverside Hudson Valley hamlet of Beacon, New York, in 80 minutes. The revitalized downtown sports cafés, charming shops, and a happening art scene, thanks to contemporary galleries like Dia:Beacon. Explore 25 miles of trails in nearby Hudson Highlands State Park, or paddle the Hudson River in a rented kayak or atop a SUP from Mountain Tops Outfitters. To get around town, borrow a bike from Peoples Bicycle.

Chicago

It’s only a one-hour ride due west from Chicago to reach the town of Geneva, Illinois, making a trip on the Metra commuter railroad perfect for a day or weekend escape. You can walk everywhere you need to right from the station, and there are more than 30 miles of bike trails along the Fox River, with rentals, including kayaks, to be had at Mill Race Cyclery. Book a room at the waterfront Herrington Inn, and don’t miss summer concerts or the treehouse playground at Island Park, accessed from town by a footbridge.

Chicago and Los Angeles

From Chicago or Los Angeles, you can take an 11-day tour of the Southwest aboard the legendary Southwest Chief via Amtrak’s Vacations by Rail program. The highlight is a two-night stay on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, and you’ll visit four other national parks, including Utah’s Zion, Arches, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef. You’ll also float down part of the Colorado River and spend a couple days in Moab.

By Bus

Seattle

For $10, you can load your mountain bike onto a Bolt Bus in Seattle, provided there’s room, and spend the weekend shredding 50 miles of rolling singletrack at Galbraith Mountain, just south of Bellingham, Washington. Afterward, grab a bite at Fiamma Burger and explore this coastal college town, sampling craft beers from more than a dozen local breweries along the way.

San Francisco

There are never enough parking spots at California’s famous Muir Woods, a 558-acre national monument just north of San Francisco filled with old-growth redwoods. So, starting this year, you have to reserve a spot ahead of time if you want to drive yourself. Instead, catch the public shuttle for just $3 per person from three easy-to-reach bus stops around the city. The best part? There’s no cell service at the monument, so even though you’re just across the Golden Gate Bridge, you can actually disconnect.

Washington, D.C.

Hop on a Best Bus in Washington, D.C., and you can be reading a book in a beach chair at Dewey Beach, Delaware, 2.5 hours later—roughly the same time it takes to make the drive. You’ll find music festivals and movie nights on the sand, heated games of volleyball, and clams steamed in beer at the Dewey Beer Co. Earn your pints with an introductory or advanced kiteboarding lesson from East of Maui surf shop.

By Boat

Los Angeles

Step aboard the Catalina Express ferry in Long Beach, Dana Point, or San Pedro, California, and in one hour you’ll be transported to tranquil Catalina Island, 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Shack up at Hotel Metropole (from $229), just steps from the beach in the town of Avalon, or book a canvas tent cabin at Two Harbors Campground (from $70 per night). More than 165 miles of hiking trails cross the island, including 27 miles of new paths completed in 2017. Catalina Backcountry offers gear hauling and guided hiking services and will cater three-course meals wherever you set up camp.

Miami

In 2016, FRS Caribbean's new high-speed ferry began taking vacationers from Miami, Florida, to Bimini, an island just 50 miles away in the Bahamas. This is the tropical paradise where Ernest Hemingway spent his summers. Package deals (from $255) include the two-hour ferry ride and a room at the Hilton at Resorts World Bimini, which opened in 2015. While on the island, sign up for a yoga retreat, swim with dolphins, snorkel through shipwrecks, or go bonefishing in mangrove forests.

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As told to Luke Whelan

I had been dating my boyfriend, Kennett, for a year and a half, and he was the one who really got me into bike racing. I entered it pretty quickly. I was working in the bike industry, writing copy for bike shop websites, then I started racing bikes in the spring of 2014.

At that point, I was living in Boulder with Kennett, and we had moved into an apartment with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. We had a new puppy. We didn’t own a car. We bike-commuted everywhere, so we were on the bike together daily in some fashion or another.

I decided to do a longer-distance triathlon in mid-November. October 18 was basically the last big ride before my race. I was going out to do over 100 miles. For me, it was really a mental training ride. Kennett and the other guys went up into the mountains for a climb, and I was staying on the flats because I was on my triathlon bike, which would mimic what my race would be like.

I was maybe 30-some miles in, traveling on U.S. 36. There’s a road that intersects with 36 on a wide-open downhill fairly early on. I was going down the hill, and this red Fiat came up from the east, went past the stop sign and straight into the road, and stopped in the shoulder lane of traffic. He wasn’t fully out into U.S. 36 where he would have had a car hit him, necessarily, but he was directly in the line of all the cyclists.

