WITH A SIGNAL FROM the cameraman, Gordon Giesbrecht pushes off on his cross-country skis and starts moving over the thin layer of powder that blankets the icy surface of a lake on the outskirts of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The mercury has stabilized at a frisky six degrees Fahrenheit. Six feet tall, with powerful limbs, Giesbrecht moves in rhythmic strides—swish, swish, swish—his breath leaving a trail of fog in the air.

Watch video clips of Gordon Giesbrecht plunging into cold water in the name of science HERE

The charismatic Giesbrecht claims he has no trouble recruiting human guinea pigs: “people are clamoring to do my experiments,” he says.

Committed to the core: the Ph.D who always wanted to be a stuntman takes another icy plunge for science near Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Suddenly the solid ice turns to slush, and Giesbrecht plunges in. As the frigid water saturates his jacket and Gore-Tex pants, his first instinct is to let out a loud gasp. Gasping is bad. If your head goes under mid-gasp, you can drown. Intent on staying alive, Giesbrecht quickly gets his breathing under control and focuses on shedding his skis. Bobbing in the icy soup, he thrusts his hands under the surface and fumbles with the releases for ten long seconds. Finally he gets them off and…a boom mike is thrust in front of his chattering teeth. “Water sucks the heat out of you 25 times faster than air at the same temperature,” he says. Giesbrecht isn’t speaking to his immediate audience—a TV crew and a clutch of EMTs who are nervously looking on—but to 55,000 viewers watching a Canadian science channel. He treads water for a few more minutes and sputters out a handful of other fun winter facts (“I have a window of two to five minutes to pull myself out, but it would be an hour or two before I died of hypothermia”). Meanwhile, the rescuers are looking anxious. They desperately want to hustle him out of the lake and into the warmth of their waiting ambulance.

To their collective relief, Giesbrecht successfully demonstrates the “kick and pull” technique, lifting himself out of the water and rolling away from the fragile ice edge. But what happens next is more suited to an old Buster Keaton routine than a science show: Gordon jumps straight back in. The paramedics immediately throw him a looped extension cord and drag him to safety. Hooray! He’s out! No, wait, he’s…lowered himself back into the lake. So they pull him out with a branch. But he plunges in again. The crew slides an aluminum ladder toward Giesbrecht and he grabs hold. They drag him onto the solid stuff—only to watch, astonished, as he leaps back in for the fourth time.

Giesbrecht has now been in the 36-degree water for 15 minutes. He dunks his head under the slushy surface one more time. “If I wasn’t rescued really soon, I would go unconscious,” he slurs, his eyelids drooping heavily. Finally, his voice flagging, he mumbles, “Ready for rescue.” This time he means it.

TO GORDON GIESBRECHT, the world’s leading authority on freezing to death, a midwinter dip is just another day at the office. Believing that the best way to study the effects of cold on the human body is to get intimate with the elements, this 45-year-old physiologist and director of the University of Manitoba’s Laboratory for Exercise and Environmental Medicine has lowered his body temperature below 95 degrees, the threshold of hypothermia, a mind- and body-numbing 33 times.

The masochism doesn’t stop there. In March 2001, to learn more about how the body metabolizes various energy sources in subfreezing temperatures, Giesbrecht and four other men each dragged 180 pounds of gear across the frozen surface of Lake Winnipeg, a body of water roughly the size of New Hampshire, for 19 days. Then there was that winter 1999 experiment during which, in an effort to cool his body core while keeping his skin temperature constant, he had a colleague inject, over a one-hour period, more than a gallon of nearly frozen saline directly into his bloodstream. “He’s a risk taker,” says William Forgey, a 60-year-old physician who is the past president of the Colorado Springs-based Wilderness Medical Society. “If he needs to take it to the edge, he does it himself. While the expertise is there and the risk is controlled, it’s still dangerous stuff. He’s like a race-car driver.”

There is, of course, a very good reason why Giesbrecht keeps getting behind the wheel: This winter, like every winter, athletes, adventurers, and hapless innocents will get themselves into trouble in the cold. While no organization keeps detailed statistics on cold-related deaths in the outdoors, each year hypothermia kills an estimated 700 Americans. An additional 1,800 or so are thought to perish in cold-water drownings.

