Pizza. At an Italian restaurant in a strip mall just outside an idyllic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, seven teenage mountain-bike racers and two coaches crowd around a table. It was a busy Saturday in May 2022 at Virginia’s interscholastic mountain-biking series, known as VAHS. 　　The team, the Richmond Cycling Corps (RCC), consists of sixth-to-twelfth-graders who attend a variety...

　　Last week I spent six hours skiing in the Vermont rain, and it actually didn’t suck–largely because I was swaddled in invisible toxic chemicals, known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” I’m speaking of the key ingredient found on and in nearly every piece of outerwear with any kind of water repellency: the chemicals that keep us dry through any weather....

　　More than 250 million years ago, in the Triassic period, what is now western Utah was a broad coastal flat of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Moenkopi Formation, as it is known, saw five million years’ worth of sedimentary layers—gypsum, siltstone, mudstone—dumped onto the flats by oceans and rivers. 　　Nearly 200 million years later, the gradual seismic uplift of the Colorado...

　　The best way to prevent running injuries isn’t to waste your time stretching or searching for the perfect shoe; it’s to get strong. That’s where the zeitgeist has been headed over the past decade or so, as old ideas about injury prevention have produced disappointing results in studies. The rationale for strength training, by contrast, is seemingly unassailable: injuries occur...

　　Earlier today, a federal jury found Charles Barrett, an accomplished Northern California climber and a guidebook author, guilty of three charges of sexual assault. 　　The verdict follows a weeklong trial held at the U.S. District Court in Sacramento. A 12-member jury composed of eight men and four women found Barrett, 39, guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and...

　　Ahead of the 2024 season, the International Federation of Sport Climbing has released a policy to prevent eating disorders among competition climbers. The policy, developed by scientific experts based on the findings of an International Olympic Committee, marks the first time any international federation has taken an active step to limit the pervasiveness of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. Ultimately,...

　　At midnight Mountain Time on January 30, the public comment period closed for two proposals from the National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) that would ban fixed anchors (bolts, pitons, snow pickets, slings) in America’s Designated Wilderness areas. 　　I’ve written a lot about and around this subject; so if you want a full treatment, read “New Wilderness...

　　Vivek Puri first noticed the symptoms in 2012. Instead of hanging or swinging by his side as he walked, his arm curled inward and up, his wrist hanging right around his belt buckle. It was strange, he remembers, but subtle enough that he simply adjusted his stance and moved on. 　　But then the 38-year-old Northern Virginia-based businessman began experiencing more...

　　The best detail in Christian Cheung’s new study in the Journal of Applied Physiology is the rigorous, Caddyshack-esque screening the subjects had to undergo: a urine test to prove that they did, in fact, use drugs at least once a week. Such is the world of cannabis research, which still tends to make funding agencies and ethics committees a little...

　　I read a lot of search and rescue reports. 　　These brief accounts, often published on Facebook or on government agency websites, are windows into dramatic lifesaving missions that sometimes involve helicopters and dozens of personnel. No, the writing isnt exactly Shakespeare, and the photos are often grainy and of poor compositional quality. But I still find these statements to be...

　　I often joke that thru-hikers are total fearmongers. Alone on a trail with nothing but a few friends, a cell phone that has no service, and all our thoughts, we dwell on the challenge posed by upcoming terrain, and we then spread these worries to one another like a common cold. 　　Oh, man, you think Tennessee is tough? I heard...

　　To keep fit, the Omaha Daily Bee advised back in 1911, women should try “the imaginary motion of lifting a piano” and the real-life challenge of pulling a cork from a bottle. “Hold the bottle between your knees and pull and pull at the tightly driven cork,” the writer advised. Sadly, she didn’t specify how many sets and reps of...