Indice dei contenuti per December 2012 in Outside

WIKTOR SKUPINSKI “It was absolute sensory overload in there,” says Skupinski of the spray cave behind Helmcken Falls in British Columbia. That’s where the Calgary shooter spent five days with UK climber Tim Emmett last January. “We eventually managed to top out—eight pitches in a single push. This one was the hardest,” says Emmett. “The ice has the texture of a bag of sugar. You don’t know if your tools will hold or you’re going to bring it all down with you.” TOOLS: Canon 5D Mark II, 17–35mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 160, f/2.8, 1/100 second FREDRIK SCHENHOLM It was a crisp January morning when Schenholm captured this image of Swedish freeskier Linus Archibald catching air beside a stand of spruce trees in Switzerland’s Engelberg resort. “The night before, the temperature…

To help you prepare for ski season, we assembled a list of North America’s 18 best resorts (“Powder to the People,” page 45) and put it all online with an additional 40 (outsideonline.com/skichannel). So what’s standing between you and your next ski vacation? 1. Budget There’s skiing almost everywhere. Forty states have ski areas, many reasonably priced—like Missouri’s Hidden Valley (see “Elevation: 860,” page 56), where a lift ticket is just $45. 2. Family Ski schools (read: baby sitters) are ubiquitous. And at resorts like Stratton, Vermont, and California’s Squaw Valley, the schools, restaurants, and hotels are all walking distance from world-class corduroy. 3. Location Steamboat Springs, Colorado, has flights from 230 U.S. airports, and Alta and Snowbird are just a 45-minute drive from Salt Lake City. Which is to…

The Mess on Everest While stationed at Base Camp for two months this spring, senior editor Grayson Schaffer witnessed firsthand one of the most chaotic climbing seasons in Mount Everest’s history, with ten deaths. The overcrowding he detailed in “Take a Number” (October) did not sit well with readers. “I’ve had a secret dream to climb Everest since 1976, when I first read Maurice Herzog’s account of his successful Annapurna expedition,” wrote Steve Whitmore, of Centennial, Colorado. “But after seeing last month’s horrifying photos of the lines up the mountain, the dream is dead.”“Where’s the glory in telling a crowded bar ‘I scaled Everest’ and then having a sixtysomething couple go, ‘Oh, so did we!’” wrote Chris Blauvet. Another commented: “One thousand tents at Base Camp? Waiting in line for…

SCIENCE OAR will assist climate-change researchers by deploying two data collectors during the voyage, measuring pH, temperature, salinity, and dissolved carbon dioxide and oxygen. WASTE MANAGEMENT The plumbing is simple: a bucket. “You take a seat and boom—done,” says former rower and shore coordinator Greg Spooner. “But I’ll be honest: the first time, it’s a little awkward.” HYDRATION A $5,000 Spectra Watermakers Ventura 150 desalination system draws sea water through reverse osmosis, spitting out more than six gallons of fresh water per hour. POWER A 160-watt wind turbine on the stern and a 530-watt solar array on the bow create enough energy to keep the battery system charged. LIVING QUARTERS The boat has an 8-by-5-foot stern cabin for sleeping—usually two at a time, four in storm conditions—and a bow cabin…

IN SEPTEMBER, at the height of New York Fashion Week, Google cofounder Sergey Brin debuted his new heads-up-display eyewear, Glass by Google—essentially a smartphone with a monocle for a screen—at designer Diane von Fürstenberg’s runway show. The critics reacted as though he’d shown up in Tevas and socks. “Mr. Brin was wearing a pair with a turquoise stem that made him look as if he had stabbed himself in the eye with the straw of some tropical frozen cocktail,” wrote New York Times fashion blogger Eric Wilson. Unglamorous? Maybe, but the high-tech glasses are part of a larger effort to develop wearable GPS-and-4G-enabled smartphones that integrate useful data into your field of vision. Though heads-up displays, or HUDs, have been projected onto glass screens in fighter planes since World War…

BEST FOR POWDER HOUNDS >Alta and Snowbird, Utah It’s not just that Alta and Snowbird average more than 500 inches of the world’s fluffiest snow each season. It’s that the snow falls on some of the most challenging lines in North America—and this season, many of those trails will be even easier to access. Over the summer, Snowbird replaced the old, slow Little Cloud double chairlift with a high-speed quad that zips skiers to the top in three and a half minutes (twice as fast as before), allowing speedier turnaround on coveted powder pitches like 1,300-vertical-foot Shireen. Just a few miles farther up Little Cottonwood Canyon at Alta—which connects to Snowbird via a high-speed quad and can be skied on the same day with the $99 AltaBird ticket—a new smartphone-friendly…