Giesbrecht has devoted his academic career to improving the odds for such victims of exposure. He is Professor Popsicle, the King of Chill. He may have a cliché for every occasion—”Keep cool, but don’t freeze,” he’ll say, smirking like Mister Rogers—but he is one of a kind. Or at least a few: There are roughly a dozen scientists worldwide who specialize in human thermoregulation, the study of how the body responds to temperature changes. Only a handful undertake human experiments, and no one goes as far as Giesbrecht, who has intentionally taken his core temp lower—down to 88.2 degrees—than any other researcher. “I’m the scientist who does things for real,” he says, “to make sure I really know what I’m talking about.”

Though many of Giesbrecht’s achievements are strictly academic, some of his scientific discoveries are already helping to save lives. His greatest contribution to the world of hypothermia treatment is the concept of immediate rewarming. It used to be that if you were found cold, stiff, and barely alive on a lonely mountainside, rescuers would leave you chilling until they got you to the nearest emergency room. The fear was that immediate rewarming could shock the body badly enough to cause death. But after five years of study, Giesbrecht determined that it is almost impossible to warm someone up too quickly. Now many first responders, from Coast Guard techs to those trained by the Wilderness Medical Society, have started rewarming victims in the field.

Giesbrecht himself has a charming habit of not always following his own instructions. Sitting in his cluttered university lab one afternoon last April, dressed in black polyester pants and a black pullover like a casual-Friday ninja warrior, he places a finger beneath his cheekbone and points out a small spot of blackened flesh. He’d felt the exposed triangle of skin begin to freeze during his Lake Winnipeg trek, but pressed on anyway. “I shouldn’t have tried to be a hero,” he says sheepishly.

The frostbite will eventually fade, but such battle scars have become his trademark, a kind of tattoo signifying a new phase in Giesbrecht’s career. “When you meet the world-famous hypothermia expert and his nose and ears are black with frostbite,” jokes Forgey, “well, you know he practices what he preaches.” Giesbrecht has reached the rescuers and trauma doctors and military men, but he knows they are only half the battle. Now he is bringing his message to the general public. His latest goal is to get through to Joe Snowshoe about what to do, and what not to do, when the blizzard hits. “I’m on a campaign to reeducate the entire known universe,” he says.

Which is why, on an ordinary Tuesday, he signs in at the front desk of his university’s pool, changes into his black swim trunks, laces up a pair of Bauer hockey skates, and climbs up onto a diving platform. Something a Mountie said after discovering the body of a 65-year-old man in a nearby lake has been bothering him. The victim had been skating and, apparently blinded by the setting sun, he sailed right off the edge of the ice into deep water. “It was the skates that did him in,” the officer told Giesbrecht. But Professor Popsicle has his doubts.

“Check out the latest Canadian Olympic sport,” he calls out. He jumps into the pool with gusto, then toodles about in the water, trying out different strokes, pulling a lap or two. He stops to tread water. “That’s interesting,” he says. “I’m not drowning yet.”

GIESBRECHT’S TACTICS may at times seem slapstick, but the annals of thermoregulation research encompass some of history’s darkest horrors. Although British physician James Currie undertook the first hypothermia studies using volunteers in the late 1700s, the term did not appear in scientific literature until 1886. And a half-century later, the still-budding field would be swept into the moral abyss of the Holocaust.

In 1942 and 1943, in an effort to determine the rescue time frames for Luftwaffe pilots shot down in the North Sea, Nazi doctor Sigmund Rascher supervised the murder of as many as 90 people imprisoned at Dachau by having them immersed in freezing water and then recording their vital signs as they perished. Some were kept in the tubs until they could no longer be revived; others were first chilled and then plunged into scalding water.

Much of Rascher’s data was destroyed before the Allies could recover it. But in 1946, Leo Alexander, a U.S. psychologist and consultant to the American Chief of Counsel for War Crimes—a federal department established to prosecute Germans at the Nuremberg Trials—wrote up what remained in an intelligence summary now known as the Alexander Report. For decades it formed an indelible part of physiology’s body of knowledge. But that changed in 1989, when an international group of about 60 researchers, physicians, and students met in Minneapolis with representatives from Jewish organizations to discuss the ethics of citing the Dachau data in scientific research. Though the attendees did not publicly announce any conclusions, a New England Journal of Medicine paper published the following year determined that Rascher’s data “cannot advance science or save human lives.” To this day, by unspoken consensus, many scientists will not reference the Alexander Report.

Giesbrecht, who at the time was only just starting to publish his own papers, calls the Nazi experiments “horrible” and flawed by poor methodology. (Apart from being motivated by sadism and ethnic hatred, Rascher’s procedures were far from scientific.) But he insists on his right to refer to them if necessary, and did so in a 1994 study of body-to-body rewarming. “I don’t write based on the data,” he says. “I just say [the Nazis] did it, they should be shot for it, and we’re redoing it.”

