Tom Walton parks his bike and surveys the surrounding terrain. Where I see modest hills sheathed in uninspiring winter brown, he sees cycling gold. “The return on investment that we’ve had,” says Walton, kicking at the Arkansas dirt with his mountain-biking shoe, “proves that building urban singletrack is a great model for rural America.”

In case you’re wondering: yes, Tom is one of those Waltons, grandson of Sam, founder of Walmart. And the modestly contoured Arkansas hills he’s hyping—maximum elevation maybe 1,500 feet—neighbor Bentonville, headquarters of the $500 billion company. The 34-year-old and his brother, Steuart, 36, are both cycling nuts, and they’re trying to do for mountain biking what the family business did for retailing: change everything. Today they’re giving me a cycling tour of their progress toward that goal—specifically, a portion of the 163 miles of in and around their hometown that they’ve commissioned through the . All told, they’ve helped pour some $74 million into cycling infrastructure for the region.

It’s an ambitious plan, and you have to admire what they’ve created. Back on our bikes, I attempt to follow as the brothers effortlessly whip through local favorites like All-American and Rocking Horse. Every trail we ride is clearly marked, categorized (“gateway,” “flow,” “technical” ), and, like ski runs, graded for difficulty. The classifications describe the riding profile of every path. Some have jump lines, others have rock gardens, still others feature one perfectly smoothed berm after another. “We talk about Bentonville as a ski town for bikes,” Tom told me before our ride. 

“Steu, do we have time for Master Plan?” says Tom as we reach a fork in the trail.

“It’s Friday, T Dubs,” says Steuart. “Go.”

There’s little question about how the brothers got their passion for bikes and being outside. The Waltons are a cycling-centric family who put a premium on outdoor experiences. When Tom and Steuart were boys, their parents didn’t keep a TV in the house. Their uncle Rob, a former Walmart chairman, is a veteran roadie. Their dad, Jim, chairman of the board of family-owned Arvest Bank, loves the dirt. Steu and T Dubs go both ways, and they always figure out a way to mix riding and travel—even on a recent trip to Azerbaijan. True siblings, they try to crush one another on climbs. 

Like a lot of rural America, Bentonville (population 47,000) remains small enough to enjoy close proximity to undeveloped land that’s ripe for trail use. And because the network is being built from scratch, trails can be situated minutes from downtown hotels, restaurants, and bike shops. Many of them might be beginner-friendly, but each is a blast and easy to access. “The barriers to entry for our kind of riding are all lower,” Tom tells me as we cruise a jumpy stretch of trail called Ozone. It runs right alongside Northwest A Street in town, an intentional move aimed at inspiring passing drivers to imagine themselves on a mountain bike.

All this investment has earned Bentonville a surprising amount of attention from the mountain-biking industry. In 2016, the town hosted the International Mountain Bicycling Association World Summit. This year it plays host to Outerbike, a massive demo event normally staged in fat-tire meccas like Crested Butte, Colorado, and Moab, Utah. It’s also attracting tourists. According to a , cycling generates $51 million annually for area businesses, including $27 million from out-of-state visitors. Both Tom and Steuart tell me repeatedly that their goal is to provide a model for other rural towns with similar access to green space. Their foundation shares its formula for measuring the economic impact of cycling investment with any interested community. Indeed, an “Arkansas effect” has already been felt within the fledgling trail-building industry. Nowadays trail designers and their bulldozing employees can’t keep up with demand, installing singletrack everywhere from Alabama to New Mexico.

Neither brother has a day-to-day role at Walmart. Tom, a graduate of Northern Arizona University, runs Ropeswing, a local hospitality company. Steuart has a law degree from Georgetown and owns an aircraft-manufacturing startup. But you can’t help but think they’re keeping the family business in mind as they funnel money into Bentonville’s cycling infrastructure. Walmart is rapidly shifting to e-commerce, which means courting the brightest minds in technology. Bentonville still has some distance to go to compete with attractive startup locales like Denver, Seattle, and the Bay Area, but the younger Waltons seem bent on changing that. Tom has opened several upscale restaurants downtown, including Pressroom and Preacher’s Son. In 2012, the brothers donated nearly $300,000 each to Keep Dollars in Benton County, a political organization that successfully campaigned to change their home county from dry to wet.

What’s certain is that Tom and Steuart’s goal of making the region a cycling destination doesn’t end with tourism. They want Bentonville to be a magnet for the cycling industry, too. In February, the Runway Group, an organization the brothers created to develop quality-of-life initiatives in the region, hired Brendan Quirk as its cycling program director. Quirk cofounded , a successful e-commerce site that launched in Little Rock. According to the group’s press release, he’ll be responsible for “positioning Northwest Arkansas as a leading region nationwide for the incubation and recruitment of cycling-related brands.”

The industry has responded, although the siblings’ strategy remains a little hazy. Right now the only other cycling-related company associated with Bentonville is tiny road-bike maker , which will relocate there from Little Rock in the fall and is partially owned by the Walton brothers’ firm RZC Investments. And last year, RZC spent a reported $225 million to purchase Rapha, the iconic London-based apparel company that has a cult following among affluent road cyclists—a curious match, given the brothers’ previous focus on mountain bikers. So far, Tom and Steuart aren’t planning to move Rapha’s U.S. headquarters from Portland, Oregon, to Bentonville.

In fact, the brothers were cagey when I asked about the thinking behind the purchase. “You know, we kept all the leaders in place, because we believe in what they’ve done so far,” Steuart told me ahead of our ride. “We’ll introduce them to northwest Arkansas and let them figure out what works best here.” He may as well have said, “Who knows?”

For now, Tom and Steuart Walton seem to prefer being viewed simply as benevolent ambassadors for their favorite sports—and to spend as much time as possible spreading the gospel about their ever expanding trail network. As we finish our ride on a mellow stretch of buffed-out Bentonville singletrack, we roll up on a group of school-aged kids on foot. 

“I’ve got one question for you,” Tom tells them. “Where are your mountain bikes?”

The post The Walmart Heirs Putting Arkansas on the Fat-Tire Map appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

With the latest Apple Watch on his left wrist and bright yellow Asics on his feet, Ray Maker suspects that disappointment lies just around the bend.

“It’ll probably take three minutes to find GPS,” he says, shaking his head while swiping a finger across the watch’s tiny screen. We’re prepping for a run that will be both business and pleasure. Maker, like many modern-day exercise junkies, can tell you that GPS satellites are the key to getting workout stats such as route and pace. But because he also earns a living as the blogger behind the exhaustive gear-review site , where he’s established himself as the geeks’ geek of fitness gadgetry, Maker can short-circuit when the acquisition of such information is delayed. The guy is mild-mannered and process-minded until the gizmo on his wrist does not compute.

“Plus you don’t even know when it’s still finding the satellites,” he says, trading annoyed glances between his laptop and the Apple Watch Series 3, for which he paid the full $429 retail a month earlier. “I mean, it’ll just say it’s ready to go.”

Such an electronic fib reveals the one thing that every manufacturer of fitness technology should know about Maker, who is both revered and feared for his influence: he hates unreliable data.

For Maker, who specializes in reviewing fitness electronics, including bike computers, activity trackers, and GPS watches, bad data is a waste of time—for both him and his millions of readers, who are big consumers of the equipment he covers and represent the kind of early adopters that brands crave. In Maker’s opinion, providing questionable analytics is more than simply misleading jocks with flawed engineering. Providing unreliable data is lying. Maker doesn’t easily tolerate such untruths, whether they come from the CEO of a fledgling gear startup or one of the largest brands on the planet.

“If a big tech company puts out a piece of crap, I’ll call them on it,” he says. “I’ll save people some money.”

Maker worked for Microsoft for 11 years. As a solution architect, he was entrusted with the dependable flow of information to hundreds of thousands of customers. DC Rainmaker, which he started in 2006, is a riff on the same theme. Maker often posts multiple product reviews per week, many of them running at 10,000 words and often featuring more than a hundred images and graphics. Each review has a table of contents. To the 35-year-old , who lives in Paris with his two daughters and wife, Bobbie, a professional baker, each day is about delivering the goods. The couple share a two-story workspace. The top floor is Bobbie’s bakery, the Cake Studio. The basement is Maker’s gear workshop, a windowless room he calls “the Cave.”