I was going about 35 miles an hour, and I hit the brakes as soon as I saw him—I only had seconds to react. I skidded 50 feet. My rear wheel skidded out from underneath me. I thought I was just going to hit the pavement, but I hit the car probably going about 10 miles hour. I don’t remember impact. I have a very fuzzy vision of being lifted into the ambulance and the one EMT saying to the other EMT, “Her face has peeled off.”

Apparently, your body will dissociate, and so I don’t have any memories except for that one, but I was awake. They were trying to keep me calm, obviously. I think I asked why there was so much blood.

I crashed on Saturday, and my first memories are on Thursday. They had put me in a sedated coma. I couldn’t talk, so I spent several days just writing notes to people. Nobody sat down and listed off my injuries to me. At one point, I was writing to my mom, “I was so lucky. I can’t believe I didn’t break a bone in my body!” And my mom had this look, and she said, “You broke every bone in your face.”

My head and my shoulder had gone through the window. The whole left side of my face was broken. My skin was ripped back from my lip all the way back to behind my ear on the left side. I tore my shoulder muscle. I broke my eye socket, nose, cheekbone, and jaw. When I say I broke them, they were shattered; they needed to be reconstructed. Every four hours, they were putting leeches on my upper lip to draw blood—my lip was dying, so that was a way to keep the skin alive. I had around 700 stitches. I had to do neurological testing after the crash, and the neurologist said I had PTSD. Subconsciously, I was going through a lot more than I realized.

I spent 11 days in intensive care, and I improved a lot every day. I had goals every day. By February, I was pretty much fine physically, but to this day I still deal with the emotional repercussions of the crash.

But when I was in the hospital, there was a newspaper article about my crash, and it placed the blame on me. [After its initial report, the newspaper interviewed Perr and followed up with a longer news story.] I read through the witness statements, and the driver had lied. He said that there were black cars that prohibited him from moving out of my way. Nobody had asked me to submit a witness statement. These stories that come out in the newspaper often blame the cyclist, and the cyclist often does not have a chance to submit a witness statement, because, to be frank, the cyclist will often be the one who dies.

I submitted a witness statement anyway. I have so many things that I wish the police could have looked into. Other cars had to put on their brakes and get out of the way. Another cyclist who was only a few feet behind me had to swerve into the oncoming lane of traffic to avoid hitting that car. It was pretty obvious that the driver was in an area he shouldn’t have been in.

The district attorney and I met, and she said that if she could have, she would have charged it as reckless driving, but it’s really hard to prove and there’s a good chance he would have gotten off without punishment. Charging him with careless driving—one step below reckless—almost guaranteed that he would get charged and sentenced.

And he did. He pled guilty to careless driving resulting in injury. He got a $1,000 fine, 200 hours of community service, and four points on his license, and he had to take a driver’s class, but he got to keep his license. I didn’t go to the sentencing because it would have been to traumatic to be in the courtroom while the driver got sentenced so lightly..

In Colorado, my case of careless driving causing serious bodily injury doesn’t fall under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act [which protects victims of crime and ensures they are kept informed about the criminal justice process]. The district attorney and the legal system do not have to keep me in the loop at all. But they did. They put my case in a yellow folder, which was designated for people who fall under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. There were several people within the legal system who really did watch out for me.

Kennett told me that he had asked me to marry him that first night I was in the hospital. That still makes me way more emotional than thinking about when he asked me again, when I could remember. I have bipolar II, so one of the major concerns was how the crash was going to impact my emotional state. That had always been something that made me question whether Kennett would want to be with me. So here was this event that almost guaranteed to impact my emotions in a negative way, and he was willing to be there for that. That was huge. I lucked out big-time; he’s the greatest guy ever. Some of the time, we just had to suffer through it, but we were going through it together. We got married at the county clerk’s office in 2015.

There’s nothing about my situation that makes me different from what many other people have been through. But I’m willing to be the face for what happens to people. If I can, I will confront people who are driving unsafely. Kennett chased down a bus a year ago. If they apologize, I won’t call the cops on them. A lot of people are really aggressive. They’re like, “Don’t touch me!” with their four-ton SUV behind them.

I have this feel-good story because I’m back and I’m training and I’m a professional as of last summer. I think when I talk to other people, it can come off as happily ever after. And, honestly, in my case, sometimes I do feel it that way. My bones are all repaired. I didn’t lose my eyesight—that’s a really big one. It was really close to my jugular, really close to my eyes. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. But that’s not the case for a lot of people—not everyone survives or makes a good recovery. Even when a crash victim does make a full physical recovery like I did, something had been taken from them. The joy that they used to get from riding and their sense of justice may never be the same. My scars show the physical trauma that I went through, but fail to capture the emotional damage that was done, which is largely irreparable.

Adelaide Perr is a writer and professional triathlete.