After the war, human hypothermia trials did not resume until 1971, when John Hayward, then a physiologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, repeatedly dropped his own body temperature to a cautious 94 degrees, and followed that by testing a series of volunteers. In 1985, six years before Hayward retired, Giesbrecht began pursuing a master’s of physical education at the University of Manitoba. His thesis supervisor was Gerry Bristow, a physician at the university hospital who had treated hundreds of hypothermia patients. Bristow, 63, felt there were serious gaps in medicine’s knowledge of the condition and no way to close them with the research methods then in use.

Ninety-five degrees “was felt to be the ‘do not cross’ line with human subjects,” says Bristow, now an associate dean in the school’s Faculty of Medicine. “But how can you learn about hypothermia by stopping cooling there, which by definition isn’t even hypothermic?” He and Giesbrecht decided to cross the line. Bristow had never seen serious heart troubles—the final, and usually fatal, stage of advanced hypothermia—occur above a body-core temperature of 86 degrees. He figured they could safely go to 89.6. Giesbrecht volunteered to go first.

In a way, Giesbrecht was living out a thwarted, slightly wacky teenage dream. Born in Winnipeg, he had learned outdoor skills from his Swedish grandfather, who spent his winters plying the backwoods of Manitoba as a fur trapper. But life north of the border was seriously lacking in adrenaline for young Gordon. Inspired in part by the 1978 Burt Reynolds movie Hooper—in which the mustachioed one plays an aging stuntman working toward his last big “gag”—Giesbrecht enrolled in a California stunt school at 21. He never got there; a skiing injury ended his Hollywood career before it began. Still, he clearly felt no need to repress his hot-dogging tendencies when it came to intellectual curiosity.

He vividly remembers that day in April 1986 when he first submerged himself in the university’s cold-water tank. “It was unbelievable,” he recalls. “You had to get slowly into eight…degree…water.” (That is, 46 degrees Fahrenheit.) Based on the success of that initial trial—the pair proved that such dunkings were medically safe—and Bristow’s reputation for resuscitating victims of advanced accidental hypothermia, the University of Manitoba’s Committee for Research Involving Human Subjects gave them the green light to drop human volunteers to 91.4 degrees. Amazingly, students were soon lining up to chill out.

Today, Giesbrecht’s office wall is plastered with plaques honoring volunteers who have each gone hypothermic more than ten times, for a mere $64 per dunking. “I never have to advertise,” he says. “People are clamoring to do my experiments.” People like 30-year-old Jeff Froese, an auto-body-shop assistant manager who has gone into the tank on a dozen or so occasions, and holds the record for longest submersion: six and a half hours.

“After that long, your hip flexors get really sore from shivering,” Froese notes. “You’re in this semifetal position. Other than that, the pain didn’t really bother me. Well, the esophageal probe isn’t really that great. And there was no food or drink, because I was wearing an oxygen mask.”

Why on earth do it? “You definitely learn what you can handle,” says Froese.

DESPITE GIESBRECHT’S more or less unblemished safety record, his experiments often make members of the university’s human subjects research committee a little squeamish. “His work draws red flags,” says Dennis Hrycaiko, 56, a former chair of the committee. “But I never had any concerns he couldn’t address.”

To understand why worry hangs in the academic air, you need to know what the body goes through as its internal temperature begins to fall from 98.6 degrees—the “normal” mark on your household thermometer. Once exposure to cold air or water lowers your core to 95, mild hypothermia sets in and the body shivers in an attempt to rewarm itself. As the body temperature drops to 89.6 degrees, the threshold of moderate hypothermia, your speech becomes slurred, motor functions crash, and shivering ceases. You remain conscious all the way down to 82.4 degrees, the realm of severe hypothermia, but at that point, the heart can quite literally stop cold.

Since so few academics are prepared to start down this road, Giesbrecht has claimed numerous research firsts. In his debut experiment with Bristow in 1986, he figured out that in humans, shivering generates up to 3.5 degrees of heat per hour, and suggested that emergency personnel use lighter blankets so they wouldn’t suppress the beneficial reaction. And in 1997, along with now-retired guru John Hayward, Giesbrecht was the first to clinically describe the symptoms of severe hypothermia in humans—crucial knowledge for EMTs. The pair used drugs to suppress shivering in mildly hypothermic subjects, mimicking the final stage before the last good-bye. Giesbrecht, ever the willing guinea pig, pumped himself full of narcotics for that one.

