Month: March 2019

12 totally legitimate excuses

Nowadays, every time you’re at the climbing gym, people are coming up to you and asking, “So, are you climbing the Dawn Wall this year or what?” Sure, they’re just trying to make conversation, but it’s a little annoying, am I right? Next time someone asks you about your Dawn Wall plans, try one of these responses:

It’s Not My Style Of Climbing

Honestly, climbing an incredibly sustained, difficult, technical 32-pitch route on granite in the world’s most famous big wall Mecca, sounds great, but it’s really not the style of climbing that truly motivates me.

I Have a Nagging Finger Injury

I know it doesn’t look like anything when I hold up my finger and show you, but trust me, every time I try to do this one crimpy sidepull on the red route over there, it feels like a bolt of lightning is hitting it right at this joint. I mean, I can climb still, just not 100 percent. So I think the Dawn Wall is out for now.

My Mom Won’t Let Me Do It

I asked my mom, and even though Kevin, Tommy, and Adam are climbing the Dawn Wall, she said no.

It’s Not a Classic

Look, the Dawn Wall only has a 1.7-star rating (out of four stars) on Mountain Project. Hardly a classic climb. Not to be an elitist, but I have a list of much higher-rated climbs at Happy Hour Crag that I want to tick before I think about doing some route that doesn’t even merit two whole stars.

I Can’t Take That Much Time Off Work

With the kids’ schedules, and the holidays, and three friends’ weddings this year, plus the trip to Mexico, I’m out of vacation days. So a Yosemite trip is out.

It’s Too Crowded

Back in 2015 it was cool because nobody had heard of it, but now everybody knows about it and you can’t even get a parking spot. I blame Instagram.

I Haven’t Been Climbing That Much Lately

I don’t know, I have a lot of other stuff going on, so I’ve only been able to climb five days a week for the past six months. I feel like if I were to do the Dawn Wall, I’d really have to get serious about training for it.

I Have Nothing To Wear

I just don’t have the right outfit for a late fall/early winter ascent of the world’s most difficult big wall free climb. I mean, all my climbing clothes just look so frumpy.

It’s Right In The Middle Of Ice Season

Winter is ice climbing season for me. I cannot think about anything else besides freezing my ass off, chopping at frozen waterfalls with sharp tools, catching shards and small blocks of ice with my face, and getting the screaming barfies at the end of every pitch. I can’t even consider anything else.

I’m Too Obsessed With My Other Project

There’s a 40-foot sport route at my local crag that I’ve had my eye on for a few months now, and while it is easier climbing by several grades and approximately 3,000 feet shorter than the Dawn Wall, I’m just too fixated on it to think about other goals right now.

I Have To Clean The Garage

Have you seen my garage? I can’t even get a car in there right now. It’s a mess. To paraphrase Tommy Caldwell, cleaning the garage is my own Dawn Wall.

I Am Physically Incapable At This Point Of Climbing That Hard

You know, I was at work the other day, staring out the window, thinking to myself, “Am I one of the top, say, dozen rock climbers in the entire world?” And I gotta be honest with you: I’m not.

>

Not all clothing is meant to last forever, but every once in a while you’ll find a piece you want to hand down to your children. We found five sweaters that fit that mold. Some are from well-known heritage brands, while others are from up-and-comers that focus on quality. They’re all made so well that you can consider them heirlooms for future generations.

We’re pretty sure Dale of Norway invented the ski sweater 150 years ago. Its 100 percent wool sweaters have only gotten better with age. The Norge was designed for Scandinavian winters, with a thick wool thread and mock turtleneck for extra coverage. The funky Norwegian pattern screams après-ski. The result is a sweater that works hard on and off the slopes.

Buy Now

---

Heritage brand Pendleton has a ridiculous number of sweaters worth ogling, including one inspired by The Dude. But the Alpaca Hoodie won us over for its 50/50 blend of wool and alpaca and the Baja poncho–inspired design. Yes, it’s more casual than some on this list, but you don’t always need to go full prep school.

Buy Now

---

Buck Mason may not have the lineage of some other brands on this list, but the California-based company takes a classic approach to design, combining proven manufacturing techniques with a modern sensibility. The goal is always quality, like this cardigan made from merino wool and a touch of cashmere. It’s a button-down sweater that will never go out of style.

Buy Now

---

Filson went to Scotland to have this sweater knitted using three-gauge wool yarn in a seam-free technique that adds comfort and durability. It’s undyed and understated, which means you’ll probably want to wear this crewneck every day.

Buy Now

---

Everyone needs a chunky fisherman’s sweater, and Finisterre goes authentic with its version, using a British wool that undergoes minimal processing to give the sweater a natural feel (and smell). The wool even retains some of its natural water repellency, so you’re basically wearing an Irish sheep.

Buy Now

Click:check balance my gift card
When Jen Ripple learned the rich history of female anglers, she thought it was about time they had their own publication

Job: Publisher and editor in chief of DUN magazine
Home Base: Dover, Tennessee
Age: 50
Education: Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin

Jen Ripple didn’t know what fly-fishing was when she stepped into a fly shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ten years ago. She was working for the University of Michigan and, with little else to do during the particularly cold winter, had signed up for a fly-tying seminar on a whim. “I liked tying flies, so when the ice was off the river, I started fishing,” Ripple says. Soon she was spending hours each week on the banks of Lake Huron. “After that, I just fell further and further into the black hole that is fly-fishing.”

Ripple was a mother of four in a sport that labels participants fly-fishermen, but that didn’t bother her. After moving to Chicago, she joined another fly-tying group, which was led by the editor of a new Midwestern fishing magazine called A Tight Loop. He hired her to write a column giving a woman’s perspective on the sport. “It was mostly double entendre stuff,” Ripple says. “One article I wrote was titled ‘Sex Hatch,’ and another one was ‘Eight Inches.’”