“We’ll see the Apple Watch results on a map later,” he says, pushing away from his laptop and starting toward the door. Maker is a long-limbed six foot two, although his frame, once Ironman-honed, has softened slightly, courtesy of the occasional croissant or pain Suisse. “There’ll be this big gap in the watch’s data,” he adds.

While mighty Apple doesn’t worry about annoying Maker (and vice versa; he accepts no advertising from the companies he covers), smaller brands, like the dozen or so whose wares currently hang off his body, certainly do. Three years ago, Runner’s World called Maker one of the . He’s even more prominent now. Each month, millions of readers pore over DC Rainmaker’s detailed product-comparison charts. His reviews often generate more than a thousand reader comments and are scrutinized by manufacturers, editors, and other gear bloggers. Pro cycling teams contact him for technical support, and the blog’s fans make pilgrimages to see the Cave’s overstuffed drawers and shelves.

Maker’s ability to make or break a product launch doesn’t come easy. He regularly works 60 hours a week. He has no staff or assistants. But stretched as he is, Maker can’t help himself. He’s as drawn to a food scale as to a new DJI drone, and the blog that began as a hobby now represents Maker’s career. He does what he loves.

We leave the workshop, which is in the Latin Quarter, and immediately cross Quai de la Tournelle. The Seine is right beside us. Notre Dame Cathedral is just to our west. But Maker is too preoccupied to absorb the beauty of the place, or even to wait for the Apple Watch to do its GPS thing. Wearing data-capturing shoe pods and insoles from four different manufacturers, a chest-strap heart monitor from a fifth, another brand’s sensor on his waistband, a GPS watch from Epson on his right wrist, carrying a third watch in one hand and an action camera in the other, Maker starts to run.

Maker was born with a huge internal hard drive. Growing up in a family of four in the Seattle suburb of Mukilteo, he liked to know how things worked. He paged through product reviews in Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated. He played soccer and baseball and was a ski racer.

From a young age, Maker also wrestled with computer code. By the time he was 15, he’d written and sold software to KIRO-TV, the Seattle CBS affiliate where his dad worked as an editor and engineer. At 17, he passed a test to become a Microsoft Certified Professional. Ahead of his high school graduation in the spring of 2000, Maker asked his parents if he could skip college and enter the workforce. They said OK—so long as their son’s starting salary topped $100,000. Maker received more than 50 such offers.

In 2004, Microsoft hired Maker to design IT infrastructure, basing him in Washington, D.C. He built and implemented sprawling computer networks. He also worked on a micro level, teaching executives how to use software and writing detailed reports. Maker’s bosses demanded that he document his sophisticated work in simple language.

“Ray had patience,” says Joel Yoker, who spent years working with Maker at Microsoft. “He could easily switch from troubleshooting large system problems to focusing on a single person and saying, How can I help you? Not a lot of people have that capability.”

By 2006, Maker was 50 pounds overweight, and he decided to enter his first endurance event, the Marine Corps Marathon in Arlington, Virginia. He finished in 4 hours 24 minutes and followed it up with a half-Ironman triathlon ten months later. That same year, Maker started a blog to celebrate his fitness turnaround. As a play on both his name and his then home base, he called it DC Rainmaker.

Early on, the blog resembled the happy and somewhat mundane diary of a twentysomething endurance obsessive. A snapshot of an indoor lap pool one day, recollections of triathlon transitions another. But in late 2007, Maker posted watch. Back then the 305’s GPS capabilities were cutting-edge. Maker’s first analysis contained the seeds of his current write-ups: the story was critical of the 305’s inferior competition, and it was wonky, with a chart of his pedaling cadence. It was also granular (explaining numerous button functions) and dutiful (a dull picture of the watch’s heart-rate chest strap).

“One neat feature is the USB charger plugs into the wall charger, which means that you can also use that wall charger for charging basically any USB device,” Maker wrote in his now characteristic folksy prose. “Just a minor little benefit.”

The review was also dramatically longer than the standard, short-and-breezy gear reviews of the era. By early 2008, after his story went somewhat viral in the online running community, Maker’s write-up topped all the other Forerunner 305 reviews in . At the time, however, Maker was still busy working long hours for Microsoft. He continued to focus his blog on his newfound fitness lifestyle. It wasn’t until 2010, he says, that he tapped deeper into his “inner geek,” and DC Rainmaker began to evolve into the review site it is today. Eighty percent of what he now writes is gear-related.

While Maker has no background in journalism, he’s always approached the work with rigid ethical standards. Maker returns every piece of equipment sent to him for review. (No companies decline his requests for product.) Once he’s sent a device back, he then frequently turns around—either to satisfy his gear lust or for purposes of reference—and buys the same thing at retail. He refuses to accept paid travel from the manufacturers he covers. He never hesitates to write a negative review.

“I feel like I’m applying consumer common sense,” Maker told the business publication a few years back. “For me the idea that an advertiser or a company under review pays for your trip is weird.”

Maker also ignores website-performance apps like Google Analytics, which tell him that if his articles were shorter, or contained more keywords or catchphrases, he’d likely have more readers. “I’m pretty much the worst SEO expert out there. I violate all the rules,” he says. “I make up for that by just having posts that thousands of people want to tell their friends about.”

The fitness-tech industry is enjoying a moment. Since 2000, technology-focused sports-hardware companies like Garmin, GoPro, and Fitbit have gone public. Strava, a social network for endurance athletes that highlights workout details including route and intensity, launched in 2009 and has millions of users. Apple released its first watch in 2015. Last year, the wearables industry was worth an estimated $31 billion.

That boom has coincided with the rise in affiliate marketing, a phenomenon that allowed Maker to quit Microsoft in 2015 and make a living off DC Rainmaker. With affiliate programs, a cut of every sale goes to the website that successfully directs a visitor to make a purchase with a partnered retailer. The Amazon Associates affiliate-­marketing program, which started 22 years ago, helped popularize the concept, which initially found its way into niche fashion blogs and price-comparison sites. More recently, affiliate marketing has gone mainstream. In 2016, The New York Times purchased , a gear-review site which had a business model built on affiliate marketing, for an estimated $30 million. (°żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s website also participates in affiliate marketing.) Today the overall affiliate business is reportedly worth $5 billion in the U.S. alone.

Maker got into affiliate back in December 2009. He now makes money through (a big seller of fitness tech, with U.S. and European markets) and Amazon. Like other Amazon Associates, Maker gets a cut of any sale, whether the shopper ultimately buys a GPS watch championed by his blog or just a case of toilet paper, as long as the buyer was directed from his site. (Maker won’t say how much he earns off of affiliate marketing annually, but he told me that when he quit Microsoft, his finances “didn’t change appreciably.”)

Generating revenues through affiliate programs requires an audience, and Maker’s is immense considering the size of his operation. His blog enjoys four million monthly visits, three million of which are unique visitors. DC Rainmaker’s has nearly 80,000 followers, and there are around 50,000 followers each on and . Maker understands that catering to such audiences is as important as churning out long-winded reviews. He spends hours each day responding to the hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of comments on his posts, helping readers troubleshoot issues like software glitches and compatibility problems. Even established gear manufacturers admit that Maker often acts as additional tech support.

“Our products are so sophisticated that there’s always going to be a question we haven’t thought of,” says Joe Schrick, vice president of fitness for Garmin. “We don’t have a problem with someone helping us out in terms of explanation, and for Ray, answering questions gets him a lot of hits.”

Maker is also brutally honest, a rarity among gadget reviewers who are often wary of angering advertisers. In 2015, he came upon the Scottish startup Limits, which was developing new cycling power meters. Limits claimed to be on the verge of releasing an impressively affordable ($250), pedal-axle-mounted technology. But after his inquiries to the company went largely unanswered, Maker sensed fraud. He had researched power-meter technology for years, Limits’ prototypes were nowhere to be seen, and the company’s production schedule seemed dubious. In November 2015, Maker called out Limits in a blog post for duping its nearly 2,000 crowdfunders who, through an Indie­gogo campaign, had backed the company with nearly $425,000.

