A Look at the Upcoming Film ‘Wildland’

One Fork to Rule them All

In this first episode of a new series exploring how gear gets made, we investigate the origin of arguably the most refined fork in history. When designer Owen Mesdag was a graduate student in the late-1990s, he fell in love with a particularly clever spoon. Engineered by outdoor brand MSR, it doubled as a stove repair tool. Mesdag was enamored with it and he thought, I want to make a matching fork. And how hard could that be, really? A fork is a fairly simple tool. Except Owen's fork didn't just have to be good, it had to be perfect. His obsessive attention to detail meant that he kept going back to do more testing, taking more trips to Asia, and redesigning the fork again and again, because it was never quite right. Producer Alex Ward has this story that explains why the business end of a fork tells us a great deal about the tireless designers who make our favorite things.

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A Vermont Foliage Film

Make Driving Dangerous Again

We live in a safety-obsessed culture, something that becomes immediately apparent when you take your seat behind the wheel of a modern automobile. Seatbelts, airbags, ABS, back-up cameras, lane-departure warning systems, automatic emergency braking... Today’s cars are way smarter than the horses that once pulled them.

Despite all this safety technology, road deaths are at a 10-year high, and cars (or, more accurately, their drivers) kill over 40,000 people per year. One reason for this is that we’re increasingly distracted by our phones—indeed, if you think about it, hitting a 10-year high about 10 years after the first iPhone came out sounds about right. Another reason for all the carnage is that, despite all these safety gew-gaws, the SUV is basically designed to kill people. See, because we’re so in love with oversized cars, the auto industry keeps churning out death machines. However, instead of selling them to the military along with tanks and fighter jets, they’re leasing them to us for $399 per month with $3,900 due at signing.

Alas, while we may be safety-obsessed, we’re also common-sense-challenged. That’s why instead of confronting our giant-car addiction, we’re trying to put more high-tech safety crap on cyclists and pedestrians instead. We also keep trying to delude ourselves into believing that all this killing is suddenly going to disappear thanks to the self-driving car. Sure, autonomous cars are unlikely to take over the roads anytime soon, but they’re already perhaps the greatest excuse for doing fuck-all that the world has ever seen. In the meantime, we just keep texting away and trusting that our bloated vehicles will protect us.

Fortunately, there’s another way to make our roads safer, and it doesn’t involve placing all our faith in an egomaniac with questionable management skills. (I’m referring to this one, not this one, though if we adopt this plan the current administration will get to tear down a bunch of onerous safety regulations, which is what it loves to do anyway.) It also doesn’t require some sort of futuristic technology that doesn’t exist yet. In fact, it doesn’t require any new technology at all. Best of all, the price of your next car will almost certainly come down dramatically.

All we’ve got to do is rip out all these damn features and creature comforts and Make the Automobile Dangerous Again.

The key here is reminding people that operating a motor vehicle actually requires a certain amount of concentration and skill, and the way to do that is to pare these machines down to the bare essentials. Think about it: When are you more engaged? When you’re on a bicycle, descending a mountain road on a contact patch the width of your thumb, with nothing between you and the tarmac but a thin layer of Lycra? Or when you’re in a 4,000-pound climate-controlled, sound-deadened, suspension-dampened Honda Pilot that’s essentially a 280-horsepower simulacrum of your living room sofa?

Yes, flensing the bloated SUV like the whale carcass it is could very well be the key to safer roadways. The first feature we should remove is the automatic transmission. This would have the immediate effect of taking who knows how many millions of drivers off the road, thanks to the fact that most Americans now regard manual transmissions with the same bewilderment as they do rotary phones. (And the drivers who do know how to use a stick shift are probably more interested in driving and therefore better at it.) No doubt we’d also see a tremendous decrease in the number of senior citizens driving their cars into storefronts, since with a manual transmission you’ve got to make a concerted effort to put your car into reverse.

Those still determined to drive would eventually learn how to operate a manual transmission and purchase new cars—only next they’d find new cars no longer come standard with backup cameras. Or automatic emergency braking systems. Or Bluetooth connectivity. Or entertainment systems. Or even airbags or seatbelts. Nope, now you’ve got nothing to watch but the road. Oh sure, you can still look at your actual phone, but maybe now you’ll think twice about hitting something, as doing so would mean a guaranteed one-way trip through your windshield.