Feeling stunted, she started looking for fly-fishing magazines aimed at women. There weren’t any. So, in 2013, without any other media experience, she started her own: DUN magazine, named for the just-hatched stage in the life cycle of a mayfly, one of the most famous flies in fly-fishing. In that first year, Ripple built four digital magazine issues, each upwards of 200 pages packed full of how-tos, expressive photography, and personal essays. Every story was written by a woman.

The online issues were met with so much enthusiasm that she decided to make a print issue in the spring of 2017. “I was talking with a friend of mine, a very respected man in the industry,” Ripple says. “He said, ‘Jen, that’s great. You’re gonna have one magazine, and it’s gonna be wonderful. But you’ll only ever have one magazine, because there aren’t enough women that fish.’ It didn’t even bother me, because I knew he was wrong.” The fourth issue, produced by what is now a nine-person staff, hits newsstands this fall.

On the Best Advice She’s Received: “It came from a National Geographic photographer, Perry Rech. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they’re saying as long as they’re saying something.’ I never imagined that the negative criticism out there about DUN was directed at me. I was just happy people were talking about the magazine.”

On Her Perfect Day: “I would wake up in Punta Gorda, Belize, in this place called the Belcampo Lodge (recently renamed Copal Tree Lodge). It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. I’d walk down to the beautiful little restaurant, get a cup of coffee, smell the saltwater and hear the birds, and look out over the water and see fish right there. Then it’s into the skiff, racing across the water. You stand in the front of a flats boat with a fly rod in your hand for what seems like hours until the next bonefish or tarpon or permit comes along. You cast to them. And if you miss them, it doesn’t really matter. There’s just something about being out on the saltwater. I grew up on a lake in Wisconsin, and my Grandma always said when you live on a lake, you have water in your veins.”

On Her Favorite Piece of Gear: “The Yeti Panga. It’s a duffel bag that turns into a backpack. I wear it when I fish, and I travel with it. It has a drysuit zipper and is completely waterproof. It saved my life when I was fishing in North Carolina. I was carrying my gear and had my Panga on my back. I slipped down an embankment and fell into a 15-foot ravine, at the bottom of which was the river. My waders immediately filled with water. I’m a really good swimmer, so I usually don’t get nervous in the water, but I knew I was in trouble. Then, all of a sudden, I realized the Panga on my back was floating. I turned it around and held it to my front and kicked to the shore. That was scary.”

On Her Best Fly-Fishing Tip: “I remind myself that fly-fishing isn’t neurosurgery. It’s supposed to be fun. So I never get too worked up about it.”

On the First Female Fly-Fishing Writer: “I love A Treatise of Fishing with an Angle by Dame Juliana Berners. Dame Juliana was a nun of noble birth and wrote the book in 1496. I always thought she wrote it because she was a nun who was bored, had money, and liked to fish. Then I did the research and found out that’s not true. She likely wrote the book because in 1496, an activity had to be sanctioned by the church in order for you to do it. A priest had to have a document to bless in order to sanction it, and this treatise is that document that allowed her to fish.”

On the History of Women in the Sport: “When I first got into fly-fishing, I thought women were new to the sport. Then I found out we’ve been here since 1496, and that the way we tie our streamer flies is attributed to a woman, and that the ‘bait and switch’ method we use to catch billfish on the fly came from a woman. A woman was one of the most prominent guides in Maine when Teddy Roosevelt fished there in 1878. The story of women in fly-fishing is huge. It gives me and the women in the sport now a foundation.”

On the Challenges of Being a Female Editor and Publisher: “In the beginning stages, I realized it was just a good old boys’ club. Let’s just say that the ad guy responsible for a big manufacturer isn’t going to take a deal away from his friend who takes him fishing in the Bahamas, even if I prove to him that I could get him more business. That’s his friend. I might not like it, but it makes sense.”

On Attitudes Toward Women in Fly-Fishing: “There is, unfortunately, that vocal minority of men out there who say, ‘I don’t care if women fish. I just don’t want them on my rivers.’ Or, in the fly shop, the guy who says, ‘Are you here to buy something for your husband?’ But that’s so small. And it’s not really the whole reality of the sport, I don’t think. I spoke at a Chicago fly-fishing convention yesterday and asked for all the women in the audience whose father, son, or uncle got them into fly-fishing to raise their hands. It was like 99 percent of them. Often male figures are the ones who got a woman involved in the sport.”

An Italian cyclist takes aim at the sport’s most storied record, with the aid of a controversial fuel.

At a high-altitude velodrome in Mexico last October, Italian cyclist Vittoria Bussi missed the world one-hour cycling record of 47,980 meters by a scant 404 meters. That margin was remarkable given Bussi’s unlikely pedigree: the 30-year-old ex-runner had started cycling less than four years earlier, while completing her doctorate in pure mathematics at the University of Oxford.
 
The 400-meter margin also had a curious mathematical resonance. While Bussi was laboring over her thesis, less than a mile away Oxford biochemists—including Bussi’s cycling coach, Tom Kirk—were studying the endurance-boosting properties of ketones, a form of emergency fuel produced by the body when it senses starvation is approaching that can provide muscles with an alternate source of energy beyond the usual carbohydrates, protein, and fat. In July 2016, they announced their results with the following headline boast: “A drink developed for soldiers to generate energy from ketones rather than carbs or fat allowed highly trained cyclists to add up to 400 meters of distance to their workouts.”
 
It’s no surprise, then, that Bussi will be heading back to the velodrome on September 12 in Aguascalientes for another assault on the Hour—this time using ketones in an attempt to eke out those extra 404 meters. Her effort is being partly underwritten by HVMN, the Silicon Valley company which now sells the Oxford ketone drink for an eye-popping price of just over $30 a bottle. When I wrote about HVMN’s new ketone drink for Outside earlier this year, I ended the article with a question mark, noting that “the true size and nature of the edge—or lack thereof—that ketones offer in real-world settings will likely take years to sort out.” But if ketones can carry Bussi to a new world record, the company hopes those doubts will begin to dissipate. 

