Expert Essentials

The Swimsuits the Pros Wear

We asked seven pro athletes about the no-fuss swimwear they rely on when surfing, stand-up paddleboarding, and racing and training in the pool

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May 7, 2018

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May 7, 2018

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We asked seven pro athletes about the no-fuss swimwear they rely on when surfing, stand-up paddleboarding, and racing and training in the pool

The last thing you want to worry about mid-workout is whether your shorts will stage a wrestling match with your knees or if your strappy suit will leave a little too much exposed. We asked professional surfers, stand-up paddleboarders, swimmers, and triathletes to share the swimwear they rely on.

Virus ST3 Origin Active Shorts ($54)

Slater Trout, Stand-Up Paddleboarder

Training in Virus shorts comes down to a feeling of freedom, says Slater Trout, a world championship medalist in stand-up paddleboarding. “They feel like air when I train in them,” he says. “I hate shorts that bind up over your knees, and these sit just above the knee for a clean fit. They also have a wide leg, which also makes them great for the gym, running, and biking.” Though the fabric is light, Trout says it’s durable. “I’ve put hundreds of hours of pure abuse on them and they’re holding up just fine.”

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Rip Curl Mirage Conner Spin Out Boardshorts ($55)

Conner Coffin, Surfer

When it comes to shorts, Conner Coffin says these Rip Curls are the Goldilocks of the surfing world: “I like a bit of bright color but not too bright, stretchy but not too stretchy, short but not too short,” says the 24-year-old rising star who is currently ranked tenth in the world in his sport. Coffin partnered with his sponsor Rip Curl to design just-right boardshorts for training. “My latest,” he says, “is a stylish take on technical shorts.” The fabric is a blend of polyester and elastane, which has just the right amount of stretch to move freely on the board, says Coffin, but not so much that the shorts feel baggy.

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TYR Trinityfit ($55)

Kelsi Worrell, Swimmer

“Fit is the biggest challenge in swimsuits, and it’s what I like most about this one-piece,” says Kelsi Worrell, a 2016 Olympic gold medalist and TYR ambassador. “The straps on the TYR Trinityfit have just enough tension to stay in place but aren’t tight and don’t limit my movement at all. I can do a two-hour workout and my shoulders still feel great. I also feel secure and comfortable in the suit. When I push off, there’s not a lot of drag on my back or front, so the suit isn’t limiting me, which is what you want in swimwear.” Worrell also likes the colors. Her favorites: pink with orange straps and bright yellow.

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Roka Elite HD One-Piece Power Back Swimsuit ($60)

Meredith Kessler, Triathlete

“This suit is about as comfortable as it gets in the water,” says Meredith Kessler, five-time Ironman New Zealand champion. “The lower cut around the hips and higher cut and compression around the chest make it so I do not need to worry about being exposed or getting a wedgie every flip turn.” Kessler also appreciates the fit—snug and secure with minimal drag. “I really feel comfortable in it. I don’t have to triple check to make sure everything is perfectly positioned. I just slide it on and dive in.”

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Speedo Mesh Drag Suit ($28)

Ryan Murphy, Swimmer

“I’m one of the few swimmers who likes to wear a drag suit to train in,” says Ryan Murphy, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and world record holder in the 100-meter backstroke. “When I have this suit on, I have to pull and kick harder to keep my body on the surface of the water, and I can feel my catch and stroke more with the added resistance.” Murphy pairs the drag suit with traditional Speedo briefs for more versatile workouts, wearing the drag for part of his yardage and slipping it off for quick, fast intervals.

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Arena Mast Light Tech Back Suit ($68)

Haley Anderson, Swimmer

Haley Anderson, the national 5K open-water champion, loves the simple, no-fuss aspects of this classic suit. “The Mast Tech has been my practice suit for years now,” she says. “The cut and fit is comfortable and snug but leaves room to move around, and the material stands up well to chlorine without fading or stretching out. For those who like a little less coverage for sunny outdoor training, I highly recommend this suit.”

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Roka SIM Pro II Shorts ($120)

Jesse Thomas, Triathlete

These neoprene shorts let Jesse Thomas, six-time Wildflower Triathlon champion and three-time Ironman winner, mimic racing in a wetsuit without the downsides of training in one. “They’re shorts, so obviously they’re a lot easier to get on than a regular wetsuit, and you won’t roast in the pool in them,” says Thomas. The center panel traps air to improve buoyancy, while less float on the sides helps you rotate properly. “They lift my midsection to where my body alignment is closer to wetsuit feel,” he says.