“To Limits’ credit, their status updates were frequent and full of all sorts of excitement,” wrote Maker. “Just like those e-mails from folks claiming that you’re the next prince of an African country you’ve never heard of.”

Limits chairman Barrie Lawson subsequently e-mailed Maker with claims of defamation. Maker shot back with a blog entry titled “Limits Responds: Says they aren’t a scam (but still lie).” All told, his Limits posts received almost 700 comments and a ­quarter-million visitors.

“And to think I almost went in on this,” wrote one reader. (Limits did not respond to °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s requests for comment.)

Knowing the blog’s power and the size of its audience, other gadget makers are understandably reluctant to say anything negative—or really much at all—about Maker. But one industry insider, who asked to re­main anonymous, said that Maker can be a prima donna, and griped that getting him the gear he wants, when he wants it—in France, no less—can be a pain. “You have to bend over backward to remind Ray how important he is,” said the source. “He always wants to see the product super early. If your finished piece doesn’t work as he thinks it should? He can take you down.”

The morning after our run, Maker continues his assessment of Apple’s latest watch. He sits at the Cake Studio’s island counter, dressed blogger casual: jeans and a T-shirt. Large display windows are filled with sweets.

I look over Maker’s shoulder at his iPhone, which shows the Apple Watch’s captured data from our six-mile effort. “Apple likes to swoop everything,” he says as we review our route. “They just make pretty lines.” The Apple imagery does look neat, but it’s also inexact. “I didn’t run in the trees yesterday,” he says. “We didn’t jump over a 20-foot wall.”

(Two weeks after I leave Paris, Maker doesn’t hold back. “[It] takes about two to three minutes to lock HR,” he writes in the nearly 7,200-word review. “I do want to be clear here: If this was any other company, people would crucify them for this.”)

Soon we leave the bright confines of Bobbie’s kitchen and descend a winding staircase to Maker’s cluttered Cave, which looks like a mash-up of a 24 Hour Fitness and a Radio Shack. The room is filled with bikes, trainers, a treadmill, and drawers that can barely contain all of his GoPro accessories, as well as bike-computer mounts, batteries, heart-rate straps, and myriad other tech trinkets. Rows of watches and old race bibs line the walls. Tight as it is, the Cave represents an upgrade. Before leasing the workspace in 2014, Maker spent his first two years in Paris testing, storing, and blogging about gear from the family’s nearby apartment.

“This is the waterproofing station,” says Maker, pointing to a glass cylinder that’s about the size of a roll of paper towels. “I can put watches in there and test whether or not they meet waterproofing standards.”

In terms of review protocol, we’re just getting started. Maker can spend more than two months field-testing a piece of gear. He’ll examine every button and switch, explore all of its screens, ports, and functions, and study the owner’s manual. He evaluates accompanying software on his smartphone and laptop. He weighs products on gram scales, assesses them for packaging and fit, and lines them up against their competition, as well as earlier generations of the same device.

Maker also measures products head-to-head via custom-made software that compares things like heart rate, power, cadence, elevation, GPS, and distance. Upon finishing a workout in which he tests multiple devices, he’ll fire up the app—called DCR Analyzer —and process results.

Our Cave visit doesn’t end before Maker tends to a little business. He throws a leg over a —a $2,000 smart stationary bike that communicates with VR cycling apps like Zwift and TrainerRoad. The Atom is so new that England-based Wattbike won’t offer it in the U.S. until this fall, but Maker has the ninth Atom to roll off the production line. However, the Atom has been out in Europe since September, and plenty of Maker’s rabid European readers (about 40 percent of his audience, with a similar percentage from North America), already own one. And they already have questions, which they’ve posed on Maker’s post previewing his .

“It’s a little slow to respond,” Maker says, pedaling in his jeans and sneakers while looking at the Atom’s controls through an iPad dashboard app. He pushes repeatedly on the Atom’s gearshift buttons. “If I do like five shifts, it takes three to five seconds,” he adds. “That’s actually a lot.”

Later in the day, Maker e-mails Wattbike as well as app developers regarding Atom-related glitches. One stateside company founder responds at 3 A.M. Nobody wants to leave DC Rainmaker waiting.

Maker’s success stems largely from two simple facts: he created a niche in the ­saturated gear-review market, and he invests immense amounts of sweat equity into his business.

Maker averages almost a post a day, writing about everything that could possibly be characterized as fitness tech. He’ll write short or long based on product qualities like innovation and potential marketplace impact, and a couple weekly entries often measure in the thousands of words. He meticulously photographs the unboxing of new products so that potential buyers know exactly what comes with a purchase. He generates endless DC Rainmaker YouTube videos.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Bobbie told me soon after I arrived in Paris. “I want to have a CAT scan done of the guy. Let’s see if he’s a robot.”

Indeed his unique skill set doesn’t bode well for DC Rainmaker’s future should he get burned out. “In order to find a second Ray, I’d have to have someone that can photograph, video, and write well. And understand the history of the devices,” he tells me on the last day of my visit. “I can’t give a new watch to a good photographer who will take pretty pictures but not have the watch menus displayed a certain way.”

Maker mostly enjoys being a one-man show. A trying day for him might involve a trip to La Poste, where, in his mediocre French, he’ll have to convince an intolerant postal worker that he does have mail. (He receives at least a half-dozen boxes of gear each week.) Or Maker will have to swim laps with 20 other people in his lane at one of the city’s ridiculously overcrowded public pools. But the troubles are a small price for autonomy. Plus, Maker lives in Paris. The food is great. He earns a good living. And bike rides are part of the DC Rainmaker grind.

“We’ll head west out of town,” he says, opening the Cake Studio’s glass door and rolling his bicycle onto the sidewalk. Under a brightening sky, Maker watches the launch of three different bike computers, which of course are all mounted on his Giant bike in such a way that he can monitor the performance of three different power meters while he rides. Why would Maker ever waste a single mile’s worth of opportunity to test new products?

“There’s going to be a bit of traffic for a while,” he adds, clicking a shoe into a pedal.

We reach the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, ride on quiet roads toward Versailles, and end up returning to a new smooth and traffic-free bike lane in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Before heading back to the Cave, Maker leads us to the massive Arc de Triomphe and the roundabout that encircles it. Cars fly around the iconic monument, but for Maker the ride isn’t over until we take a quintessentially Parisian victory lap.

Maker cleanly enters the fray, and I dutifully follow. In the name of survival, I take my eye off him as we go around. When the traffic momentarily relents, I look up, and there’s Maker, riding through the scrum with one hand and holding an action camera with the other, recording everything he can.

Andrew Tilin () is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor. He wrote about the online cycling game Zwift In October 2016.

The post The Man Behind the DC Rainmaker Gear-Review Empire appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

After watching the parade of Olympic skiers come heartbreakingly close to medaling in Pyeongchang, South Korea, one would be forgiven for thinking that ski racing is a young person’s sport. After all, Lindsey Vonn just became the oldest woman to medal in an alpine Olympic event—at the ripe old age of 33.

But that would disregard the feats of 56-year-old Lisa Ballard. Last year, Ballard won the aging athlete’s version of the Olympics and World Cup—the FIS Masters Cup—in super-G. She’s the only American to win the category, earning her an oversized glass globe trophy that looks a lot like those won by current world-beaters such as Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin.

“Winning a globe had always been percolating in me,” says Ballard, who now lives in Red Lodge, Montana. “I didn’t want there to always be that woulda, coulda, shoulda.”

Ballard has really never wavered from a life on skis. In the quarter-century ahead of winning the Masters Cup, she trounced many of the 2,000 other American masters ski racers, winning a ridiculous 96 U.S. Alpine Masters national championships. She also spent several years on the , which came after a tour of duty on the U.S. Ski Team.

Ballard grew up in the Adirondacks, where she initially debated between a career on skis or ice skates. Her dad ski raced; her mother figure skated. For a while, Ballard did both. However, her parents grew tired of the two-sport schlep, and she had to choose a path. Ballard picked skiing, a sport whose hard truths she admired. “Figure skating is a judged sport,” she says. “But if I’m the fastest person on the hill, nobody can refute that.”

Ballard attended Vermont’s ski-centric ahead of spending several years as an aspiring downhiller on the U.S. Ski Team. A hairline fracture in her leg one month before opening ceremonies ended all visions of Ballard racing at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Games. “Heartbreaker,” says Ballard, who went on to ski for—and graduate from—Dartmouth College.