In theory, ketones offer a way of supplying additional energy to your muscles during exercise, delaying the point at which they run out of carbohydrate. But demonstrating this in practice has proven to be difficult, partly because of the challenges of making a palatable and affordable ketone drink. The Oxford researchers developed a formulation based on a chemical form known as ketone esters that partly addresses these challenges: it’s still not cheap, but it’s a bargain compared to the $25,000-a-dose price tag in their initial experiments. Their 2016 study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, found a 400-meter boost in performance during a cycling trial that lasted 30 minutes—a promising finding, but one that hasn’t yet been replicated despite other attempts.
 
How that boost might translate to an assault on the Hour record isn’t entirely clear. When I asked Geoffrey Woo, HVMN’s CEO, how much benefit he expected Bussi to get from the drink, he was cagey. “We think she’ll cover an additional 400 to 800 meters this second attempt,” he said—but he was careful to note that such improvements would be due to “added experience and training” in addition to the ketone factor. Bussi herself told me that she has made significant changes to her riding position since last year, thanks to wind tunnel testing with aerodynamics expert Simon Smart.
 
Not coincidentally, all this is reminiscent of Nike’s Breaking2 project last year, which Woo cites as an inspiration. In their pursuit of a two-hour marathon, Nike had a groundbreaking pair of shoes to market which they claimed (with good reason, apparently) would make runners four percent more efficient. But they also spent a lot of effort optimizing the race course and the aerodynamics of the pacemaking team and various other factors—so when Eliud Kipchoge ran a remarkable 2:00:25, it was very difficult to know how much of the performance to attribute to the shoes versus the other factors. The project’s strength, which was that it was a real-world test outside the lab, also limited the conclusions that could be drawn.
 
The same will inevitably be true of Bussi’s attempt on the Hour record, which is currently held by American cyclist Evelyn Stevens: success won’t prove that ketones work, and neither will failure prove that they don’t. But seeing a top-level cyclist try it with full transparency will nonetheless be interesting. There have many rumors about pro cyclists and other top athletes using ketones, but not much solid information. When I wrote my earlier article about HVMN, the company initially promised to connect me with “professional athletes that have benefited from HVMN Ketone,” but eventually backed away from that promise citing confidentiality agreements.
 
Bussi has only been experimenting with the drink since June, and admits that “the taste is not great.” She normally likes to eat nothing but white rice before training or competing, so adapting to a pre-race drink that many people find stomach-churning will be a significant challenge. For now, her plan is to drink between 1 and 1.5 bottles of the ketone drink roughly 90 minutes before the race. So far, she reports, the drink seems to give her “extra energy in the last part of the effort and more mental focus.”
 
In the end, Bussi’s decision to use ketones will generate some controversy. Is her record attempt now just a giant marketing stunt? If she narrowly beats Stevens’ record, will the record be tainted by the use of a new super-fuel? I understand these criticisms. Still, after some reflection, I’d ultimately like to see more moonshot projects like this. A big record attempt will never replace careful laboratory science. But it does offer another sort of reality check: if your new product can really make athletes better than rival products, why not prove it by helping someone go faster or farther than any human has gone before? It’s a great proof-of-principle—and no less importantly, as Breaking2 demonstrated, it can also be a ton of fun to watch.

---

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.

>

There’s been much talk among scientists of late about becoming better storytellers. What’s needed to convey scientific findings to the public, they say, is a device to isolate the signal from the noise: a good old-fashioned plotline.

Enter ecologist Lauren E. Oakes and In Search of the Canary Tree ($27, Basic Books), a debut effort in which she storifies the five years of research that earned her a doctorate in 2015 from Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. Part memoir and part adventure yarn, with pen and ink illustrations by Kate Cahill, Oakes’s book is an attempt to put a human face on hard science.

She transports the reader from Stanford’s gladed campus to southeast Alaska’s temperate rainforest, where she braves brown bears, rough seas, and thickets of devil’s club to survey 50 stands of Callitropsis nootkatensis. Otherwise known as the Alaskan yellow-cedar, the species has been slowly succumbing to climate change in the lower latitudes of the Alexander Archipelago. Archetypal characters guide her—call it the fellowship of the growth ring—consisting of wise elders, eccentric helpers, and even an old man of the forest, the Yoda-like Greg Streveler, who counsels her to pay heed to that which cannot be measured. She comes away from the yellow-cedar killing fields with a fundamentally altered view about what it means to be a scientist in the Anthropocene: “I didn’t want to become an ecologist to monitor a living species to extinction, write it up for a journal, and move on to the next study,” she writes.

So she didn’t.

Taking Streveler’s advice, Oakes observes the built and natural landscapes of southeast Alaska for six years to determine how both human and plant communities will cope with the cedar’s departure. First she uses environmental science to quantify the yellow-cedar’s dieback and succession (cataloging metrics like tree height and canopy density). Next she employs social science (interviews, mainly) in the frontcountry to gauge the local citizens’ reactions to the tree’s decline. Call it the human-plant interface, the canary in the book’s title. As goes the yellow-cedar, so go we.

In one pivotal scene, essentially a hack into the book’s thesis, Oakes interviews the late Teri Rofkar, a Tlingit weaver, who says it plain: while the earth will persevere, climate change will go hard on humanity until we find some way to cooperate—and soon.

