Back in 2014, pro climber Alex Honnold gave us a tour of the 2002 Ford Econoline E150 he used as his mobile base camp. That van served him...
The ultralight, ultrawarm Pinion Pullover ($199; 20 percent off) is stuffed with 800-fill water-repellent down and features a ripstop shell, so you can stay toasty while taking a beating from Mother Nature. We also love the Pinion's zippered kangaroo pocket, which doubles as a stow pouch for the jacket. Stuff it in, then use the whole package as a travel pillow.
The women's Superleggera ($45; 55 percent off) may be light, but its waterproof outer and long cut works to keep you dry during unexpectedly wet rides. If you’re heating up, you can pack it away into a jersey pocket.
The WindFront jersey ($100; 50 percent off) blends two fabrics to shield you from the cold on a winter ride: a windproof membrane up front and in the sleeves and a thermal fleece out back. It’s also coated with a DWR finish to shed light rain and sleet.
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake with an epicenter just eight miles north of Anchorage struck Alaska at 8:29 a.m. this morning. Damage is still being assessed, but local police have said it caused "major infrastructure damage across Anchorage." Photos from the scene show heavy damage to buildings and roadways. Thankfully, a tsunami warning that followed the quake has since been canceled.
The quake occurred along the fault line between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, which produced the largest earthquake in American history. The 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake measured 9.2 on the Richter scale and took 3,000 lives.
Complete reporting on today's quake is not yet available, but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates a low probability of fatalities. Still, it says there could be $100 million to $1 billion in damage.
Significant aftershocks continue, including one measuring 5.8.
Damage to the area appears to include significant power outages, collapsed bridges and overpasses, structure fires, and sinkholes.
In response to the now-canceled tsunami warning, Alaskans fled low-lying coastal areas to head inland, but their progress was frustrated by the damaged roadways. Traffic throughout the region is said to remain snarled.
Tsunami warnings remain in effect elsewhere across the Pacific. Consult the National Tsunami Warning Center for details.
Feet without their owners attached seem to be turning up all over the place.
On November 16, a person looking for returnable bottles found a foot clad in a gray Nike running shoe in a dumpster at a boat ramp at Rogers Landing Park, located on the Willamette River, about 20 miles southwest of downtown Portland, Oregon, the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post.
The foot was found in a large, clear plastic trash bag with other flotsam, which has led investigators to think the sneaker was perhaps tossed there by a Good Samaritan who had cleaned up one of the islands in the river, says detective Todd Steele. It’s possible the person picked up the shoe without even knowing a foot was inside, he says.
The shoe and sock visually match those found on the shore of a nearby riverside park last July, he says. DNA work on the foot is now being done at a crime lab.
“It’s fairly clear at this point that we have a body somewhere, and that body is probably in the water,” Steele says. But the Willamette passes through several cities. “We have no idea where these feet went into the river,” he says, so the location the shoe was first picked up could be useful to police. (If you have any leads, contact Steele at 503-434-7349 or steelet@co.yamhill.or.us.)
Once you start looking for them, though, severed feet really do seem to be everywhere. Consider a few headlines from just the last year or so around North America:
Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, though, remains the epicenter of foot-finding. At last count, 14 dismembered feet have been uncovered since 2007, the most recently last May, when a foot in a hiking boot was discovered in a logjam on an island west of the city. That foot, and most of the others, have been identified.
Is there anything nefarious, ahem, afoot?
Not likely. As a forensic pathologist explained to Outside nine years ago in our definitive look at the foot-loose phenomenon, our hands and feet are like kites, attached only by a few tendons. Underwater, they flap around and come off pretty easily when body tissues break down. “It doesn’t mean someone is running around with an ax, chopping feet off,” says Steele.
If there’s a trend, experts say, it’s the way sneakers are now made: light, foamy, buoyant. “It really didn’t come up until we had running shoes that floated so well,” coroner Barb McLintock told Canada’s National Post in 2016. “Before, they just stayed down there at the bottom of the ocean.” Experts working on the Vancouver-area foot cases have found no signs of any foul play. “In every case, there is an alternate, very reasonable explanation,” McLintock says.
