Table of contents for February 2013 in Outside

DONALD MIRALLE To capture 2,000 triathletes swimming across Kailua Bay at October’s Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, Miralle needed to get above the action. “It’s the only way to show the madness of that mass start,” says the San Diego photographer. After shooting this photo from a helicopter at 7 A.M., he spent the next ten hours on a motorcycle, following the athletes through all three stages of the 140-mile race. “I competed in a few triathlons years ago but nothing like this. It’s incredibly inspiring what these people can do.” THE TOOLS: Nikon D4, 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/1,600 second KARI MEDIG Medig shot Revelstoke, British Columbia, skiers Audray Ayotte and Gurpreet Chandna skinning up 13,000-foot Rohtang Pass on the last day of a three-week backcountry…

LOVE AND TERROR In our December issue we published “Honey Stinger,” the story of eco-activist Eric McDavid, who planned a bomb attack with the help of an alluring FBI informant and was sentenced to prison for 20 years. Was McDavid set up? Readers responded fiercely to the story. Outside readers should take an interest in all types of eco-activism. I don’t condone terrorism, but I dislike entrapment even more. In the case of McDavid, that’s what it is. JIM KELLER ONLINE While there is certainly no problem, legally or morally, with peaceful protest or dissent, acts of terrorism—ecological or otherwise—are illegal and despicable. Why do eco-activists like McDavid think they can trump others’ rights? If someone is so morally shallow and suggestible that all it takes is a word of…

INDOOR CLIMBING COULD SOON REPLACE SPIN CLASS AS THE URBAN PROFESSIONAL’S SPORT OF CHOICE—AND THAT HAS MARKETERS SALIVATING AT THE SPRAWLING 18,000-square-foot Brooklyn Boulders climbing gym, the theme song from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pumps out of a sound system next to a 12-foot-high Adidas advertisement featuring 20-year-old climbing star Sasha DiGiulian. Eighty adults, all wearing purple, bounce off walls, yell, and generally behave like overcaffeinated primates. One guy hops from a slackline onto a series of mats, trying not to touch the ground. The crowd roars and the music rocks: Mi-chelan-ge-lo is a party dude! This is Brooklyn Boulders’ signature event, an obstacle race called the Lava Monster. The premise is simple—the floor is lava, so don’t touch it—and the rewards are pretty good: free beer for the runner-up…

THINK OF CYCLOCROSS as Tough Mudder on wheels—a mashup of road and mountain biking wherein riders must dismount at full speed and carry their bikes over barriers and stairs. The century-old sport has earned a dedicated following in Europe (Belgium is the primary hub), and now a growing appetite for masochistic competition is fueling a stateside surge. According to USA Cycling, participation in cyclocross has tripled over the past six years, to 100,000 racers. And U.S. cross fans have made the sport’s culture of booze, brats, and revelry all their own: costumes abound, and heckling, always popular, has become a mainstay. In February, the raucous Cyclo-cross World Championships leave the old continent for the first time, touching down in the heart of bourbon country: Louisville, Kentucky. The Objective: Roughly 200…

LAST MAY, Andrew Badenoch, a thirty-something former Internet marketer in Oregon, set off on a 7,000-mile solo expedition from Bellingham, Washington, with a jumbo-tired fat bike and a pack raft. His goal was to travel to the Arctic Sea and back under his own power, all the while making a documentary about the trip. Backing him were 212 individuals who anted up a combined $10,437 via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. PBS even loaned Badenoch camera equipment and agreed to run his footage as an online series. By late summer, though, the expedition had fallen apart, and Badenoch, who had never before embarked on a human-powered expedition of this scale, had quietly returned to Oregon after bailing on the trip in Pink Mountain, British Columbia. He later blamed “14 weeks of…