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We might be years away from seeing solar power compete with traditional energy sources on an industrial level, but it’s never been easier for the individual to tap into the power of the sun. Solar technology continues to evolve and the products that hit the market are better year after year. We dug through countless online reviews to find the most trustworthy solar gear on the market. Here are five of our favorite pieces of solar gear.

The River is a sleek, portable lithium-ion battery built to meet your power needs, whether you’re car camping or looking for a backup generator at home. The battery has massive storage capacity (412Wh) and a total output of 500 watts through 11 different ports. You can charge it in your car, through a wall outlet, or through EcoFlow’s solar panels (it’ll take at least 12 hours to charge the bank via solar). We like the digital display which tells you the exact percentage of battery life you have left, and the fact that it’s compact, weighing just 11 pounds and taking up less space than a toaster. Even more important, the River doesn’t leak battery life, so it will keep a full charge for up to a year if left dormant.

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Want to take your van/tent/tree-house off the grid with little fuss? Biolite’s Solar Home 620 is like an instant self-power kit with a 6W solar panel that connects to a 20Wh Control Box and three overhead lights (with wall-mount switches). The Control Box has a radio and MP3 player and even serves as a power bank where you can charge your devices. The system is in place in 40,000 homes in Kenya, but we think it would be pretty dope powering your van life.

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We’ve raved about MPowerd’s collapsible Luci light in the past, so we’re pretty excited about this string light version of the Luci, which gives you an 18-foot-long wire of lights for your campsite. The LEDs can be charged via USB port in two hours, or via the attached solar panel in 14 hours.

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This isn’t the most powerful solar panel on the market, but the Nomad 7 provides a good balance of portability and output. There’s no battery attached, so you’ll be connecting your devices directly to the panels, but the lack of battery cuts down on the weight (less than 13 ounces and it folds flat, making it easy to stuff in your pack).  We also like the little details, like the zippered pocket for cables and the kickstand. An LED indicator tells you how much power you’re collecting from the sun. You’ll get seven watts of output through a USB port, which will charge a cell phone or GPS in 2 hours in full sun.

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A hot shower at the end of the day in the backcountry? Thanks sun power! The Helio holds three gallons of water in a polyester PU coated material that’s bombproof and transfers heat from the sun to warm the water inside. And it uses a foot pump to add pressure, which means you don’t have to hang it from a tree. Fill it up and set it out in the sun for a couple of hours, and you’ll get five minutes of hot pressurized water.

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Evan Phillips climbed mountains until an injury took him out of the game. Now he pours his energy into making music and ‘The Firn Line,’ a podcast about the lives of climbers, artists, and adventurers.

Growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, Evan Phillips had front-row seats to the wild. From age 16 to 27, he ventured from peak to peak, often guiding on the 20,310-foot Denali, as well as climbing in the Canadian Rockies, the American Southwest, and Aconcagua, in Argentina. So it seemed natural that when Phillips created a podcast, he called it The Firn Line, named after the elevation on a glacier where the snow reaches bare ice. “I spent a lot of time on glaciers and rugged mountains, and the name just made sense to me,” he says.

The podcast may not have happened if not for an injury that sidelined Phillips’ serious mountain pursuits. In the spring of 2002, he pulled his right groin while stemming up a rock climb. Ignoring the injury, Phillips continued guiding and schlepping loads in the hills. “[The groin pull] was quite serious, but I didn’t stay off it,” Phillips, now 42, told Outside from Anchorage, where he lives with his partner, Kelsey Vrem. For two years, he explored solutions to the chronic pain that made it difficult to walk, let alone climb. Phillips underwent multiple surgeries, but nothing worked. Defeated, he sold his climbing rack.

The year following his injury, Phillips made a shift. He poured all his energy into singing, playing guitar, writing, and producing music—he taught himself while in high school—and eventually started touring in Europe with his band, Easton Stagger Phillips. He also records with the Whipsaws. To date, Phillips has released five Americana-style solo albums; his latest, Cabin Vibes, is due out in July. He’s also a producer and has released dozens of albums for other groups. As for his injury, “sometimes I do well, other times I have so much pain I have to work at home,” Phillips says.

Last year, Phillips also started The Firn Line. He’s releasing the second season this month. He produces the show out of his condo, doing his best to fit the labor into a nine-to-five schedule so he and Vrem can hang out when she gets off work. But sometimes he still finds himself up all night, editing episodes and composing music to get them just right. “The satisfaction for me is that I’m able to contribute to the climbing community again,” Phillips says. “I spent 15 years away from that because it was devastating for me.”