That conversation takes place years after Oakes had surveyed 40 low-elevation stands of dead and dying yellow-cedars on the outer coast of Chichagof Island and other places farther north in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, where the trees still flourish. The yellow-cedar, Oakes explains, has survived southeast Alaska’s harsh winters for millennia, thanks to snow blanketing its roots and the annual release of a kind of antifreeze throughout its vasculature—a process called dehardening. But early-season thaws effectively drain the antifreeze, and rain falls in the lower elevations where snow once did. When cold snaps follow, the trees freeze to death.

Yet for Oakes, the yellow-cedar is an emblem of survival. She describes how the trees “migrate,” their seedlings finding tenacious purchase in widely scattered ecological pockets that seem promising for survival, an adaptive predilection scientists can’t quite explain. Humans similarly adapt, observes Oakes, especially when they work together toward a common cause. “We see what goes on and adapt for thousands of years,” Ernestine Hanlon-Abel, a Chilkat weaver from Hoonah, tells Oakes. In the 1700s, the Glacier Bay Tlingit people fled the advance of the Little Ice Age by relocating south, to Chichagof Island, and settled the village of Hoonah.

Change and loss: Oakes isn’t exempt. She quotes her field journal: “We are constantly working to stay warm, to access our sites, paddling, hiking, scrambling, hanging bear bags, hollering, measuring… Middle of the night, waking to hunger pangs.” She shuttles between wilderness and modernity with the accompanying angst. Her boyfriend dumps her by sat phone. “What do you mean ‘you can’t do this thing,’” Oakes asks. “This thing,” replies the boyfriend. “Like us.” At that moment, a brown bear emerges from the bush. “I gotta go,” says Oakes. “Hey bear. Heyyyyy bear.” She stands her ground, avoids eye contact, and survives the encounter. 

Then one evening, back in Palo Alto, she learns that her father has died. In shock, she runs into a rainy night in her socks, toward a cliff fronting the Pacific Ocean. A faceless man carrying a sleeping bag emerges from the shadows of a Monterey pine, which is distantly related to the yellow-cedar. He stops, and they silently regard one another, but her gaze moves to the tree. “I traced the shadow of the trunk back to the tree and looked up toward its branches. They fanned out in layers with their flat tops reaching for the sea,” she writes. But when the man takes a step forward, she thinks, What am I doing? Go home. She does and reaches a “white picket fence, a familiar fence that bordered a yard a couple blocks from home.” This is a rich scene, an exploration of the shear zone between the frontier and civilization, wilderness and society: despite our yearning for the former, we’ve disrupted and abused it—both the land and its Indigenous settlers. Now we’re impelled to return to the latter, which is where, perhaps, the hard work of reconciliation and the way forward begins.

If the book’s central plot device is Oakes’s maturation as a scientist, then the plot suffers as she shifts her inquiry from the wild fringe of the Pacific to the homes that border it. We miss scenes of the near hypothermic Oakes and her ragtag team battling the elements in the name of science: here her dialogue with academics and tribal elders, although intimate and vulnerable, seems to have been lifted straight from the interview transcripts. Action turns to reflection as Oakes recapitulates the themes with which we’ve already become familiar, such as loss, regeneration, connection to landscape, cooperation, adaptation, and hope. Oakes seems to be using the book less as a cudgel than a rhetorical vehicle to answer her own questions about the fate of species—ours and the yellow-cedar’s.

With good reason. It’s been three decades since NASA scientist James Hansen concluded, in testimony before Congress, that the changing climate was human caused. And for too long, Oakes reminds us, we’ve viewed nature as a resource well, something to be hewn, mined, and domesticated. That mindset doesn’t work anymore. As recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government make clear, the dangers of the runaway climate couldn’t be more present or clear. 

The yellow-cedar’s prognosis? Overall, not good. Oakes is a bit more bullish about Homo sapiens, although there’s no deus ex machina in her plotline; we’ll need our own dose of dehardening to find the will to work together. Meanwhile, we can take inspiration from the surviving pockets of yellow-cedar and adapt to the changes as best as we humans can.

In 2016, Outside wrote about Oakes’s Stanford colleague Nik Sawe, who transformed her yellow-cedar data into music. The topic was the subject of an Outside podcast.

>

When it comes to sleeping outdoors, the insulation level of your sleeping pad is one of the most important factors there is in determining your comfort. But many consumers aren’t aware of the need for sleeping-pad insulation, most don’t know how much insulation they need, and no one has the ability to compare the insulation of one pad to another. All that’s about to change, as REI and its Canadian equivalent, MEC, will begin requiring the brands they carry to report a standardized R-value rating in 2020. 

R-value is a measure of how well something resists the conductive flow of heat. The higher the number, the better it is at insulating you from the cold. So if you’re going camping, it’s an important number to know. Without insulation below you, the cold ground will zap the heat out of your body as you sleep. And your body compresses the insulation in the portion of the sleeping bag you lie on, meaning it’s the pad that provides the key insulation beneath your body. 

Did you know that, in order to achieve its advertised temperature rating, your sleeping bag needs to be used in conjunction with a 4.0 R-value pad?I didn’t, at least not till I hopped on the phone with Greg Dean and Brandon Bowers from Therm-a-Rest’s design team. For some perspective, the brand's ultra popular, ultralight pad, the NeoAir XLite only ranks a 3.2. You likely need a higher R-value pad than you're currently using just to get the most out of your sleeping bag.

“The R-value measurement is very pure,” Dean says. You’ll see some brands list the insulation abilities of their pads in temperature ratings or even applicable seasons. But none of these metrics give you a hard number detailing just how good at insulating your pad really is.

Trouble is, many sleeping-pad makers don’t currently release this information (if they even test for it), and no one uses a standardized methodology so you can accurately compare one brand’s R-values with the next. You cannot currently shop for which sleeping pad best meets your needs without actually testing all of them. Heck, I’ve done that, and I can’t even offer you a precise assessment of their warmth. 

