Late on Monday evening, Maggie Guterl became the first woman to win the Big Dog Backyard Ultra, a race many consider to be among the hardest in the world. It took her 60 hours to cover 250 miles.
The race, put on by Barkley Marathons creator Gary Cantrell, is deceptively, painfully simple. Participants have 60 minutes to run a four-mile trail loop through the woods on Lake’s farm in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. At the top of each hour, anyone who is still able lines back up at the start line and does it again, until there’s only one person left. In 2018, the race went on for almost three daysand 283 miles.
“It’s like a contest for getting punched in the face,” Cantrell said in an interviewwith Outsidelast spring. “Who will stand up and get punched in the face the most times? Because, after a while, it starts to hurt.” The race started in 2007, but Cantrell, himself a lifelong runner, conceived of it more than four decades ago, while he was in high school. He designed it to isolate pure competitiveness and mental grit:you don’t have to be fast to succeed. You just have to keep going.
Women have come close at the race before: Courtney Dauwalter was the last person to drop in 2018, after 67 hours and 279 miles (Johan Steene ran one more lap for the win). Guterl also ran last year, but bowed out 183 miles in due to IT band issues. She came back this year determined to keep running.
“[Cantrell] had said at Barkley this year that he would give anything to see a woman win the Backyard,” she said, “And I was like ‘OK, I can do this.’” This year, the 39-year-old came prepared with an army of massage tools, a smorgasbord of potato-based snacks (mashed potatoes, potato soup, pierogies), and a single-mindedness that she would not quit until she was the only person left on the start line.
It worked. According to Amelia Boone, who ran 112 miles (27 hours), Guterl was “solid and mechanical” forthe entire race. Even after 100 miles, she maintained an average of 54 minutes per lap—she didn’t slow down, and didn’t speed up. “If anything went wrong, she did not let on.”
Indeed, Guterl says she felt like she could have run more. When Will Hayward, the second-to-last person left, timed out in lap 60, “I wanted to keep going,” she says. “I had this thing in my mind that it would be cool to beat what they did last year, and even break that 300 barrier. I’ve never run through three nights.”
Recent years have seen a surge in adult-recess leagues across the United States. By some estimates, there are now 1.6 million grown-ups participating in these leagues across the country, and they’re only growing more popular. Today’s adults are seemingly desperate for more playtime—and so we’re eagerly bounding outside after work for all kinds of kid-style activities, from kickball and flag football to capture the flag and cornhole. But it’s not all fun and games: some of the leagues are highly competitive, with team names, uniforms, and strict scheduling. To find out what’s really going on, reporter Mimi Montgomery and producer Alex Ward visit rec fields in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, to observe grown-ups at play.
I became alarmed around the third time I saw someone almost get nailed in the boob. On a recent Thursday evening, I stood on the sidelines in a community-center gym in Washington, D.C., watching a group of millennials duck and run while covering their heads and muttering expletives. Around them a cloudburst of rubber balls streamed through the air, like unfed birds sweeping in toward death. I was there to observe a dodgeball game organized by DC Fray, anadult recreational league that organizes teams for after-work games like Skee-Ball, kickball, or ultimate Frisbee.
Adult sports leagues have been popular for decades, centered around competitive activities like squash and soccer. But in recent years, a newer brand of grown-up recreation has begunto materialize across the country that emphasizes fun over competition, with a carefree name to match—adult recess. Last month, Players Sport and Social Group in Chicago hosted an adult field day, where folks ran relay races and bounced through inflatable obstacle courses. In Kokomo, Indiana, United Way hosts recess eventsup to ten times a year filled with grown-ups playing giant Jenga or four square. Other adult recesses feature scavenger hunts, tug-of-war, or capture the flag, all activities that require a little less blood, sweat, and tears than signing up for a softball league. They allow adults to focus on the real benefit of these after-hour meetups: playing.
When contract manager Oliver Chang first moved to San Francisco ten years agowhen he was27, his options for after-work activities were limited to either joining a supercompetitiverec team or partaking in something more laissez-faire, like kickball. So he decided to create the Play Recess league, which combines the ethos of each. “We wanted to bring that kickball attitude, that playfulness and lightheartedness, and apply it to all different sports,” Chang says. The group switches activities weekly to keep things interesting and easygoing; one week it could be ultimate Frisbee, the next a scavenger hunt. Play Recess started out with just one seasonal league, and it’s now up to five annually, with about 1,000 yearly participants, most of whom, perhaps unsurprisingly, are young professionals in their twenties and early thirties, says Chang.
DC Fray has a similar backstory. Its CEO, Robert Kinsler, started the group as a Skee-Ball league a decade ago, thinking it was “a super silly, fun thing to do at a bar” with friends. Now the company manages over 15 activity leagues in four different cities, where participants can enjoy everything from flag football to bingo to cornhole. It also hosts onetime events, like a Halloween scavenger hunt or an adult field day with potato-sack races and a watermelon-eating competition (plus drinking games like flip cup). Kinsler estimates that the Fray organization, which also includes NOLA Fray, PHX Fray, and JAX Fray, sees around 55,000 participants a year.
(Photo: Courtesy DC Fray)
Kinsler thinks that Fray has been successful in part because it offers a forced break from the tiny computers everyone carries around all day. Instead of scrolling through Bumble or Instagram or stalking your ex’s Venmo account (no judgment), you’re interacting with people in real life, which is an added bonus if you’re new to a city and looking to make friends, as many millennials, a notoriously transient generation, are. You just need to sign up for a group. Someone else will organize the teams, matches, and postgame bar hangouts. “Fundamentally, you can’t do these things by yourself,” says Kinsler of the activities. “People are craving connection with others. They need a way of breaking out of the digital world that we’re all getting wrapped up into every single day.”
It also doesn’t hurt that playing has been proven to begood for you. The definition of adult “play” can be more nebulous than when it’s applied to children, but experts generally define it as an act without any sort of utilitarian purpose; engaging in play is more about the experience. “Play is pretty much in your head. So if I think, I’m playing, then I am,” says Garry Chick, a Penn State professor emeritus who focuses on play theory. “If it feels like play to us, then why not? It is play.” That means anything from a tennis match to a crossword puzzle qualifies—all that matters is that it’s pleasurable and not a necessary function of your day, says Chick.
Play is so important to human well-being that Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, classifies present-day society’s tendency to overlook it as a public-health issue. “Severe play deprivation is associated with smoldering depression, ideological rigidity, a lack of optimism, and often a quick response to confrontations that could otherwise be settled without violence or hostility,” says Brown, who has examined the play histories of thousands of subjects throughout his career as a clinical researcher. Engaging in play can help increase optimism, self-motivation, trust, and empathy for others, he says.
The allure of these recess events is that they make it easier forpeople who may not be as, ahem, athletically inclined to get in on the playing. While baby boomers may have met up for activities like golf or squash, sports that required expertise, time, and financial commitments, a tetherball face-off or hula-hoop contest doesn’t call for that much equipment or skill (a welcome notion for the kids who sat in the outfield eating grass during PE, like I did). They also force players to commit to a time when all they’re doing is playing—and for a demographic that has been labeled the “burnout generation,” it may be more manageable to dedicate an hour to something fun if it’s tied to a reminder on your phone. “We need to make sure it’s on our calendar, where we know, OK, that’s the time I’m going to have fun with my friends,” says Kinsler of designating a night a week to bingo or flag football. “We’ve all gotten so busy that we have to be even more intentional about how we play.”
Still, some older generations may see recess participants as kickball-playing Peter Pan millennials who can’t handle adulting. “The cultural rules of the not actually too distant past were that these kinds of playful activities were not something that adults did, because adults don’t behave that way,” says Chick. But that assumption is simply incorrect, says Chang. “These are incredibly hardworking, very successful people,” he says of the folks signing up for Play Recess,who include lawyers, consultants, and nurses. “They, I think smartly, strive to find that work-life balance, and I think that’s part of what makes them so successful.”