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Just don’t ask to follow me

I was hesitant to try Strava at first: Everybody’s heard about some jackass who almost ran over a kid on the trail because they were racing against invisible riders for King Of the Mountain—and nobody wants to be That Guy. But I was trying to train for a long running race—not to necessarily run fast, mind you, but to get in enough training miles that my legs wouldn’t fall apart before the finish line. And I already had an idea of what didn’t work: Not keeping track of it.

I am, maybe like you, one of those people who needs a firm commitment in order to get anything done. I can’t say “I’m going to try to eat more vegetables,” or “I will try to work out more often this year,” because then I eat more vegetables a few times and then I’m back eating mostly pizza within a few weeks. Or I resolve to work out more, and then five weeks after the resolution is made, I can easily go five or six days without doing so much as a pushup or going for a jog around the park, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty.

A few years ago, I was visiting my friend Tony, who has started and grown several successful businesses and completed an Ironman triathlon, and I noticed a quote from management consultant Peter Drucker on the white board in his home office: “What gets measured gets improved.” I somehow paraphrased it and remembered it as “What gets written down gets done.”

I found a training plan (in Bryon Powell’s book Relentless Forward Progress) and copied the mileages into my phone calendar so I’d get reminded on Thursday to run eight miles, and on Saturday to run 22 miles, and so on.

After a few hours of trying to retroactively map my long runs using a website and realizing how inefficient it was, I finally downloaded Strava. Not to race anyone, or even interact with anyone. Lacking a GPS watch, I took my phone with me on long runs and kept track using Strava.

It was wonderful. It kept track down to the tenth of a mile, and let me know how many vertical feet I had ascended and descended on my trail runs/shuffles. I even used it skiing uphill to track my vert. But I kept all my workouts private, and when people found me on Strava, I ignored their follow requests. I already feel like I have 40 different social media/email/messaging apps to update; I didn’t want one more. Plus I am about the least competitive person you’ll ever meet. Think you’re faster than me? You’re probably right. And I don’t mind.

I have zero followers. No, I do not want to connect with you on Strava. Nothing personal, I just want it to keep track of my stuff. I hope you’re having fun out there and getting whatever you want out of Strava-ing your exercise, but I am not going to follow you. I don’t care if we’re good friends or have never met, my interest in your running and cycling times remains at 0/10.

After a few months of running with my phone, I got a semi-fancy GPS watch that uploads directly to Strava (but still keeps my workout data private). I’m psyched. I love being able to check my stats and see that I’ve run 40 miles in a week, with 5,000 feet of elevation gain. I love being able to quantify my training before a race, and tell myself, for example, that I ran 1175 miles over six months, so I’m ready. I love knowing that I did something, rather than fooling myself that “I’ve been running a lot,” or that “I’ve been doing a good amount of training.” I’m geeking out on the data, and I am not ashamed of it. My girlfriend is not nearly as excited about it as I am, but she at least acts like she’s listening.

It’s an old business maxim that “what gets measured gets done,” and psychology studies have shown that the more often you check in on progress toward your goals, the higher your chances of success. So it’s not just me.

I still have zero KOM’s, unless you count being King of a Mountain of nachos after a long run. Which I find very satisfying.

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In 1977, Yosemite National Park employees Jay Johnson and Les James had an unusual request: They wanted their employer to rebuild the homes that park staff had destroyed eight years prior. This was more than a pitch for employee housing. Johnson and James are Miwuk, and their ancestors inhabited the Yosemite Valley—or the Ahwahnee Valley, as it was originally known—for thousands of years. Even after Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890, about 15 families continued living in their homes on the land.

The small village housed mostly Miwuk and Paiute Native Americans who also worked in the park. Their homes were seen as employee lodging, so the Park Service allowed the buildings to remain. But as the majority of Native residents stopped working for the park or its concessionaires, Yosemite staff decided to raze the village in 1969, forcing people out of their ancestral homes. “During that time, we had no voice. We were just individuals, and we were always afraid of what the government could do to us,” says James, 83. “They could fire us or throw us out for any kind of reason, and we were always afraid of that.”

A year after the village was leveled, some of the local Miwuk founded the American Indian Council of Mariposa County. (The Southern Sierra band of Miwuks, descendants of Yosemite’s original inhabitants, lacks federal recognition.) In 1977, with the council’s backing, James and Johnson requested their village be returned. “Since that time, we’ve been working on it,” James says.