But like all mavericks, Giesbrecht is not without his critics. As recently as five years ago, a number of his peers, particularly in the United Kingdom, challenged his ideas about in-the-field rewarming of victims. They pointed out that his human-study temperature measurements had been taken from probes snaked down the esophagus, and that Giesbrecht’s data conflicted with heart-temperature readings taken during animal tests. In 1998, believing that incorrect rescue protocols were costing lives, Giesbrecht underwent perhaps the most dangerous procedure of his career. He poked a catheter into a vein in his arm and carefully pushed it through his circulatory system to take a reading from inside his own beating heart. Then he went hypothermic and, risking cardiac arrest, showed that in humans, heart and esophageal temperatures mirror each other exactly. “That really silenced my critics,” he says.

Well, not all of them. “That was only one study,” counters Michael Tipton, a 43-year-old professor of human and applied physiology at the University of Portsmouth, England. “The mass of animal studies still show a difference between heart and esophageal temperatures.” Sticking with the animal data, Tipton argues that “the jury is still out on rewarming.”

A few thermoregulation scientists and physicians feel that Giesbrecht’s experiments may be bruising the margins of prudent research. Giesbrecht admits it’s not all fun and games; one test subject fainted from hyperventilating, while another chipped a tooth from shivering. But he calls his work “brutal, not dangerous.” Most of his colleagues seem to agree. “All these studies are approved by review boards. They may be uncomfortable, but he’s not taking anyone to body-core temperatures that are dangerous,” says Colin Grissom, 42, a physician at the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City and an avalanche-burial researcher.

Giesbrecht avoids bragging about his exploits, but he makes sure all his colleagues know what he’s up to. He copies and sends out videos of his gonzo field demonstrations (often, it must be said, upon request). “He sends me photos of himself way out there, wandering where Jesus left his sandals,” says Robert Vosskuhler, a clinical vice-president for Augustine Medical, the makers of a forced-air rewarming device called the Bair Hugger, for whom Giesbrecht has done consulting work.

Sometimes his aggressively knowledgeable personal style can rub folks the wrong way. “He’s very smart, but he has that scientist’s arrogance,” says one member of the Lake Winnipeg expedition. “He’s always telling you what to do—how to cook, how to put up your tent,” says another. “But the annoying thing is, he’s always right.”

SCIENTISTS ARE BY definition highly rational beings who pursue truths supported by hard data. But Giesbrecht’s headlong rush into the mysteries of the deep freeze is motivated by something very rarely found in science: God. Giesbrecht, his wife, Debra, and the couple’s two teenage daughters are devout born-again Christians, members of the Immanuel Pentecostal Church. Some ten million Americans call themselves Pentecostals of one kind or another, and the faith is best known for promoting the practice of speaking in tongues. Pentecostals also believe in divine healing, but Giesbrecht understands that God is not prone to miraculously saving some schmo in a snowbank. Miracles are, by their nature, rare, he says. “For instance, there are a few hypothermia cases—like that girl in Regina who went down to 13 degrees [Celsius] and lived—that people say are miracles,” he says. “I’m not convinced.” As an exercise in balancing the scientific side of his brain with his faith, Giesbrecht is collaborating with a minister to write, over the next couple of years, a book about miraculous healing. His aim is to determine which cases cannot be scientifically explained and to debunk the others. “I plan to play devil’s advocate,” he says.

Giesbrecht is happy to talk about religion, though he worries about being portrayed as a freak. “It’s not like we’re throwing snakes on the ground like they might in Texas,” he says. Sitting with Debra, a peppy 40-year-old blonde, at a grill table in their favorite Japanese steak house, he debates the theory that Christ was a vegetarian.

“It’s not like he’s alive today for us to ask him,” concludes Gordon, between bites of beef. Debra looks surprised.

“Gord, remember, Jesus lives,” she chides gently.

“Of course!” Giesbrecht sputters. He may keep Christ on the front burner—posted on the wall of his lab is a sign that reads, THE FEAR OF THE LORD IS THE BEGINNING OF KNOWLEDGE—but adventure and experiments-cum-stunts are also important, and can be distracting at times. His wife isn’t worried, though. “I know he’s careful,” she says. Her friends, however, aren’t so sure. “They say, ‘Don’t you think he’s crazy?’ ”

“I hate it when people say that,” Giesbrecht announces.