Honey Stinger ON A WARM August day in 2004, Eric Mc-David was sitting inside a house near Des Moines University in Iowa, talking to Zach Jenson, a guy he’d just met, about life as a roving environmental activist. McDavid was 26, Jenson 19, but Jenson was much more experienced—he’d already taken part in loud but uneventful demonstrations that summer at the G8 Summit, an economic forum for the world’s industrialized powers held on Sea Island, Georgia, and at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Both men were in town to attend the third annual CrimethInc, an invitation-only gathering for anarchists and anticapitalists eager to share ideas about political organizing. (The name is a play on “thoughtcrime,” from George Orwell’s 1984.) Roughly 15 people who were in town for the event…

As hunter-gatherers and then settled farmers, humans touched, breathed, swallowed, and coevolved with a broad range of microbes, says Graham Rook, professor emeritus of medical microbiology at University College London. These bugs—from gut flora and probiotics to bacteria and parasites—came to play an important role in regulating our immune system. They became, Rook says, our “old friends.” But in today’s sterile urban environments, we’ve reduced our exposure to these microbes—and there’s substantial evidence that we’re paying for it. According to the hygiene hypothesis, a theory held by many immunologists, our modern estrangement from these organisms may be contributing to an explosion in allergies, asthma, and other serious illnesses. One new study in Finland found that teenagers living near forests and farms harbored a different composition of microbes on their skin…

These days, it’s the rare outdoor athlete who isn’t plugged into something: heart-rate monitor, iPod, power meter, GPS unit. . . The assumption is that these gadgets improve our performance or experience or both. But there’s good reason to question that. First, we’re better at listening to our bodies than we thought: new research shows that people’s sense of how hard they’re working out is a more reliable indicator of their personal heart-rate maximum than the charts they might use to set up a new monitor. And second, electronics subtly reshape the very experience of being outside, says Jason Duvall, a researcher at the University of Michigan. Duvall asked sedentary urban adults to take three 30-minute walks a week; some were told to walk for exercise, others were given awareness…

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARRY BORDEN DANNY MacAskill, the 26-year-old Scottish streettrials phenomenon, looks up from a plate of chicken enchiladas and out toward the Pacific. We’re tucked into a busy boardwalk café in Venice, California, and nearby a lone trials rider is practicing tricks. He holds a track stand, pops onto a bench, then drops off. “He’s pretty good, actually,” says Mac Askill, who is sometimes referred to as Danny Mega-Skill, at other times as Danny MadSkillz. Pretty good, sure, but no MadSkillz. Street trials is the obscure yet flashy cycling subgenre that entails pogoing your bike onto and over large obstacles (like, say, a train car), performing physics-defying balancing acts, and stringing together wheelies, pivots, bunny hops, and even complete flips into Cirque du Soleil–worthy routines. MacAskill, in case you’re…

Currently, there is no standardized way to screen for susceptibility to exercise-induced heart scarring or other cardiac abnormalities. But through a combination of ECGs, echocardiograms, treadmill stress testing, and MRIs, you can make an informed decision about whether to cut back on endurance runs. Testing is expensive (a cardiac MRI runs about $3,600) but may be worth the peace of mind, particularly if you have any of the following risk factors. >Blacking out: “A lot of people collapse after intense races,” says cardiologist Keith George. “That’s not uncommon even in healthy people.” But if you have blacked out, see your doctor: it could be a symptom of an underlying heart condition. >Family history of heart disease: The leading cause of sudden cardiac death in athletes under 30 is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,…

BEST FOR: VIRTUAL-RIDING AFICIONADOS >ProForm Tour de France, $1,500 If you can get past the ridiculous marketing and steep price tag, ProForm’s wonky Tour de France bike is a serious piece of engineering. The magnetic-resistance spin bike comes bundled with software that lets you create cycling routes using Google Maps and then wirelessly upload them to the bike. Not only can you watch where you’re riding in Google’s street view, but the hydraulic system pitches you forward and back (up to 40 degrees) to match the grade and adjusts resistance accordingly. The built-in algorithm-based power meter is imprecise, but the second generation (coming later this winter) will have a strain-gauge system, drop bars, and other cycling-specific details. EPO not included. BEST FOR: PERFORMANCE-TRACKING JUNKIES > Wahoo Fitness Kickr, $1,000 Wahoo…