2008: “WHO IS J.O.B.?” Filmmaker Vincent LaForet and drone pilot Tabb Firchau use a $20,000 craft carrying a Canon 5D Mark II to shoot Jamie O’Brien surfing Oahu’s legendary Pipeline. 2010: “SURF” After recording surfers dropping into waves in Byron Bay, Australia, Bri Moreau and Chris Vogelzange upload the footage to YouTube, along with a link to buy their Aerosurfcam Quadrocopter, becoming some of the first videographers to sell and market drones. 2011: “FOLLOW ME ON THE WAKE-BOARD” MikroKopter cofounder Holger Buss, wearing neon green boardshorts and a GPS transceiver, films himself wakeboarding across a German lake with a $6,000 custom-made drone that automatically tracks him. 2012: “WHY” Corey Rich releases a seven-minute short of kayaker Dane Jackson, mountain biker Rebecca Rusch, and climber Alex Honnold—shot using a $5,000 custom…

One reason to brave the crowds at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (January 17–27) is Irish filmmaker Nick Ryan’s The Summit, a gripping documentary about the 2008 disaster on K2 that claimed the lives of 11 mountaineers. With it comes the recognition that, from here on out, high-alpine devastation won’t be chronicled by journalists alone; it will be reconstructed, in excruciating detail, from the hi-def footage of survivors and the dead alike.…

A LOW-LYING, four-building property atop the lush, 1,250-foot Bejuco Ridge on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific coast, Kurá Design Villas is barely visible from the beach and surrounding hills. The property has almost zero ecological impact; solar panels and rain-collection systems keep the owners, Alejandra Umaña and Martin Wells, from relying on civilization for much of anything. Even the hammocks have minimalist steel stands. But the best part about Kurà is the access. While most of the country’s two million annual tourists focus on areas like Guanacaste, the southern coast around Uvita—and its three surfing beaches within a 15-minute drive—saw a fraction of that last year. Beginners: start at two-mile-long Uvita beach and its gentle, four-foot waves. Experts: head north to Dominical, a three-mile-long beach with strong left and right breaks.…

“I’M TRYING TO help you optimize yourself to live longer,” says Gil Blander, founder of Inside Tracker, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that uses lab work to analyze athletes’ nutritional blind spots. Send him $299 and a few vials of blood, the Israel-born biologist says, and he can show you how to enhance your performance, raise your metabolism, reduce pain, improve sleep, boost energy, and optimize mood. It might sound like a slick sales pitch, but Blander is on the forefront of what could be the next great leap in health and fitness. InsideTracker is one of at least a dozen startups that have appeared in the past few years, including Talking20 and WellnessFX, hoping to bring blood-based analytics into the mainstream. The science they’re marketing is sound. In the past…

TWO YEARS AGO, Andrea Orbeck, a Los Angeles fitness instructor and former Canadian bobsled champion, noticed that a number of her high-powered Hollywood clients were missing workouts because they were simply too busy to go to the gym. Hoping to alleviate this time crunch, Orbeck designed a CrossFit plan that could be done anywhere and offered to beam herself, via Skype, into her clients’ SoCal living rooms, offices, and backyards. It was an instant hit, and she soon became one of a hundred or so pioneers in the world of webcam fitness—personalized online coaching in activities ranging from yoga and Pilates to kickboxing and circuit training. “Why go to the gym,” says Orbeck, “when you can maximize your workout with 25 minutes of high-intensity intervals in your living room?” Indeed,…

SPORTS TAKE THEIR TOLL, ESPECIALLY ON YOUR SKIN. THESE SEVEN ESSENTIALS WILL KEEP YOU IN THE GAME. J.R. Watkins Peppermint Foot Salve, $9 With moisturizing safflower seed oil, this foot cream is a perfect massaging agent for runners to soothe cracked feet. jrwatkins.com Jack Black Double-Duty Face Moisturizer SPF 20, $27 This odorless formula with UVA and UVB blocker is a perfect daily moisturizer: it doesn’t feel like you’re wearing anything at all. getjackblack.com Kiehl’s Cross-Terrain UV Skin Protector SPF 50, $26 Most sunscreens wear off after a quick dunk. This all-condition wax formula provides UVA and UVB protection and stays put no matter what. kiehls.com Fresh Balls, $10 Cheeky marketing aside, this quick-drying lotion makes for a drier, more comfortable ride. freshballs.com Molton Brown Re-charge Bodyscrub Bar, $22 For…