This obviously creates a glaring need, and it’s one REI and MEC set out to address by creating an industry-wide working group to develop a unified test methodology back in 2016. After nearly three years of work, that standard was just published by ASTM International. The new methodology will enable various sleeping-pad makers to test in identical conditions and release like-for-like numbers that consumers will be able to use to cross-shop. Just like you can can compare performance and fuel economy across multiple cars, this new standard will, for the first time, allow you to compare the insulation levels of sleeping pads, in addition to their thickness and weight. 

To determine the R-value of a sleeping pad, ASTM standard F3340 dictates a test in which the pad is squeezed between a hot plate on the top and a cold plate on the bottom—replicating the location and weight of a sleeping human. Variables like ambient temperature and humidity levels are also controlled for, as is the inflation pressure of the pad, if it inflates. That cold plate is then held at 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit), while the hot plate is heated to 35 degrees Celsius. Over four hours, the energy required to maintain the hot plate’s temperature is measured. The less energy it takes, the better the pad is at insulating. F3340 dictates that three examples of a given pad should be tested, and they should be sampled across three test locations at different areas on the pad, to account for differences in construction and thickness. The average of those numbers is determined, and that in turn becomes a pad’s listed R-value. It’s this number that REI and MEC will begin displaying to consumers come 2020. 

That methodology is actually very similar to the way in which Therm-a-Rest currently tests its pads. In fact, of the three $50,000 standardized test machines currently in existence, one lives in Therm-a-Rest’s Seattle factory. The other two belong to REI and MEC. Bowers and Dean tell me that some small changes in methodology created by the new standard will shift the brands’ advertised R-values up or down by a small amount, but overall they’re excited for the category’s newfound transparency. 

“Currently, you can report whatever you want,” says Bowers. “We believe our products perform at a high level, so we’re glad to have this more accurate comparison.”

Of course, R-value is only one piece of the puzzle that is sleeping comfortably outside. Consumers will still need to account for varying approaches to providing support and stability, outright thickness of the pad, and its noise level. That’s in addition to weight and packed size, resistance to punctures, and of course price. There are also practices users can employ to get the most of out of their pads, like inflating them with a pump in order to keep heat-sapping moisture from your breath out of them, and minimizing the portion of the pad exposed to cold air. But Bowers and Dean see the adoption of a unified R-value standard as an important first step in empowering campers to enjoy better sleep. 

“We need to educate people in a meaningful way what R-value means for them,” Dean says. Starting in a little over a year, we’re at least going to have the data necessary to do that. 

International flights don’t have to break the bank—even when your budget is zero

The skyrocketing cost of plane tickets—thanks in large part to the rising cost of jet fuel—can make or break a vacation before it even leaves the planning stage. But if your schedule and destination are flexible and youre willing to put in a little extra work, its relatively easy to snag a low-cost flight to just about anywhere in the world.

Score a Free Trip to Hawaii

Or anywhere 30,000 miles will get you. Most airline credit cards give you enough miles to book a round-trip flight from Seattle to Honolulu or Los Angeles to Cancun just for signing up. Depending on which card you snag, other perks can include extras such as no blackout dates, free checked bags, priority boarding, and discounts on hotels, car rentals, and cruises.

Play Destination Roulette

Plug your travel dates and home airport into Kayak Explore or Google Flights to find prices for trips to everywhere in the world. All you have to do is pick out a great deal. Last summer, we snagged $414 round-trip tickets from LAX to Barcelona. If your final destination isn’t cheap, try finding the closest inexpensive flight, then check rates for trains or cheap regional airlines like Ryanair to get you those last few miles.

Book a Long Icelandic Layover

If you’re flying out of Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Denver, or San Francisco to major European cities like Dublin, Paris, London, Milan, or Zurich, book with Icelandair for a free layover in Reykjavik, or the rest of Iceland for that matter, without any additional cost. Visit the country’s famed hot springs, geysers, and glaciers, or schedule an adventure like heli-skiing the powder-filled mountains of the Troll Peninsula. Bonus: Flights can be pretty cheap. We flew round-trip from Seattle to Zurich with a stopover in Reykjavik for just over $400 each.

Pay Your Dues

Charge everything you can to your airline credit card while paying off the bill each month and you’ll rack up miles without racking up debt. Big-ticket items like a new computer or sofa go a long way, but if you use the card for recurring bills like gym memberships and utilities, you’ll be getting free flights in no time.

Stay in the Loop

Sign up for alerts from sites like TravelPirates or Scott’s Cheap Flights, which scan the web for the cheapest flights, including mistaken price listings that airlines are forced to honor, and you’ll receive a daily email with some of the best deals around.

>

A young boy is prone to thinking that his father is the toughest man on earth. “My dad could beat up your dad!” is the clichéd taunt, but there’s sometimes a truth in the conviction behind it.

“My dad could beat up your dad!”

“My dad could bend a steel bar!”

“My dad could ride a bicycle 120 miles covering 11,000 feet of elevation gain at altitudes that give visitors acute mountain sickness and then do it all again the next day!”

I don’t think I ever actually sneered that last phrase aloud on the schoolyard, but it was true about my father.

When I was three years old, my dad, Michael, organized a bike ride near our house in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains called the Triple Bypass. It was named for the three mountain passes it climbed: Juniper Pass (on Mount Evans, a 14er), Loveland Pass (the Continental Divide), and Vail Pass, totaling 10,990 feet of climbing over 120 miles. He served as the chairman for the ride for the first two years, starting in 1989. In the words of former club president Carol Mickelberg in an article in the local Canyon Courier: “It’s all Michael Dern’s fault…It was an awesome challenge with a great name. He had us all sold on it before anyone had ever done the ride.” My mom, who has completed the ride several times herself, had this quote printed on T-shirts she made to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ride, five years ago.