After decades of negotiations, a breakthrough was made this summer. An agreement struck with the park guarantees Southern Sierra Miwuks greater access to their homeland and to cultural practices that were upended almost 170 years ago.

The first white settlers to enter Yosemite Valley were led in 1851 by a gold-rush merchant named James Savage. During a conflict between Native Americans and miners, Savage’s trading post was attacked, and he led a group of men into the Valley for revenge, hanging some members of the Ahwahneechee Tribe, one of four Native groups in the Miwuk family, and shooting a chief’s son in the back. After Savage’s attack, most of the Ahwahneechee ended up on a reservation in the San Joaquin Valley, although a small band remained in Yosemite.

It was into this vacuum that famed naturalist John Muir emerged. He, too, had little care for the indigenous population. While waxing poetic about the Valley’s ecology and geology, Muir found its residents “most ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.”

Muir’s people-free preservation ideal eventually became national park policy. And as America’s greatest idea caught on, the National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs would togetherseparate Native Americans from landscapes they cherished. As 19th-century Oglala Sioux luminary Black Elk noted, the agencies “made little islands for us and other little islands for the [animals]” with the simultaneous establishment of reservations and national parks.

The narrative put forth by the Park Service has always been one of Native acquiescence, though in reality, historian Philip Burnham writes, that was far from the truth. For instance, the Ute Mountain Utes didn’t willingly swap reservation land to expand Mesa Verde National Park in 1911. Rather, the feds threatened to withhold appropriations. The Blackfeet Tribe sold the western portion of its reservation, which would later be added to Glacier National Park, to the United States in 1895 only after a severe winter had starved many of its members.

“The idea that these parks were ‘gifted’ by Indians or other owners, a myth born in the era of later philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, was anything but true for Native people,” Burnham wrote in an email.

While Native Americans were being forced off the land in national parks across the country, in Yosemite, James’ and Johnson’s ancestors remained—even becoming integral pieces of the Yosemite economy. From the park’s earliest days, the small band of local Native Americans served as laborers and attractions. The park held annual Indian Field Days, during which park administrators would dress locals in Plains Indian regalia to perform before tourists. A replica village was built in the park, but Miwuk people still had to ask permission to use it.

For decades, Johnson, James, and other Miwuk members had been negotiating the return of their village, always running into problems with politics or leadership change. The first agreement was struck in 2008, but that plan was derailed when then-superintendent Don Neubacher said the indigenous construction methods would pose a liability. Then, this June, the Miwuk gained a powerful ally. Michael Reynolds became the park’s new superintendent. Shortly after arriving in his post, Reynolds signed a 30-year agreement that would allow the local American Indian Council of Mariposa County to build and use a wahhoga, the Miwuk word for village. A roundhouse is scheduled to be completed in 2019, and multiple umachas—lodges sheathed in cedar bark—will be built as well. The buildings will be constructed using traditional methods and materials and will serve as a focal point for Native American cultural and religious ceremonies.

Announcing the latest agreement, Reynolds, who grew up near Yosemite, struck a reparative tone. “I, along with many, often struggle to find a better and more complete understanding of the difficulties that our people have caused to the lives and cultures of the Native peoples of this land,” he said in a video of the event posted by the Fresno Bee. “Perhaps today we are restarting this conversation.”

Though nobody will live in the wahhoga, the agreement is nonetheless a watershed moment in the park’s relationship with local Native Americans, who have long sought to reestablish their cultural and subsistence connection with the park. The wahhoga could also function as an example for other NPS units, nearly all of which were created following forcible or coerced removal of the Native population. “Our ancestors used to live there, and we always felt that what was available to our ancestors should’ve been available to us,” James says.

James, who chairs the Wahhoga Committee, sees this as one more step toward indigenous tribes reconnecting with their ancestral homeland. Next on the docket, he plans to start programs that teach Native youth about traditional plant and animal harvesting. As James says, “This is about our survival.”

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The United States is now likely the world’s largest oil producer. Even so, the Trump administration continues its sprint to lease the nation’s public lands to energy companies.

From September through the end of the year, the Bureau of Land Management will offer leases for oil and gas drilling on nearly 3 million acres of public lands,according to government statistics compiled by the Wilderness Society and Center for Western Priorities. That would mean, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, that for the entire year the administration will have offered for lease almost 4 million acres in the Lower 48 alone.

That’s a nearly four-fold increase over 2016, the last year of the Obama administration. And that doesn’t include lease sales in Alaska and in public waters such as the Gulf of Mexico, where Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has vigorously pushed leasing as part of the administration’s policy of energy dominance.