To fulfill a longtime dream and honor the memory of a fallen hero, a Turkish-American software engineer decides to circle the earth by bike and rowboat, powered solely by his own muscle, lungs, and heart. A little obsessive? Maybe, but look closely at the journey of Erden Eruc and you’ll see something else: one of the most incredible adventure stories of our time. Who is the man at the oars, alone in the middle of the ocean? What is his purpose? Ten-foot swells roll beneath the little boat, ferrying it into the troughs, then lifting it, presenting the horizon in queasy undulations. He drives his feet against a brace plate, dunking the carbon-fiber blades, putting the full power of his Popeye forearms and blocky shoulders into his strokes. The oarlocks…

AFTER HEEDLESSLY cranking out oversize SUVs, underwhelming electric cars, and uninspired wagons, carmakers are finally delivering what we’ve been craving: scaled-down all-wheel-drives with V-6 performance and four-cylinder fuel economy, compact cars with enough storage to swallow a quiver of skis, and affordable electric cars that are fun to drive. There’s enough technology in these rigs to make NASA blush, and much of it—lighter frames, more efficient transmissions, better battery life—is dedicated to improving fuel economy. Five years ago, every car featured here would have been called green. Now they’re just crossovers, subcompacts, and EVs. Audi Allroad THE SELL: A stylish, go-anywhere crossover wagon with power to spare. THE TEST: With all-wheel drive, seven inches of ground clearance, and aggressive all-season tires, the Allroad excelled on the icy tarmac and steep…

Slow-Cooked Adventure I barely remember this, but apparently more than five years ago we green-lighted an assignment for contributing editor Nick Heil to profile a 51-year-old adventurer named Erden Eruc. It was 2007, and Eruc, a Turkishborn engineer, had recently announced his absurdly ambitious plan to embark on a solo human-powered circumnavigation of the earth, including rows across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans—all part of an effort to honor his hero and mentor, Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp. Assignment in hand, Heil began trying to coordinate a place to meet up with Eruc during the journey, but the logistics proved impossible. The story was shifted to the back burner, where it stayed, barely simmering, for another four years, a span during which Heil had time to write a fantastic book…

“One clear, sterile autumn morning—September 2006, to be exact—a hand not entirely my own but that nonetheless belonged to me smashed a beer bottle against a rock wall I once climbed in Rifle Mountain Park. It hunted a shard of glass. The hand, once rough with climber callus and ropy with veins, had withered sickbed soft and pallid. Now it had designs—a theatrical slashing at the wrists—on its paranoid and bloated host.” —From Death Grip: A Climber’s Escape from Benzo Madness (MacMillan, $25), Matt Samet’s new memoir about his addiction to climbing and prescription drugs, which began as an Outside story (“Beauty in the Breakdown,” June 2010)…

BY SOME estimates, the market for gluten-free food products will approach $5 billion this year. Here’s why: although only about 1 percent of Ameri cans are afflicted with celiac disease, a severe gluten intolerance, 18 million people suffer from gluten sensitivity (not to mention the people who think they do), causing everything from mild inflammation to malnutrition. In beer, gluten shows up in the fermented grains, but at least 30 breweries are rooting it out by substituting sorghum, rice, and other gluten-free fermentables for barley and wheat. The mayor of the hops-soaked city of Portland, Oregon, has even declared a Gluten-Free Beer Day (May 16, in case you’re making plans). These are the best of the new brews. HARVESTER IPA PORTLAND, OREGON Traditional IPAs are made with barley. Harvester’s (5.8…

By the age of 21, Delaware native Katie Compton had already spent a decade as a top road, track, and mountain-bike racer. But she was also plagued by searing leg pain that left her incapacitated for weeks at a time and that doctors were powerless to diagnose. So in 2000, she quit riding and focused on school. But a month later, while out drinking with friends, Compton was convinced to sign up for her first cyclocross race—the next day. “I’m pretty sure I threw up after the race,” she says. “But I had a blast.” She also finished second. Compton has since won eight consecutive cyclocross National Championships and scored three World Championship medals, along with a coveted sponsorship from Trek Bicycles. At this season’s second World Cup race in…