Beyond these benefits, getting out and playing a game for an hour or two simply feels good. It’s just fun. “There’s a happiness associated with recess and getting outside and doing these things,” says Chang.
As I watchedthe players end their dodgeball game in the fluorescent-lit gym in Washington, I recognized—and I was envious of—that happiness Chang describes. There are few things that get me that excited in my adulthood. For a moment, I got it. Why do you come out on a Thursday night when there’s still laundry to be done and email to be sent and a lump on the cat that could be cancerous?You come to play, to forget, to listen to the sound of plastic on wooden floors. Todisappear, just for a little bit, as another sweaty someone running through a crowded room, the world waiting behind the closed double doors.
Over the summer, Oru Kayak announced the Inlet, its smallest, lightest-weight kayak yet. The brand claims that you can assemble the new 20 pound boat in under five minutes (with practice). We testedthat withtwo gear editors to see if it’s actually true. The kayak is available for preorder now and ships in June 2020.
For a stretch of more than 20 years, Dave Mackey rarely took a break from running. The 49-year-old physician assistant spent those two decades putting together a stellar ultrarunning career, earning national championships in 50K, 50-mile, and 100K distances. He set the record for the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim run in 2007 and was named Ultrarunner of the Year twice by USA Track and Field. His only injury during that time was a rolled ankle in 2007 that made him rest for a few weeks. “I’ve always been lucky with injuries,” Mackey says from his home in Boulder, Colorado. “Well, except for falling off a mountain.”
In 2015, Mackey was running 8,459-foot Bear Peak in the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range when he decided to scramble down a series of boulders off the backside of the summit. An experienced rock climber, he had taken the route plenty of times before. But during his descent, a boulder jostled loose, and he fell 50 feet, breaking his left tibia in eight places. For a year after the accident, Mackey and his surgeons were hopeful he would keep the leg. But after suffering constant pain from scar tissue and low-grade infections, it became obvious that it would never fully heal. Mackey says the decision to amputate was an easy one. “It was about quality of life,” he says. In addition to being a dedicated ultrarunner, Mackey is also an accomplished adventure racer, skier, and mountain biker. “Keeping my leg would’ve held me back for years, if not my whole life,” he says. “But I knew after the amputation I would run again. People do amazing things with one leg, or no legs for that matter.”
After the surgery, Mackey spent almost a year adjusting, learning how to walk and run again while also undergoing multiple fittings for his prosthetic leg due to shrinking muscles in the residual limb. But he wasn’t down for long. Less than two years after his surgery, Mackey completed the Leadman Series, a succession of six races over the course of a summer that includes the legendary Leadville Trail 100 Run and Leadville Trail 100 MTB. “The vast majority of people who lose a leg never work again,” Mackey says. “They never establish the same mobility as they had before. I’m really fortunate, and I was motivated.”
Finishing the Leadman Series was just the beginning for Mackey, who has largely resumed his old routine since losing his leg. He runs every day with a blade prosthetic—there’s an 11-mile route he likes to knock out in the morning before sending his kids off to school—he mountain-bikes regularly, and he skis with his family during the winter. Although Mackey figures he’s half as fast on rocky trails now,it’s all relative. Last year he finished 12th in the Leadman Series, just over seven hours behind the series winner’s accumulated time for all six races. This year he ran the Leadville Trail 100 in 25 hours, 54 minutes, roughly six hours slower than his 2014 time. Still, he placed 98th overall out of 841 runners and was the first runner to ever finish the race with a prosthetic leg. “The more technical the terrain, the slower I have to go,” Mackey says. “Rocks that are smaller than a fist are easy to work through, but with the baby-head-size rocks, the blade can roll more easily. I have to watch my steps more.”
Mackey alsosays he’s enjoying the training process more than he ever did before. “I just want to get out there and make the most of it,” he says. “I’m more appreciative now of every individual run or ride. Or skiing with my kids. It feels so good. With the accident I had, I could’ve died.”
Recovery has been a fact of life since Mackey’s accident. He’s had more than 13 surgeries during the last four years. When I talk to him, he’s fresh off a three-hour mountain-bike ride, slowly working his way back into “normal” life after having two screws removed from his leg two weeks earlier. “It can be hard,” Mackey says. “Taking time off in your forties is different than taking time off in your twenties. You don’t necessarily bounce back like you used to. But this whole process has taught me patience. You have to stay patient so you don’t get hurt again. But if you’re motivated, you can come back.”
Although Mackey is still getting after it postaccident, his motivation to keep moving has changed slightly. At one time, pre-accident, it was pushing himself to the brink of collapse in order to win races and crush records. “You feel like a train wreck one moment, then an hour or two later you feel great, because your body cycles through it,” he says. But while he continues to love the physical challenge of ultras, it’s not the podium that motivates him these days. It’s the process itself.
“Being in the outdoors is what keeps me going,” Mackey says. “The longer the trail run, the more I get out of it. It takes energy to make it happen, but the net return of those runs gives me more energy for everything else. It gives me a better attitude, a better perspective. Being outside, moving, it’s like therapy.”
Professional waterman Mark Healey was born in Hawaii and has had a long-standing connection to the Pacific for as long as he can remember. In Pressure, from First Lite, Healey explains how his connection to the ocean influences his time hunting in the hills.
When it comes to outdoor adventures, Jenny Jurek doesn’t shy away from taking her three-year-old daughter and 18-month-old son along for the ride. She designs outdoor gear for a living, and her husband, Scott, (yes, that Scott Jurek) is a professional ultrarunner known for his 2015 speed record on the Appalachian Trail, among other feats. In 2016, the couple carried their daughter, Raven, 21 miles across the Grand Canyon. She was just three months old. In 2018, Raven and her then six-week-old brother accompanied their parents for eight miles to the summit of Georgia’s Springer Mountain, to revisit the site where Scott had begun his AT record three years earlier.
Like most parents who get outside with their little ones, Jurek has discovered the limitations of kids’ gear. It doesn’t always fit right. It’s often overbuilt. It’s usually pretty expensive. And it gets outgrownfaster than you can say“growth spurt.”
Her motto is to make do with what you have. “Kids don’t care,” she says. “They’ll go in jeans.” If you have something sort of close to appropriate but not totally right, “don’t be afraid to cut it or modify it to make it work,” she says. Jurek’s decades of experience designing running equipment and women’s clothing for the likes of Montrail, Outdoor Research, and Patagonia have come inhandy when customizing her kids’ gear. “I’m constantly crafting stuff that makes it fun for them to be outside,” she says.
Most recently, the Jurek family spent the month of August bikepacking around Japan. When you’re dealing with roadside diaper changes and all the other challenges that come with bringing children on a long adventure, having confidence in your gear and your kids’ gear is key. Outside chatted with Jurek to learn about the pieces she modified in preparation for the trip.
DIY Kid’s Sleeping Bag
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
On any trip that involves carrying all your gear for multiple days, weight is a primary concern. The only issue: lightweight, warm, and compressible sleeping bags for kids are hard to come by. “There are a lot of kids’ sleeping bags that are puffy and synthetic for sleepovers but really nothing for ultralight backpacking,” Jurek says. The couple lucked into a warranty-returned down quilt from Sierra Designs, which Jurek turned into two kid-size bags.
She cut the quilt—a hybrid with a closed footbox but open shoulders and no hood—down the middle crosswise. The footbox portion became the 18-month-old’s sleeping bag. (Jurek added a bungee cord and cordlock for a makeshift hood.) For Raven’s sleeping bag, Jurek sewed together the sides and bottom edge of the quilt’s upper half to make it a fully enclosed bag. “The kids loved having their own sleeping bags,” she says. “It was so cute.”