To that end, Zinke has directed BLM offices, which oversee the public’s oil and gas deposits, to hold lease sales every quarter. Master leasing plans, or broader planning for the landscape, have been scuttled. Opportunities for the public to comment have been shortened, or dispensed with altogether. The energy industry has cheered these changes, saying the old ways were sclerotic and discouraged sensible development.

For the Interior Department this kind of wholesale leasing seems to be what they most loudly tout. Earlier this month it issued a press release crowing about third-quarter lease sales in New Mexico that brought in nearly $1 billion. “Critics of the Administration’s American Energy Dominance policy often falsely claim there is little to no interest in Federal oil and gas leases,” Zinke said in the release. “Today, they are eating their words and once again President Trump’s policies are bearing fruit for the American people. The people of New Mexico will see about a half a billion dollars of this right back into their roads, schools, and public services.”

But this headlong rush to lease is bearing mixed fruit, in more ways than one.

Even as the New Mexico lease sale broke records, in Nevada, no one bid on roughly 300,000 acres offered for sale this week. That exemplifies the BLM’s haphazard and frantic leasing, say critics such as Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society.

The agency is offering up parcels for auction just to obey Zinke’s directive—without thought to whether it is wise, and regardless of consequence, says Culver. “We’re seeing millions and millions of acres put up for sale, and they aren’t being screened.” In Montana, one parcel lay beneath a river, the Wilderness Society found.

But often the issues are more serious. Earlier this month, the BLM leased to energy companies land just outsideArizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. And this week, 134,000 acres were leased in a much larger offering in Utah, with much of that land going for the federal minimum of $2 per acre. The Salt Lake Tribune dubbed the auction a “bust.” Even so, environmentalists are upset because some of the leases are near Canyonlands National Park’s Horseshoe Canyon, the paper reported, and others are near Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

In this week’s sale, and another coming in December, the BLM has proposed leases totaling about 535,000 acres around Utah. Areas include the Book Cliffs; the culturally sensitive lands east of Bears Ears National Monument; near national parks (Hovenweep National Monument), and in wild, undeveloped backcountry around the White River.

“We’re risking this heritage so that the Secretary of the Interior can have a messaging moment,” says Culver. “And his moment will pass, and we will be left with the wreckage.”

In Colorado, the BLM is planning to offer 236,000 acres for lease, and the proposed sale concerns the state’s governor, John Hickenlooper, who pointed out recently that more than 108,000 acres of the sale is in “priority and general habitat” for the greater sage-grouse. The grouse is a chicken-like bird whose numbers are in steep decline throughout the interior West. Despite its free fall, the Interior Department trashed a plan, years in the making, aimed at protecting the bird. The administration’s new plan makes it easier for companies to lease and drill in those good-habitat areas. For example, in Montana, environmental groups say nearly 75 percent of parcels proposed for a December sale lie in important sage grouse habitat.

Leasing public lands is hardly new or without controversy, of course. Though the Obama administration offered a declining number of acres throughout its eight years, even it was no slouch when it came to allowing drilling on public lands. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy resulted in leasing more than 1 million acres of public lands annually across the Lower 48—and sometimes much more—almost every year of his presidency.

But under Secretary Zinke, the Trump administration is blowing away those figures, and seem dead set on offering up public lands as quickly as possible, for cheaper than dirt.

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When Monserrat A. Matehuala worked for Eagle Rock School, in Estes Park, Colorado, she’d regularly drive an hour outside town to visit a small, family-owned restaurant that served Mexican food. As one of a few people of color living in Estes Park, she craved timesurrounded by people who spoke Spanish and danced to her kind of music.

“That was my self-care back then,” Matehuala told me. “As an outdoor educator, it’s hard for me to bring in that cultural part of my identity, which is so important for myself and my survival.”

For many people of color who love the outdoors, this story is familiar. Often, the areas most famously known for their natural beauty and access to outdoor recreation are also the country’s least diverse. “It’s a negotiation,” Matehuala says. “I have to say, OK, I’m either going to live where there are people of color, but I won’t have rocks to climb, or I can live somewhere I can rock-climb every single day, but I won’t have a place with people from my culture.”

This isn’t just an issue for Estes Park. The racial demographics for many of the places that topped Outside’s Best Towns of 2017 were remarkably homogeneous. Bend, Oregon: 91 percent white. Boise, Idaho: 89 percent white. Missoula, Montana: 91 percent white. In Matador Network’s list of “America’s Coolest Outdoor Towns,” many of the towns followed the same pattern. Jackson Hole, Wyoming: 91 percent white. Truckee, California: 86 percent white. Salida, Colorado: 93.7 percent white. Big Sky, Montana: 93 percent white.