1. CREATE A PROJECT: To post to Kickstarter, according to the site’s guidelines, you need a “creative project [with] a clear goal, like making an album, a book, or a work of art.” The best lure: documentary films. 2. WRITE A BUDGET: Be specific about where the money is going. For example: “$5,499 for a camera and accessories” and “$5,200 for travel-related expenses and provisions.” Tell backers you’re donating your time. 3. MAKE A VIDEO: This is your sales pitch, so be convincing. “You can’t be just a good mountain climber, you have to be a good communicator,” says Jeff Blumenfeld, author of You Want to Go Where? How to Get Someone to Pay for the Trip of Your Dreams. Make eye contact with the camera. Avoid cue cards. 4.…

BY 2020, the International Energy Agency predicts, the United States will be a net exporter of natural gas. By 2035 we will be energy independent. This is largely due to the current boom in domestic gas drilling, using a controversial series of techniques known as hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, in which pressurized water and chemicals release natural gas and petroleum trapped in underground shale formations. There are temporary financial windfalls for the communities at the surface, as well as environmental degradation; anti-fracking campaigns have become a cause célèbre, with stars like Mark Ruffalo joining the fight. Now Hollywood weighs in with Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, the auteur of American angst. The director and the film’s cowriters, Matt Damon and John Krasinski, have stated repeatedly that Promised Land takes…

PUT IT ON ICE Montreal, Quebec If Richard Branson were to build an igloo, it might look something like Montreal’s Snow Village, which is constructed entirely often-foot-thick snow walls and located in Jean-Drapeau Park, an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Temperatures hover around 20 degrees in the 25-room hotel, pub, and restaurant, where you can sip wine in a fur-draped ice chair while dining on elk stew and caviar. By day, drive an hour to Mont Saint-Sauveur for downhill laps through the trees and natural jumps on Sous-Bois, one of the mountain’s most challenging runs (lift ticket, $53; montsaintsauveur.com). Back at your frosty digs, order up a nightcap at the ice bar before getting some rest in your private room (think Superman’s boudoir in the Fortress…

HEARST PUBLISHING EXECUTIVE MICHAEL CLINTON HAS TRAVELED TO 122 COUNTRIES IN 45 YEARS—MUCH OF THAT ON BUSINESS TRIPS. HE RECOUNTS HIS EXPERIENCES THIS MONTH IN THE GLOBETROTTER DIARIES: TALES, TIPS, AND TACTICS FOR TRAVELING THE SEVEN CONTINENTS (GLITTERATI, $30). HERE, WE PICK A FEW OF THE MOST USEFUL SECRETS. —JONAH OGLES 1. “Always take an overnight train. You may miss out on some scenery, but you’ll save on a hotel bill.” 2. “Always bring a small travel steamer. Bring enough underpinnings and soap to avoid the hotel laundry.” 3. “On long-haul flights, take the one that leaves at midnight. Go to the airport showered and ready to sleep.” GO LIST SLEEP APPARATUS INCLUDED Quiksilver-owned VSTR and perennial surf champion Kelly Slater developed the Nomadic backpack, in collaboration with New York…

THREE BLOOD-ANALYSIS COMPANIES TO HELP MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE TALKING20 FOUNDED: 2012 COST: $30 THE SELL: The DIY option. Register online for a one-time kit and receive a blood-spot card in the mail. Prick a finger and blot the five circles, then send back. Results are posted online in a week, minus any nutritional recommendations. The company also offers a monthly testing option to track biomarkers over time. talking20.com WELLNESSFX FOUNDED: 2011 COST: $199 THE SELL: Face-to-face advice. Register online, have blood drawn at a clinic, and sit down for a 20-minute consultation with a health professional for answers to questions about nutrition and lifestyle. wellnessfx.com INSIDETRACKER FOUNDED: 2009 COST: $49–$299 THE SELL: Total customization. Pick a biomarker package and have your blood drawn. Results appear online about two days later, with…