But as Outside pointed out years ago, we humans crave patterns. It’s how we make sense of the world. So forget Occam’s razor—the principle that the simple explanation is the most likely one. We’ll choose the unlikely and the macabre if it explains our experience. Even a killer on the loose is somehow more assuring than the fact that sometimes people die. And we find them.
This week, Strava, the activity-sharing network favored by endurance athletes and those who stalk them, released its annual “Year in Sport” report, which offers insights on data collected from over 36 million users in 195 countries. Even though Strava is looking to broaden its reach—for better or worse, roller skiers and kitesurfers can now upload their activities on the app—runners and cyclists continue to dominate.
So what does the data reveal about the tortured psyches of those who voluntarily log thousands of miles every year? Not much, I hope. Because the last thing we need is another social network that can provide access to psychological profiles of millions of users. Instead, Strava’s annual report tells us stuff like what days of the year are most popular for running, and what post-workout foods people like to brag about. Perhaps we are already living in an age where such seemingly innocent information can be used to nefarious ends, but, for now, let’s pretend it’s all in good fun.
Here, I’ve cherry-picked a few of the more interesting points from Strava’s report, which reflects data from last September through August of this year. Enjoy.
It will probably come as no surprise that, worldwide, the most popular day to go for a run typically falls on a weekend. Last year, for instance, a record 766,100 Strava users logged miles on Saturday, September 16.
In the United States, however, the most popular day for running is Thanksgiving; in 2017, 169,900 Americans uploaded a run on Strava on November 23. Strava’s data suggests an obvious explanation for the spike: the proliferation of the Turkey Trot. Last year, the app recorded 10,404 Turkey Trot races nationwide.
One of the more interesting revelations was the stark discrepancy between men’s and women’s most popular activities on Strava. Among women, running won by a wide margin, with 90 million uploads on the app over the past year. At 50 million uploads, cycling was a distant second. Meanwhile, among men, the trend was reversed: cycling occupied the top spot with 382 million uploads, while running lagged far behind with 234 million.
Shameless hot take: while pro running still has its own issues to resolve when it comes to equality between male and female athletes, the situation is arguably much worse in professional cycling. If we can make the generalization that Strava users represent a more competitive subset of amateur athletes, it’s perhaps not surprising that more women prefer running.
Strava users have the option of adding a title to their activities when recording them in the app—e.g.: “a.m. Miles With Nasty Ned,” or “Chicago Marathon 2018 Requiem for My Toenails.”
Needless to say, food and drink are frequent themes when athletes decide to label their workouts, races, or easy runs. In the report, Strava added a graph to reflect the number of times coffee and beer were mentioned in activity titles among cyclists and runners. For the former group, coffee showed up a record 491,000 times, while runners most frequently mentioned beer (306,000). I have no idea what to make of this, but we do know that runners and coffee have a complex, sometimes fraught, relationship.
“When the right words are hard to come by, emoji get right to the point,” Strava states in its report. May God help us if that’s true.
But, since you were surely wondering, I can confirm that the “running” emoji was the most widely used emoji in every U.S. state except Florida (biking emoji), North Dakota (snowflake), Wyoming (smiling face with sunglasses) and Vermont (black heart).
So, if you ever meet a Strava user from Vermont, be sure to give them a hug.
In terms of percentage, American women beat out American men when it came to race participation. In the past year, 13.1 percent of U.S. women uploaded a race on Strava, compared to 12.7 percent among men. It’s a trend that’s corroborated by Running USA’s annual road race participation report, which noted that, in 2017, around 59 percent of road race participants were women.
It’s also noteworthy that, while percentage of race participation increased for both sexes, for American women the increase was a dramatic 28.1 percent from the last annual Strava report. (The increase for American men was 17.2 percent.) This increase came during a 12-month period in which Shalane Flanagan became the first American woman to win the New York City Marathon in 40 years, and Des Linden the first to win Boston in 33 years. All just a coincidence, surely.
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