Even in diverse towns, when it comes to outdoor recreation, people of color often disappear. “If you look at the Native American population in Banff, Canada, for example, it’s very high. And the people cleaning rooms, mowing lawns, plowing snow are often people of color. But when you actually go skiing, you won’t see them anymore,” says James Mills, writer of The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors. He argues that the diversity in an outdoorsy town is sometimes not a question of racial population but of racial and cultural access. Outdoor recreation is often reserved for the white and upper class. Meanwhile, it’s people of color who often provide the labor that allows outdoor culture to thrive in the first place.

“In Colorado, many of the families I knew had never gone rock climbing, even though they lived in a town that was world famous for that,” Matehuala says. “What does it say when your service industry workers haven’t been able to able to experience the main sport the town is known for?”

Some states known as outdoor paradises also have long histories of racial violence. For example, in 1857, Oregon was the only state to write the exclusion of black people directly into its constitution. By the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River; by some estimates, 10 percent of Colorado’s male population were card-carrying members. In the 1920s, in both Oregon and Colorado, KKK members were even elected governor. More recently, in the 1980s and ’90s, Richard Butler led the Church of Jesus Christ Christian-Aryan Nations in creating a compound for white supremacists in northern Idaho. Even today, this violence persists. Groups like the Northwest Front advocate for turning the northwestern United States into a homeland for only white people. When the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked hate groups across the United States, it ranked Montana and Idaho—states known for their unspoiled wilderness—first and second, respectively.

Much of this history is still very present in the outdoors today. When people of color participate in outdoor recreation, they often must confront what remains from a state’s racist past. When Matehuala worked for Outward Bound in North Carolina, she often took black students on outdoor trips in the Pisgah National Forest. There, they would often encounter men with guns at their hips who called themselves “military police” and stared her group down when they tried to unload supplies. When she recently took children of color rock climbing near Golden, Colorado, her group saw swastikas spray-painted on the rocks. After the recent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matehuala canceled a weekend nature trip because she didn’t feel that the students she was taking out—mostly students of color—would be safe.

“Regardless of how people say, ‘Oh, the outdoors is for everybody,’ you can feel the difference in many outdoor spaces,” Matehuala says, especially in places where there aren’t many people of color. But it’s even a problem in more diverse and allegedly more progressive cities. Stacy Sarver, a first-generation Filipina American who lives in Seattle, Washington, is grateful that her city generally supports her need for a progressive way of life. But when it comes to the outdoors, she still experiences subtle acts of everyday racism.

For example, when Sarver hikes with her white husband, she notices that people often seem to act as if she doesn’t exist: “I have literally had people only address my husband in conversation while we’re hiking. Sometimes they act like I don’t understand English.”

Sarver belongs to the Seattle Mountaineers, an outdoor community with more than 12,000 members. Though the city has a fairly large population of people of color, this group has less than 10 percent enrollment by people of color. After receiving its latest brochure, Sarver also noticed something telling: The only time people of color showed up in the brochure photos was in the section about scholarship funds.

“I thought to myself, ‘I manage the accounting department for a large developer, and my husband is an engineer at Amazon. We don’t qualify for your scholarship,’” Sarver told me. “When we speak about getting more people of color outside, the conversation automatically goes toward talking about ‘poor communities.’”

Some cities have begun to acknowledge the problem. In 2017, outdoorsy cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina, hired their first diversity, equity, and inclusion officers. The goal of the position is to help eliminate systemic biases in city programs and policies and open more opportunities for underrepresented groups. Last year, the Cities Connecting Children to Nature (CCCN) project selected seven cities to receive a $75,000 grant to support their efforts to create systemic policies and programs that encourage children of color to spend time in the outdoors: Saint Paul, Minnesota; Madison, Wisconsin; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Providence, Rhode Island; Louisville, Kentucky; Austin, Texas; and San Francisco, California. CCCN assists each city in completing “community assessments” that analyze their specific equity issues. Once a city creates a plan, it’s eligible for further CCCN funding and support in implementing it.

Though it’s still early to quantify the program’s success, many cities have already begun showing progress. For example, Austin conducted a GIS mapping exercise to develop a “nature equity score” for the city. San Francisco created an early education site survey to determine opportunities for addressing disparities in early childhood environments. Louisville trained and deployed its first group of interns to recreation centers to provide nature-connection activities for mostly children of color.