Her Olympic dreams never materialized—but her national and world championship dreams did. Eleven years after the Lake Placid Games, Ballard entered her first and soon became the athlete to beat. She owns multiple national titles in every discipline: slalom, giant slalom, super-G, and downhill. “As long as I can remember, Lisa’s been the ‘fast lady,’” says Deb Lewis, another fixture of the U.S. Alpine Masters scene. “If you’re close to her, you feel good about your day.”

Yet Ballard longed for a chance to race the international FIS Masters events. At many of the 40 annual Masters Cup competitions, Ballard estimates that the fields are more than 300 strong, and the caliber of competition is superior to the U.S. comps. “A lot of those Austrians who show up at Masters Cup competitions? They never played basketball or anything else,” says Bill Skinner, national masters manager for . “Skiing is their life.”

For Ballard, winning a 2017 FIS Masters globe started with strategizing. The competitions are Eurocentric in terms of both the athletes and the venues. She mapped out 15 races. (The best nine finishes count toward qualification, starting with September competitions in 12,000-foot Andean ski resorts that sit above Santiago, Chile.) The early events, held far away from western Europe, tended to have smaller fields. “I wanted four quick wins,” Ballard says.

On the day of her first race, Ballard caught an edge while warming up and cartwheeled down the better part of a 500-foot headwall. Yet Ballard kept what would become a crippling hematoma at bay for a couple days in Chile, winning three races that week on ibuprofen and grit. She won another four golds—two super-Gs, a giant slalom, and a slalom—when the Masters Cup made its annual trek to North America (Park City, Utah, in February 2017).

Between racing and ski coaching, Ballard spends 100 days annually on skis. But she confesses to “hating the gym” and instead prepares for ski runs, which can last more than a minute and average upwards of 70 miles per hour, by cycling, paddling, hiking, slacklining, and playing tennis. Ballard also has a lifelong dedication to flexibility and core work. She’ll exercise accordingly almost daily, if only for ten minutes at a stretch.

“In ski racing, you’re so often performing in extended and odd positions,” Ballard says. “So many masters athletes don’t pay attention to flexibility and agility. They only think ‘aerobic.’ Let me tell you, in my years of masters racing, I’ve seen some really ugly tucks.”

Yet ski racing is still what Ballard calls her “personal time.” When she’s not on the mountain, she hustles as a professional photographer, freelance writer, and ski coach. Whereas some masters skiers have been known to spend $20,000 in pursuit of a globe, Ballard cobbled together her run at a world championship title. For months, she shopped flights—the round-trip to South America and two more to Europe—with her frequent-flyer miles. She stayed with friends in Park City.

Coming into last April’s finals in Abetone, Italy, Ballard was tied with three Europeans for the 55-to-59 age group title. She finished 0.2 seconds out of first in the giant slalom and 0.5 seconds off the lead in the slalom. But over the entire season, nobody had accumulated more super-G victories. Ballard became the first American woman ever to win an FIS Masters oversized globe for the discipline.

She still wants that age-group title. Ballard will compete when the kaleidoscope of FIS racers soon comes to , on March 20. “I know that hill well,” says Ballard, who lives only three hours away. “I’ve won national championships on it.”

But this year, she’ll only race for more Big Sky bragging rights. Pursuit of another globe will have to wait for Ballard to accumulate more savings—and frequent-flyer miles. Fortunately, time seems to be on her side. “I hope to try again in another year or two,” she says. “I have a job that remains unfinished.”

Shortly after Andrew Tilin, our Masters Athlete columnist and longtime contributor, wrote this story, he was killed in a traffic-related accident in Austin, Texas. He was 52.

The post The World’s Best Skier Isn’t Named Lindsey Vonn appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

As a runner, aging marathoner seemingly does a lot wrong. She doesn’t put much thought into her diet. She never stretches. Hates speed work. Can’t train much on hills or in crystalline air. Owns a bunch of foam rollers, all of which go unused. And yet, back in late 2016 and probably between handfuls of Doritos, Friel told her coach that in 2017 and at 50 years old, she wanted to qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.

Then she did something very right. On December 3, Friel became the second-oldest woman ever to land a spot at a trials marathon. She finished Sacramento’s in a swift 2:43:57, well under the qualifying time of 2:45 and far faster than the time then-54-year-old Sister Marion Irvine ran (2:51:01) to qualify for the 1984 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Friel ran virtually each of the flat CIM’s 26.2 miles in 6.25 minutes.

But Friel is not exactly the freewheeling John Daly of masters marathoning. She’s consistent. Friel also qualified for the trials in 2004 and 2016. She’s workwomanlike, logging 100-mile weeks in an era when many of her peers opt for less. She’s also unfettered. Friel trains and competes as she does only to please herself. “I’m not sure that these stupid-crazy finishing times get me anything,” she says, “except self-satisfaction.”

Well, such “stupid-crazy” results also gain Friel entry into America’s most selective women’s marathon. In the trials, Friel will no doubt lose to athletes who are a fraction of her age. But don’t lose sight of the cool truth that Friel, who was running high school track before a lot of her competition were born, gets the honor of being in the mix. You don’t see 50-year-olds playing Wimbledon or racing in the Tour de France. Older athletes generally have lost more than their world-class abilities. They’ve lost the desire to push themselves ridiculously hard.

“I’ve never met this woman, but clearly she loves to run,” says Robert Andrews, founder of the , a Houston-based organization that focuses on mental performance and works with myriad pro athletes and Olympians. “Her authentic self seems to mesh with her natural talents.”

Friel’s age isn’t the only quality that distinguishes her from her competition. Take her approach to traditional speed work: Friel has always disliked the track sessions that are often part of a marathoner’s training mashup. In the buildup to Friel’s CIM race, her coach devised workarounds. Ian Torrence, who heads up the Flagstaff, Arizona–based coaching company , often forced his athlete to dig deep during, for example, a 17-miler. Friel would run a few miles at a 6:10 pace, and then a few more at 6:20. Then she would repeat and repeat. She says she suffered plenty.

“On paper, you’d think Molly would be able to run a fast 5K,” says Torrence, who has coached Friel for five years. “Not her thing.”

For her age, Friel also logs a lot of distance. She believes her peers don’t approach her mileage, and guidelines indeed exist for “older” marathoners to log as little as one-third of Friel’s biggest weeks. On and off, she’s been running a lot since she was a kid growing up in Great Falls, Montana. “I’ll see a lot of women saying quality, not quantity. But some people’s bodies can’t hold up to more stress,” says Friel. “I’m a mileage junkie. I’m on the odd end.”

What’s even weirder is where such a prolific runner lives. Friel, who works part-time as a legal secretary, resides and trains in Fresno. The hot, flat, and smoggy central California farming hub has been home to Friel and her husband for 14 years. In prepping for CIM, she deepened her groove in the Lewis S. Eaton Trail inside Woodward Park. Friel pounded up and down the mosquito bite of a climb that is Hospital Hill. “You make do with what you’ve got,” says Friel, who sometimes trains alone and sometimes with her Dalmatians, Buster and Flynn. “That little bit of extra particulate matter in the air is my form of altitude training.”

As her A-race approached, Friel did some push-ups, snacked on Doritos, and never stretched. “Though sometimes I pretended,” she says.

Then, on a mild Sacramento day last December, Friel had a great race. She set out with a pace group purposed to finish in 2:45. Friel knew the pacesetter, and when she fell back at mile 11 and again at mile 15, Friel said to herself, “I know I can run with him.”

Torrence hadn’t given his client a backup strategy. “The goal was to qualify,” he says. “If she blew up, she blew up.”

Somewhere after mile 15, however, Friel found a rhythm. While she downplays her competitiveness and her connection to running, it’s highly likely that the athlete who seemingly does so much wrong enjoyed what gets her out there every day. Before mile 20, Friel dropped her pacesetter pal and his group.

“Love and passion for what you do are their own kind of fuel,” says mental performance coach Andrews. “In some cases, that can be better than the right diet or whatever was your target number of training reps.”

