Table of contents for August 2016 in Outside

Every week for the past two years, Spartan Race founder Joe De Sena has interviewed some of the most successful people on the planet, everyone from explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes to TV producer Thom Beers. If you haven’t been listening, here’s a sampling of the life lessons De Sena uncovers each week, broken down by episode and guest. Angela Duckworth, #11 You Can Get Grittier Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a lot of time thinking about grit—which she calls the “stamina of effort and interest” and success. “How do you get grittier? I wake up every day with that question,” she tells De Sena. One answer is to have a growth mindset—a belief that you can learn and get better at things. “Interestingly, you…

IN 2012, Carlin Isles wanted to sprint in the London Olympics. He knew he was fast—he ran the 100 meters in 10.13 seconds at a race in Austin, Texas, that year—but he thought he could go faster. He was researching training techniques on the Internet when he found rugby, a sport he had never seen, much less played. “The only thing I knew is that they didn’t have any pads and people get their teeth knocked out,” he says. Then 22, Isles was no stranger to discomfort. As a boy, he shuffled between foster homes after his mother went to prison. At times he was so hungry he ate dog food. He got into fistfights and ran away. That all changed when Charles and Starlett Isles, both property managers in…

AS A KID, ERIC JACKSON, OR EJ AS JUST about everybody calls him, began canoeing on camping trips with his father. “My dad was the only one who could tell me if I couldn’t do something. The subject only came up a few times, and each time he allowed me to do what I wanted.” He didn’t discover whitewater kayaking until college— and once he did, he was hooked. From the start, he says, boating was about “freedom and having the ability to run around anywhere. That has never changed.” Fast-forward 40-some-odd years and 52-year-old EJ is the most decorated freestyle kayaker ever. A seasoned expedition kayaker and four-time world champion and Olympian, he was a member of the U.S. Kayaking Team for an unprecedented 25 years in a row.…

“Huelo chilingos,” the boatman shouts over the drone of an outboard motor. I smell migrants. I turn around and see nothing but a wall of dark, unruly jungle, then I slump back into the bow of the canoe. Five days we’ve been out here, waiting for a group of foreigners to appear on this godforsaken smuggler’s route in the Darién Gap, and all we have to show for it is sunburn and trench foot. Our search is starting to feel futile. For centuries the lure of the unknown has attracted explorers, scientists, criminals, and other dubious characters to the Gap, a 10,000-square-mile rectangle of swamp, mountains, and rainforest that spans both sides of the border between Colombia and Panama. Plenty of things here can kill you, from venomous snakes to…

JAKE WOOD FOUNDED TEAM RUBICON A YEAR AFTER RETURNING FROM AFGHANISTAN, WHERE HE SERVED AS A MARINE SNIPER. It was January 12, 2010. Wood, then 26, was in boxers on his couch in Burbank, California, when, 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a previously unmapped fault line ruptured. The resulting 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least 160,000 people and displaced one million more. By week’s end, Wood was in the disaster zone, helping to splint the compound fracture of a 14-yearold girl and curing his post-deployment boredom with the comfort of chaos. Wood didn’t go to Haiti alone. He spent the first four days after the quake assembling a team of eight volunteers, including two doctors, Team Rubicon cofounder William McNulty, a former intelligence contractor in Iraq, and Mark Hayward, a…

Cherise Tuttle Before launching from a 10,500-foot ridge on Mardi Himal, in Nepal’s Annapurna Range, California photographer Cody Tuttle handed the camera to his wife, Cherise. On the anniversary of the country’s devastating earthquake, the two planned to paraglide on a thermal updraft that would carry them to 15,000 feet, and Cherise wanted to capture Cody near Fishtail, considered a sacred peak and therefore inaccessible to climbers. “Getting into position was tricky, but I knew it would be spectacular up there,” Cherise says. “Then all it really took was a gust of rising air.” THE TOOLS: Sony 17Rii, Zeiss 24–70mm f/4 lens, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/1,600 second Alex Manelis At peak flows, 2,425-foot Yosemite Falls could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in a minute. But last October, following several months…

THIS YEAR, OLYMPIC organizers will introduce an ultrafast catamaran in the mixed multi hull sailing category, one of ten classes in which sailors will compete. Like the bigger catamarans that race in the America’s Cup, the Nacra 17 employs curved daggerboards, or foils. They enable 30-mile-per-hour speeds and make the 17-foot boats appear to be flying. “If the previous catamarans were Indy cars, these are like Formula One,” says 40-year-old U.S. helmsman Bora Gulari, who lives in Detroit. Gulari, a two-time world champion in the Moth class of foil-equipped sailing dinghies, started sailing the Nacra last May. He and his partner, 24-year-old Louisa Chafee, a three-time All-American at Brown University, have been climbing the world rankings ever since. (Standing as of early June: 41.) Here they explain the keys to…