Pro tip: when splitting down-filled fabric into multiple pieces, sew closed the area you plan to cutwith two parallel lines, like a tunnel, and then slice in between them. This keeps the down from spilling out. Jurek warns that you need a heavy-duty sewing machine to handle this kind of bulky, stuffed material, though many high-quality home machines are up to the task.
DIY Ultralight Baby Carrier
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
Baby carriers aren’t typically compact. They come with heavily padded hipbelts and shoulder straps built for comfortably holding a heavy baby, not folding into your frame bag. Jurek knew they’d need something to carry her son on short hikes and in busy airports, but she wanted something that was “super light and packable,” since they’d be lugging it around for a full month. The answer came in the form of an Ultimate Direction hydration vest Jenny designed with Scott.
She stripped off all the pockets, leaving just the mesh base—the part that sits right against your skin. An 18-month-old is bigger than most hydration vests, which are narrower in width than most baby carriers. Jurek split the back of the vest down the middle and spliced in some of the leftover pocket mesh, to make the carrier wide enough to hold in her son. The last step entailed using more of that pocket fabric to lightly pad the underarm webbing adjusters, which turned into leg supports.
Of all the DIY hacks Jurek shared with us, she strongly cautions against doing this oneat home. “You have to make sure everything is not going to rip out,” she says. “I used a lot of heavy-duty, extra-strength thread, and I don’t know if a home sewing machine could handle that.” If you’re motivated, seek out a local tailor who has the requisite machinery and ability to work with technical gear.
A Trailer with Reflectors
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
Before leaving for Japan, Jurek tricked out their Thule bike trailerswith all manner of high-visibility reflective and fluorescent patches and flags. “We just happen to have a really great outdoor-fabric store” nearby that has lots of reflective and fluorescent materials, she says. “But you can order it online, too.”
Jurek also added bug-screen mesh to the back of the bike trailer to cover the rear gear-storage area.
Modified Children’s Bike Seats
(Photo: Jenny Jurek)
Most children’s ride-along bike seats come with robust, secure harnesses. But the shoulder straps on Jurek’s children’s seats kept slipping (their kids are both small for their age). Jurek again turned to her home library of running-vest parts to find a spare sternum strap, which she attached to the bike seat’s shoulder straps. When the kids started to nod off halfway through a 30-mile day, and their heads began to bob, she felt better knowing the shoulder straps would stay in place.
Homemade Kid’s Bike Shorts
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
(Jenny Jurek)
Jurek’s number-one recommendation for kids’ gear is to not let the gear you have—or don’t have—hold you back from getting your little ones outdoors. After a few fun family outings, chances are your mini-me will want to look pro just like mom and dad. “After this bike trip, Raven really wanted bike shorts,” says Jurek. Of course, Raven didn’t need bike shorts to get out on a bike. But Jurek knew it would make the activity more funfor her and would be easy to accomplish for very little cost.
The morning of our phone call, Jurek bought a pair of cheap spandex girls’ tights at a big-box store. That night she was planning to cut off the legs and make a faux chamois out of removable sports-bra pads (those tan, foam, cupped disks that get crumpled every time you wash your favorite racerback). “She’s gonna flip out,” Jurek says.
Merriam-Webster defines horror as “painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.” The best films in this genre, like The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, and The Witch, display our worst fears and suggest that those dangers are very real. In this regard, Free Solo—the 2018 Oscar-winning picture that documents Alex Honnold’s historic, ropeless ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan—is absolutely a horror flick, and it’s the scariest outdoor movie you can watch this Halloween.
If you haven’t had the pleasure (or misery) of seeing Free Solo, just listen to Tommy Caldwell’s synopsis. In the film, he boils down the complexities of Honnold’s feat into a simple analogy: “Imagine an Olympic gold-medal-level athletic achievement that, if you don’t get that gold medal, you’re going to die. That’s pretty much what free soloing El Cap is like. You have to do it perfectly.” Codirectors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi add another layer of dread by filming Honnold’sloved ones as they watch him risk fallingto his death. The experience fits Merriam-Webster’s horror definition to a T.
Punch “scary outdoor films” into Google, and it will spit back titles like The Evil Dead(really?), Cabin in the Woods(a dark comedy), and Cabin Fever (also a comedy). It’s preposterous that Free Solo is not the first and only search result. In other horror pictures, we often know the hero will survive, but the more we are removed from that thought, the scarier it is. Free Solo succeeds in making us feel like Honnold is on the brink of falling, even though it’s not a mystery whether or not he will prevail. After one Outside staffer’s first viewing of Free Solo, she told me: “I kept telling myself over and over in my head that I knew the outcome—Alex was alive and well! He just posted on Instagram!—but the sweeping wide-lens shots of him clinging to El Cap made my brain refuse to listen to reason.”
But the true horror of Free Solo is not watching Honnold pull off 5.13a moves thousands of feet above the ground. It’s spectating those around him as they wrestle with that awful possibility in their heads, like a good psychological thriller.
“My fear is that I’ll be filming and I could potentially see Alex fall through the frame,” Chin says in the film. As audience members, we’re putting ourselves in the shoes of Chin and the supporting cast—not Honnold’s—as we try to digest what’s unfolding before us. But most of all, we’re viewing this horror show from the viewpoint of Sanni McCandless, Honnold’s girlfriend. Some argue that Free Solo isn’t so much about the act of climbing El Cap as it is about their relationship. They’re right: no one is forcing Honnold to climb, and McCandless has to reconcile that fact with his unstoppable desire to push himself. We, along with McCandless, ask: Why do you need to do this?
The whole crew had to deal with this gigantic mental struggle. In one scene, professional climber and cinematographer Mikey Schaefer films Honnold from the Yosemite Valley floor. As Honnold reaches pitch 27, Schaefer can’t bring himself to look through his camera lens any longer. With his hand covering his mouth, Schaefer has to turn away from the tripod. It’s as if he’s cringing as the protagonist in a horror flick approaches the house where the killer awaits. In this case, the protagonist is his close friend.
In a behind-the-scenes clip, Schaefer explained the source of his fear. “There were many times while shooting the actual free solo that I had a hard time watching. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that I know the route. I’ve free-climbed El Cap with ropes,” Schaefer said. “But I know those holds. I have grabbed those holds numerous times and know how slippery they are, I know how insecure that move is. In a way, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t know.”
Schaefer’s explanation brings up a good point. Free Solo instills fear in two different types of audiences: those who don’t know much about climbing, and those who climb and know how insane and earth-shattering Honnold’s ascent is. Schaefer obviously falls into the latter category. But his knowledge is actually a curse, and that’s what makes Free Solo so edge-of-your-seat terrifying for climbers.
The same is true for nonclimbers (at least some). No one else in my family climbs, yet when I took them to see the film, I could hear their gasps, which were notably louder when Honnold did the “karate kick” move on the crux. Another Outsidestaffer, who is “decidedly not a climber,” told me: “The first time I saw Free Solo, I was sweaty the whole time and white-knuckle-gripping the armrests of my theater chair.”
I’ve seen Free Solo five times. My palms were sweaty during each viewing. And I’m certain they will be the next time, too—when I watch it again on Halloween.
It was a Sunday in Tonga, so the kingdom’s business had come to a halt. Stores were shuttered, traffic was quiet, even the airport was closed. King Tupou VI strolled out of his oceanfront palace and down the main street of Nukualofa, capital city of the island of Tongatapu, to attend church along with the rest of his South Pacific nation. Men wore their best sarongs; women wore taovalas—coconut-fiber aprons—over long dresses. The scene was all very ordinary except for one thing, and it was visible from the palace’s front lawn: a 224-foot ship moored at the pier, bristling with heavy cranes, stacked with high-tech equipment, and carrying a mysterious $30 million cargo.