FOUR WAYS TO TRAIN ONLINE IN REAL TIME PILATES Form Fitness and Function streams personalized Skype lessons from a farmhouse in Asheville, North Carolina. From $45 per session; form fitnessfunction.com KICKBOXING EMG Live Fitness, of Hamburg, New Jersey, offers classes in everything from kickboxing to core workouts. From $5 per class; emglivefitness.com ONE-ON-ONE TRAINING Andrea Orbeck and Ramona Braganza both develop targeted training programs mixing core, cardio, and circuit-heavy intervals. From $125 per session; andreaorbeck.com and ramonabraganza.com YOGA PowHow users choose from hundreds of streaming fitness classes—everything from kettlebells to yoga—taught by experts from around the world. From $12 per class; powhow.com…

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Sheryl Nields A couple of months before last year’s ski season began, Lindsey Vonn posted a video clip on her Facebook page of a training run in Portillo, Chile. The video, which plays in slow motion and split screen, shows Vonn running a super-G course side by side with Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time men’s overall champion from Norway. For the past several summers, Vonn has trained alongside male racers at camps in Portillo and Mount Hutt, New Zealand, and since 2009 she has been the only woman to consistently race in World Cup competition on skis designed for men. In the video, Vonn skis a more aggressive line than Svindal, entering several turns earlier and lower to the snow. Where Vonn loses ground is at the exit,…

ILLUSTRATION BY RICCARDO VECCHIo A DECADE BEFORE HIS DEATH, SUN MYUNG MOON—MULTIMILLIONAIRE FOUNDER OF THE CONTROVERSIAL UNIFICATION CHURCH—SENT A BAND OF FOLLOWERS DEEP INTO THE WILDS OF PARAGUAY, WITH ORDERS TO BUILD THE ULTIMATE UTOPIAN COMMUNITY AND ECO-RESORT. SO HOW’S THAT WORKING OUT? MONTE REEL MACHETES HIS WAY TOWARD HEAVEN ON EARTH. Day THREE aboard this muggy cargo boat and I’m still incapable of turning around without bumping into a hanging bag of oranges, or a sack of wheat flour, or a jug of cooking oil. Crammed to the rafters with rapidly perishing produce, the Aquidaban is as colorful and claustrophobic as an Arabian souk. An unwritten rule confines pigs, chickens, and goats to the foredeck, but two plus-size rats, Carlos and Pepe, as named by the cook who ladles…

Minneapolis: West of downtown, Theodore Wirth Park has snowmaking capabilities, lights, and a rope tow (plus cross-country trails, a restaurant, and a snowboarding park). Boston: In Jamaica Plain, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum has three good slopes. (Peters Hill is the longest.) Seattle: Snoqualmie Pass, about an hour from downtown, has two good options. Hike up Hyak Sno-Park’s windy and treed slopes, or pay for tubes and rope-tow access at Snoqualmie Summit Tubing Center (summitatsnoqualmie.com), which has 12 open, groomed lanes. Chicago: The South Side’s long, steep, well-lit Swallow Cliff Woods Sledding Hill is your best bet. Los Angeles: Closer than you might think, Mount Baldy’s tubing runs (mtbaldyskilifts.com) are just an hour east of L.A. in the San Gabriel Mountains. Denver: Ruby Hill Park is the city’s only sanctioned sledding spot.…

Software engineer ERDEN ERUC spent five years walking, biking, and rowing the globe (“Around the World in 1,026 Days,” page 62). Only one object made it through every leg of the 37,000-mile journey: a quarter-size basalt rock. “A friend of mine, Göran Kropp, fell and died while I was belaying him up a climb. A week later, I returned to where he had fallen and picked up a little stone covered in his dried blood. That rock came with me—in my chest pocket, in a pouch on my handlebars, in my raft—around the world. The blood has long since worn off. Someday I will plant it atop Everest.”…