The show is built around interviews with notable alpinists, with one-hour conversations that come out about a month apart and 30-minute episodes that Phillips calls “Short Ropes.” He also gives each season a theme that informs who he interviews. Season one, which included 22 episodes that ran from March 2017 to January 2018, was titled “Stories from Alaska’s Mountains.” Guests included landscape and climbing photographer Mark Westman, photographer Clint Helander, and legendary alpinist Jack Tackle. “My goal is to honor the people I’m chatting with,” Phillips says. “I understand on some level what drives them, and I’m fascinated by this lifestyle. I take it very seriously.”

In the ten years that Phillips climbed, he says, what drew him to the mountains were the partnerships as much as the adventure and beauty of high places. So his conversations are often intimate, focusing on emotions and relationships surrounding his guests’ experiences. Phillips also gives speakers plenty of space to tell intense stories about great climbs, rescues, and near misses. In the podcast’s first episode, alpinist Charlie Sassara talks about when he was forced to abandon his partner Jack Tackle and facilitate a rescue after Tackle was struck by rockfall that left him temporarily paralyzed high on Mount Augusta, in the Yukon Territories, in June 2002. In another episode, Helander describes multiple visits to Alaska’s Revelation Mountains, as well as his strained relationship and eventual reconciliation with his mother before cancer took her away.

“When I started this podcast, I knew it would feel like a huge alpine climb,” Phillips says. He spends about 40 hours on each hour-long episode. He does everything, including preproduction, recording, postproduction, editing, and writing the music. And his labor shows: The podcast has 150 perfect reviews on iTunes, and Phillips believes his listenership is approaching 15,000 streams per month.

Season two, starting April 20, is themed “The Creative Climber,” focusing on alpinists and climbers who are also artists, writers, and photographers. Interviewees include Alaska bush pilot and all-around adventurer Leighan Falley and professional skier, adventurer, and storyteller Brody Levin. In one upcoming episode, Phillips interviews a woman who skis deep into the Alaska mountains with her paint kit and spends hours capturing the scenes that inspire her. “She lives in a cabin in Fairbanks, with no running water, and she creates her own path through life,” Phillips says. “That simple lifestyle allows her to make a living as an artist.”

As always, Phillips is behind the scenes doing whatever it takes to create the podcast that reconnected him with the climbing community. For another upcoming episode, Phillips met Conrad Anker, head of The North Face climbing team, at the Hilton Hotel in Anchorage at 6:30 a.m., just before Anker flew back home to Bozeman, Montana. They chatted for nearly two hours about climbing with the late Mugs Stump, Anker’s first Alaska climbs, and his passion for environmental activism. “After days of preparation and planning, I just got the alpine start to go and do it,” Phillips says.

Subscribe to The Firn Line on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud. You can also listen to episodes on Phillips’ website.

To get the most from your performance, you have to accept the unpleasant—and keep pushing

This month, during the final few miles of the 122 running of the Boston Marathon, if all goes to plan, elite U.S. marathoner Des Linden will be in a world of pain.

Pain is, after all, necessary for Linden—or any athlete—to get the most out of herself. But, Linden says, “I won’t spend time negotiating with myself about ways to relieve it.” Instead, when the pain arrives, Linden will check in with her body, relax her arms and jaw, and dial in her breathing pattern. “When I’m hurting, I check in with the physical sensations of my body,” she says. “But I also remind myself that this is what I signed up for.”

Linden doesn’t fight the pain. She embraces it. And in her trade, the ability to do so is one of the fundamental elements of success. A 2012 meta-analysis published in the journal Pain found that athletes possess a higher pain tolerance—that is, they can endure more of it until they reach their breaking point—compared with the general population.

Pain can be a bit of a catch-22: often the more you try to wish it away, the worse it becomes. According to modern psychology (not to mention ancient Buddhism), therein lies the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is pain, and it’s bad enough. Suffering—which features distress and misery layered on top—occurs only when you try to fight that pain.

Consider the work of Steven Hayes, a well-known clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Reno, Nevada. He’s shown that the more you resist or try to avoid unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations, the stronger and more frequent they become. “If you cannot open up to discomfort without suppression,” he writes, “it becomes impossible to face difficult problems in a healthy way.”

Hayes’s work is based on acceptance and commitment. When you’re in pain, be it physical or emotional, you need not make it worse by resisting it. It’s better to accept the pain and commit to accomplishing your goals, and often that means carrying the pain with you.

In the midst of pain, “thoughts like ‘This is killing me,’ ‘I can’t stand it any longer,’ or ‘How long will this go on’ may all move through your mind at one point or another,” explains Jon Kabat Zinn in his seminal work, Full Catastrophe Living. “You may find such thoughts coming and going constantly. A lot of them are fear-based, anticipatory thoughts about how bad the future may be. It is good to notice that none of them is pain itself.”