“Welcome to the good ship Pressure Drop,” said Rob McCallum, who stood on deck in khaki shorts, river shoes, and a polo shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the Five Deeps Expedition, a black shield bearing the Latin phrase In Profundo: Cognitio (“In the Deep: Knowledge”). A former New Zealand national park ranger who grew up in Papua New Guinea, 54-year-old McCallum is a legendary expedition leader. He specializes in bespoke trips to far-flung places, some of which happen to be underwater, like the wreck of the Titanic. Five Deeps, however, was something even more extreme: a global mission to dive a manned submersible to the deepest point in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans. This had never been done before—which is exactly why McCallum’s client, Texas businessman Victor Vescovo, had set out to do it.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram of people who want to dive seven miles underwater, people with the skills to test-pilot a deep submersible, people with the means to fund the most technologically advanced ocean expedition in history, and people willing to devote several years of their life to such an expedition—you wouldn’t find many names in the middle. But Vescovo qualifies on every count.
According to Vescovo, the roots of his go-big-or-go-home philosophy can be traced back to age three, when he snuck into the family sedan, released the emergency brake, and rolled the car down the driveway into a tree. The resulting crash cracked his skull in three places, shattered his jaw, broke his hand and some ribs, and provided an early whiff of mortality. “I realized that every day is precious, and you may not get another one—best make full use of them,” Vescovo says.
Yet even by Vescovo’s standards, the goals he’d set for the Five Deeps were outlandish, ranking somewhere between launching into low orbit (easier) and decamping to Mars (harder). Twelve people have walked on the lunar surface, but only three had ever been to our planet’s deepest spot, known as the Challenger Deep. There are reasons for this. For one, it lies at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a 1,500-mile-long, 43-mile-wide gash in the western Pacific seabed, near Guam. To reach it, you need to dive 11,000 meters: that’s 1.3 miles deeper than Mount Everest is high, in obsidian darkness, under pressures of 16,000 pounds per square inch.
Our knowledge about the ocean has long been concentrated in its uppermost waters, the top 200 meters known as the epipelagic zone. If you see marine life and you can name it, odds are it swims in these shallows. But the epipelagic occupies only 5 percent of the ocean’s volume. It’s merely a ceiling: the real action takes place below. Traveling downward, you pass through the twilight zone (from 200 to 1,000 meters), the midnight zone (from 1,000 to 4,000 meters), the abyssal zone (4,000 to 6,000 meters), and then finally the hadal zone, named after Hades, the mythical kingdom of the dead. These waters begin at 6,000 meters and pitch down into dozens of ultradeep trenches—the vast majority of which are located in the Pacific—like the inverted summits of towering peaks. The hadal zone is the earth’s most forbidding frontier. This realm is so hard to access that it has generally seemed prudent to send robots rather than people. But hard doesn’t mean impossible.
The Limiting Factor is to shallower-diving submersibles what the Space Shuttle is to a Cessna. (Photo: Courtesy The Five Deeps Expedition)
In 1960, the U.S. Navy sent Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard to the Challenger Deep in the Trieste, a sort of underwater zeppelin loaded with iron pellets and 34,000 gallons of gasoline. Five hours after its submergence, the Trieste landed on the trench floor with a thud, stirring up clouds of silt that ruined the visibility. It was ironic to arrive at such an exotic destination and then fail to see it. But in their time near the bottom, Walsh and Piccard did glimpse something long and flat swimming away—a hint that Hades wasn’t a total wasteland.
The next half-century went by in the Mariana Trench without human visitation. Then, in March 2012, filmmaker James Cameron took the plunge in the Deepsea Challenger—a torpedo-shaped, lime-green vessel designed to carry only a pilot—becoming the first person to dive solo to the Challenger Deep. “In the space of one day, I’ve gone to another planet and come back,” Cameron said at the time. (Unfortunately, that was the last trip his submersible has made. He had donated it to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and it was damaged during transport. It’s been in drydock ever since.)
To complete the Five Deeps, a submersible would need to be strong enough to withstand implosion in the hadal zone, but nimble enough to handle in rugged terrain; big enough to carry a pilot and a scientist, and reliable enough to trust with their lives, but light enough to be launched from a ship. Every wire and bolt and circuit board and battery on it would need to be fail-safe in corrosive salt water, under gargantuan pressures, and they would need to stay that way over time. This is such a tall order—and a proposition so expensive it makes Phenom jets look cheap—that no such vehicle existed. Until Vescovo commissioned one.
I hauled my duffel bag up the gangway and shook McCallum’s hand. The tropical sun blazed in a cloudless sky, glancing off a white hangar that stretched across the ship’s stern deck. Beneath this container, I knew, the most futuristic submersible ever built hunkered quietly, awaiting its next mission. Vescovo had named it Limiting Factor after an artificial intelligence in an Iain M. Banks science-fiction novel, and when I joined the ship, it had already made a run of successful dives. The Atlantic’s Puerto Rico Trench? Check. The Java Trench in the Indian Ocean? Done. The South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean? Dicey but completed. And three weeks earlier, in May 2019, Vescovo had become the fourth person ever to touch down in the Pacific’s Challenger Deep, at 10,925 meters. The Five Deeps team had gone on to make four more dives in the Mariana Trench, for a total of five jaunts to the bottom of the earth within ten days. On one of those dives, the Limiting Factor became the first vessel to be certified by the submarine classification society, known as DNVGL, for “unlimited trips to full ocean depth.” On another, the expedition’s chief scientist, Alan Jamieson, of England’s Newcastle University, became the first hadal researcher to personally visit the ecosystem he studied.
A supergiant amphipod from the ocean's Hadal Zone (Photo: Courtesy Leah Brown/Newcastle University)
Now the expedition was headed out on its next Pacific quest: the first manned descent to the second-deepest spot on earth. Known as the Horizon Deep, this patch of Hades is part of the Tonga Trench. In 2013, a Japanese government agency measured its depth at 10,850 meters, less than 100 meters shy of the Challenger Deep’s record depth. But the world’s ocean trenches are tumultuous places. They’re formed by colliding tectonic plates, one plate driving another downward into the earth’s mantle. This process is called subduction, and it wreaks geological havoc. Some of its effects include rattling earthquakes, volcanic paroxysms, and submarine landslides, resulting in mega-tsunamis like the 2004 nightmare in Indonesia, which originated in the Java Trench, and the 2011 horror show in Japan. Such upheavals can change the seafloor topography as huge volumes of rock shift around. And the Tonga Trench is the liveliest subduction zone of all. Part of its lower plate is moving at the unsettling rate of nine inches per year, causing swarms of earthquakes. On the off chance that some new, yawning chasm might be found, Vescovo wanted to take a closer look. “It’s well within the margin of error,” McCallum said, raising an eyebrow. He explained that we’d be leaving for the trench the following afternoon, timing our departure to skirt a major storm. “It’s going to be a little sporty.”
Later, after traveling with him, I would become familiar with McCallum’s signature facial expression: a kind of half smile, half smirk, both bemused and concerned, happy but always scanning ahead for trouble. By the time I arrived in Tonga, McCallum had spent two years planning, worrying, juggling, hiring, and scheduling, in addition to cajoling bureaucrats around the globe for the expedition’s necessary permits. “At the moment I’m dealing with 57 government entities,” he told me.
That was the easy part.
