Midwestern Mindset

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Balanced rock. On an unnamed trail outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, USA.

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Early morning at Grindstone Lake, Ruidoso, NM

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Okinawan butterfly on trail to shrine

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A frosty morning by the River Nene.

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A Guide to the Best Wood-Burning Grills

How the New All-Wheel-Drive Ford Transit Van Stacks Up

Ford’s full-size Transit cargo van, already popular in the #vanlife scene, is about to get even more so. Earlier this month, the automaker announced that the van will come with available all-wheel drive for the 2020 model year. While it isn’t the heavy-duty four-wheel-drive system that many may have been hoping for, the introduction of an all-wheel-drive Transit is a big deal.

History in the U.S.

First, some context. The full-size recreational van market in the U.S. is dominated by two main players: the Transit and the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter.

The Transit was introduced in the U.S. for the 2015 model year, replacing the outdated and inefficient E-Series. While it caught on in a wide range of industries—from delivery companies to airport-shuttle services to RV upfitters—the Transit was not available with all-wheel drive. That put it at a major disadvantage among vanlifers when compared to the AWD Sprinter model that was introduced in 2015. This changes with the updated 2020 Transit.

What Changes

Let’s make one thing clear: while all-wheel drive turns the Transit into an objectively more capable vehicle, the van still lags behind traditional 4x4 vehicles in terms of adventure readiness. When engaged by the driver, a four-wheel-drive system splits power 50/50 between the front and rear wheels, meaning that both axles are forced to turn at the exact same speed, which is often necessary for propelling the vehicle over rough terrain. All-wheel-drive systems, like those in the Transit, on the other hand, typically engage only when the vehicle’s on-board computer deems it necessary and send torque only to the wheels that need it. But the computers aren’t always right, and uneven surfaces can confuse them, leading to lots of wheel spin and loss of forward momentum.

“We anticipate the AWD Ford Transit being sufficient for on-road needs and for use on the occasional forest road,” says Brent Hawk, sales director at Quigley Motor Company, a van-conversion outfit in Pennsylvania. “But what we’re hearing from RV manufacturers we work with is that many recreational customers still want traditional four-wheel drive, which allows you to go farther off-road than any all-wheel-drive system.”

The Sprinter all-wheel drivetrain does offer an optional low-range mode, which is great for conquering obstacles that need to be taken at slow speed. But Hawk says that it’s still primarily reactive, engaging at the behest of the on-board computer. In comparison, everyday pickup trucks like the new Ford Ranger have proactive four-wheel-drive systems that can be engaged prior to coming upon an obstacle.

The Transit’s system lacks low range altogether and is more closely related to the road-oriented all-wheel drive you’ll find in a family crossover. That said, it will have selectable modes for muddy, rutted, or slippery surfaces that should make up slightly for its mechanical shortcomings. According to Ford, it can also send “100 percent of available torque to the front wheels to help prevent slipping on loose surfaces.”

Also notable, Ford has opted to leave the AWD Transit’s ride height untouched, claiming it wants to keep the vehicle as easy as possible to get into and out of. But that means a set of meaty all-terrain tires is probably out of the question. The all-wheel-drive Sprinter, on the other hand, is about six inches higher than its two-wheel-drive cousins, allowing for larger tires and greater off-road capability.

Finally, while the all-wheel-drive Sprinter comes with diesel only, the AWD Transit will be a strictly gas-powered affair—a bit disappointing given the fuel-economy and torque benefits of diesel.

For what it’s worth, though, given that it’s a more basic package than the Sprinter, the AWD Transit is likely to cost less than its German competitor, which starts at just under $47,000. We’ll know for sure when pricing is announced closer to the vehicle’s launch date in the fall.

What It Means

While this new Transit won’t allow you to rock crawl, it will still afford many of the day-to-day advantages of all-wheel drive. This means better traction on rain-slicked pavement, not having to chain up at the base of a snowy canyon on your way to the ski resort, and greater confidence when it comes time to venture down a forest road to a remote campsite. It still lags behind the Sprinter and is still a ways away from being overland ready, but the AWD Transit will be more approachable for a lot of vanlifers and road-trippers.