In the three decades of its existence, the ride has taken on a life of its own, with more than 3,000 riders each year generating over $2.2 million in donations for nonprofits like the Special Olympics. And thanks to the passage of time, more recent articles about the ride in larger papers like the Denver Post don’t mention my father’s name.

My first two attempts to complete the ride were thwarted—once in 2012 by my own fitness level, resulting in a DNF around mile 60, and once in 2017 by wildfires that caused the ride to be canceled the night before. This past July was my third attempt. My father, who is 63, was watching from the side of the road.

I’m not a serious cyclist. In fact, it would be misleading to call me a cyclist at all. I am an occasional bike commuter. Heading into the ride, I would put my odds of completing it as the same as my chances of remembering which way to hit my shifter to move my chain down on the big ring: 50-50.

Outside of cycling, I’ve made various attempts at acts of physical toughness over the years to prove to my myself that I, like my father before me, am a Tough Man. And since we no longer wrestle our dads amid a throng of jeering relatives to prove that we have turned into Tough Men, I’ve had to seek out other avenues.

If I could distill my dad’s motto into three words, they would be: “Work hard, quietly.” My dad stays late at the office, even if the boss isn’t around to give him credit for doing so. He picks up trash from the side of a busy road, even if thoughtless motorists are just going to litter more the next day. I guess you call that integrity.

I wrestled in high school like my dad did (while I usually lost, our attic is filled with trophies from tournaments my dad won), and I’ve run marathons (still not as fast as my dad’s fastest, but I’m gaining on him). Finishing my father’s Triple Bypass feels like the last obstacle in the father-son challenge that I’ve imagined myself to be competing in my entire life. There’s been no overt goading from my father, but the example he set is enough.

---

The sun is just starting to think about rising over the mountains of Colorado on July 14, 2018, and I’m starting my Triple Bypass journey with a few of my dad’s riding buddies, who are three decades my senior. After my dad sees us off from the Evergreen Rec Center parking lot, his friend John mentions that my dad should be riding with us—some health issues have caused him to take a break from riding, and he’s been slow to return to the saddle. “Your dad is all or nothing,” John remarks. “He needs to be the guy leading the pack or else he sits it out.”

I’m quickly at the back of the pack. My dad’s friends are jovial as we start off, talking about frame sizes and gear ratios. I’m somber, thinking about how I haven’t prepared as well as I should have, making excuses about a busy work schedule and then mentally berating myself for making those excuses.

As we settle into the ride—an immediate 6 percent grade climb, with me barely hanging on—I resist the urge to check my Garmin watch, afraid at how small the distance traveled will be. I attempt to get in the zone and just ride, but I soon give in and look. Too soon. Three miles in, to be exact. The number taunts me. Three miles? It’s somewhere near 5:30 a.m., and as I slowly spin up the 3,000 vertical feet to the 11,140-foot summit of Juniper Pass, I do the math that I’m only 1/40th of the way through the ride. I start to think about how tired I feel already. I know that’s a dangerous avenue of thought to go down, so I try to distract myself.

Out of nowhere, a mantra floats into my mind. In the voice of Ellen DeGeneres’s Dory character from Finding Nemo, I update her catchphrase for the task at hand: “Just keep spinning. Just keep spinning. Just keep spinn-ing, spinn-ing, spinn-ing.” I have the thought that this mantra isn’t exactly the greatest evidence to prove to myself that I am a Tough Man, but silly as it is, it works. I pedal on, and memories begin to drift through my head.

It’s 1989, I'm almost five years old, and I’m on the side of the road with my mom somewhere near the base of Loveland Pass. It’s the first year of the Triple Bypass. My memory is impressionistic, spotty but vivid. I remember that we’re at an aid station, handing out little paper cups of water and Gatorade to riders who are stopping to rest. They look exhausted, and they’re not even halfway done. Suddenly, my mom is cheering louder than she was for the strangers. My dad is approaching us at a grueling pace, blowing past other riders. He doesn’t stop for aid. My mom cheers him on as he rides past us.

Back in the present, I reach the aid station at the top of the Juniper Pass. I’ve fallen off the pace set by my dad’s friends. Alone, I put on my neon windproof jacket for the descent, and as I approach 40 miles per hour and my hands begin to go numb from pumping the breaks, other memories drift in.

I’m 11 years old, and I’m going with my mom to pick up my father at a gas station after he got into an altercation with a driver while he was on a ride. The short version of the story is that a driver passed my dad dangerously close, and my dad confronted the driver when he spotted the car at a gas station farther down the road. The driver then attempted to run my dad over, knocking him and his bike to the ground. From the ground, my father ripped the license plate off the car with his bare hands. So even though the car sped away, he was able to give the license plate number, literally, to the police. The driver—who turned out to be intoxicated—was arrested.

---

After the thrilling descent from Juniper Pass and passing by the picturesque Echo Lake, I begin the long slog up the frontage road past the sleepy mining towns of Idaho Springs and Georgetown. This section of climbing, though not officially a pass ascent, is the most mentally difficult part of the ride for me. It’s a deceptively steep grade and doesn’t have any obvious markers of progress or beautiful mountain views to keep you motivated. It was during this section that I quit on my first attempt, five years ago, when I felt myself bonking as I arrived at the aid station at the base of Loveland Pass.

This time, I prevent the option of stopping from entering my mind by keeping up my mantra—just keep spinning—and I enter a meditative state. Another memory floats by. I’m 15 and a freshman at Evergreen High School. My best friend Scott and I are putting on self-tanner in my basement for a choreographed lip sync at the homecoming week talent show. You know, just the normal stuff that young boys transitioning into being Tough Men do. We’re applying the self-tanner, of course, because the costumes that I’ve made require us to be shirtless except for suspenders, and we’re worried about appearing too pale in front of our classmates. Because that would be embarrassing. My father walks in from work at the moment that I have just smeared a dollop of the product on Scott’s hard-to-reach lower back. I lock eyes with my dad. He passes us silently as he walks up the stairs, disregarding us like an aid station he did not need.