A suggestion to make the magazine better: Can you include updates on past stories? What happened to the soldier who walked into the wilderness (“Why Noah Went to the Woods,” by Mark Sundeen, May 2012)? Has he been found or heard from again?1 Or the story about the women who have disappeared in Canada on the lonely highway (“The Vanishing,” by Bob Friel, July 2012)?2 And how about that young man who stole the airplanes and boats (“Game Over,” by Bob Friel, March 2012)? Is he still in prison?3 MIKE SLY SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS Happy to help, Mike: 1. Last August, Noah Pippin’s remains were found in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness, 18 miles from where he was last seen nearly two years earlier. The coroner’s report has yet to be…

JOHN JOHN FLORENCE OAHU, HAWAII IF YOU HAVEN’ noticed, professional surfing is in a rut. Primary sponsors Billabong and Quiksilver have undergone massive financial restructuring to prevent bankruptcy, and the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) has struggled to keep backers for its events. Scariest of all, the sport’s only consistent draw, 11-time world champion Kelly Slater, turns 41 in February and is winding down his storied career. All of which means that surfing is in need of some serious verve. Enter 20-year-old John John Florence, a North Shore wunderkind who’s been billed as the next Slater since he was in kindergarten—and whose time has finally arrived. SKILLS: With his technical, skateboarding-influenced moves and years of training at Oahu’s famous Pipeline, Florence is equally adept on two-foot and 30-foot waves. “He…

Up to 20,000 fans will be in attendance, but one is sure to raise his voice above the rest: cyclocross’s most infamous heckler, a Louisville native who goes by the name Superious Fannington (Super Fan, for short) and has been known to lead group serenades of “All By Myself” for straggling racers. “Heckling is the heart and soul of cyclocross,” he says. “It is to racing what beer is to spectating: necessary.” His advice for getting underneath a competitor’s skin? “Do your research, get creative, and be personal,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be rude or mean-spirited, it’s just more fun that way.”…

LAST JULY, expedition photographer Corey Rich was hanging from the side of Pakistan’s 20,508-foot Trango Tower, filming climbers David Lama and Peter Ortner as they negotiated the granite spire’s 3,000-foot face. After a few shots, Rich put his camera away and radioed Remo Masina, a 22-year-old Swiss pilot who was standing in a talus field about a mile away. Masina grabbed a remote control, turned on a Dedicam Quatrocopter—a lawnmower-size drone aircraft that looks like an inverted spider, with spinning blades for feet and a GoPro camera for a head—and sent the thing flying. Masina navigated the drone from the ground, using custom goggles that allowed him to see what the GoPro was filming. The Quatrocopter made three cinematic passes above the climbers, then touched down just before the battery…

In The River Swimmer (Grove Press, $25), Jim Harrison once again demonstrates why he is perhaps the best American writer working in the largely ignored novella form. In “The Land of Unlikeness,” the first of the two long stories that comprise the book, we meet Clive, a failed artist and divorcé in his mid-sixties who travels back to his Michigan home to drive his bird-crazed mother around the countryside, seduce boyhood flames, and rediscover his love for painting. The superior title story centers on Thad, a Michigan farmboy with a deep love of rivers and girls, in that order. He has a somewhat supernatural talent for navigating waterways, once swimming from the farm, which is on an island in an unnamed river, to Chicago, his clothes in tow in a…

LEAVE THE SKIS AT HOME AND SIGN ON FOR AN ODDBALL WINTER ADVENTURE ICE-FISH WISCONSIN The Baker House on eight-square-mile Geneva Lake offers ice fishing for bon vivants—glass shanties, furs to keep warm, and butler-delivered champagne to celebrate that 36-inch northern pike. $220 for two; bakerhouse1885.com DOG-SLED MAINE Play Lance Mackey on a two-day dogsled through western Maine, from Bethel to Umbagog Lake (watch for moose). Your guide will teach you to mush a team of Alaskan huskies, and you’ll crash at bed-and-breakfasts along the route. $1,000 per person all-inclusive; newenglanddogsledding.com OFF-ROAD WEST VIRGINIA Get in touch with your inner dirtbag off-roading with trained drivers at the posh Greenbrier resort near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. You get a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon with 35-inch off-road tires and body armor,…

