Southern Indiana Trails

It began as every surfer’s dream: an empty point break, a rising swell, and a good friend to share the rides. But what happens when you’re out there and the waves just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger? So it went for William Finnegan at a break off the Portuguese island of Madeira. This happened decades ago, back when surfers had to more or less guess at the conditions they’d encounter on any given day. In this episode, Finnegan, whose surfing memoir Barbarian Days   won the Pulitzer Prize, shares one of his most harrowing experiences in the water. He and another longtime surfer were stuck out past the impact zone in a remote section of seas as night descended. Exhausted and frightened, they were forced to decide how to go about saving themselves. This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Sonos, maker of the Sonos Move, a portable smart speaker that delivers detailed sound and rich base in every kind of room and outdoors. Learn more and order yours a...

Two years ago, I wrote a column for Outside  suggesting that cross-country competitions like the NCAA or USATF National Club Championships should feature the same race distances for men and women. (At those events, women currently run 6K and men run 10K.) It was not a particularly radical or original proposition; pro runner Kara Goucher, for one, has been vocal about men and women racing the same distances and Lauren Fleshman wrote about the topic back in 2015. However, and as Fleshman notes in her piece, it’s an issue of some contention whether equalizing race distances is really the sort of equality we should be striving for.  For the British grassroots initiative RunEqual , the answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” The initiative, whose viral success prompted my 2018 article, is pushing to equalize race distances at national level cross-country meets. As it states on its website , RunEqual believes that having different distances sends a subtle message to women ...

Explosive strength is critical for athletes. There’s a power component to every movement we make, whether that’s a ski turn, a quick jump over a felled tree, or a lunge for a distant climbing hold. But it’s often overlooked in the gym, says  Alex Bunt , a strength and conditioning coach with Red Bull and  Lindsey Vonn’s personal trainer . While strength and speed are familiar territory, power is more nuanced and difficult to train. In practical terms, power is the ability to exert more force at higher speeds. Every movement has a relationship between force and velocity, Bunt explains, and this creates a spectrum called the force-velocity curve. On one end of the spectrum, there’s pure force: think of isometric exercises, like  a front plank  or one-rep max lifts where speed is negligible, like a heavy  back squat . On the other end, there’s pure speed, like sprinting or jumping. “The goal is to generate as much force as possible ...

When I first started bouldering—indoors, at a gym in Somerville, Massachusetts—I was struck by how closely my experience sending a problem tracked with how I solve crossword puzzles. Often, a stiff V3 could be unlocked with just the smallest input. “Turn your knee in a bit” or “match that pinch and then step up” might be the insight that unlocked an entire route. It’s an elegant bit of symmetry that crossword solvers often refer to the first answer they’re able to enter into a puzzle as a “toehold.”  Five letters for “Rapper Nicki” MINAJ! And we’re off! M-I-N-A-J. Just five boxes filled out of a couple hundred in a standard crossword, but often that toehold is all a solver needs to cruise through the rest of the grid. The J  turns out to be the first letter in JUMP SCARE, and that A  helps you see HAHA, and so on.   I started constructing crosswords in earnest the same year, 2016, that I joined the climbing gym, and ...

Pro skiers Cody Townsend  and Josh Daiek  teamed up with  Salomon TV  and  Switchback Entertainment  to show what they pack for backcountry ski touring, from brief forays into sidecountry terrain to advanced all-day alpine or glacier adventures. by Outside Editors via Outside Magazine: All

The struggle to pry kids away from screens can be traced back for decades, even if the specific devices have evolved. When I was young, it was television; what better way to decompress from school than with an afternoon block of cartoons and M*A*S*H reruns? These days it’s the phone; kids can kill a whole morning going full zombie mode on TikTok videos and text messages. But no matter the era or screen of choice, organized sports have always offered a healthy alternative—lots of exercise, important lessons about being part of a team, and ample time spent in loud, smelly locker rooms being uncomfortable with your awkward body in various stages of puberty.  Even before the pandemic, however, the number of youths involved in team sports was beginning to decline. From 2008 to 2018, the participation rate of kids between the ages of 6 and 12 dropped from 45 to 38 percent , due largely to the increasing costs, time commitments, and competitive nature of organized s...

As every race I signed up for in 2020   got canceled, I thought my daily running routine might disappear. But I own two Lab puppies, I value the state of my chew-mark-free home, and I’ve learned my lesson: a tired dog is a good dog . So I run most days—sometimes a few miles, sometimes much more—through the sandy arroyos of my backyard in northern New Mexico. This occasionally leads to cramps, but while a weird kink in my hamstring once may have earned me a rest day, try explaining an exercise-free morning to a puppy. Now every time I feel a tight IT band coming on, the  LuxFit Premium High Density Foam Roller: Extra Firm  ($9)   saves my life—and the longevity of my chair legs.  My partner, Will, and I   are both long-distance runners, and   we own four to six foam rollers between us. We have soft ones, firm ones, and ones with ridges. Our fanciest roller features “pressure points,” lime green ribs, and costs aroun...