“But Gord,” says Debra, “it’s not what normal people do, is it?”

It isn’t. But Giesbrecht is not about to give up his research or his crusade. In the future he hopes to turn his attention to “tree wells,” pits that form in deep snowpack beneath evergreens. These holes have been killing snowboarders, who can ride into them and suffocate. And he’s fixated on “ice masks,” which quickly form over the faces of buried avalanche victims, cutting off access to the precious oxygen suspended in the snow around them. Someday he hopes to collaborate with Utah-based researcher Colin Grissom, who helped develop the AvaLung, an under-snow breathing device made by Salt Lake CityÐbased Black Diamond Equipment for backcountry snow mavens.

Giesbrecht’s to-do list is endless, because the war against cold is dangerous and protracted, and human beings are frail. His dream experiment is a 65-day crossing of either the North or the South Pole, with full metabolic tests throughout. “I would want to get to the point where the body is well and truly falling apart,” he says. “When we did 19 days [on Lake Winnipeg], we could have turned around and done it again. After 65 days you’re not so chipper.”

But for now, he’s focusing on a 400-mile trek across the Canadian high Arctic with a to-be-determined colleague. He will start, perhaps, in the village of Resolute, about 400 miles shy of the magnetic pole, and wander onto the frozen Arctic Ocean in the general direction of Baffin Island. It will assuredly be colder than any trip Giesbrecht has done before. So what is he going to test?

“Us,” he says.

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ALL SUMMER long you surfed, you hiked, you all-out mountain biked. Soon enough you’ll be thumping through the moguls and skidding on ice. Problem is, relentlessly redlining your outdoor lifestyle week in and week out takes a toll on the body, especially when recovery means little more than popping ibuprofen caplets like they’re Flintstones chewables. What’s a sore adrenaline junkie to do?

“Every day, have a massage,” says Melissa Shockey, a rubdown master at Otter Bar Lodge, a white-water kayaking school on Northern California’s Salmon River. “The more massage, the better.”
Her prescription may require a chubby wallet and open-ended leisure time, but Shockey has a point. No longer stigmatized as a frivolous luxury or a therapeutic detour on the woeful road to rehab, massage is now joining exercise, nutrition, and rest as a crucial component of a sound fitness plan, particularly for weekend athletes who may not take optimal care of their bodies. “Amateurs are training as seriously now as pros did 50 years ago,” says Mel Cash, founder of the London School of Sports Massage. “It’s usually aches and pains that make people give up a sport. But if Joe Runner stays out there with the help of regular massage, he’s going to live to be 80 or 90 years old.”

What can massage do for you, besides help you stay in the game longer? Even the simplest relaxation massages will decrease stress and improve circulation. More intense sports massages and deep soft-tissue work characterized by pushing hard into the layers of muscle, tendon, and ligament will shorten your recovery time after tough workouts and races, while keeping joint injuries and other ailments at bay. But don’t take our word for it consider the evidence.

What the Pros Know
For competitive cyclists, speedy muscle recovery can make the difference between winning a stage race which can entail up to 20 races over consecutive days and finishing at the back of the pack. Rest between stages is critical, but rest combined with sports massage can double or triple recovery speed.

Racing and hard training leave behind microtears in muscle fiber, while muscle metabolism deposits waste in the form of lactic acid and phosphocreatine. As your body cools, these metabolic by-products solidify, creating adhesions between muscle fibers that inhibit those fibers from contracting smoothly against one another. Massage does two things: It physically breaks down the adhesions and waste products imagine rolling a clump of dirt between your fingers until it disintegrates making it easier for the body to flush out waste and restore your full range of motion. And it stimulates blood circulation, speeding up repair work by delivering oxygen and nutrients to muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Of course, bike racers aren’t the only people who stand to benefit from deep massage. “For recreational athletes who hit it hard on weekends and who may go three or four days without activity, exercise is even more stressful on the body than for those who work out regularly,” says Bob McAtee, a Colorado Springs massage therapist who teaches sports-massage seminars around the country. For working-class funhogs, massage may be more about injury prevention than performance enhancement, but the two go hand in hand. Unless you apply due diligence every time you bike, run, or climb stretching before and after, warming up slowly and adequately, drinking plenty of water you’re risking strains, pulls, and tears. And you’re begging for more serious problems down the road, such as tendinitis and chronic pain.