When it comes to holiday giving, you should never have to choose. Here are 68 perfect ideas—priced from $4 to $50,000—guaranteed to make anyone on your list feel like a million bucks. PHOTOGRAPHS BY INGA HENDRICKSON Crappy socks make a crappy gift, but a colorful pair like Stance’s cashmere Bradfords ($26; stance.com) are a hit every time. Vapur’s flexible one-liter Element bottle ($12; vapur.us) is perfect for adventure travel—when empty, it rolls up to the size of a banana. Alite’s Twig Pod ($28; alitedesigns.com) makes self-portraits easier. The collapsible monopod has a spike at one end, so you can plant it in the ground and let your camera snap the pic. GSI Outdoors’s titanium Kung Foon ($17; gsioutdoors.com) is the new king of back-country cutlery. Use the spork and rosewood…

Wilderness Therapy A week ago, as the page proofs for this issue started landing on my desk, I found myself staring at the photo that appears on pages 80 and 81. I wasn’t mesmerized so much as paralyzed: I was so completely drawn in, it almost seemed like I couldn’t move. And as I sat there staring, I began to wonder what exactly was so absorbing about the photo. It’s a simple image of the ocean, equal parts water and sky, stripped of any other elements. Gazing at it placed me on an empty shoreline, and I didn’t want to leave. I could actually feel my neck and shoulders relaxing. I assure you I’m not losing my mind. In fact, the article that accompanies that photo (“Take Two Hours of…

To report “Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning” (page 78), an investigation into the benefits of being in nature, contributing editor Florence Williams spent a week immersed in Japan’s forests and cities, where scientists measured how time outside—and the lack thereof—changed her brain and body. One discovery: sniffing oil from cypress trees immediately dropped Williams’s blood pressure 12 points. Which made us wonder: could it have the same effect on stressed-out editors?…

“Really? Bend, Oregon, doesn’t even get an honorable mention?” —Matt Deacon, Facebook “About Boise you wrote that ‘the political climate (mostly conservative) won’t appeal to the liberal-leaning crowd.’ While Idaho is definitely conservative, Boise is quite liberal. The local saying is ‘Idaho without Boise would be Mississippi.’” —Steve Chattin, Boise, Idaho “Dudes, no mention of windsurfing in Hood River? It was a windsurfer’s town long before kiters were on the scene. To make up for it, you should run a cover article on the radness of windsurfing.” —Taurin Spalding, Seattle “I find it almost laughable that Portland, Oregon, is not on the list. C’mon, guys!” —LoriGrannis, online “Thank you for choosing my hometown as the River City of the Year. Richmond is such a dysfunctional place, it needs all the…

THE PEDIGREE: Professional surfing came of age in the 1970s, and no other event measured up to the Pipe Masters. “The other pro tour events all seemed optional by comparison,” says surf historian Matt Warshaw. “Dudes got hurt. You couldn’t look away. It was, and still is, the surf contest all other surf contests want to be.” THE SWELL: Pipeline breaks best on a west swell, which is most prominent October to March. Local knowledge is key: while some Pipeline waves hit the reef at just the right angle, creating flawless semi-truck-size barrels, others slam headlong into the shallow, razor-sharp reef. THE TOLL: Pipeline is widely considered the deadliest wave in the world, having killed at least five surfers in the past decade, including Tahitian big-wave pro Malik Joyeux in…

A DECADE AGO, top sponsored white water kayakers were making $100,000 a year and competitions were booming at venues like the world championships in Graz, Austria. Lately, though, the sport has fallen on hard times. According to the Leisure Trends Group, there are half as many whitewater paddlers today as there were when George W. Bush took office. Sponsorships have dried up; the few pros who remain are lucky to make $10,000 a year. Patrick Camblin, a 30-year-old kayaker from Ontario, thinks he knows how to fix the problem: send the world’s best paddlers down insanely dangerous whitewater and broadcast it online. “I want the world to see what the best kayakers are capable of,” says Camblin, who launched the Whitewater Grand Prix last year on six flooded rivers in…