As the population of people of color continues to grow, perhaps the homogeneous reputation of of outdoor towns will change. These towns can then begin to transform into places that nurture a person of color’s cultural identity as well as their love for the outdoors.

Meanwhile, Matehuala has moved to Denver, Colorado, and has enjoyed reconnecting with people from her same background, something she had to compartmentalize when living in smaller towns. Recently, her work with Brown Girls Climb has connected more than 100 female climbers of color across Colorado by hosting meetupsevery Monday. Last week, when they hosted their first meetup in Boulder, Matehuala was impressed: “It’s the most people of color I have ever seen congregate there.”

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Boulder Denim was one of the first manufactures to incorporate stretchy Lycra into jeans when it launched in 2015. Since then, performance jeans—jeans that are comfortable and look good but don’t hinder you when climbing, running, or biking—have exploded, with major brands like Patagonia, Levi’s, and Black Diamond all making their own versions.

This month, Boulder Denim is launching Boulder Denim 2.0, a new product that has the same performance use in mind but employs more-comfortable fabric and has more everyday-wear features. The new jeans are 83 percent cotton, 14 percent polyester, and three percent Lycra in a soft twill blend that makes them even harder to rip or tear yet lightweight and more breathable than other denims on the market. The fabric moves with the body, and each pair is shaped with a waistband designed to work with the wearer’s curves, hugging contours and reducing gapping. The curse of regular jeans is that they stretch and loosen over time, but with 90 percent shape memory and reinforced stitching, Boulder Denim 2.0 retains its fit no matter the activity. The PFC-free hydrophobic DWR treatment repels sweat, spills, and stains to help keep pants dry and clean longer. 

My favorite feature of the Boulder Denim 2.0s is the super-deep pockets (they’re easily the deepest jean pockets I’ve ever seen), which are designed to keep items from falling out when you’re on the move. Additionally, there’s a small front pocket with a hidden zipper to secure valuables.

Currently available for preorder on Kickstarter, the jeans come in four different models: men’s slim, men’s jogger, women’s skinny, and women’s straight. 

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Shorter days mean it's harder to squeeze in a post-work run. The following ten products will help keep you motivated, comfortable, and safe during evening workouts so you don’t have to think about anything other than leaving the office behind. Plus, they’re all on sale at Backcountry.com through September 3. 

While the midsole is firm to the point of being harsh on hardpack, this shoe’s responsiveness is off the charts. Plus, with a snug, narrow fit and meaty lugs, it’s one of the fastest, most technical, and most agile shoes we’ve tested. 

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The Ambit3 has a sleek display and a stable of cool features. We especially like the midrun access to lap comparisons and the recovery advice based on metrics. Multisport athletes will appreciate its ability to measure cycling speed and cadence. Even better, it can share that data with many popular apps. 

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For longer days in the mountains, or if you just need to carry your cell phone and keys during a 5K, this tiny lumbar pack provides a little extra storage space. Reflective elements offer visibility in low-light conditions, an elastic belt helps dial in the fit, and a 3-D mesh outer lets it vent and not turn soggy.

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The go-to workout top of one of our editors, the Fleur tank is both incredibly soft and moisture-wicking, thanks to its recycled polyester fabric with spandex for additional stretch. The sleek design sits close to your body—but without inhibiting critical movements—and looks flattering when you’re wearing this casually around town.

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Not many mountain- running shoes have both technical chops and loads of comfort—that’s the Speedcross’s secret sauce. With its narrow last, rock-solid fit, and big six-millimeter lugs, it can quickstep through sketchy rock piles and bank tight switchbacks with confidence. A steep ramp angle means the Speedcross is definitely a shoe for heel strikers.

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Light, breathable, and equipped with an internal drawcord and stretchy fabric, the Pulse shorts are a perfect accomplice for runs or gym workouts.

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Summer trail runs or quick-paced hikes are usually unencumbered affairs, but when a light shower blows in or the wind picks up, the Incendo jacket is a great piece to have clipped to your hydration belt. Its nylon face is treated with a DWR to keep surprise weather from cutting your run short, while the Dot Air Mesh vents under the arms provide stretchy mobility and keep you from overheating during a warm rain.

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The Soleus’s super-light fabric has a DWR finish to reduce moisture retention, and Arc’teryx made the side panels and brief liner out of mesh for enhanced ventilated comfort. It also features a unique storage system with a zippered rear pocket, three stash pockets, and a large center back pocket.