Massage shouldn’t replace stretching, but since it moves muscle fibers in many more directions than a person can stretch, it can increase your range of motion dramatically. Wes Hobson, a top American triathlete based in Boulder, Colorado, adheres religiously to a regular hour-and-45-minute intensive rubdown to keep himself limber. “I’m not the most flexible person, and I hate to stretch,” says Hobson. “Massage really helps me out.”

How Much Is Enough?
For mortal athletes, McAtee suggests gauging how often you should get a massage by the number of training miles you log. For runners, consider a massage session every 70 miles. “If you’re a recreational runner who jogs two or three times a week for short distances, that may mean one massage a month,” he says. “If you’re training for a marathon, you’re probably looking at a massage every week.” Cyclists should slot a visit every 300 miles. Since a professional massage runs between $50 and $90 per hour, weekly sessions may require some budgeting. Of course, there is also the low-budget, do-it-yourself option.

Once you’ve committed to time on the table, determining your pain threshold is critical. While therapists vary on their opinion about how much you should hurt during and after your session, the purpose of sports massage is to penetrate far into muscle tissue, and sometimes that work can be painful.

“In general, the more pain you can tolerate, the deeper the massage, and the more you’ll see lasting benefits,” says Mark Tamoglia, a massage therapist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who works with athletes of widely varying age and ability. “With a deep massage, you may feel good the day after, but the next day you’ll feel even better.” Your comfort zone may depend on how seriously you take your sport and your recovery. Any qualified therapist can help you zero in on the right intensity level.(To find a massage therapist near you, contact the American Massage Therapy Association, 888-843-2682 or .)

Relax, Bro
In the end, sports massage is about feeling better, not hurting more. A little extra suffering at the hands of your massage therapist pays off in the form of enhanced relaxation afterward, which may be more important than you realize. The body reacts to non-sports-related stress flack from your boss, for instance by contracting muscles and restricting blood flow to certain parts of your body. Worse, this tension carries into your extracurricular activities, leading to bigger problems. “People bring stress into whatever they do,” says Shockey. “A lot of tension in sports is emotional tension, and anywhere there’s tension there’s potential for injury.”

Moreover, some evidence shows that relaxation is a conditioned response. Massage takes the body through the relaxation process and makes it easier to coax yourself into a mellow state when you’re feeling stressed, say, at the start of your first half-Ironman or pulling through the crux of a lead climb. “Over time,” says McAtee, “the relaxation you learn on the massage table can be tapped on the line.”

Whether you’re budgeting for a professional massage therapist or plying your squeeze with red wine in hopes of convincing him or her to take on the role, consider sports massage the most pleasurable fitness prescription you’re ever going to get. Forget gulping down painkillers this is medicine you’ll take with glee.

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CAN’T AFFORD A PROFESSIONAL massage as often as you’d like? Time to convince your partner to help out—and for both of you to learn the ropes. Beginners often go too far on expensive glop; a moderate amount of ordinary hand cream will suffice. Start with light stroking and build gradually to vigorous rubbing. (If working the limbs, rub toward the heart.) Finish with the light touch again. Spend extra time on tension areas, using body weight to apply pressure without straining your fingers and thumbs. Don’t massage injured areas without first consulting a doctor. Now you’re ready to rub. What follows are two simple massages you can practice on each other: below, a shoulder and upper-back routine, courtesy of massage guru Kris McFarland, who works with professional triathletes in Boulder, Colorado; on the next page, instructions for a leg massage, courtesy of Lori Stahler, a massage therapist in Salt Lake City who works primarily with skiers.

SHOULDER AND UPPER BACK��

STEP 1: Have the lucky victim sit backward on a chair, leaning his chest into the backrest. Stand facing the massagee, press down on the upper trapezius muscles (near neck), and knead back and forth.

STEP 2: Place your fingers where the base of the skull meets the neck, fingers pointed toward the floor. Work the neck as above.

STEP 3: Standing behind the victim now, go back to the trapezius zone. Gently squeeze and roll the muscles between your fingers. (Don’t pinch.)

STEP 4: Massage between the shoulder blades and the spine (rhomboids). Lean in with your body weight, pressing with the heel of your hand.

STEP 5: Switch places and repeat.

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LEGS AND LOWER BODY

STEP 1: Have massagee lie on his stomach on a flat surface, level with your hip if possible (a bed or a sturdy kitchen table with blankets will do), or on a blanket-covered floor. With lotion, use your palms to rub the back of the leg above the knee (hamstrings) with long upward strokes, beginning with light pressure and increasing to moderate pressure. (Avoid the back of knee, a sensitive area.)