Even after the complete de-Naderization of the automobile, many people still won’t think twice about driving—that is until there’s no more climate control. Hot outside? Well, guess what? Now it’s hot in the car too! No more sitting in an idling car for 45 minutes on a 90-degree day, futzing with your phone while you pump more carbon emissions into the atmosphere. And maybe freezing your ass off in winter will help remind you that you’re not actually invincible in your SUV. Maybe that snotsicle hanging from your nose will help you remember that when it gets cold outside, the road gets icy. Maybe you’ll even start taking those blizzard warnings seriously instead of spending the night on the expressway because you thought your all-wheel drive was more powerful than nature.

Without all those extras to protect them in a crash, it’s only a matter of time before drivers start to realize that SUVs were a stupid idea. Cars will get smaller and so will their engines. If all goes well, by 2030, we’ll all be driving 1960s roadsters with better reliability—and due to the lack of safety features, drivers will instead be pressured to wear motoring helmets. With any luck, eventually those helmets will become mandatory, because nothing discourages people like helmet laws. In the end, driving will finally be the exclusive domain of a handful of enthusiasts, and tomorrow’s motorist will be no different than those people you see riding around on Can-Am Spyders today.

As for commuting, running errands, and generally getting things done, the vast majority of people will opt for a safe, efficient machine that makes sense. You know, like a bicycle.

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Don’t Think Too Hard About Your Running Form

Have you ever tried to explain to someone how to tie your shoes? It’s a task you do smoothly and automatically—so smoothly, in fact, that you may find it impossible to break it down into a series of discrete steps that you can teach someone else. The best way to tie your shoes, it turns out, is not to think about it, and simply let autopilot take over. And some new research bolsters the controversial claim that, in this respect, running is a lot like tying your shoes.

The new study, published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, was led by Linda Schücker of the University of Münster. Twelve runners ran at a moderate pace on a treadmill in a virtual-reality set-up with a large video screen simulating the experience of running on a path around a lake. Their running economy, a measure of much energy you burn to maintain a given pace, was measured in three different conditions: when they were told to focus on their running form, their breathing, or simply on their virtual surroundings.

The experiment was designed to test a theory in motor learning that distinguishes between directing your focus internally or externally. A large body of research suggests that focusing externally, on the consequences of your actions rather than on the actions themselves, produces better results. For example, you’ll do better shooting a basketball free throw if you’re told to focus on seeing the ball go through the rim than if you’re told to focus on the angle of your elbow or the motion of your wrist. Focusing internally on the details of your movements disrupts the “automaticity” of these familiar actions.

Back in 2009, Schücker published a study very similar to the new one which suggested that the same thing applies to running. When runners focused on their running form, they ran less efficiently than when they simply watched the scenery go by; when they focused on their breathing, they got even worse. That’s exactly what the new study found, too. On average, they burned 2.6 percent more oxygen when focusing on their form, and 4.2 percent more when focusing on their breathing.

The twist in the new study was that Schücker tried to understand what made the runners less efficient. When they thought about their running form, they had more vertical oscillation from stride to stride, which may have cost extra energy. There were other subtle differences in individual runners; several, for example, bent their knees more when they thought about form. When they thought about breathing, they took longer, slower breaths: just 28.7 per minute compared to 34.0 in the scenery condition.

The message seems pretty straightforward here: you know instinctively how to run and how to breathe, so stop trying to tinker with the details. But there are some important caveats. A few years ago I had a chance to chat about this area of research with Noel Brick, a psychologist at Ulster University who studies what endurance athletes think about while running, cycling, and so on. One of the points he made was that not all ways of thinking about running form are equivalent. In Schücker’s experiments, the runners are told: “Pay attention to the push-off and the forward movement of your legs.” Does that correspond to advice that any running coach would actually give? Perhaps it’s the specific details of this advice that hurt your efficiency, and you’d get a different result from thinking, say, “Take short strides and don’t lean too far backwards.”

Another point raised by Brick is that even staunch advocates of trying to change your running form don’t suggest thinking about form all the time. Instead, it’s something you might do as part of a periodic self-check: run through a list of form cues that you’ve identified as important for you personally, rather than generic guidance to pay attention to the forward movement of your legs. Then relax and think about something else.