Now Friel waits for which of four cities, come the winter of 2020, will host the Olympic Trials. Torrence says that even without the help of a foam roller or a better diet, the 50-year-old Friel will show that she belongs. “She’s going to do better than what people think,” he says. “She won’t be bringing up the rear.”

Shortly after Andrew Tilin, our Masters Athlete columnist and longtime contributor, wrote this story, he was killed in a traffic-related accident in Austin, Texas. He was 52.

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Cycling coach and world-class rider Gary Hoffman, 66, knows exactly why older athletes often lack explosive power. They tell themselves to plod toward the horizon, convinced that the days of sprints, leaps, launches, and dynos are gone.

But Hoffman—and recent science—says don't listen to foot-dragging naysayers. “For years people told me I wasn’t a sprinter,” says Hoffman, who last summer won silver in the match sprint at USA Cycling’s 2017 Masters Track National Championships.

The biological truth is you’re never too old to train at intensity, or to wield it. Intensity training commands relatively little workout time, makes you faster, and pretty much lassoes the aging process. “You’ll get slower more slowly,” says Hoffman.

Here’s the proof: last year, researchers at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic put 60 subjects—many of them between 65 and 80 years of age—through a 12-week program that included high-intensity aerobic interval training (HIIT). The regimen, which featured four four-minute cycling intervals three times per week, as well as treadmill work and resistance training, improved lean body mass, aerobic capacity, and mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are cell organelles that contribute to the making of new proteins, and their improved operation delivers greater energy and more musculature.

“Our data suggest [sic] that exercise training in older humans can induce a strong upregulation of mitochondrial proteins,” wrote the study’s eight authors in . “HIIT appears to be an effective recommendation to improve cardio metabolic health
in aging adults.”

Hoffman is the track-cycling manifestation of such a finding. The category 2 racer, USA Cycling coach, and member of the is a one-time elite road racer who backed off competitive riding in early middle age to raise a family and build a business in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, over 40 years after competing in the 1976 Team USA Olympic Trials road race, Hoffman is again hammering on two wheels. He credits much of his 2017 success, which includes a bronze medal in the team pursuit at the 2017 UCI Masters Track World Championships, to power-related work. “I’ve discovered a lot through my high-intensity training,” he says. “It’s a holy grail. It’s also legal.”

Year-round, Hoffman does a sprint workout on his bike at least once a week. The workout will include 10 to 15, 12- to 20-second efforts, which begin from a standstill. Hoffman then launches himself from a gear so big that even one revolution of the pedals is a challenge. He’ll rest three minutes or more between intervals, and yet often finish the entire workout in under an hour. “You do need specificity of movement so that you’re teaching your body to recruit exactly the right muscles,” he says. “No matter what your sport.”

Hoffman sends his older athletes to grunt through intensity work at the gym. He says that the right kind of resistance training can diminish the effects of sarcopenia, or the age-related loss of lean muscle mass, which can snowball once we reach our 40s. Hoffman, who estimates that he totes around less than 10 percent body fat, is partial to kettlebell work, which he says strengthens his core, back, and upper body. Plus, dynamic kettlebell work—he can swing —can burn the equivalent of 20 calories per minute.

Introducing intensity work to your exercise routine, however, should be gradual. With age, muscles often shorten, and connective tissue can stiffen. Your range of motion likely isn’t what it once was. Doing your best Lindsey Vonn or Usain Bolt imitation too soon or too often can lead to injury. Hoffman, who estimates that he’s completed 15,000 sprint workouts over the last 30 years, might point his athletes to the gym for as little as 20 minutes per session. The kettlebell work in particular requires proper technique in order to avoid injury. “Your muscles have to stabilize you while they also move the weight,” he says. “Do it under the guidance of a professional.”

But whatever you do, don’t shy away from the high-intensity work. over whether or not we can, at any age, reconfigure our muscle composition in a way that makes us ever faster and more explosive. But there’s no doubt that the vast majority of aging athletes don’t harness the fast-twitch muscle fibers they already have.

“Given the chance, your body will do a lot,” says Hoffman. “There’s no reason that an older athlete has to lose a bunch of muscle or mojo.”

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Figure it one way, and the news that Rob Kelman, who’s been climbing half his life, Wyoming’s iconic Devils Tower is unspectacular. Lots of experienced climbers bag the basalt-like, 900-foot monolith. But Kelman started climbing in 1971, at age 41.

Do the math. Kelman is now 87, and officially the oldest climber ever to bag Devils Tower. He’s a retired mathematician who worked in the Eisenhower Administration’s White House, in the 1950s. Kelman tore up his left knee and lost his entire meniscus before the invention of arthroscopic surgery. He lost his ACL in that same knee while bouldering in the 1970s. He had his first heart surgery 20 years ago. He had his second in 2015, and at age 85, Kelman emerged from that procedure with resolve. “I thought it would be nice to have a goal,” he says. “Devils Tower kind of popped up.”

Huh? What does the bright-eyed and articulate Kelman drink, swallow, inject? What’s his brand of mattress? His secret?

To which Kelman replies: Climbing and exercise.

“All this attention is a bit unexpected,” says Kelman, a Loveland, Colorado, local whose achievement quickly became a feature on Denver TV news. “I didn’t realize how things spread around the Internet.”

When it comes to aging and athleticism, Kelman has long practiced what researchers and doctors now preach: always keep moving. No matter your age, continue running, skiing, kayaking, downward-dogging
everything. As best as you can, and at different speeds, angles, and intensities.

“The main thing with these older athletes? They’ve stayed with it,” says Michael Joyner, a physician and faculty member focused on human performance at the Mayo Clinic. “They’ve kept their muscle mass up, they’re not overweight. They go at their sports just about every day.”

Research has proven that athletic tenacity begets athleticism. An ambitious, , published in 2011 by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that performance during physical challenges like “chair rises” and “standing balance” was superior among 53-year-old subjects who characterized themselves as moderately active or most active. The study’s 3,000 subjects had been tested with the same challenges years before, at ages 36 and 43. The research also indicated that those who were active earlier in life tended to remain active in middle age, too.

“I’m always preaching lifestyle activities as lifetime activities,” says Kelly Rice, an associate professor of Activity and Health at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. “We’ll decline with age, but we can slow that decline.”

Enter the 87-year-old, 5-foot-6 Kelman, who’s a lifelong gym rat. Often thrice weekly, you’ll find him in his 425-square-foot weight room at home. Kelman performs presses, squats, power cleans, and the like. “I do chin-ups, palms both forward and reversed,” he says. “I’ll do ten with no weight. I’ll do some with 30 pounds on my back.” 

Over the decades, Kelman has climbed in various corners of North America. He wrote a , a granite outcropping in southeast Wyoming. But as time passed, Kelman increasingly found himself to be his tribe’s consummate graybeard. “I’ve lived long enough for four of my climbing partners to die of cancer,” he says. “Another one died of a heart attack. But these are just life’s exigencies.”

Kelman does have DNA on his side. His mother lived to 99 and he had aunts who lived into their 100s. The experts, however, say not to make too much of biological inheritance. “Genetics may tell us something about potential,” says Rice. “But behavior and lifestyle decide if we’ll ever reach our potential.”

Kelman set his mind on Devils Tower, which is less than a day’s drive from his home and has an easy approach, several months after his 2015 aortic valve replacement. He also liked that the landmark is widely revered—and that he might set a record. “I did want to break it,” he says. The Mayo Clinic’s Joyner finds swagger in a lot of truly old but dedicated athletes. “They’re pleasantly aggressive,” he says. “In a sort of crazy, paradoxical way, they have the attitudes of 16-year-olds.”

The valve replacement, however, initially left Kelman feeling puny. After the surgery, he spent months lifting virtually nothing. He wouldn’t let himself return to the rock before meeting self-imposed goals: complete 12 chin-ups; perform six somersaults. “The body needed to be sturdy enough,” he says.

Kelman returned to the rock in spring 2016. His high-stepping was weak. His endurance lacked. He went to Devils Tower, which he’d last climbed in the 1990s. While Kelman is an experienced crack climber who once climbed 5.11, the 5.7, crack-filled wall turned him back. “I remembered clearly how to do every move,” he says. “But I’d put my hand there and my foot here, and pull—and nothing would happen.”

So he went back to the gym. 