AFTER WINNING bronze in the 10,000 meters at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Shalane Flanagan surprised many by switching to the marathon. “I felt like I’d reached a pinnacle and a new challenge would be fun,” she says. Flanagan’s mother once held the American marathon record. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 34-year-old has excelled. She came in first at the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials, won the 2010 and 2012 U.S. championships, and placed third at the 2014 Berlin Marathon with a time of 2:21:14—the second-fastest ever by an American woman. One of the biggest differences she has noticed at longer distances? “I’m always hungry,” she says. “I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.” (She even wrote a cookbook, Run Fast. Eat Slow., which hits stores this fall.) Her go-to pre-race…

My daughter, Eliot, and! are floating facedown in the Caribbean Sea a quarter-mile off the coast of Grand Cayman Island. Our snorkel tips fight for air above the chop as we stare into the depths at a Greco-Roman warrior with a seahorse’s tail. A 13-foot-tall statue known as the Guardian of the Reef, it rises from a sand flat 65 feet below us. This is our final afternoon of a two-day freediving course, and it’s Eliot’s turn to go off-rope. A weighted guideline knotted every 16.5 feet, the rope has served as a focal point for our battery of trials. Having it at hand also made the ocean seem smaller somehow. No longer. The Guardian beckons Eliot with his raised scepter. I don’t want to let her go. Except that…

“In a vacant schoolhouse by the water, we found a gallery of graffiti. Rahim from Pakistan had been here, along with Ahmed from Ethiopia and Yahya from Kenya. The walls were scrawled with national pride and nostalgia for home.” — JASON MOTLAGH, PAGE 64 A Perilous Crossing During the aimless few years that followed my graduation from college, I cultivated a number of romantic travel fantasies. At the top of the list: a road trip down the Pan-American Highway all the way to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. I never embarked on the journey, but passionate research proved an excellent way to put off thinking about a career. The highway spans some 19,000 miles, and I was fascinated by the route’s Connecticut-length blank spot, a morass of jungle and swamps…

AT THE LONDON Games in 2012, Natalie Coughlin won a bronze medal in the 4x100 relay. The third-place finish brought her Olympic medal count to 12 (three of them gold), tying her with swimmers Jenny Thompson and Dara Torres for the most medals won by an American woman. The Rio Games will be the 33-year-old’s fourth Olympics. With her eyes on the record as she competes in the 100-meter backstroke, freestyle, and freestyle relay, she’s learned to focus more than ever on the little things. “As I’ve gotten older, sleep has become more essential. I’ve started using earplugs, and I kick the dogs out of the bed. They were hurting the quality of sleep I got. It was hard on all of us.” “I hate naps, but I force myself…

SIX ATHLETES on the USA Track and Field team will compete at the Paralympics this September in custom carbon-fiber wheelchairs dreamed up by Designworks, BMW’s Southern California design firm. The team has worked with Olympians before; they built sensors for long jumpers to check their form and delivered the lightning-fast two-man bobsleds that enabled the United States to break a six-decade medal drought in Sochi. But this is their first time tackling a wheeled rig. To do so, they rethought it from front to back. “The ideal is that the wheelchair disappears,” says associate director Brad Cracchiola, “and it’s just the athlete.” CARBON FOOTPRINT BMW decided to upgrade the chassis from aluminum to carbon fiber for the same reason pro cyclists prefer it: with the improved strength-to-weight ratio, you can…

FOR RIDERS tired of the debate over 27.5- and 29-inch wheels, the advent of plus-size hoops may seem like yet another sales gimmick. but the 27.5+ and 29+ options—the same diameters, but with wider rims and tires—are no marketing ploy. broader rubber adds traction, cushion, and control without sacrificing speed and momentum. these “midfat” bikes are a touch heavier, but the improved ride is worth the extra ounces. We’re not saying you have to upgrade—again!—but if you do, you’ll love the softer, grippier ride. SANTA CRUZ HIGHTOWER $7,800 BEST FOR: Those who want it all. THE TEST: This robust rig shines with either 29-inch wheels and a 140-millimeter fork or a 27.5+ setup with 150-millimeter fork—your choice. (A “flip chip” on the suspension keeps the frame geometry the same no…

THE STEELHEAD was delicious. Our guide Ryan Peterson, a 39-year-old self-taught Alaskan ichthyologist who’s been traveling to Russia’s far eastern peninsula of Kamchatka for the better part of a decade, emerged from the camp kitchen with a tin salad bowl stacked high with thick slabs of pink trout meat sprinkled with dill. “It wouldn’t be Russian if it didn’t have dill,” he said. The fish, a silver-colored female 32 inches long and 19 inches around the middle, had probably swum into the Kvachina River estuary that morning from the Sea of Okhotsk—it still had sea lice on it, which fall off after a few days in fresh water. Ryan had marinated it in teriyaki before cooking it over a fire behind the 10-by-30-foot plywood cabin that served as the camp’s…