Zinn, who is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a world-renowned meditation teacher, has helped everyone from cancer patients to elite athletes deal with discomfort. “It’s not always the pain per se, but the way you see it and react to it that determines the degree of suffering you will experience,” he writes.

Much like Hayes, Zinn recommends that instead of fighting pain you should acknowledge it and hold it in your awareness—even curiously explore and warmly embrace it. Treating pain in this manner, he’s found, almost always makes it easier to bear.

Embracing pain may sound nice conceptually, but that doesn’t make it easy to do in the heat of the moment. One way to build this facility is through meditation. Studies show that individuals who meditate regularly feel the same amount of pain as those who don’t, but they respond much differently. Instead of reacting to the pain with a massive stress response (i.e., suffering) they accept the pain, sit with it, and then move on. In the words of Zinn, instead of fusing with the pain they are able to “cradle it in their awareness,” which in turn dampens its effect.

Another way to prevent pain from turning into full-blown suffering is to have what my close friend and collaborator Steve Magness calls a calm conversation. Magness, who is a running coach at the University of Houston and also works with many top pros, says that the conversation, which should be deployed when workouts or races start to get really tough, goes something like: “This is starting to hurt now. It should. I’m running hard. But I am separate from this pain. It is going to be OK.”

Similar to regular meditation, Magness’s calm conversation gets athletes in the habit of creating space between the physical sensation of pain and their reaction to it. “If you fight the pain, or freak out at its onset, that’s when you really suffer and tend to crumble,” he says. “But if you learn how to somewhat dispassionately observe your pain, you increase your chances of working through it.”

Brad Stulberg (@Bstulberg) writes Outside’s Do It Better column and is the author of the new book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success.

It’s the most reliable performance booster in the world—unless you have the wrong genes

Sometimes I feel bad that I’m such a supplement skeptic. “Do you think Pill X will make me a better athlete with healthier skin and more regular bowel movements?” someone will ask, pointing me to a small unblinded study with four subjects, all of whom are employed by the company selling Pill X. “Sorry, but no,” I’ll say. Then I’ll try to cushion the blow with some good news: “Caffeine works, though. For almost everything.”

It’s true that caffeine’s power as a performance booster is uniquely well-supported by a big pile of well-designed scientific studies. There’s even a whole book about its athletic applications, written by some of the most respected sports nutrition researchers in the world. Study after study shows that caffeine enhances performance, particularly in endurance events, by a few percent—on average.

But a few years ago, researchers started to look more closely at the individual variability in response to caffeine. Every study has some more or less random scatter in its results: If the average improvement is 3 percent, some people might actually get 6 percent better, while others don’t improve at all. But not all scatter is random. A few years ago, evidence started to emerge that some people were consistently more likely to benefit from caffeine than others, and some might actually get slower after taking caffeine, based on their genetic profile. The biggest study to date on this topic has just been published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, and the results are striking.

The study was conducted by Nanci Guest, a sports dietitian and doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, and her supervisor Ahmed El-Sohemy, a professor of nutritional science. They put 101 well-trained male (more on that below) athletes from a variety of sports (everything from marathon running to boxing to soccer) through a series of three 10K cycling time trials. Before each one, the athletes received either a placebo, a low dose of caffeine (2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight), or a higher dose (4 mg/kg). If you weigh 150 pounds, that corresponds to either 136 or 272 mg of caffeine. (A typical cup of coffee has 100 to 160 mg of caffeine, and a single NoDoz tablet has 200 mg.)

As expected, caffeine boosted performance. The athletes cycled 3 percent faster with the high dose of caffeine compared to the placebo. The improvement with the lower dose wasn’t statistically significant. Here’s what those results looked like, showing the cycling time in minutes on the vertical axis:

That’s where these studies usually end: Caffeine works, so go forth and get caffeinated. But in this case, the researchers also took a spit test to determine which version of a gene called CYP1A2 each subject had. More than 95 percent of the caffeine you drink is metabolized by an enzyme encoded by this gene. People with the AA version of the gene are considered “fast” metabolizers, breaking down the caffeine rapidly. People with the AC or CC version are “slow” metabolizers, with the latter group especially slow, meaning that the caffeine they drink lingers in their bodies for much longer.

Take a look at what happens when you break down the results by genotype:

In the AA group (the fast metabolizers), caffeine is helpful, and the more the better. They get 4.8 percent faster at the low caffeine dose and 6.8 percent faster at the high caffeine dose. In the CC group (the very slow metabolizers), the pattern is the opposite: The more caffeine they get, the slower they go. At the higher dose, they’re 13.7 percent slower! In the middle AC group, it seems to be pretty much a wash, with no significant difference either way.