STEP 2: Using the same long strokes, rub the calf muscle from the ankle to just below the knee. Make sure to rub the middle, lateral, and medial sides of the muscle, and then lightly grasp the calf muscle and jiggle it.

STEP 3: Work the soles of the feet by using short pressing strokes with your thumbs, from heel toward toes.

STEP 4: Have the subject lie on his back. Work the front of the thighs with the same palm-of-hand technique, moving from the top of the knee upward. On the outer side of the leg, rub the IT band—the muscle that runs from the outside of your pelvis to the outside of your knee—using a “cross fiber” technique, side to side with the first two fingers in strokes three to five inches long, starting near the knee and moving upward. Use comfortable pressure; this is a sensitive area.

STEP 5: Rub the main muscle of the lower leg on the outer side of the bone, using long strokes with your thumb from the ankle to just below the knee.Switch places and repeat.

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LAST FALL, 20-year-old human fly Chris Sharma clawed up the first 80 feet of limestone on Biographie Extensiona 70-move, 140-foot climbing route in Ceuse, south of Grenoble, France, that has yet to see its first full ascent and that is believed by many to be the hardest sport climb in the world. Nearing the crux, Sharma reached for a tiny, three-finger split pocket, held it for one agonizing second, screaming—and then fell.

For the past decade, sport climbing’s benchmark has been 5.14d, a rating first claimed in 1991 in Germany on Action Directe by prolific route setter Wolfgang Gullich. (In climbing’s Yosemite Decimal System, 1 is flat, hikeable terrain, and ratings between 5.0 and 5.15 denote vertical ascents.) Despite the fact that there are only about two dozen individuals capable of completing Action Directe and the approximately 20 other 5.14d routes around the world, elite climbers on both sides of the Atlantic have been scraping their fingertips raw trying to reach the next pinnacle: a clean ascent of a route boasting the absurdly difficult 5.15 grade. This summer that milestone may finally be reached by the climbers currently flinging themselves at Biographie Extension.
Sharma’s narrow miss shifted the U.S. focus to Dave Graham, a 19-year-old rock rat from Maine with one of climbing’s toughest resumes. Graham, currently traveling in Europe, says he plans to attack the coveted French route this July, all the while keeping an eye on 30-year-old 1996 UIAA World Cup champ Arnaud Petit, who conquered the lower half of the climb, Biographie, in 1996 and has this year stepped up his efforts to link it with Extension, the route’s more difficult upper half. Petit goads the competition in e-mails from his home in Chambry, France “Allez Dave, viens vite!” (‘Let’s go Dave, come quick!’) And Sharma? The famously anticompetitive climber is priming himself for another go at the route this summer. “Giving up now,” he allows, Òwould make my 19 previous attempts pointless.Ó ÑAlisa Smith

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Balance + Flexibility

Exercises

WANT TO AMAZE YOUR friends with feats of coordination they never thought possible (by you)? Want to rip the slopes? Then try the following exercises. The easiest is first, leading to the most difficult. Each is geared toward a specific sport, but all are excellent for general conditioning. Work them into your established routine or, for complete functional-training regimens, see www.fitter1.com, www.performbetter.com, or www.power-systems.com.

Windmill with Medicine Ball
Clear your mind. Now stand on the right side of a line marked on the floor. Begin crouched in squat position with the medicine ball in both hands, held to your left side. Jump over the line, swing the ball over your head, and finish with the ball on your right side. Try one set of eight to ten reps; work up to three sets. For mogul hounds and freeriders.

Squats on Rocker Board
Stand with your feet apart, near the outer edges of the board. Now perform squats, at reduced or no weight. Once this seems easy, alternate the rocker bar alignment from front-to-back to side-to-side. Add one set of ten to your regular squat routine. You’ll soon dazzle your friends on technical mountain-bike trails.

Paddle with Tubing and Swiss Ball
Hook the middle of a two-handled, four-foot length of tubing to a door or heavy object (like a Nautilus machine) at navel height. Thread a pole through the handles, and grip it like a kayak paddle. Now sit balanced on a Swiss ball with your legs extended and toes pointed. Keeping your abdominal muscles tight, lean back and mock a gentle paddling movement. Do three sets of 30 seconds each. You can also try it facing the other way so that the resistance is coming from behind. It’s Class IV whitewater in your very own living room!