The Tonga Trench lies 178 miles southeast of Nukualofa, a passage that would take 18 hours. Four days were planned at the dive site, making it a weeklong round trip for 43 passengers and crew. While it was in port, the Pressure Drop buzzed with preparation. Vescovo had bought the ship—a Stalwart-class ocean-surveillance vessel designed for spying on Russian submarines during the Cold War—and outfitted it for the expedition. Its facilities included multiple offices, wet and dry science labs, a machine shop, a gym, a movie lounge, an infirmary, and satellite internet access that enabled Vescovo to conduct business from the middle of nowhere.
Patrick Lahey and I stood in the hangar next to the Limiting Factor, the submersible that he and his team had built after years of doodling on napkins, dreaming of the day when someone would come along with a large checkbook and a burning desire to dive below 6,000 meters. Lahey, 56, is a battle-tested guy with a lively sense of irreverence and a fast engine running between his ears. He’s the president of Florida-based Triton Submarines and, like McCallum, a familiar figure in the world of ocean exploration. If you’ve ever seen a sub that looks like something George Jetson would drive—an aquatic spaceship in which passengers sit under a clear acrylic dome—you’ve seen Triton’s handiwork. The company has revolutionized the field: it’s the Apple of submersible design.
Even so, the Limiting Factor was a challenge of a different magnitude. It is to shallower-diving submersibles what the Space Shuttle is to a Cessna. I looked up at the sub: at 12 feet tall and 12.5 tons, it loomed over us. To me it looked like a giant padded envelope, white and square, with tapered edges. Most of its bulk consists of a highly specialized syntactic foam—made of tiny ceramic spheres suspended in polymer resin—the only material able to provide buoyancy while remaining uncrushable. “This is a perfect titanium sphere,” Lahey said, pointing to the pressure hull near the bottom of the sub, the five-foot-diameter cockpit where Vescovo and sometimes a passenger sit in padded leather seats. (It’s Vescovo’s custom to do the first descent alone in every new location, but after that he often brings another team member along on his dives.) The titanium is three and a half inches thick. In the deepest ocean trenches, the metal orb would be subjected to pressures equal to 292 fueled and fully loaded 747 jumbo jets stacked on top of it. The sphere’s three acrylic view ports gave it the appearance of a chubby alien’s face.
The Pressure Drop (Reeve Jolliffe)
Chief Scientist Alan Jamieson in the lab (Reeve Jolliffe)
A new species of Snailfish (Reeve Jolliffe)
“I first met Victor four years ago,” Lahey recalled. “He said, ‘Would you build me a sub that will take me to the bottom of the ocean?’ A sub that would carry him—he didn’t care if it had view ports. I said, ‘I’m not doing that. I’ll build you a sub that takes two people, with view ports. It needs a hydraulic arm so it’s a legitimate tool for science. And it has to be certified, not a one-hit wonder, but a sub that can do thousands of dives to hadal depths and will change our relationship to the deep ocean.’” He smiled. “After all, it’s not just about getting down there. It’s about what you can do when you get down there.”
Over the past year, the Five Deeps team had been doing a lot: Horizon Deep would be the Limiting Factor’s 26th dive. All that remained to complete the expedition were this depth check of the Tonga Trench and the Molloy Deep in the Arctic Ocean (and a few dives on the Titanic by Vescovo and Lahey en route to the Arctic, because why not?). It was all going smoothly now, but for Lahey and his crew it had been a wild ride, with plenty of white-knuckle moments. There was the dive in the Southern Ocean when Vescovo’s communications systems failed and the weather closed in as he surfaced in the gloom among icebergs. On the next launch attempt the seas were pitching, and as the sub was lowered into the water, it swung like a wrecking ball into the stern of the ship. Then there was the dive in Challenger Deep when the Limiting Factor ran out of battery power on the bottom. And it was nobody’s idea of a good time when the sub’s $350,000 hydraulic arm fell off on a dive, sank into the Puerto Rico Trench, and had to be replaced. Through all this, Lahey remained undaunted. Thirty-eight years spent working as a commercial diver, submersible pilot, and submarine manufacturer had taught him that the ocean makes its own rules. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy,” he said. “You have to be optimistic or crazy or a little bit of both to do this, because I know there are easier ways to make a living.”
Vescovo arrived on board the next morning, coming into McCallum’s office with a gust of energy so intense that I wondered if it might knock the skull and crossbones flag off the wall. He is a slender, athletic man, six feet tall, with ice-blue eyes, blond hair that he wears in a ponytail, and a close-cropped silvery beard. Even now, in his fifties, he has the high-voltage stoke of a grommet. “So let’s see, I’m at the bottom of the deep, and I’m in my own submarine,” he said, laughing, when I asked him how things were going. “I can do whatever I want. I’m looking around, I’m seeing sea creatures—oh yeah, I’m having a blast!”
Vescovo’s enthusiasm is infectious, but there’s nothing giddy about it. His kid-like curiosity coexists with a mind that knows how to construct an aerospace factory and decipher raw intelligence on Al Qaeda. Lahey had described him to me as “a bit of a Vulcan,” equipped with fierce logic, but also “a friggin’ unicorn.” Both of these things are true.
At that particular moment, he was excited about the possibility of diving on the wreck of a fully armed Russian nuclear-powered submarine. He’d been trawling online for new places to take the Limiting Factor. “K-278,” Vescovo announced. “It’s between the Molloy Deep and Tromsö, Norway. No Westerner’s ever gone down and photographed it. I’d have to bring a Geiger counter.”
Lahey, standing nearby, stared at him over the top of his reading glasses. “Diving next to a nuclear sub—what could possibly go wrong?”
“Oh, come on!” Vescovo urged. “It’d be awesome!” He turned to me. “When I started my Navy career, I was an intel guy. That was part of my job, hunting these things.”
Vescovo wandered into the dry lab, a mission-control area where the ocean-mapping team, the Triton engineers and technicians, and the scientists worked. LCD screens lined the walls, displaying high-resolution bathymetric maps of the Tonga Trench. The maps had been made with the expedition’s state-of-the-art sonar system, welded to the ship’s hull, on the trip from Guam to Tonga.
A lander used to collect scientific specimens (Photo: Reeve Jolliffe)
The trench was radically steep, with sheer walls of jagged rock. A ridge reared up in the center. “It will be the most dramatic deep we’ve seen so far,” Vescovo said, looking pleased. On the maps, the Horizon Deep appeared as a yellow dot, with its measurements confirmed: the Challenger Deep still reigned as the deepest trench. If Vescovo was disappointed by the news, he didn’t show it. The chance to make record-setting dives alone may have been his grail—he knew that Five Deeps could be perceived as “one man’s ego trip”—but along the way he’d become intrigued by the expedition’s scientific goals: to find out as much as possible about what was going on down there and then share that information. An impressive team of scientists had become involved; it included Jamieson, one of the top experts in hadal biology; geologist Patricia Fryer, an authority on subduction zones; and marine geologist Heather Stewart, from the British Geological Survey. The Tonga Trench is a wonderland of rock formation, earth processes, fluid circulation—a glimpse back into planetary deep time—and Vescovo planned to take Stewart on his second dive, to survey a thousand-meter wall near the bottom. “It would be nice to age that section of the crust,” Stewart noted. “Nobody’s actually done a transect of one of these walls. At all.”
On each dive, Vescovo invited eminent ocean explorers of past decades to join the ship. Captain Don Walsh, now 88, had come along to the Mariana Trench. Dr. Joe MacInnis was here for the Tonga leg. MacInnis’s medical specialty is the physiology and psychology of extreme diving, how the human body copes (or not) with exposure to depth. He’s led ten expeditions under Arctic ice and was an adviser to James Cameron. The French submersible pilot and former naval commander P. H. Nargeolet served as Five Deeps’ technical consultant; he’d been in charge of the Nautile, France’s 6,000-meter sub.