A ton of questions spring from these results. First of all, why the huge difference? The answer, for now, is that we don’t know. The likely explanation is that caffeine has a mix of positive and negative effects in everyone. The positive effects are likely in the brain, leading to a reduced perception of effort. The negative effects, Guest and El-Sohemy speculate, could be a result of blood vessels constricting in response to caffeine, which would impair blood flow to muscles during exercise. Everyone gets the positive boost when they ingest caffeine, but perhaps the negative effects stick around much longer in the slow metabolizers and ultimately outweigh the benefits. That raises the question of how the results might change in an event lasting, say, one minute or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, several hours. We can only be sure that the particular balance of positive and negative effects seen here applies for a duration of (on average) 18 minutes.

In the study group, 49 percent of people were in the AA group. They’re the lucky ones in terms of getting a caffeine boost. Of the rest of the group, 43 percent were AC (slow) and just 8 percent were CC (very slow). This distribution is similar to what’s seen in other studies, suggesting that it’s relatively rare to get negative effects from caffeine but quite common to have no significant effect. Interestingly, there’s apparently no link between this gene and habitual caffeine consumption levels: Your rate of caffeine metabolism isn’t what determines whether you like caffeine.

Another interesting wrinkle is that the effects of caffeine metabolism aren’t limited to athletic performance. In previous work, El-Sohemy and his colleagues showed that fast metabolizers have a lower risk of heart attack if they drink one to three cups of coffee a day, perhaps thanks to its antioxidants and other health-promoting elements. In contrast, slow metabolizers have a 36 percent increase in heart attack risk if they drink two to three cups of coffee a day and a 64 percent increase if they drink four cups or more.

It’s also important to note that the subjects in this study were all male. In theory, El-Sohemy says, they would expect to see similar results in female athletes, and the researchers hope to extend the findings to women in a separate study. There’s some evidence that hormonal contraceptives can affect the activity of the caffeine metabolism enzyme, which raises the possibility that there might be some subtle effects related to the female hormonal cycle. The current study required all subjects to abstain from caffeine for four weeks during their four weekly visits to the lab. To study the question properly, Guest notes, women would have to come into the lab at the same time each month to ensure similar hormone levels, which would require four months of complete caffeine abstention. That practical barrier is why they started with the male study.

The big question, of course, is what you should do with this information. And at this point, it’s important to note that El-Sohemy is the founder of a company called Nutrigenomix, which offers genetic testing for personalized nutrition, including the caffeine metabolism gene. Guest serves on the company’s scientific advisory board. That’s exactly the sort of conflict I was making fun of at the top of this piece, and it should give us pause. I do think the study design here is really strong—the sample size is huge by the standards of this area of research, and supplement allocation was double-blinded so the researchers didn’t know who was getting the placebo when. (Remarkably, only three of the 101 subjects correctly guessed which pill they had received each time when they were debriefed after the study.) And there has been research from other groups that reached similar conclusions.

Still, I remain on the fence about the merits of getting tested to figure out how caffeine is likely to affect your performance and health. The hype about genetic predictions often outpaces the results—for example, a major attempt to use genotype to predict who would benefit from a low-fat versus a low-carb diet fell flat in real-world testing last month. Still, these results are intriguing, and if I drank coffee (which, as it happens, I don’t), I’d certainly be curious about which genotype group I fell into.

In the end, it’s also important not to fall into the same trap we originally fell into, assuming that average results reflect everyone’s individual reality. When I initially posted the abstract of this study on Twitter, I got a response from John Trautmann, a running legend who once held the U.S. high school record for the 3,000 meters, competed at the 1992 Olympics, and more recently set a 45–59 age group world record of 4:12.33 for the indoor mile. “Strange,” he wrote. “I’m CC, and I find it hard to work out without a caffeine boost. Placebo effect?”

I don’t know why Trautmann, who supposedly should get slower after taking caffeine, finds it to be an essential workout aid. It’s possible that his perceptions are wrong—that he feels better working out with caffeine, but he actually runs slower. Or it’s possible that other factors in that delicate balance between positive and negative effects are dominant. Maybe he’s ultrasensitive to the positive effects or insensitive to the negative effects. But the bottom line is that for a runner who has accomplished as much as Trautmann has, I would be very wary of telling him he’s been doing it all wrong on the basis of a DNA test. And the rest of us, even at less rarefied levels, should be similarly cautious.

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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.

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Kelly Mayor grew up in Wyoming in a family of hunters. “My dad and brother hunt,” Mayor says. “My husband is a hunter. His family are hunters. We usually have game meat in our freezer.” Typically, the 56-year-old aestheticianhas no problem with hunting.

“But I do have a problem with trophy hunting,” Mayor says—that is, the killing of a large animal for no other reason than sport and bragging rights.