Rotations on Wobble Board
Standing with your feet balanced near the outer edges of the board, dip one edge to the floor and then slowly draw a circle going clockwise for one minute without stopping; now go the other way. Advanced: Try it standing on one leg in the center of the board (if you can’t balance at first, put your other foot on the ground behind you). Advanced plus: Try it on weeble boards—mini-wobble boards for each leg.Hey, runners, no more weak ankles!

Lunges on Bongo Board
While standing on a Bongo Board (like a skateboard with a rolling spindle underneath), turn so your feet are parallel to the length of the board. Lunge forward while shifting your weight to the front leg (the spindle will roll forward); don’t let the end of the board touch down. Pivot so your feet are perpendicular to length of the board, then pivot again so that you’re facing the opposite end of the board, and lunge on the other leg. Do ten reps on each leg. The lunge is quite difficult; attempt only with extra caution. But for ambitious surfers, snowboarders, and skateboarders, this is where enlightenment awaits.

Balance Tools

Ignore the unfortunate names. These seven essentials can be the foundation for a home-gym workout that builds core muscle strength and balance. Now go make Bela Karoli proud.

GEAR
Pro Fitter ($499)
Versafitter ($399)

MODUS OPERANDI
Behold the gizmo that begat the functional-training revolution: The Pro Fitter features a rocking base and sliding footrests that mimic the downhiller’s flexible stance. Use it to boost proprioception and build core strength, which will help keep your upper body quiet in bumps, crud, steeps, and waist-deep powder. The brand-new Versafitter is a simplified, more portable version (just eight pounds compared to the Pro Fitter’s unwieldy 22).

PROS / CONS
PRO: Tailor-made for skiing, but provides a unified cardio and balance workout for all dynamic sports.
CON: Costs about as much as weekend lift tickets at Vail for a family of four.��

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GEAR
Swiss ball ($15­-$90)

MODUS OPERANDI
Sit on it, do push-ups with it, or, for the frighteningly coordinated, stand on it while holding dumbbells. The Swiss ball’s core-strengthening applications are limited only by your creativity and tolerance for ridicule.

PROS / CONS
PRO: Best bang for the buck in a home gym (or office).
CON: If you’re using weights and your Swiss ball isn’t a “burst resistant” model, you could end up flat on your ass.

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GEAR
Rocker boards ($59­-$69)

MODUS OPERANDI
Simply apply these Zenlike instructions: Stand on board with unstable base, try to avoid landing on face. Entry-level, rectangular rocker boards only tip from side to side; move up a notch with round wobble boards resting on half-spheres; or take on the challenging weebles, miniature wobble boards for each foot.

PROS / CONS
PRO: Promotes ankle stability and agility—a plus for many sports, from trail running to tennis. Next step: stilts!
CON: Balancing on weebles can feel like walking a longliner deck in The Perfect Storm.

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GEAR
Bongo Board / Indo Board ($99)

MODUS OPERANDI
The modern Bongo consists of a skateboard deck secured by a bungee to a rolling base and requires lateral balance to stay up and core stability for fancier moves, like switching to fakey. The Indo Board, developed by shorebound surfers in the 1960s, lacks the bungee, allowing pro-level flip tricks.

PROS / CONS
PRO: Nearly a sport unto itself. Ultra-practical for snowboarders, surfers, and skateboarders.
CON: Embrace the pain of falling—or retreat to a shag carpet.

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GEAR
Stretch tubing/ resistance cables ($5­-$20)

MODUS OPERANDI
Handles attached to surgical tubing that comes in various degrees of resistance. Pull on them. Repeat. Build stabilizer muscles by combining with balance boards or Swiss balls for a full-body workout.

PROS / CONS
PRO: No-frills simplicity. A recommended home-gym cheapie.
CON: Poorly secured cords could leave you with medicine ball­size welts.

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GEAR
Medicine ball ($13­-$90)

MODUS OPERANDI
Throw it. Catch it. Voilà! No more 98-pound weakling. Combine with balance boards for a more complex workout.

PROS / CONS
PRO: Injects a retro yet manly vibe into your workout.
CON: Miss catching the 25-pounder and you’ll learn why one company calls them “Ooof! balls.”

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GEAR
Rock’n Rody ($69)

MODUS OPERANDI
Sit on the polka-dotted saddle, grab Rody’s ears, and hang on. Nurtures rodeo-specific proprioception for budding bouncy-horse cowboys.

PROS / CONS
PRO: Great conversation starter for shy athletes.
CON: Appropriate for toddlers to teens.

Power to the People

Marty Nothstein can help you get in touch with your inner beast

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