As a rule, deep-ocean research is difficult and expensive, and the field is badly underfunded. In 2018, NASA’s budget for space exploration was $4 billion. That same year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration received a scant $36.5 million for ocean exploration and research. Every last crater on the moon has been named, but less than 18 percent of the ocean has been mapped with any kind of sharp detail. Precise depth measurements are especially hard to come by. The only way to measure ocean depth is with sound waves, which travel at varying speeds depending on water temperature, density, and salinity. Pinpointing depth over thousands of meters is a highly technical affair, and in most places in the ocean no one has even tried.
Before Vescovo could dive to the deepest spots in the Indian and the Southern Ocean, for instance, first he had to find them. He’d sprung for the most advanced civilian sonar system ever made, and hired Cassie Bongiovanni, a talented young ocean mapping scientist, to run it. (Ultimately, the Five Deeps maps will be donated to the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, a UN body that’s compiling a complete, high-resolution model of the seafloor by 2030.) Triton had also built three full-ocean depth landers—untethered platforms the size of Smart cars and laden with scientific instruments, navigational equipment, cameras, animal traps, and bait—engineered to the same specifications as the sub. The landers took samples from the water column and enabled Jamieson to collect specimens everywhere the ship went, an unprecedented trove.
The first night at sea was bouncy, as predicted. “These are some pretty big swells,” Vescovo noted at breakfast the next morning, holding his plate to keep it from sliding across the table. “Well, the storm that’s generating them is a monster,” Lahey replied. “It’s covering half of New Zealand.” McCallum, a Kiwi, flashed his trademark smirk. “We call it winter.” I finished my toast and stood up, bracing myself between two tables. I was headed to the science lab to meet up with Jamieson and look at some deep-ocean creatures. “You’re gonna like Al,” Lahey said, grinning. “He’s a proper fucking dour Scotsman, miserable as the day is long. But he’s got a great sense of humor.”
Jamieson was in his office, a nook just big enough for a desk and two chairs. He was drinking coffee from his thermal mug, also known as the Goblet of Hades. No one had logged more time studying the trenches than Jamieson. He’s in his forties, tall, with a mop of dark hair and a tendency to glower even when cracking a joke. His uniform was a black T-shirt, baggy cargo shorts, and black steel-toed boots. I wanted to know more about what he’d found in the trenches, what the landers had brought up in their traps: critters were slurped into canisters and lured into wire-mesh boxes. “A lot of the usual suspects,” he said, and then brightened. “Oh, the Java Trench was quite good. I don’t know if you saw the video with the big sort of transparent thing with the dog head and the tentacles?” He pulled up a clip on his computer.
The video had been captured by a camera on one of the landers, at 6,000 meters. The background was ink black; the lander’s lights illuminated the foreground. Two metal bars reached into the darkness, holding a dead mackerel above a seafloor covered in soft brown sediment. A small fish hovered hopefully next to a white crinoid, a sea lily that resembled a wonky flower. “That’s a new species of snailfish,” Jamieson pointed out. “But look—” A ghostly figure appeared in the frame, sailing toward the bait. It really did look like a gelatinous basset hound head trailing a long tentacle. Inside the head there was a lot going on. It glimmered in pale shades of lilac, with twinkles of white and gold. “That’s so far scored highest on the weird-shit-o-meter,” Jamieson said, adding that it was a stalked ascidian, or sea squirt—albeit a species nobody had ever laid eyes on before.
The highlight reel continued, a parade of beings visiting the landers at various depths and locations. “Dumbo octopus at 6,000 meters—who would’ve thought?” Jamieson said of the deepest-ever sighting to that point. Dumbos are rare, primitive animals that propel themselves with the help of two flappy fins perched on their heads like cartoon elephant ears. (They’re also adorable.) A larger head jutted in from the side, round with small eyes, attached to a thick, snaky body. Jamieson identified it as a cusk eel. It wasn’t interested in the bait, he added, but in the other animals that had come for the bait. Cusk eels like to eat amphipods, white prawn-like crustaceans that populate the trenches in large numbers. Some amphipods are tiny, but others, known as supergiants, can grow up to 13 inches long. They’re ace predators: in one time-lapse sequence, we watched a cloud of amphipods devour a mackerel with such gusto that only the skeleton remained.
Earlier in his career, Jamieson had discovered the world’s deepest-dwelling fish, a snailfish species that could swim down to 8,200 meters. (Beyond that, the pressure is too great for any fish’s cells.) “And there it is,” he said, pointing to the screen. Snailfish are popsicle-size, with semitransparent jelly bodies and fluttery fins, and they’re found in every Pacific trench. Despite their delicate appearance, they’ve got some gnarly capabilities. “They have two mouths,” Jamieson explained. With the first, they suck in amphipods. “But if you put an amphipod in your mouth, the first thing it’s gonna do is eat its way out of your head.” To solve that problem, the snailfish’s second, internal mouth consists of two grinding plates.
By this point in the expedition, Jamieson had made 63 lander deployments, filmed ten terabytes of video, and filled a freezer with animals that would all be donating their DNA to science. The genetic material collected on the expedition would be studied for years to come. “We’re looking at the population of the trench from the shallow end all the way to the deep end,” he said, gesturing to the screen. “And as you can see, there’s all kinds of things going on. The idea of the deep as this barren, lifeless place is just horseshit.”
On the morning of Vescovo’s first dive, the wind was blowing 20 knots and the ocean was choppy with swells coming from two directions and the sunrise had been a strange dark scarlet, but everything was a go for the launch. “Conditions are more challenging than we’d like,” Lahey admitted. “But they’re not the worst that we’ve had.” On the dive plan, McCallum had listed the day’s hazards: “Extreme depth. Tropical sun. Night recovery.” And then, at the bottom, highlighted in red: “Complacency.” “We’re coming off the massive high of Challenger Deep,” he warned. “This is the time karma will kick us if we’re not careful.”
I positioned myself on deck, out of the way of heavy machinery, and watched the Triton crew perform the industrial ballet required to launch the Limiting Factor. The process is undeniably dangerous, fraught with enough perils that it had once caused the deck operations manager, Kelvin Magee—a good-natured Canadian so strong and capable he’d been nicknamed the Kelvinator—to collapse from a stress-induced migraine. Winches whined as the hangar rolled back, and the sub was moved along tracks and then out of its cradle, pinning it against a bumper at the stern of the ship. Tim Macdonald, a 30-year-old mechanical engineer from Australia, climbed atop the sub, wearing a wetsuit, a safety vest, a helmet, and neoprene booties. He is the “swimmer,” a risky job that involves grappling with the sub’s hooks, lines, and straps during launch and recovery, and securing the craft so Vescovo can enter and exit. “I’m the most expendable,” he’d said jokingly. “That’s why they put me in.”
Now the Limiting Factor was suspended over the water, and Vescovo disappeared into the hatch. Slowly, the sub was lowered and moved away from the ship. Macdonald, still riding it like a bronco, unhooked the lines. It helped that he was a surfer: from my vantage point, I could see a big set rolling in. When he was finished, he leaped into the ocean and was picked up by McCallum in a Zodiac. The submersible was free to descend. I watched as it rocked in the waves, a white speck in the vast blue Pacific. Then it was gone.
I found Lahey in the dry lab, huddled over a laptop alongside Triton’s principal electrical design engineer, Tom Blades, a soft-spoken Brit in his thirties. The two would stay glued to this spot for the next ten hours, monitoring the sub’s movements using software Blades developed. “He’s doing roughly two knots,” Lahey said, “about a meter per second.” Every 15 minutes, Vescovo would transmit his depth and heading via acoustic modem, his voice coming in faintly but audibly with a burst of squeegee static.