So when Mayor heard earlier this year that the state of Wyoming would hold its first grizzly bear hunt in more than four decades, the news didn’t sit right with her. She soon heard about a campaign that urged grizzly hunting opponents to apply for a hunting tag that they would never use. She applied, one of more than 7,000 people who did. And she won.

Mayor’s winning draw gave her tag number two out of ten to hunt in what the Wyoming Game and Fish Department has called “core areas” outside of Yellowstone National Park, which is home to the vast majority of 700 grizzlies in and around the park. Late this summer or early this fall, Mayor will get a ten-day window to head into the woods, with no other bear hunters around. Instead of a gun, however, Mayor will “shoot ’em with a camera,” as the protest campaign urges.

Famed wildlife photographer Tom Mangelsen also joined the protest and won tag number eight to hunt a grizzly in what the state calls core “suitable habitat” areas. In all, the state will allow for up to 22 bears to be taken, although most of those will not come from the core area near Yellowstone, but from a broader zone around the park that the state deems as less suitable habitat for bears and where it says they come into more conflict with humans. The season will run from September 15 to November 15. (It starts two weeks earlier in the less suitable habitat.)

In the core grizzly hunting area, the hunt there ends as soon as ten males bears or the first female is shot. When his turn comes, Mangelsen says he’ll be out there with his long lens. “The hope would be that we would save a bear or two, and maybe even three or four,” he says, believing that others, still unknown, might have tags and may have similar plans not to hunt. Only he and Mayor have made their plans public so far, and for that Mangelsen says he has received a death threat.

The federal government removed greater Yellowstone’s grizzlies from the endangered species list in 2017, saying the population had sufficiently recovered. Idaho and Wyoming soon made plans to start a grizzly hunt. (Montana is still considering a hunt but decided against starting it this year.) Renny MacKay, a spokesperson for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, says the state is holding a hunt because the population has recovered, that it is possible to hold a hunt without hurting their numbers, and, lastly, because hunters want one. But obviously not everyone in the community does.

Killing a bear isn’t just killing one bear, Mangelsen says. He mentions a much-photographed grizzly in the Grand Teton area called Bear 399—“the most famous bear who ever lived,” in Mangelsen’s words—who has had 17 or 18 offspring.

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Wyoming isn’t the only place where activists have experimented with this type of protest. British Columbia, which until recently held a grizzly hunt, wrestled with its own controversy over shooting the bears, and among opponents there was a movement to “swamp the lottery,” says Kyle Artelle, a biologist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria. Some ecotourism lodges offered to host bear-viewing trips for those who won a tag and didn’t want to hunt with it, Artelle says.

But blocking one bear from dying isn’t a useful protest, argues Sy Gilliland, vice president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association. If the quota of bears killed isn’t reached this year, the state will simply increase the number of bears that can be taken in following years, he says. Indeed that's what might have happed in British Columbia. “We don’t understand why some organizations are willing to have this bear run at a level that is way larger than its carrying capacity, to the detriment of its species.”

The protest, according to Gilliland, is “just grandstanding, without any benefit for the wildlife.”

Aside from temporarily protecting individual bears, the Wyoming protest might prove more effective in other ways. One is by drawing attention to the issue. “It’s probably already effective down there, based on the fact that it’s all over the press,” Artelle says. (It didn’t hurt that Jane Goodall signed up for the lottery.)

In turn, protesters hope the public attention translates into public outrage. One factor that finally turned the tide in British Columbia against grizzly hunting was public opposition to a trophy hunt, “which is qualitatively different than a hunt for subsistence,” or meat, Artelle says. Surveys of the B.C. public eventually showed opposition running in the 90 percent range against grizzly hunting, he says. “That’s just unheard of. We don’t agree on anything that much up here in B.C.” Then, late last year, the province completely banned the hunting of grizzlies.

Ironically, what Mangelsen believes would galvanize public opinion against the grizzly hunt in the United States wouldn’t be done by a protester at all: the shooting of Bear 399. “Remember Cecil the Lion?” he says. “Cecil’s killing would be child’s play compared to the number of people who would be outraged.”

The protesters hope their efforts will also help jump-start a conversation that’s larger than grizzly bears and more about how the state manages its animals. “At first [our effort] was perceived as sabotage. It’s not sabotage,” says Lisa Roberson, a 28-year resident of Jackson, Wyoming, who is a member of the grizzly protest campaign. Hunting licenses often provide the majority of funding for wildlife programs, which gives hunters a disproportionate voice, she says. But that doesn’t capture all the people who value wildlife for different reasons than killing them. Hunting is on the decline, even as wildlife tourism continues double-digit increases, Robertson says. And yet, nonhunters have never really been welcome into wildlife management conversations, she says.