Last month, when Kelman again stood at the base of Devils Tower, alongside hired climbing guide Taylor Lais, he was a vastly improved athlete. Yet Lais had concerns. In the walkup and pre-climb prep, Kelman had moved slowly. In a way, he acted his age. “I just thought, if the shit hits the fan, what would that be? How am I going to deal?” Lais later told me. He’s previously guided upwards of 40 trips up Devils Tower. Obviously, Kelman was his oldest client.

But soon Lais was relieved and impressed. The rock had a Midas effect on Kelman: he touched it and was transformed. “I could immediately tell that Rob has been doing this for a long time,” says Lais. “Really it was like, holy cow. He has his technique down.”

In the spirit of added rest and greater oversight, the pair agreed to break up the ascent into a numerous eight pitches. The temperature climbed, the rock heated to the point of feeling less sticky, and more chalk was sought for sweaty hands. The climbers kept climbing. “I took a couple falls, but the protection was good,” says Kelman. “I was mostly annoyed with myself.”

Halfway up, though, Kelman felt his strength ebb. He drank from the water that Lais had hauled up the wall, and ate an energy bar meant for kids. “You’re not going to stop now,” he told himself. Lais said the turning point came at the end of the sixth pitch. He truly believed that his 87-year-old client still had enough left to finish the Tower, and rightfully claim that he did it all on his own. “I told him, it’s going to happen, Rob. You’ll make it,” says Lais.

About five hours after he started out, Kelman reached the top and posed next to the summit post. The whitish-gray beard and slightly stooped stance said old man. The orange helmet, sunglasses, and long-sleeve T-shirt with a huge Superman logo said kid. 

“At the top, I said a little prayer of thanksgiving,” says Kelman. “I’m here. That’s good.”

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You might ask what the world’s most intrepid paddler does for 110 days while kayaking across the Atlantic Ocean solo. He gets naked.

The logic is obvious to 71-year-old : no chafing, no laundry, and no one to judge you. 

Last month, the perpetually upbeat and determined Polish athlete, who had ignored all sorts of common sense and caution, finished his successful crossing of the Atlantic in a one-man, human-powered boat. Only three other kayakers have ever achieved the accomplishment (Franz Romer in 1928; Hannes Lindemann in 1956; and Peter Bray in 2001, ), and Doba is the only one to have done it three times. Again: The man is in his eighth decade. “It’s not like he’s an older guy who set out to climb a hill,” says Piotr Chmielinski, a supporter and the expedition’s publicist, who himself once kayaked the Amazon River. “Olek decided to cross an ocean.”

, Doba pushed his 23-foot long, 39-inch wide, reinforced fiberglass kayak, named Olo, off the New Jersey seaboard and toward Lisbon, Portugal. The mishaps started almost immediately. First, Olo nearly ran aground close to the Sandy Hook coastline. Man and vessel were towed away from the land, and in the process, Olo—which weighs 1,600 pounds full and has a tiny compartment for sleeping—nearly capsized. Over the next four days, Doba advanced about 60 miles east under his own power before retreating to the Jersey coast ahead of an approaching storm. Onshore, he grabbed a steak dinner and some new compasses. He then re-started the journey on May 16. 

The seasoned adventure kayaker, who over the last 37 years has logged 62,000 water-going miles, including circumnavigations of Lake Baikal (1,200 miles) and the Baltic Sea (2,600 miles), didn’t anticipate an easy float trip. On his first trans-Atlantic journey—a 99-day trip in 2011 from Dakar, Senegal, to Acala, Brazil—he endured weeks of stormy weather. During his second attempt—167 days at sea, from Lisbon to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in 2014—he paddled in circles inside the Bermuda Triangle, then had to stop on an island for boat repair. 

Yet Doba, a retired chemical engineer who skydived, flew gliders, and sailed before he started kayaking, never lost enthusiasm for crossing the Atlantic. “On the water, I never think about dying or that I could die,” Doba later told me through an interpreter. “The kayak is very safe.”

Doba’s team didn’t agree. Polish yacht builder Andrzej Arminski, who overbuilt Olo with a keel and superstructure, worried that the kayak might come apart in rough northern seas. He characterized Doba’s third trans-Atlantic attempt as “suicidal.” Doba’s navigation advisor, noting that tricky trade winds can blow west across the ocean, didn’t expect the paddler to finish. Yet none of those concerns fazed Doba. “My assumption,” says Chmielinski, “is that Olek would prefer to finish somewhere with the sharks than not to attempt his dream.”

Sponsors, including Chmielinski, have supported all three of Doba's trans-Atlantic expeditions. Over the course of his adventuring, these patrons have stepped in with a $20,000 kayak fix here, a $75,000 transport cost there. Doba seems to attract sympathy and goodwill precisely because he looks less like Odysseus and more like a down-and-out Santa Claus. “If you’re 30-something and stuck in the middle of the ocean, that seems to be your problem,” says Chmielinski. “But at 70, Olek is an .”

Doba first tried his third trans-Atlantic crossing in 2016. That May, he paddled past the shadow of the Statue of Liberty with media and a documentary crew in tow, only to encounter unkind conditions almost immediately. Within two days, he’d washed up at Sandy Hook Park. Breaking waves had left the kayak’s key electronics equipment waterlogged and useless. A cop—and the owner of a Bobcat-type loader—and Chmielinski helped with the rescue Olo and Doba. Thus his 2017 attempt across the Atlantic was all about redemption. He skipped the Big Apple. Media wasn’t invited to the sendoff. “On this trip, I would paddle seven to 12 hours a day,” Doba says.

But even after his successful, mid-May reboot, Doba encountered imposing hurdles. One night in early June, Doba tried to sleep through a weather spasm of 40-knot winds and two-story waves. Unfortunately, his airtight, cramped sleeping compartment, nicknamed “the Casket,” lacked proper ventilation. Doba was up every 15 minutes opening the hatch for air. By morning Olo’s anchor rigging had badly twisted some of the boat’s key rudder hardware. Doba jury-rigged the steering system to stay close to course, although he made inconsistent progress for three long weeks. On June 30, he remained over 2,000 miles from Lisbon.   

He needed help. Chmielinski looked at rescue efforts costing between $15,000 and $80,000 before the captain of a 600-foot cargo ship bound for Central America took pity on Doba. He plucked the paddler and his boat from the sea and set his crew to fixing Olo. The captain wanted no money. Instead, he tried to insist that the paddler was too fragile to finish the journey. Doba’s wife, Gabriela, and other friends agreed. But Doba was insistent. “The ship was sailing to Panama, and I was headed in a different direction,” he says. 

Several hours and a hot meal later, Doba and Olo were back in the Atlantic. The assist caused Doba to lose all hope of setting a Guinness World Record for the longest unassisted journey by kayak or canoe. But he remained positive, even when an early August storm punished him with 55-knot gusts and white seas. “I’m always a 150 percent optimist,” he says. “Okay, in bad days, I’m 100 percent.”

Dining on rehydrated cabbage stew, chicken tikka masala, and pasta with Bolognese sauce (the Olo was armed with desalinators and solar panels), and paddling naked whenever the weather warmed, Doba was blown northeast. On September 3, after navigating a dicey stretch of the English Channel, Olo landed in the French port town of Le Conquet.

He didn’t get the Guinness record, but Chmielinski contends that Doba, who achieved his continent-to-continent goal, traveled over 25 percent farther than the 3,000-mile-route might indicate. “There were days where he went 100 miles in the wrong direction,” he says. “Two steps forward, one step back.”

Doba says that he now wants to spend time paddling with members of his local Polish kayaking association. He hopes to hang out with his three young grandchildren.

But Grandpa Olek’s big adventures may continue yet. “I have 29 years to go before I turn 100,” says Doba. “My body looks a little old. But inside? My heart and mind are all young.”

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“A little public-service announcement,” declares off-road riding legend , also sometimes known as “the Queen of Pain.” My childhood buddy Adam Willner and I lean in, along with perhaps 200 other cyclists. We’ve each traveled many hundreds of miles—I’ve come from Texas, Adam from California—in the name of two-wheeled adventure and affirming 40 years of friendship on this September weekend. Tomorrow we’ll ride an off-road challenge, which Rusch unabashedly calls (RPI). The particularly masochistic, century-length option that we’ve chosen is appropriately branded the “Big Potato.”