THE CAPITAL city of Quito is no longer just a stop-off point for travelers headed to Ecuador’s biodiversity hot spots. In the past decade, riders have discovered hundreds of miles of world-class singletrack, much of it on centuries-old footpaths crossing high desert, cloudforest, and some of the world’s tallest volcanoes. It’s a four-hour flight from Miami; here’s how to get in on the action. CRUISE World Bike Adventures cracked open Ecuador’s scene with singletrack trips in 2009. Its ten-day Downhill Safari explores the best rides in Quito and Cuenca. Guests warm up on trails through Incan ruins, then head to Cuenca to ride clay rollers. While in Quito, feast on ceviche at El Ventanal and stay on the flanks of Pichincha volcano at Hacienda Rumiloma, a boutique hotel with killer…

AGE 30 5 FEET 9 INCHES 135 POUNDS BOULDER, COLORADO Though he didn’t seriously take up the sport until 2005, when he was 22, Elias is fast becoming the most complete climber on the planet. Really fast. By 2006, he was redpointing several 5.14a’s in Red River Gorge and Rifle, Colorado. In 2007, he started ice climbing, eventually taking second place in the prestigious Ouray Ice Festival’s mixed-climbing competition in 2010. And last May, though he’d never climbed higher than 13,000 feet, he summited Everest via the technical and treacherous southeast ridge. He credits his rapid rise to punishing workouts and smart nutrition. BY GORDY MEGROZ • “I used to have real problems with overtraining, and it caused elbow issues. Now, if I start to feel like I don’t want…

Q: I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST MARATHON, AND I’M READY FOR A REST. HOW LONG BEFORE I START LOSING THE BENEFITS OF MY PEAK FITNESS LEVEL? First, the bad news: it takes only about 8 to 12 days to lose cardiovascular training adaptations. “They’ll decline by half in about 12 days if you do nothing at all,” says Edward Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. Your VO2 max will plunge, as will your lactate threshold and your body’s ability to oxidize fat, making muscles more reliant on glycogen as fuel. At three weeks, your strength will decline and your finely toned calves and quads will atrophy about 1 to 5 percent, especially if you’ve been lifting weights. And it doesn’t matter how…

PHOTOGRAPHS BY INGA HENDRICKSON 1. Detroit Manufacturing In particular, startup bike brands Detroit Bicycle Company, Detroit Bikes, and Shinola. The latter builds exquisite city bikes in a former GM building, using lugged steel frames hand-crafted at the legendary Waterford Precision Cycles factory in Waterford, Wisconsin. The three-speed Bixby (right) runs $2,500; shinola.com 2. A Better Hoodie One that’s tough on the outside and soft on the inside. One that lasts. One that’s made in the USA. American Giant sews its cotton hoodie in a Northern California factory but keeps the price reasonable by selling it exclusively online. $79; american-giant.com 3. Dogs that Heel Off-Leash At all times. Without fail. Even when distracted by rabbits, bikers, and all the bad-behaving mutts on the trail. 4. Cops on SUPs Last summer, the…

When the Reverend Sun Myung Moon died in September, at age 92, obituaries described a man who’d inspired zealous devotion and condemnation—a summation that Moon never shied away from. “I am a controversial person,” he wrote in his 2009 autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen. “The mere mention of my name causes trouble in the world.” Here’s a look at his wild career. 1935: Moon, the son of Presbyterian farmers in South Korea, is 15 when he claims a miraculous experience: Christ visited him on a mountainside and asked him to establish God’s kingdom on earth. 1950: After three years of forced labor in a North Korean prison camp, Moon is liberated by United Nations forces. The experience will fuel a lifelong crusade against Communism. 1954: Establishes the Unification Church…