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There’s simply no better hydration mix than Skratch. It’s easy to get down, it doesn’t cause GI distress, and we feel like we can go a bit harder for a bit longer than we can with plain water or other mixes. We haven’t tried the Matcha + Lemon flavor so let us know if you like it.

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The author on his writing process and what we can learn from Pleistocene humans. Plus: three more books to take you way back in time.

Twenty years ago, Craig Childs was lying in a Colorado cave, alone with a Pleistocene-era camel skeleton he was helping excavate as part of his graduate research in desert studies. He realized that he was one of the first people to ever see the camel, which had lived before people inhabited the States. “I was spending all this time with these bones and imagining what it looked like before people were there,” he says. North America was one of the last major places on earth to be occupied by humans, sometime between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, and that idea—of what the unexplored continent looked like when people first crossed over the land bridge from Asia— has stuck with him for two decades. In his latest book, he goes back into the cave, and then all over the world, to trace humankind’s initial exploration of the Americas.

Childs is known for meshing anthropology and exploration in books like The Secret Knowledge of Water. The new book, Atlas of a Lost World, pulls together the themes of his past work and lets him explore the questions he’s been marinating on for more than two decades. He traveled from the Yukon Flats of Alaska to Quintana Roo, Mexico, to try to learn from the people who came to the continent first. We talked to him about exploration, ancient history, and why his research sent him to Burning Man.

On Traveling for the Book: My history with writing is about time and archaeology, so I want to see where the blank places are, and how the threads got connected place by place. I went to Saint Lawrence Island, one of the last pieces of the Bering Land Bridge, which was the last landscape people would have seen 20,000 years ago when they were crossing over. That was pretty compelling to me because it was such a meeting point between two different parts of human civilization.

On His Most Unusual Book Destination: I was in Black Rock Desert during Burning Man, which was intentional. I was writing about the first large gatherings of people, at the end of the Pleistocene in [what’s now] Massachusetts. It has the same layout and the same concept: people coming together to share ideas. We’ve gotten somewhere on scale—there’s way more of us—and we’ve opened ourselves up to understanding things like scientific processes we didn’t understand then, but we’ve given up a lot, too. There’s a lot of knowledge of plants and animals we’ve lost.

On Where He Was Most Surprised By What He Saw: When I’m in the backwoods of Florida it’s all new to me. There were times we might have been in people’s backyards, but it felt wild. In some places you can employ the skills you picked up on western rivers, but it’s not that easy there. There were snakes hanging out of trees, and alligators, and there were times I was in over my head. The rivers were bewildering. I’d follow them and they would go into holes in the ground, then I’d walk farther, and they’d come out of different holes.

On Research and Reading Material: Half of the book is brain work with other researchers and half is foot work. I rely heavily on other people’s research, so mostly what I’m reading is hundreds upon hundreds of scientific journal articles. But the place I start from is fiction because I want to see what they’re doing in more sharp-edged writing. I always go back to Siddhartha. And lately I’ve been reading poetry, Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver. I can open up a page, get blown away, and set it back down.

On What He Learned: It’s about species colonization. Every species has to have a certain number of individuals who are willing to go out looking at the edges of things to see if there’s a niche they can move to, or a new resource they need for long-term survival. I think it’s true now, too. It’s no wonder we’re consuming everything so quickly.

On Why People Explore: A Pleistocene sense of landscape is still within our grasp. You can still go have those experiences, and I think it’s why we hike and put on packs. We remember what it’s like to make decisions, and to scan the horizon with every step. When you drop in there and pretend you’re first, how do you learn about the plants and the place? You learn how to adjust to the landscapes.

On What He Hopes Readers Get from the Book: What I really want people to come away with is context. We get lost in thinking that this is the only moment. We see history only going back 3,000 years, but the country as we know it now has a much deeper story. I think if we understand the arc of where we’re going as a species we can make more intentional, informed decisions.

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Like the sound of Atlas of a Lost World? Here are some other books to add to your list:

Sapiens  by Yuval Noah Harari

Really want to know how we got here? Harari’s human history goes deep on everything from biology to economics to try to understand.

Annals of a Former World  by John McPhee

The similarities don’t stop at the titles. McPhee is the master of pulling together disparate people and places to show the ways the systems we depend on are built. he’s also the master of getting readers to care about something—geology!—they might have otherwise ignored.

“Welcome to Pleistocene Park” by Ross Andersen, The Atlantic, April 2017

Andersen’s weird, wonderful article about a recreated Ice Age biodome in Russia asks some of the same, bittersweet questions about what we’ve failed to learn from the past.