Standing at the foot of a pretty Idaho meadow, Rusch faces a gathering of RPI participants who’ve opted to attend the Saturday pre-ride. We’re taking a break halfway through the 20-mile, out-and-back workout, and Rusch is bent over a beast of a road bike, and giving welcome guidance. Adam and I, and no doubt many in the helmeted tribe all around us, may know plenty about cycling. But the two of us can talk a sliver of nothing about the form of riding known as gravel grinding, which we’ll be doing, for many hot and dusty miles, within 24 hours. We’re grinder rookies, and we’re learning that, in the simplest of terms, gravel grinding is road riding on everything but road.

“It’s a lot more secure and safe to descend in your drops. You’re all tucked in,” says Rusch, flexing her forged arms so that she can wedge her hands into the curves of road-bike style handlebars. The bike underneath her has, for a road-type bike anyway, supremely fat and knobby tires, as well as disc brakes. All standard gravel-grinding fare. “If you’re descending up here on washboards and going super-fast?” she says, tapping on the tops of the handlebars. “You have a lot more opportunities to come off.”

Rusch says that the final, bumpy, 1,500-foot, dirt-and-dust descent ahead of the finish lacks a guardrail, and that the drop-off is sometimes 1,000 feet. 

“You know, it’s narrow,” she adds. 

Welcome to the kind of stupid-great adventure that two young-thinking but old and nostalgic pals might embark on. RPI, which is in its fifth year and climbs over 5,000 feet across nearly 94 miles through south-central Idaho’s Pioneer Mountains, initially felt far more doable and digestible to a couple of bike-loving friends than, say, a weeklong . Adam and I figured that we’d frame a bro weekend in Idaho’s mountainous Ketchum and Sun Valley terrain around RPI. When we weren’t on our saddles, we’d kick back at the condo, or feed at some oft-Yelped, quaint eatery. On the continuum of BFF reunions, we thought that this one would lean closer to a spa weekend than to Deliverance.

But then the gravel reared its head.

A day earlier and on Adam’s and my first Idaho ride together, we’d loaded up on a Mexican lunch, pulled on spandex, and grabbed our bikes. We agreed to pedal at an easy pace on one of the many dirt roads leading from town and then
 we suffered. Our lungs, which live a lot closer to sea level than Ketchum’s 6,000 feet, groped for oxygen. Our 52-year-old legs felt wooden on a climb that didn’t ease much over 10 miles.

The worst, however, was yet to come. The last time I’d descended miles of dirt on a suspension-free bike, the Berlin Wall remained upright. Even in the 1980s, I was still riding dirt on a truly fat-tired mountain bike. In Idaho, on the other hand, I was on my new, rugged aluminum cyclocross bike, which I’d fitted with oversize tires and extra-low gearing, specifically for RPI. A mechanic at my local shop called my ride a “Frankenbike.” It was expensive, too. But hey: Can you put a price on lifelong friendship?

Frankenbike, cyclocross bike, whatever—the dirt-road descent seized up my shoulder blades and hands. My ligaments and muscles shook like dice in a cup. Adam, on his new carbon-fiber gravel grinder, fared no better. By the time we reached pavement, I felt that a couple of aging athletes were about 20 years too late for the moment.

A day later, and with Adam and I still smarting, Rusch concluded her public service announcement by telling us and the rest of the pre-ride crowd to rest up ahead of tomorrow’s RPI. Rather matter-of-factly, she told us that if we wanted to be Big Potatoes by day’s end, we’d need to suck it up.

Persistent shoulder pain or no, I still felt overwhelmingly happy. The love and understanding of an old friend is one of life’s most glorious intangibles. You can’t put a metric on, say, the soothing feel of cool dew meeting bare feet on a crisp morning. Or how great it is to watch your dog go legs-up on a patch of grass, and zealously roll and roll on its back. 

The same kind of joy comes from a friend gently laughing at you when you get frustrated—as you did in his company 35 years ago while you were traveling abroad together, when he watched as you pushed back on a prickly inn-keeper over the money spent for a dumpy room in Brixton—because you’re burning through all the zip-ties while wrongly fastening your racing chip to your bike fork. Doesn’t really matter that you’re no longer a teenager. 

“Drew, it’ll be OK,” he says with a chuckle as I fume over a job poorly done. “We’ll get more zip-ties back at the packet pickup tables.”

Adam is gray-haired but still ever cheerful, with a round, unlined face that defies the weight of life encountered by so many of us in middle age. Adam also looks about as lean and strong as he did when we met as freshmen at San Francisco University High School back in the fall of 1979. And where he once was an entrepreneurial restaurateur who only occasionally found time to ride, Adam and his wife, Marta, are now nearly empty nesters. Over the last decade he’s gone from cycling enthusiast to mileage monster while thriving as a father, chef, and host. In 2017 alone, my friend has ridden three organized 200-mile rides. 

I’ve been riding since I was 18, and my three oldest friends in the world have each been part of the journey. In my early 20s, I toured across Europe with Dave Rosenthal. I raced bikes all over the west with Peter Wood in my 30s and 40s. Now on a brisk Idaho morning in summer 2017, Adam and I were about to pile more stories onto a friendship that already included memories of high-school parties, weddings, births of children, and celebrations of families and careers. Adam and I fasten our helmet straps before walking out the condo door.

Glorious intangibles. Adam’s cleats click into place, and I watch as my longtime friend takes his first pedal strokes toward the RPI start line.

Soon, after almost 1,000 riders bow their heads in downtown Ketchum for “America the Beautiful,” I do what any compulsive, longtime, self-important bike racer does: I drop all the riders that I can, including my best friend. The four-mile dirt climb up Trail Creek Road near the start of RPI plays to my scrawny frame, and my often short but intense training. Adam, whose natural bulk steered him to play lacrosse in high school, still has 40 pounds on me. 

“Hey, Texas,” Adam says as he comes up behind me, two-thirds of the way to Trail Creek’s 7,800-foot summit. “Nice riding.”

Even though we haven’t hatched a genuine strategy for RPI, Adam and I both understand that the day’s priority is to take on the ride, and the bumps and dirt and heat, together. Sure, some participants race RPI. Former Tour de France rider Ted King is among RPI’s entrants. No doubt he’s already many miles ahead of us.

The top of the climb brings several rewards. At the pass a huge and beautiful basin inside the Sawtooth National Forest, which includes broad peaks, open grassland, and clusters of evergreens, lays ahead of us. Maybe best of all, the endless bumps and ripples of the Trail Creek climb give way to extended stretches of smooth and fast dirt.

Adam looks over his shoulder as I push myself to stay on his wheel. Clearly he’s enjoying the flat and rolling terrain. “Like pavement!” he yells, and for maybe nine miles we often find ourselves grouped with other riders and riding roadie style. We draft, and take pulls leading others.

We also owe some gratitude to our tires, or more specifically our tire pressures. Gravel grinders obsess over tire firmness the way Taylor Swift sweats shades of red lipstick. Too much air in gravel grinder tires and you’ll feel every pebble. Too little and you might flat, as the tire deforms on big hits and either pinches a hole in your tube or perhaps, on tubeless tires, causes a sidewall to tear. But get the air pressure just right and a fat gravel grinder tire provides a happy blend of speed, traction, and shock absorption. Adam and I had picked up some intel during the pre-ride: run our tires at 30 to 40 pounds per square inch (PSI), which represented a lot less air than we’d used for our first two days of Idaho riding.

RPI is going great—our legs humming, our asses and hands retaining sensation—when, about 35 miles into the ride and on the thick gravel of East Fork Road, the ride gets better. None other than Rusch latches onto our group of eight.

“That a way, ladies, looking strong,” says Rusch to the four women among us. She’s all smiles under her Red Bull helmet. “Keep rotating off the front.”

Rusch is chatty, pulling out of the slipstream in order to ride alongside me. Only one of us fights for breath as we talk, and it’s not the woman who owns a first (female) ascent on Yosemite’s El Capitan, once raced for top international adventure-racing teams, and has won the MTB (100-mile) mountain-bike race four times during a career as an outdoor athlete that has spanned decades.