FIRST I SEE A MOM and her two daughters tracing perfect S curves, dressed in sleek North Face soft shells and woven beanies. Nearby, teens rocket out of the terrain park, pulling 360s. Around a bend I see the Carhartt brigade, decked out in camo hats, orange hunting vests, and welding goggles. A dude on a snowboard whizzes by in a gorilla suit. St. Louis Cardinals jerseys are ubiquitous. In the distance stands not a ridge of jagged peaks but St. Louis’s Gateway Arch. Astonishingly, I’m carving man-made corduroy at Hidden Valley mountain, in Wildwood, Missouri—which, at elevation 860, offers a grand total of 310 vertical feet. My guide is 24-year-old ski patroller Dan Arnold, a clean-cut Missouri native wearing black-frame glasses and a weathered baseball cap. Arnold is touting…

These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And nope, there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. FLORENCE WILLIAMS travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the surprising theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression, beat back stress—and even prevent cancer. PLUS: The Outside Rx—six natural prescriptions for improving your body and mind. I WAS SUPPOSED to be listening to the cicadas and the sound of a flowing creek when a Mitsubishi van rumbled across a small steel bridge just downstream. It was probably depositing campers at a nearby tent village, where kids were running around with their fishing poles and pink bed pillows. This was nature, Japan style. I…

1. In a 2011 study of 128 college runners, researchers found that “surrounding greenness” was an indicator of better athletic performance. Other studies have shown that exercising in nature results in less fatigue, reduced anxiety, less hostility, more positive thoughts, and an overall feeling of invigoration. 2. Natural settings alleviate directed-attention fatigue (DAF), which occurs when the brain’s prefrontal cortex must constantly manage competing stimuli. DAF can cause impatience and irritability. Gazing at clouds and trees restores both mood and cognitive function. 3. Running on natural surfaces, specifically grass, is 15 to 35 percent easier on your joints—especially your knees—than running on pavement and also lessens the impact on the plantar fascia, the sensitive tissue that supports your arch. The shock absorption also makes your muscles work harder, so you…

Human sleep-wake cycles are set mostly by the sun. Light levels filtered through the retina send messages to the pineal gland, which pumps out or dials back on melatonin, the hormone associated with sleep regulation. Without sufficient exposure, melatonin levels are disordered, and our body’s innate rhythms are thrown out of whack. Disruptions in circadian rhythm have been linked to cancer, diabetes, obesity, and, in the short term, declining athletic performance and mental fog and gloom. Natural light “of sufficient intensity and suitable spectral composition” is the main factor in regulating our circadian rhythms, according to a 2012 study of workers at the North and South poles. During dark polar winters, researchers found, a one-hour pulse of bright artificial sunlight in the morning was enough to stabilize workers’ circadian rhythms.…

AS WE made our way uphill, kids trickled out of mud-brick houses and fell in behind us, scarves wound around their wind-burned cheeks, thick wool socks under their flimsy plastic shoes. Before long there were two dozen of them, ages 10 to 15: Afghan boys carrying homemade skis—wooden planks with rubber foot straps on top and scrap aluminum nailed to the underside. I kicked the toes of my boots into the frozen mud beneath the snow, making stairs on the slippery ridge. To my left rose a gently sloping alpine face called Kasa Dugh, or the Yogurt Bowl. Across the valley, I could make out a crevice flanked by two steep snowfields. Locals call this the Open Book, for its resemblance to a Koran on a reading stand. Towering above…

ATHLETES HAVE long used interval training to amplify performance, but recent research suggests you should crank up the intensity even more. Curious about how to maximize interval training, Jens Bangsbo, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and a former assistant coach with Italy’s dominating Juventus soccer club, has studied interval regimens for the past decade. He even devised one earlier this year that helped runners improve their average 5K times by nearly a minute. All it required was a 30-minute high-intensity workout three times a week for seven weeks. The key, Bangsbo says, is simply going harder than normal—much harder—and coming as close to your V02 max as possible. By doing so, the body is forced to activate muscle fibers that aren’t normally used, making the muscle stronger overall,…

The Colorado-based road-race champion logs much of his winter mileage indoors. Here’s how he makes trainer time count. 1. Create a dedicated space for your indoor work. “Leave everything ready to ride,” Duggan says. “If you have to set up and tear down, you’re less apt to do it.” 2. Focus on intensity by doing intervals. “Riding a trainer can be torturous, so you need to get quality over quantity.” 3. Have fun. “Watch a movie and do an interval every time some prescribed event happens,” Duggan counsels. 4. Mix it up. “Often I’ll combine a trainer workout with another activity like ski touring or snowshoeing. By hopping on the trainer for an hour after something else, your body thinks it just did a four-hour ride.”…