I reach the base of Loveland Pass and see my mom and dad. Each in character, my mom is cheering for me while my dad looks on stoically. My mom supports me by giving me the support that she would like to receive: She praises me, gives me the option of a variety of drinks and snacks, poses for a photo with me, and asks me if I need anything. My dad supports me by giving me the support that he would like to receive: an affirming nod and a pat on the back, as he then steps back to let me get on with it.

As I ride on, I feel a twinge of sadness that my dad isn’t doing the ride this year. It’s a ride he has done 11 times before. Several times, he’s followed it up with completing the reverse route the very next day—a “Double Triple Bypass.” I always assumed he would keep doing the ride up until he was the age of 120. Just a few years ago, my dad logged more than 10,000 cycling miles for the year, commuting to work on his bike most days. I’ve always admired my dad’s toughness, but now I recognize that it can be a double-edged sword. The same instinct that led my dad to skip an aid station also led him to put off doctor’s appointments.

---

At the Loveland aid station, I realize that I’ve caught up with my dad’s riding buddies. The section that beat me on my previous attempt is behind me, and I’m feeling emboldened. I let the rest of the group know that I’m going to head out alone. An hour later, I’m on top of the Continental Divide, two out of three passes done. Even though I’m exhausted and still have 60 miles and another mountain pass to go, I know I will finish this time. I just have to keep spinning.

In the hours of riding through the breathtakingly beautiful Colorado mountains that follow, I think about my dad and what it means to be a man. I think about the difference between toughness and stubbornness, about the strength it takes to keep working when you want to quit, and about asking for help when you need it.

When I got married last year, my father gave me a book called Letters to My Son: A Father’s Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love. In my dad’s characteristic dry wit, he gave it to me with the message “From the co-author.” My dad doesn’t exactly gravitate toward touchy-feely stuff, so in a way the gesture felt like him asking the author, Kent Nerburn, for some help in that arena. I like the book. Although some passages feel like the sort of platitudes you hear from a friend after a psychedelic experience, other passages feel as profound as the realizations you might have yourself during a psychedelic experience, as trite as they may feel to say aloud.

As I approach the aid station at Copper Mountain, near the 80-mile mark, a chapter from Nerburn’s book, on sports and competition, returns to me. Nerburn tells the following anecdote about asking a runner friend, upon seeing him retching after a mile track workout, why he puts himself through the misery:

He walked back up the track to a point about ten yards before the finish line, then drew a line in the cinders with the toe of his shoe. “Why do I run the mile?” he said. “I do it for these last ten yards. In these last ten yards I learn more about myself than I could on any psychiatrist’s couch.” In that one sentence, he had isolated one of the most profound reasons to participate in sports: “the last ten yards.” Every sport has them, whether they be in the form of the last few minutes of a game or the last few inches of a putt. They are the moments when the body and the will are tested to the fullest.

I like many of Nerburn’s insights, and he seems like a great person to talk about life’s big questions with over a beer. But I disagree with him on this point about the last ten yards, and I think my dad would too. From my experience, the last ten yards are easy. In the last ten yards, you can see the finish line, people are cheering for you, you’re almost done. Anyone can be a hero in the last ten yards. The middle of a great effort is the hard part. When the finish line is far off and your suffering isn’t recognized by anyone. This is the effort of spinning between the peaks. I guess you call that integrity.

Outside the Copper Mountain aid station, at the base of the final pass of the day, I’m riding strong—not a grueling pace, but a strong pace for me—when I see my father and mother up ahead, cheering for me. I hesitate about whether I should stop and rest. I think about what my dad would do. I wave and smile, and then I keep going.

I finished the ride three months ago. Both of my pinky fingers are still numb, I assume from braking so hard on the descents, coupled with my overall lack of adequate training. It’s possible that my ulnar nerve has become compressed, a condition known colloquially as “cyclist’s palsy.” If it doesn’t start to feel better soon, I’m going to go to call the doctor.

Rarely will you find a fitness tip that is equally applicable to all areas of your life.

As an athlete, if you want to improve something—your 100-meter time, say, or your deadlift PR—you’ve got to apply a challenge, some sort of “stressor,” and then follow it with a period of rest and recovery. Too much stress without enough rest and you get injury, illness, and burnout. Not enough stress plus too much rest and you get complacency, boredom, and stagnation.

Stress + Rest = Growth. It’s as simple and as hard as that.

Since Peak Performance was published a little over a year ago, no theme from the book has garnered as much attention as that equation. And for good reason. The American College of Sports Medicine, the country’s premier body on the application of fitness science, has officially endorsed training in this manner to increase size and strength. Meanwhile, a 2015 study published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology found that best endurance athletes in the world all have one thing in common: they oscillate between periods of stress and rest.

And yet the more feedback I get from readers, the more I see how that equation can be beneficially applied not just to fitness but to all areas of life.  Below are a few of the most common examples, along with some practical advice on how to make what I’ve come to call the “Growth Equation” work for you.

Grow Your Career

When I’m coaching non-athlete clients who are striving to excel professionally, I start by asking them where they want to be in their careers and what they are doing to get there. In my experience, people in the workplace—myself included—tend to fall into one of two traps: either getting stuck in a rut where they are just going through the motions or taking on so much hard work at once that they become completely overwhelmed. Neither is conducive to long-term progression.

I encourage my clients to systematically challenge—to stress—themselves in the direction they want to grow. And then I ask them to follow those challenges with rest and reflection. What went well? What didn’t go well? What could I do differently next time?