Life on the ship was quiet while the dive was underway. People who’d been up all night preparing for the launch went off to their cabins to sleep. I felt restless and found it impossible to do anything but stare at the screens that charted Vescovo’s progress. It’s an odd thing to go about your day knowing that someone is miles below you in a world that nobody has ever seen. A small part of me was nervous for him. Every safety precaution had been taken, but the hadal zone is never 100 percent jeopardy-free. The worst-case scenario is known as catastrophic failure, which means that nothing—not the sub, not its passenger—comes back in solid form. Entanglement is another hazard, although that’s more of a concern around shipwrecks and cables. A cockpit fire or slow leak wouldn’t be good for Vescovo, either. Yet the odds of any of these scenarios happening were minuscule, and the larger part of me would’ve happily sold my lesser internal organs to trade places with him.
Triton president Patrick Lahey (Reeve Jolliffe)
Tim MacDonald preparing Limiting Factor (Reeve Jolliffe)
Kelvin Magee on deck (Reeve Jolliffe)
I could only imagine what it would be like to roam around Hades, the feeling of primeval solitude, alone in the ocean’s eternal night. That was Vescovo’s favorite part: he loved to dive solo. Understandably, there had been grumbling about going to such rarefied—and scientifically significant—places with an empty seat beside him. It didn’t make sense from an operations standpoint: it’s tricky for the pilot to simultaneously navigate and work the hydraulic arm. But Vescovo was firm about his choice. “It’s a materially different experience to be completely on your own in these remote, somewhat dangerous places,” he’d said. “It’s a more private experience. And there’s no greater feeling of freedom.” Vescovo would socialize as much as he needed to—on the ship he was always friendly and accessible—but his real soul food was independence. “I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that I’ve never been married,” he said.
Just before one o’clock, after a four-hour descent, Vescovo touched down in the Horizon Deep. “Life support good,” he relayed, his voice warbling in and out on the modem. “At bottom. Repeat. At bottom.” “Roger, L.F.,” Lahey responded. “Understand, depth one-zero-eight-one-seven meters. Life support good. On the bottom. Congratulations.” A cheer went up; everyone’s shoulders relaxed. But we also knew that the dive was far from over. Anything could happen. And 15 minutes later, it did.
After he landed on the seafloor, Vescovo had set out across the trench to pick up rock samples and deposit them in one of the landers. But he noticed that the sub’s batteries were draining fast. He shut down some systems and tried to figure out why he was losing power, but nothing was obviously wrong. Continuing on, he arrived at a slope where slivers of rock poked through the sediment. When he tried to run the manipulator arm, it gave him a voltage failure: not enough juice. By that point, he’d spent two of his three hours of bottom time. He decided to head back up.
Later it was discovered that water had breached an electrical junction box outside the hull, causing what Lahey described as “a sustained high-current event.” In other words, an electrical fire, though there couldn’t be actual flames at that depth. The box itself was scorched and melted and looked like it had been through a war. Lahey and Blades examined it for a long time. “It’s a difficult one,” Blades said, frowning. “There’s so much damage that we can’t see what the original cause was. There’s a seal that could’ve leaked slightly, but that seal’s long gone now. We just need to rebuild it.”
“Tom’s unflappable,” Lahey said. “Unlike me.”
Blades smiled drily. “I’m screaming inside.”
The submersible is designed so that failures are isolated, with triple redundancies and backup safety systems—Vescovo was never in imminent danger. But the repairs would take 48 hours, which meant there was no time for a second dive. If we waited out here, the storm would be upon us; 30-foot seas were forecast. The weather window had closed.
When the ship returned to Nukualofa, we had a sunset barbecue on the top deck that turned into a raucous party lasting late into the night. The celebration was due: over the past six weeks, the team had executed six dives below 10,000 meters, with everyone brought back safely. It was a feat that had never been accomplished—or even attempted—before.
I’d spent the days since the dive pestering Vescovo for details of what he’d seen in the deep, what thoughts had gone through his head, even what he’d eaten in the sub (a tuna sandwich, chips, and a Diet Coke). When I asked him how it felt down there, he described it as totally peaceful. “Once you go down below 500 meters, it’s a very different world,” he said. “It is quiet. It’s very dark, very calm. You could have a raging hurricane above you and you wouldn’t know it. In that respect, it’s almost an embrace.” He told me that each trench had its own personality: The Puerto Rico Trench was wide and flat at the bottom, thick with sediment and rafts of sargassum seaweed, and not especially lively at a glance. The Southern Ocean offered more scenery. The trench was rockier; he’d flown over the remnants of a volcanic eruption. The Mariana Trench emanated a strong mystique. He’d passed through an area of undulating dunes and fissures in the seafloor tinged yellow by sulfur deposits. In the Challenger Deep, he was met by a swimming sea cucumber. The Java Trench was enthralling: its steep walls were carpeted in ochre, cobalt, and orange bacterial mats, and there was evidence of underwater landslides. But Tonga? Vescovo wasn’t a fan. “This is the eeriest, most hostile place I’ve seen so far.”
Expedition leader Rob McCallum (Photo: Reeve Jolliffe)
He’d landed in a heavily sedimented basin that was “completely and utterly flat.” No visible life stirred, though Jamieson would later point out the burrows of many reclusive creatures captured by video cameras. “It felt the most alien,” Vescovo said. “It was really cold, and I could just see the battery power being eaten away. It wasn’t welcoming. It didn’t want me there.”
He showed me some video that he’d shot on his phone, through the view ports. I found it hypnotic and dreamlike, beautiful in its own spooky way. The visibility was crystalline, and the bottom looked weirdly smooth, as though covered in a soft skin. It was actually a beige-gold sediment so fine that when it was disturbed by the thrusters, it billowed like smoke in the water. The sub’s lights cast rich twilight colors, azure and indigo ebbing to black. The Horizon Deep appeared to me like a cryptic story in an ancient language, a chapter of earth’s autobiography written on the seafloor.
Now, on the deck of the ship, after the miles at sea, the all-nighters spent working, the months away from family and friends, the tense business of submersible operations, the endless planning—it was time for the Five Deeps team to set all that down and cut loose for an evening. Jamieson was jamming on guitar with first mate Fraser Retson. In the background, I heard blenders whirring.
McCallum, circulating in a Hawaiian shirt, was pouring frozen margaritas. Lahey looked relaxed, laughing with his six-man Triton crew at a picnic table. The night was warm and humid, and the air smelled of rain and flowers. After a while people began singing. Vescovo got up and belted out “Desperado,” his ponytail slipping from its elastic. Then he added a verse of his own:
I’ve got the Five Deeps blues
Sitting on a bridge in Tonga
My battery’s on fire at 10,000 meters
And I’m just trying to get home
He finished to loud applause; someone handed him a margarita. Vescovo leaned back against the ship’s railing. Five Deeps was on the home stretch of its journey, but some interesting experiences still lay ahead. Eleven weeks from now, the Molloy Deep dive in the Arctic would go off seamlessly, and the team would celebrate by cruising through fjords for two days, watching polar bears cavorting and walruses lolling against a backdrop of snow-capped peaks. From there, the Pressure Drop sailed on to Edinburgh, then down to London, where Vescovo received a standing ovation after a presentation at the Royal Geographical Society.
But his victory lap was interrupted by a dash of controversy. James Cameron, who’d supported the expedition wholeheartedly, offering advice and exchanging e-mail with Vescovo along the way, spoke up from New Zealand, where he was working on three Avatar sequels. He took exception to the expedition’s newly announced claim that Vescovo had made the “deepest submarine dive in history” in the Challenger Deep, going 17 meters deeper than Cameron had. “For me, the science work is the most important part,” Cameron told me. “But I don’t think he went deeper. I don’t think you can go deeper.” The Challenger Deep is just not that bumpy, he said. “I think Victor and I went to the same place, which is a completely dead-ass flat plain.” Any variations in depth measurements, he added, fell within the typical margins of error.