Dean Kuipers, who wrote “Honey Stinger” (page 60), about an FBI ecoactivism informant, isn’t new to environmental reporting. His first article for Outside, in 1993, was about monkeywrench-style sabotage, and his book Operation Bite Back tells the story of radical activist Ron Coronado. In this issue, Kuipers focuses on “Anna,” an informant who infiltrated a group of seemingly innocuous radicals, spying on them but also egging them on. “This guy Eric McDavid was arrested simply for talking, which has become a pattern post–9/11,” says Kuipers, who lives in Los Angeles. “The FBI is using informants to generate a lot of radical chatter and then nailing people for it. Getting 20 years for that is just wrong.”…

“I spent much of my four previous trips to Afghanistan slumped down in the backs of cars for fear of being spotted by kidnappers. Which is why reporting on locals who ski in the mountains near Bamiyan was so thrilling: I could actually see the people and the country like they were before the wars started 30 years ago. I drank tea in people’s homes while children giggled around us. Bamiyan is what a peaceful Afghanistan could look like. It makes the situation in the rest of the country that much sadder.” —Contributor Elliott D. Woods Woods won a National Magazine Award for his work in Afghanistan. He wrote and photographed “War and Piste” (page 102), about the burgeoning ski culture in the Hindu Kush.…

Ocean rowing, once an adventure sideshow, is on the rise thanks to new technology that has made record-setting crossings easier—and high-stakes rescues inevitable DURING ITS PREVIOUS voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, in 2006, OAR Northwest, a Seattle-based team of four former college rowers, encountered 30-foot swells, stared down sharks, and narrowly dodged a freighter. But their toughest challenge came two weeks into the 3,200-mile trip, when they realized they had drastically underestimated how much food they would need. So the group rationed for the next 56 days, collectively lost 147 pounds, and still managed to become the first team to row from the United States to mainland England. “Day 16 rolls around and we’re told we don’t have enough food,” says OAR’s captain, 30-year-old Jordan Hanssen. “It occurred to me…

Considering that he’s already devised miracle shortcuts for jobs (The 4-Hour Workweek) and fitness (The 4-Hour Body), you might think Tim Ferriss, king of life hacking, would find few challenges in cooking. Wrong. It “kicked my ass so many times,” he writes in the first chapter of his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, out this month from Amazon. “There’s an overabundance of information.” Indeed—you could use the 672-page hardcover to tenderize a flank steak. Here we hack the hacker, plucking and condensing a selection of his most useful and curious tips. >TOOLS ThermoWorks Original cooking thermometer and timer, $19 This is the easiest way to avoid under-and overcooking. No more prodding a steak to see if it’s done. For most meats (always double-check), an internal temperature of 140 degrees should…

RED BULL RAMPAGE CONTEST: Mountain bikers bomb down a 1,500-foot trailless slope in Utah. The event streamed live in October at RedBullUSA.com. PAYOFF: $48,500 CARNAGE: During 2012’s Rampage, Cam Zink crashed spectacularly—complete with helmet-cam footage—during a 60-foot canyon jump. AMERICA’S CUP CONTEST: For 2013, revamped high-speed catamarans will race on narrow, serpentine courses at 45 miles an hour while viewers watch on NBC. PAYOFF: The winning team decides the rules for the next race. CARNAGE: Two million-dollar boats collided during a September 2011 qualifier. BILLABONG XXL GLOBAL BIG WAVE CONTEST: Whoever rides the biggest wave—and films it—wins. The 2013 awards stream live May 3 at BillabongXXL.com. PAYOFF: $15,000 CARNAGE: Sion Milosky died while filming an XXL attempt at Maverick’s in 2011.…

BEST POWDER: Mount Bohemia, Michigan Arctic blasts and damp Lake Superior air bless this Upper Peninsula mountain with nearly 300 inches of snow each year, none of it groomed. That allows for plenty of face shots on one of its 85 trails, including Flying Squirrel, a 41-degree, 900-vertical-foot run. mtbohemia.com BEST TERRAIN PARK: Nub’s Nob, Michigan The park offers 37 features—from boxes to rails to rollers and jumps—and is the former training ground for pro snowboarder Danny Davis. nubsnob.com BEST NIGHTLIFE: Afton Alps, Minnesota Afton Alps, just 20 minutes south of Saint Paul, lights up all 300 acres of its skiable terrain until 10 P.M. on weekends. When the lights go out, it’s time for live music, craft beers, and a burger at Paul’s Pub. aftonalps.com BEST ESCAPE: Devil’s Head…