“We want our wildlife on the landscape,” Robertson says.

It’s unclear how much traction this argument will get in Wyoming. Both the outfitters’ association and the state game and fish agency point out that nearly $50 million was spent on grizzly recovery over the past few decades. That money came from sportsmen’s licenses and taxes on outdoor gear. Today, people can photograph grizzlies “while not contributing to the state’s efforts,” says MacKay of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

“That’s bullshit,” Mangelsen counters. Tourists pump much more than that into Wyoming each year when they come to see wildlife, he says. Wildlife watching is a $365 million industry in Wyoming, according to 2016 figures from the University of Wyoming. That amount makes it nearly equivalent to all spending by both hunters and fishermen in the state each year.

It is yet possible that much of these efforts could be moot. At the end of the month, a federal judge will hold a hearing in a Montana courtroom as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by environmental groups. For all the hopes for the grizzly protest, it is a judge who may have the final word on the animals’ fate.

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On July 9, 65-year-old Scottish climber Rick Allen left his three teammates on Broad Peak in Pakistan’s Karakorum Range to make a solo push on a new route up a steep ice cliff. He didn’t return, and the other climbers assumed he had died on his way up the 26,414-foot mountain. But Sandy Allan, Allen’s long-time climbing partner, wasn’t ready to give up on him.

Nearby, at K2 base camp, Bartek Bargiel was preparing to use his high-altitude DJI Mavic Pro drone to film his brother, Andrzej, skiing off the world’s second highest peak. The Mavic Pro is supposed to have a 16,404-foot ceiling, but Bartek had already flown it higher than 27,500 feet. Allan asked Bartek if he’d use the drone to scan the area where Allen was last seen climbing.

As Bartek’s drone launched on July 10, a cook for a Japanese team on Broad Peak spotted what he thought was an abandoned backpack while looking through a telescope. Then it started to move. Bartek focused the drone’s camera on the area and found Allen, seemingly in distress.

Climbers David Roeske and Fredrik Sträng, already at Broad Peak’s 22,965-foot Camp 3, went to investigate. They found Allen, who was alive despite a 100-foot fall off an ice cliff, and helped him back to the high camp. Soon Tenji Sherpa, who was supporting a team from Washington-based Summit Climb, arrived along with other climbers and helped Allen back to base camp on July 12. He had been alone on the mountain for over 36 hours. Allen was badly dehydrated and had a bit of frostbite, but he was largely unscathed.

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Update, 8/14: A representative from Mountain Equipment, one of Tom Livingstone’s sponsors, told Outside that while they’re still waiting for details on the exact route the climbers took, it appears the team did not in fact do an integral ascent of the North Ridge. Rather, it seems that at a certain point they branched off to the North Face after climbing around two thirds of the North Ridge. The representative did confirm that the trip took a total of seven days, five days up and two down. We will continue to update the story as details become available.

 

After four decades of attempts by some of the world’s top alpinists, Latok I’s North Ridge has finally been conquered. A team comprised of Slovenians Ales Cesen and Luka Strazar and Briton Tom Livingstone, completed their historic ascent with a safe return to base camp on August 11, according to a post on the Alpine Association of Slovenia’s website. If confirmed, they will have claimed what has been lauded as one of the holy grails of modern climbing.

The line up the 23,442-foot peak in Pakistan’s Karakoram range has eluded climbers since 1978, when an American expedition was forced to turn back just a few hundred feet from the summit after one of its members became too ill to press on. In the 40 years that followed, more than 30 teams have attempted the North Ridge, but none have come close to the original team’s high point.

That is, until July 25, when Russians Alexander Gukov and Sergey Glazunov reportedly came within 600 feet of the peak before being forced to descend due to weather conditions and insufficient food. The disappointment turned to tragedy when Glazunov fell to his death while rappelling, leaving his partner stranded at 20,000 feet for six days before being plucked from the mountain by Pakistani Army helicopters.

Now, less than three weeks later, it seems a group has finally finished those last unclimbed pitches. While details are scant as the team makes their way back to Slovenia, gear company CAMP—one of Strazar’s sponsors—backed up the team’s claim in a congratulatory Facebook post. “…The ‘impossible’ Latok I (7145m) was finally climbed from the north by our Luka Strazar together with Ales Cesen and Tom Livingstone!” They wrote on August 12. “We congratulate Luka and mates for this huge, astonishing achievement.”  

Strazar is best known for his 2012 Piolets d’Or for the first ascent of the northwest face of K7 West, while Cesen was awarded the prize in 2015 for the first ascent of the north face of Hagshu. In April, Livingstone forged a new route up the north face of the 9,650-foot Mount Jezebel in Alaska.