Career progression is generally more complex than going from a 6-minute mile to a 5:45 mile; or from squatting 200 pounds to 210 pounds. It’s harder to dial in the right amount of “stress.” On a scale of one to ten—with one being "I could do this in my sleep" and ten being "this is giving me panic attacks"—I ask my clients to take on projects that they’d rate a seven; assignments that they think they’d get right seven or eight out of 10 times, but not every time. These are just-manageable challenges.

Another way to think about stress in the context of career growth is something I got from my co-author on Peak Performance, Steve Magness. He says: “Ask yourself, ‘What’s the next logical step?’ And then do that.” For example, if you’re used to presenting to middle managers, try to create a situation where you’re in front of a vice-president. If you manage a team of five, talk with your boss about trying to expand that to seven or eight.

Just make sure you don’t go from challenge to challenge without giving yourself some time to catch your breath. Much like a muscle grows in between challenging workouts, career growth is more sustainable if you respect the need to rest, recover, and reflect in between challenging projects.

Grow Your Team and Organization

What do Kodak, Blockbuster Video, Borders Books, and the Cleveland Browns have in common? They were all busy doing things the same old way over and over again when the world around them was changing; they neglected to “stress” themselves in the direction of growth. The first three are out of business and the Browns are perennially at the bottom of the NFL.

What do Google and the San Antonio Spurs have in common? They all continue to evolve their strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Google does this by extending into new markets—think: from an internet search-engine to self-driving cars. The Spurs do it by constantly evaluating and adjusting their style of play, including overseas recruiting of little-known players who become hard-to-guard stars. An area of business research called Organizational Ecology says that organizations that are forward-looking, reflective, and challenge themselves to grow tend to survive and sustain their performance over time.

Grow Your Relationships

I am by no means an expert on relationships, but something that comes up repeatedly in the Q and A part of my workshops is how the growth equation tends to apply here, too. Be it friendships or romantic relationships, people in audiences always call this out. Bonds strengthen after two people experience a challenge together and then openly reflect on it. A handful of experts think the same. But just like in the other contexts, too much “stress” without enough rest and the relationship can flame out. 

Make the Growth Equation Work for You

• Pick an area of your life.
• Reflect on where you currently are and where you want to be.
• Think about whether you ought to be in a state of stress—taking on just-manageable challenges—or in a state of rest, recovery, and reflection.
• Align your behavior accordingly.
• Check in every few weeks, just like you would for any other training program, and evaluate your progress.

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

It’s the seemingly mundane storms that will catch you off guard. Here’s how to never let that happen.

Big storms really do keep meteorologists awake at night, but the most dangerous ones aren’t the epic disasters you see on the Weather Channel. No, the greatest threat to your safety likely isn’t a scale-topping hurricane or a tornado that scours a hole in the earth. Instead, it will be a preventable tragedy, the result of an everyday storm we ordinarily wouldn’t think twice about. 

Take some examples that all happened this summer. Strong winds ahead of a severe thunderstorm in July capsized an amphibious duck boat on a lake near Branson, Missouri, killing 17 passengers—the highest death toll of any single U.S. thunderstorm since 24 people died in the EF-5 tornado that tore through Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013. Fourteen people were injured by falling debris in August when a strong thunderstorm struck a casino in Oklahoma City where people were waiting for a concert to begin. Earlier that month, an intense hailstorm at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs injured 16 people when ice pelts as large as baseballs hit the area.

What can we learn from these incidents? The threat posed by storms at outdoor events is far greater than you might think—but the harm is also entirely preventable.  

Now, I’m not here to feed potential weather phobias; I've spent years covering the weather in a way that counters the hype you hear everywhere else. The weather on most days will behave normally and most people will get through most thunderstorms just fine. But things can change in a hurry and staying a step ahead of mercurial weather could make all the difference—especially if you’re going to be spending an extended amount of time outdoors.

The thing is, severe-weather warning systems have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few decades, which means you really have no excuse to venture outside—be it just into town or into the backcountry—without some inkling of what type of weather to expect. Weather models and forecasting techniques have advanced to the point that NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center can issue accurate severe thunderstorm forecasts many days in advance. Doppler weather radar allows meteorologists to see damaging winds and tornadoes before they strike, giving people in harm’s way up to an hour of warning, in some cases. While meteorologists still have plenty of work to do on the false-alarm rate—it's around 70 percent for tornado warnings and 50 percent for severe thunderstorm warnings—most dangerous storms are predicted accurately in advance.

You carry all this tech in your pocket. Modern smartphones are equipped with wireless emergency alerts that push flash flood and tornado warnings right to our screen with an annoying tone to catch our attention. Severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings also come across most reputable weather apps, television, and radio the moment they’re issued.

It’s up to us to hear and heed those warnings. Here are the best ways I’ve found to do just that.

---

Check the Storm Prediction Center Website

The best way to keep up with severe weather forecasts is to check the Storm Prediction Center’s website at least once per day. The agency issues severe weather outlooks on a 1-5 scale ranging from “marginal risk” to “high risk.” These forecasts are also relayed through local National Weather Service offices and local news broadcasts.

Download the RadarScope App

You can keep up with storms in real-time by downloading weather apps capable of displaying radar. The best app for this is RadarScope (found on Google Play and iTunes). The only downside is that the app costs $9.99. I'd argue that $10 is well worth it if you’re serious about tracking storms, but if you’re only looking for the location of storms at a glance, radar images from free apps like Weather Underground should work just fine.

Use Your Phone Like a Radio

Always keep your wireless emergency alerts activated—at least for tornado warnings. You can also receive watches and warnings in real-time through any reputable app like those run by the Weather Channel, Weather Underground, AccuWeather, or WeatherBug. It’s also a great idea to have a NOAA weather radio on hand. These devices are like smoke detectors for the weather, sounding a loud siren when a watch or warning is activated for your preferred counties.