What happens to a mind in constant motion? That’s a question we seem intent on answering, one laptop and DVR at a time. In a now famous, years-long study of employees at the Boston Consulting Group, led by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, 26 percent of participants admitted to sleeping with their smartphones within reach. Fifty-one percent said they check e-mail obsessively while on vacation. Kids are even worse. According to a 2010 survey by the Kaiser Foundation, American teens spend about 7.5 hours a day toggling between text messages, Instagrams, and streaming episodes of Jersey Shore. This nonstop engagement changes how the brain processes information—and, in some cases, changes the brain itself. One alarming study of Internet-addicted Chinese teenagers found signs of “abnormal white matter structure”—atrophy of connective…

Greening our lives is a good start, but we need to blue them, too. New research suggests that water may be a key element in the natural world for psychological well-being. When researchers in Exeter, England, showed a group of adults a series of 120 photos of urban and natural scenes both with water (rivers, lakes, oceans) and without, the subjects greatly preferred the images with water, even if those scenes also showed buildings and streets. In fact, they liked cityscapes depicting water as much as they did majestic but more arid natural scenes, including forests and mountains. There seems to be some intangible tug to water, says Mathew White, a lecturer at the University of Exeter Medicine School, who led the study. “People report better moods when taking a…

Five minutes is all that’s required to achieve the minimum effective dose of nature immersion to raise your spirits. So says Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, who synthesized the results of nearly a dozen studies for a comprehensive 2010 review of nature’s effects on the body. “All outside activity offers mental and physical benefits,” says Pretty, adding that the majority of them are gained by simply walking out the door. The first five minutes have the greatest impact, his review found; people’s moods continue to lift from minute six on, but not as much. If even short outdoor breaks can reduce stress, imagine what a week in the wilderness can do for your mind. In a 2011 pilot study of 57 adult Outward…

IN MARCH OF this year, 58-year-old ultra runner and cult hero Micah True—a.k.a. Caballo Blanco, the central character in Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run—died on a 12-mile training jog in the rugged Gila Wilderness of southwest New Mexico. It took friends and authorities four days of searching before they discovered his body, faceup and bruised, legs dangling in a creek. When the autopsy report was released, the Albuquerque coroner wrote that “Micah True died as a result of cardiomyopathy during exertion.” An enlarged left ventricle—the part of the heart that sends oxygenated blood to the body—likely caused a fatal arrhythmia. Caballo Blanco had died of natural causes. Or had he? During a presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in June, cardiologist James O’Keefe, director…

MIDDLE-DISTANCE RUNNING 1. One-mile warm-up. 2. Ten seconds of high-intensity running (90 to 95 percent of max), 20 seconds of medium-intensity running (50 to 60 percent of max), and 30 seconds of low-intensity running (25 to 30 percent of max), with two minutes’ rest in between. 3. Repeat five times in 30 minutes. 4. Add one to three repetitions each week for seven weeks. MARATHON-DISTANCE RUNNING AND FARTHER 1. One-mile warm-up. 2. Thirty seconds of high-intensity running (90 to 95 percent of max) followed by three minutes of recovery. 3. Repeat six times. CYCLING 1. Ten-to-fifteen-minute warm-up. 2. Ten seconds of high-intensity cycling (90 to 95 percent of max), 20 seconds of medium-intensity cycling (50 to 60 percent of max), and 30 seconds of low-intensity cycling (25 to 30 percent…

PLAYING THROUGH THE PAIN Turns out athletes do have a leg up when it comes to dealing with pain. A recent review of 15 studies found that athletes in endurance sports have a moderately elevated pain tolerance, while athletes in game sports have a much higher tolerance. Interestingly, the athletes scored the same as a control group did in terms of pain threshold—the point at which discomfort begins—they were just able to deal with it longer. TO KEEP ANGST AT BAY, CYCLE MORE Here’s one more reason to ride your bike to work: in a study published in September, subjects who cycled for 30 minutes experienced reduced anxiety levels immediately afterward—the same as members of a control group who had sat quietly. But only the cyclists maintained their reduced stress…