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Your Psychological Skills Can Predict Injury Risk

Pushing the limits of your athletic potential requires, as the author John L. Parker, Jr., once put it, “a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.” Balancing on that edge is tricky, and it’s why top athletes get injured pretty frequently, having pushed just a little too far. Of course, some athletes get injured more than others. Is that just a matter of luck and biomechanics—or is there some degree of skill in managing the delicate balance between enough and too much?

That’s the question at the heart of a new study from researchers at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. A group of 73 tennis players in the country’s national high performance program, all between the ages of 11 and 14, completed a series of psychological tests at the beginning of the season, and were then tracked weekly for the rest of the year to see who got injured and how severely.

The researchers hypothesized that self-regulatory skills would help distinguish who got injured and who stayed healthy. In particular, they focused on four “meta-cognitive”—which means thinking about thinking, basically—elements of self-regulation: planning (“I determine how to solve a problem before I begin”); self-monitoring (“I keep track of my progress”); evaluation (“I go back and check my work”); and reflection (“I often reappraise my experiences so I can learn from them”). In essence, the idea is that knowing which pains you can train through and which require some time off is a skill that requires careful and honest self-appraisal, and that you can get better at if you’re sufficiently reflective.

The results were pretty stark. During the season, the 73 players suffered a total of 88 overuse injuries, not including acute injuries and illnesses. For the most part, they were pretty good at self-regulation: 28 of them score highly on planning, 36 on self-monitoring, 48 on evaluation, and 43 on reflection. But the players with moderate or low overall self-monitoring scores were 4.6 times more likely to suffer an overuse injury that required missing training or competition compared to those with high self-monitoring skills. That’s a huge difference.

There was an additional wrinkle when they broke the results down by gender. Among the 45 boys in the study, self-regulatory skills didn’t actually have a significant relationship to injury risk. Among the 38 girls, on the other hand, those with moderate or low self-regulation were a whopping 10.8 times more likely to lose time to overuse injuries. It’s worth looking a little more closely at that finding.

As it happens, the new study is actually a follow-up to a 2017 paper in the same journal, where the authors analyzed the same dataset looking for links between risk-taking behavior and injuries. In that case, the results were the mirror image of the self-regulation data. Risk-taking, as assessed by a card-based betting game called the Iowa Gambling Task, was associated with increased risk of losing time to overuse injuries in the boys, but not the girls.

It’s tempting to combine these results into some sort of pseudo-evolutionary narrative about how the psychological traits that made males good hunters long ago now make them prone to tennis elbow, and how women evolved to ignore discomfort because of childbirth or whatever. Let’s resist that temptation. In a small study like this, it’s hard to know whether the gender-based differences they observe are generalizable differences, or simply reflect the particular characteristics of the 45 boys and 38 girls in the study. For example, the average international ranking for the boys was 436, compared to 281 for the girls—so maybe competitive level, or some other factor, is the real source of these differences.

Still, the overall data suggests that psychological traits do affect how likely you are to get injured, joining previous studies like the one I wrote about last year that found runners with perfectionist tendencies were 17 times more likely to miss training time with injuries. While this area of research is still in its infancy, it’s hard not to wonder what you can actually do about it. There’s plenty of research about how to improve self-regulation in the context of eating habits, and even about teaching pre-schoolers better self-regulation through mindfulness-based training. I don’t know how much of this we can apply to sports injuries, but I’m sure there are people working on it.

The authors of the study suggest that coaches and trainers should be on the lookout for athletes with weak self-monitoring skills, and try to help hold them back when necessary. This seems reasonable. But maybe the bigger point is simply that overuse injuries are not acts of god. They flow, at least in part, from the choices we make. For an athlete who is training hard, those choices are difficult. You’re always gambling, trying to guess which aches you can safely ignore and how much fitness you can afford to lose. And you’ll inevitably guess wrong some of the time. But if you don’t gradually get better at that guessing game, perhaps you’re simply not paying close enough attention.

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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