Vescovo conceded nothing. “We assaulted the Mariana Trench with a level of technology—the sonar, three landers, multiple submarine dives—that we have very high confidence in our data,” he pointed out to the audience at the Royal Geographical Society. “His depth data probably are more accurate,” Cameron agreed, and then laughed. “My response to that is: Cool. That means I went deeper than I thought I did.”
“Look, I have enormous respect for the guy,” Vescovo would tell me later, sounding frustrated. “But it’s tough for me to just ignore my own data and make a scientific statement that, ‘Yeah, it’s completely flat.’ I’ve got all my instruments saying that’s not the situation, and I think it’s just as possible that we did find a deeper place. And you know, I don’t know what to tell him.”
In any case, all these dives were good news for the ocean, and none of this was any kind of finale. It was more like the end of the beginning. Vescovo had already announced his next expedition with the Limiting Factor. He wanted to go back to the Challenger Deep—he’d extended an invitation to Cameron to join him—and then off to explore more trenches along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile belt of seismic mayhem full of deep-sea volcanoes. “That’s what’s so great about ocean exploration,” he told me in Nukualofa, taking a sip of his drink. “There’s still so much that’s unknown.” Plus, he added, “I’ve gotten hooked on it.” Behind him the lights from King Tupou’s palace shone. Vescovo looked out at the water and smiled. “We’ve had some fun. Isn’t that the point?” O
Spearhead Ridge, a horseshoe-shaped traverse connecting Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains in British Columbia, is a backcountry ski zone renowned for its easy access. But it’s just this access that makes the skiers in this film from Arc’teryx second-guess whether or not they’re loving it to death.
There are a lot of cool things happening in the world of running right now. People are running faster and farther, and gear just keeps getting better and smarter (read: your shoes can now record your workouts). But you know what’s especially cool? The sport’s changing DNA. All over the world, a new breed of clubs is sparking a fresh, far more inclusive era of running.
Harlem Run club manager Amir Figueroa has seen that change firsthand. When he joined in 2014, the club had only a handful of members. Today, 250 to 300 people regularly turn out for its biweekly group runs. And as clubs like Figueroa’s have grown and evolved, so too has the demand for a different kind of running event.
Under Armour, which sponsors the Harlem Run club and many others like it, has been paying attention. So on September 26, the brand debuted the New York City HOVR Challenge, a subversive “secret race” promoted mainly through the running crews’ social channels. It was a far cry from traditional “run with the herd” events; participants knew only the course distance and their start location until the day of the race, when they received the finish-line coordinates via text message. How they got to the finish zone was entirely up to them. “It’s about freedom,” says Jay Shemenski, Under Armour’s senior lead of North American consumer engagement, who designed the race. “You’re the one who’s making the decisions.”
Under Armour also created the race to be accessible, with a relatively short distance of five miles and no entry fee. And because the race mimics the way people run on a daily basis, it naturally minimizes the intimidation factor of traditional races. “That’s what made it authentic,” says Figueroa.
The strategy worked. For many of the 150 registrants, this was their first race, and they had a blast, Figueroa says. The runners gathered at sunset at four different starting points throughout the city, wearing color-coded LED bracelets that corresponded with their location. Then they wound their way through city streets to the finish line at Southpoint Park, designated by a giant 20-foot-diameter balloon surrounded by four light towers. “It was really unique,” Figueroa says. “A couple of us stuck together at first, and then branched out because we had different ideas of where we wanted to go.”
As the runners began to merge near the finish line, their bracelets lit up the Queensboro Bridge, and their cheers drowned out the traffic noise. Although an all-expenses-paid trip to Under Armour’s Human Performance Center, in Portland, Oregon, was on the line, winning wasn’t the priority, says Figueroa. “We all supported each other, and that’s what it’s really all about.”
So when and where will the next HOVR Challenge be? Under Armour won’t say—you’ll have to go underground to find out.
Under Armour is a leading athletic performance apparel, footwear, and accessories brand. Powered by one of the world's largest digitally connected fitness and wellness communities, Under Armour’s innovative products and experiences are designed to help advance human performance—making all athletes better. Learn more and shop at underarmour.com.
On Monday morning, Shalane Flanagan, a towering presence on the American running scene for almost two decades, announced her retirement on Instagram.
“From 2004 to 2019 I’ve given everything that’s within me to this sport and wow it’s been an incredible ride!” Flanagan wrote. “I’ve broken bones, torn tendons, and lost too many toenails to count. I've experienced otherworldly highs and abysmal lows. I've loved (and learned from) it all.”
Flanagan’s last race was the 2018 New York City Marathon, in which she finished third. The year before, she upset Kenyan superstar Mary Keitany to become the first American woman to win New York in 40 years.
In the wake of last year’s race, there were rumors that Flanagan’s retirement was imminent. She was 37 years old at the time, and had nothing left to prove. What’s more, this past spring, she had reconstructive knee surgery—a late-career comeback seemed unlikely. However, in a further display of the professional discipline that defined her career, Flanagan didn’t want to retire while she was injured. Making such a consequential decision while physically impaired didn’t sit right with her. So, characteristically, the official announcement didn’t come until she had started running again.
Even though she wasn’t able to compete this year, Flanagan has still been active in the wider running community. She was a commentator for the CBS broadcast of the 2019 Boston Marathon, as well as for the Ineos 1:59 Challenge earlier this month, in which Eliud Kipchoge became the first man to run 26.2 miles in under two hours.
Flanagan has also been a conspicuous trackside presence at her team’s workouts, bolstering her reputation as a runner deeply invested in advising the next generation of athletes. Since 2009, Flanagan has competed for the Bowerman Track Club, arguably the best distance running team in the nation. Initially, she was the only woman on the BTC, but the roster now includes world championship medal winners like Emily Infield (10,000-meters) and Amy Cragg (marathon), as well as American record holders Courtney Frerichs (steeplechase) and Shelby Houlihan (5,000, 1,500).
This proliferation of talent has been attributed to Flanagan’s influence. Despite being hyper-competitive and deeply invested in her own success, Flanagan embodied a teamwork ethos that seemed vaguely at odds with such an individualistic sport. And yet, it brought results—both for Flanagan and her fellow Bowerman runners.
“She’s helped me so much in the past four months. I’ve kind of just been hanging on to her,” Cragg said of her BTC teammate after winning the 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials by working with Flanagan for much of the race.
Therefore it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that, on the day that she announced her retirement as an athlete, Flanagan also gave official notice that she will now be beginning a career as a professional coach for the BTC. In a sport where the dearth of high-profile female coaches has long been conspicuous, Flanagan seems well positioned to pave the way for others in the same way that she did as a runner.
Very few, if any, coaches have had a running career as distinguished as Flanagan’s. Two individual NCAA cross-country titles. American records over 5,000 and 10,000-meters. An Olympic silver medal. Four podium finishes in World Marathon Majors, including her victory in New York in 2017. Too many national titles to count.
Beyond such benchmarks, Flanagan set the standard for toughness in a runner, as demonstrated most memorably in that 2016 Trials race. Despite starting out strong and working with Cragg to ditch the rest of the field, Flanagan became severely dehydrated in the second half of the race and looked to be struggling with heat exhaustion. Nonetheless, she hung on for third place, securing the final spot on the Olympic team.
“Each season, each race was hard, so hard,” Flanagan wrote in her retirement announcement. “But this I know to be true: hard things are wonderful, beautiful, and give meaning to life.”