There are two other caveats that always come up in discussions of changes in running form. One is that trying to alter your form may make you less efficient in the short term, but more efficient in the long term as the new motion becomes automatic. The other is that efficiency may not be the outcome you care most about. Lots of people might be willing to accept a 2-percent penalty in efficiency if it makes you less likely to get injured. Both of these points are entirely reasonable; but both assume that you know what changes to make to your form to make yourself more efficient and injury-proof—a proposition that remains hotly disputed among running researchers, to put it mildly.

Another important distinction in the motor-learning literature is between novices and experts. Actions like tying your shoes, shooting a basketball, or putting a golf ball all begin as a series of discrete steps that you have to consciously focus on. As time goes on and you get better at it, the sequence gets combined into a single step stored in your procedural memory, which no longer requires conscious control. That distinction has interesting consequences. If you tell novice golfers to hurry up, they’ll sink fewer putts than if you tell them to take as much time as they want. They need to focus on the discrete steps of their putting motion to be successful. In contrast, if you tell expert golfers to hurry up, they’ll actually sink more putts. They do best when they rely on their internalized procedural memory, rather than thinking too hard about the detailed steps of their motion.

With this in mind, I think there’s a high bar to clear before you tell experienced runners to start messing with their form. They may have apparent imperfections in their motion, but to improve on their current form you’ll need to overcome deeply ingrained motor patterns that have already been self-optimized to some degree. The unanswered question is whether less experienced runners count as novices or experts. You could argue that we’ve all been running for most of our lives; but you could also argue that someone who’s been mostly sedentary and then takes up running as an adult is essentially learning a new skill—or at least, is capable of learning from scratch in a way that someone who’s been running daily for a decade no longer is.

In the end, it’s probably best to steer clear of absolute pronouncements. Thinking about form isn’t always bad; neither is it always good. But I do think this research should tip the default option toward just getting on with it. Unless you’ve got a good reason to think your form can be improved, and a solid basis for knowing which changes to make, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. And as for breathing, where the potential benefits of meddling are unclear, I think the case is even stronger: stop thinking about it and just do it.

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, is now available. For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

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How to Watch the 2018 New York City Marathon Online

On Sunday, November 4, 50,000 runners will line up in Staten Island to start the 26.2-mile journey through Brooklyn and into Manhattan’s Central Park. Every year, the race attracts some of the world’s best runners, but the everyday athletes in the crowd are pretty amazing too.

This year’s race should be packed with excitement. On the women’s side, reigning champion Shalane Flanagan returns to defend her title against a stacked field that includes top Americans Desiree Linden, Molly Huddle, and Allie Kieffer, plus Mary Keitany of Kenya, who holds the women-only world record. The men’s field features last year’s winner, Geoffrey Kamworor, two-time Boston champ Lelisa Desisa, and five-time Olympic middle-distance runner Bernard Lagat, who will be making his marathon debut.

If you’re not in New York City on race day to watch in person, you can still tune in on your computer or smartphone. Here’s what you need to know.

When

Live race coverage runs from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST. Pre-race coverage starts at 7:00 a.m. The wheelchair division starts at 8:30, followed by hand cyclists and other athletes with disabilities at 8:52. Professional women runners start at 9:20, followed by the first wave (including professional male runners) at 9:50. The following three waves start at 10:15, 10:40, and 11:00.

Where

In the New York tristate area, you can watch the race live on WABC-TV Channel 7 starting at 9:00 a.m. Free livestreaming, including pre-race coverage, is available on the ABC app and ABC7NY.com starting at 7:00 a.m.

Across the United States, you can watch live coverage on ESPN2. ESPN subscribers can also follow along on the ESPN app or website. ESPN3 is airing a live feed of the finish line from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with pre-race and continuing coverage starting at 7:00 a.m.

International viewers can watch the broadcast via local providers. Check out a list here.

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Save 27 Percent on the Light My Fire Meal Kit 2.0

Emily Reed, one of our gear editors, never leaves for a backpacking trip without this meal kit. It weighs just 13 ounces and includes two large plates, two small bowls with sealable lids, two mugs, and a cutting board that doubles as a strainer. 

Buy Now

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