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Researchers say cyclists are a “problem” for self-driving technology, but the real problem is the cars

On August 17, 1896, in London, 44-year-old Bridget Driscoll made history when she became the first pedestrian fatality in a gasoline-powered automobile collision. Now, over 120 years later, another woman has become a pioneer in the field of death by auto: 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who on March 18, 2018, in Tempe, Arizona, became the first pedestrian to be killed by a self-driving car.

Happy Women’s History Month.

Over the years, it’s become a common refrain whenever the subject of automotive mayhem comes up: “Self-driving cars can’t come soon enough.” This sentiment isn’t surprising. As inured as we’ve become to the carnage caused by driving, it still has the capacity to stun. For example, early this month, New Yorkers were outraged when Dorothy Bruns drover her Volvo through a red light in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and killed two children, ages 1 and 4. It’s very tempting to think self-driving technology could make senseless tragedies like this a thing of the past.

Of all road users, cyclists in particular find the idea of factoring humans out of the driving equation to be enticing. (Well, us and motorcyclists, who experience many of the same indignities.) For one thing, heedless motorists are the number-one impediment to the unfettered enjoyment of our favorite activity. Also, our lofty perch atop our saddles affords us a direct view into the cabins of the drivers with whom we “share” the road, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of what they get up to in there. (Texting, mostly, though it’s often accompanied by scarfing fast food.) And while reckless or distracted driving is a danger to all of us no matter how we travel, we cyclists seem to receive the brunt of the road rage, since humans seem to think shouting at people on bicycles is more effective than turning the steering wheel the three or four degrees necessary in order to pass safely.

So who wouldn’t prefer an algorithmic driver to an apoplectic one?

Nevertheless, as a cyclist I’ve long been leery of this “I, for one, welcome our new self-driving overlords” attitude. It’s not that I’m a technophobe, it’s just that I’m an automobophobe (say that one ten times fast). At no point during my own lifetime or indeed the entire century-and-a-quarter of automotive history have cars or the companies that make them given us any reason to trust them. Instead, cycling’s been marginalized, walking’s been criminalized, and, thanks to autocentric policymaking, you can’t even maintain a minimum wage job in most parts of the country without also assuming the burden of a car loan or lease. The entire history of the car is one of offloading responsibility onto the vulnerable and of fostering a vicious cycle of car dependence. Bridget Driscoll was merely the first casualty in a war that’s brought us to the point where we’ve got to wave flags of surrender just to walk across the street.

Alas, as the driverless era dawns, it’s hard not to suspect it will be more of the same for us cyclists. See, we’re a “problem” for this technology, which struggles to detect us. Therefore, various companies are developing “bicycle-to-vehicle communications.” This is a polite way of saying that in addition to the helmet and reflective clothing and lights and hand signals you’re already supposed to be using, you’ll also have to incorporate some sort of personal locator beacon to guarantee that these autonomous systems can “see” you. If you’re a fan of helmet-shaming this is great news, because you’re going to love Victim-Blaming 2.0, which will involve people blaming cyclists for their own deaths because they weren’t riding around with homing devices or subcutaneous microchips. 

Hey, this is the same industry that already wants cyclists to spray-paint themselves, so you’ll have to forgive me if driverless cars freak me the fuck out.

None of this is to say we shoudn’t continue exploring this potentially life-saving technology. Traffic deaths are an epidemic and we need to pursue every possible solution. However, Elaine Herzberg’s death is a reminder that in the context of history, all of us should be extremely wary of simply putting computers behind the wheel and calling it good, and that cyclists should be skeptical of any industry that frames us as a “problem.” After all, death by auto has already been normalized, and we’ve already proven our willingness as a culture to supplicate ourselves to the automobile. It’s easy to see how we could be marginalized further in the name of convenience. Do you really think the average driver’s going to care if we have to get wired up before every ride if it means they get to immerse themselves in their smartphones and feast on Sonic Signature Slingers behind the wheel? Helmet laws will seem positively quaint once you’re legally required to use a GPS suppository.

For years, we’ve maintained that the problem isn’t the cars, it’s the drivers. But driverless technology may soon force us to confront the fact that actually, yeah, the problem is the cars. Sure, we need to make cars safer, but ultimately relying on 21st century tech to solve a 19th century problem is like giving a dinosaur an iPhone. The real solution is to stop building our world to conform to the car—and to let it die out as nature intended.