“Several years ago, one of my sponsors told me: you have to go do this event in Kansas,” says Rusch, referring to gravel grinding’s iconic race, the 200. “I thought, that sounds heinous. I’m a mountain biker. That will be death by boredom.”

But Rusch loved how the 200-mile race meshed the demands of riding on- and off-road. She’s now won the DK200 three times. “The technical aspects of the uneven surfaces felt a lot more like mountain biking than road riding,” she says as my bike steers nervously and only semi-straight through 50 yards of deep gravel. “Someone couldn’t just ride in a pack and then outsprint you for a win.”

Rusch brought RPI to her adopted hometown of Ketchum in 2013, and precisely because she’s the Queen of Pain, Rusch believes that she’s attracted a disproportionately large chunk of female riders (about 30 percent). It’s also no accident that gravel grinding in general and RPI specifically (average race age: 46) bring out many older athletes who are a lot like me and Adam: aging riders who don’t always want to tangle with traffic or with hard-charging pelotons in Gran Fondos or road races. Instead we’re finding fun riding squirrelly road bikes over dirt, while trying to win one more bout of rider-versus-the-elements.

RPI remains fun even after Rusch is long gone, and Adam and I are a little more than halfway done. Then I get a flat.

What does a real friend do when you’re hot, dirty, thirsty, and watching your new, $55, tubeless front tire that had been filled to exactly the right PSI continue to seep goopy sealant, and air, courtesy of a sidewall tear? He pumps. He pumps like a madman.

“Drew, maybe we can keep it filled long enough to reach the next rest stop,” says Adam, his whole body moving like a piston in time with the hand pump that’s breathing a little life into my tire. “I don’t think we’re terribly far away.”

My shoulder blades had already been tingling for a while, and my hands were tired. An uncomplaining, salt-stained Adam can't be feeling much better. I don’t know how he’s able to pump so furiously. 

“OK, bud. Thank you,” I say, lifting my leg over my bike’s frame. “Let’s try it.”

Slowly and now literally feeling every seam in the dirt, Adam and I creep for miles before we reach the aid station. When we leave, my mortally wounded front tire is now armed with a tube, with an empty energy-gel wrapper acting as a liner at the place of the tear. In the hopes of reaching the finish line, the tire now has the qualities of a taut balloon: it’s extra-firm in order to best avoid flatting again.

For several miles of riding over washboard road and sloppy gravel, the Frankenbike resembles a jackhammer. Nerves in my neck and upper back feel like they’re aflame. I quietly throw myself a pity party. This is the dumbest fucking sport ever, I say to myself. What fool rides 100 off-road miles on a bike that’s as stiff as an I-beam?

A short while later, I notice that Adam is slowing. He keeps changing gears, which likely means he's searching for a pedaling cadence that will deliver less pain to his legs. He drinks a lot from his bottles.

Now my friend needs a friend, and that notion thoroughly invigorates me. I catch Adam’s eye and point to my rear wheel. As instructed, he lines up his bike behind mine. 

The road rolls up and down. The gravel goes from soupy to nonexistent to soupy again. Bumps come and go, pickup trucks pulling fifth wheels cover us with more Idaho dust, and two exceptionally large deer—maybe they’re elk, honestly we're too tired to tell—sprint across the road just ahead of us. The final, 1,500-foot, dirt plummet back to the outskirts of Ketchum is insultingly painful, a true violation of my body’s connective tissue best handled by—yes, Rebecca Rusch—staying low in my handlebars. Adam regains strength and takes the lead, and after seven taxing hours, we finish what we’d started. We are “Big Potatoes,” and only two-and-a-half hours behind winner Ted King.

In Ketchum, Adam and I unfold our bodies off our bikes, and soon thereafter, drink beer and eat grilled cheese-and-bacon sandwiches. Then we eat hamburgers and fries. Then we buy two pints of ice cream.

“You know, I thought about Advil a lot,” Adam says back at the condo, between spoonfuls of our cold and creamy, salted-caramel reward. “I mean, that descent was not comfortable, or fun. It wasn’t scary so much as something to just endure.”

He swallows one more bite of ice cream. “But weren’t those some great views?” he asks. 

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Last month, 52-year-old mountaineer Vanessa O’Brien found the snow so deep on her K2 summit attempt that she forgot about her aching knee, recent shoulder surgery, and stress fracture in her sacrum. She didn’t think about becoming the oldest woman—and first American one—to ever summit the treacherous, 28,000-foot Pakistani peak, known as the “Savage Mountain.” Instead, O’Brien, a prolific mountaineer who also holds a British passport and was once a Morgan Stanley executive, thought about math not adding up.

“It was one step forward, slide down,” she remembers while navigating K2’s crazy-steep Bottleneck couloir. “And then another step to get back in place. Two steps for every one step.”

But on July 28, as part of a dozen-person summit party guided by outfitter , O’Brien defied all the creaks, pains, and numbers to summit K2—a mountain that, , historically takes about one climber’s life for every four that successfully summit. No other K2 climbing team reached the peak in 2017. 

Really, an argument can be made that O’Brien summited because she’s 52. “Some mountaineers feel they get better with age,” says Peter Hackett, a physician and longtime altitude expert serving as the director of Telluride, Colorado’s . “The belief has less to do with any physiological effects of aging and more to do with behavioral effects. Older climbers might pace themselves better, or perhaps have better hydration regimens, or better ability to sleep. They have wisdom.”

O’Brien, who in the last six years has summited five 8,000-meter peaks and completed the “Explorers Grand Slam”—summiting the highest mountains on each of the seven continents and reaching both North and South poles—agrees that experience and patience had plenty to do with the success of her third attempt at climbing K2.

“With mountaineering, there’s a lot of waiting. More and more young climbers have a hard time quieting their minds. They want constant stimulus and entertainment,” says O’Brien, who started mountaineering soon after the 2009 global financial collapse left her thinking there was more to life than the Type A work required to build banking empires. “Go into an expedition’s communication’s tent. It’s hilarious. All the millennial Sherpas and climbers are in there, on their screens.”

O’Brien, on the other hand, reaches a camp and chills out. Instead of unnecessarily tiring herself with excess high-altitude activities or acclimatization hikes, she’ll read books, drink tea, or do laundry. “I’m good at rearranging a tent,” she says.

She needed all her mental toughness ahead of her 2017 campaign up K2. A 2016 fall while climbing in Ecuador resulted in a damaged right rotator cuff that required two surgeries and extensive physical rehab. Recovery slowed O’Brien’s 2017 fitness plans, which included April’s Boston Marathon. She finished the race in slightly over five hours, despite a training-induced stress fracture to her sacrum that left her questioning whether she should even start. Her modified plan had been only to complete the marathon’s first mile, “but I just kept running and running,” says O’Brien. “Ultimately it wasn’t a time thing. It was a completion thing.”

This summer’s successful climb up K2 was another exercise in persistence, and mind and body control. The team, which was the last remaining on the mountain, left for the summit at a relatively late 11 p.m. under the false assumption that the lack of crowding and waits for fixed ropes would boost team speed. Instead, weather dragged out the attempt. Snow dumped on the 12 climbers, and wind heightened the threat of avalanche. The group consistently and laboriously broke trail, while often looking up at the accumulating snowpack.

O’Brien, who was climbing on a left knee that had been sore since the marathon, gave herself plenty of pep talks. Having been to Camp 3 in a previous expedition, she knew the difficulty of the terrain. She’d become a student of K2 climbing history, and had reminded herself that this was her group’s time: statistically, 58 percent of all K2 summits have occurred between July 20 and August 1. 

Until the situation seemed utterly dire, she decided to stay quiet about the threat of avalanche from above. “We were all experienced, and thinking the same thing,” she says. “The waiting game became, can we keep closing in on the summit before the snow really piles up?”

There were other mountaineering metrics left unspoken. Like how research has shown that the probability of death among Everest mountaineers climbs dramatically by their mid-50s or so, and how an 85-year-old climber died in Everest base camp this past spring. VO2 max, which represents the highest amount of oxygen that a body can process, often begins a continuous taper after an adult reaches the age of 25 or 30. Even with O’Brien’s training, which in addition to the Boston Marathon included regularly ascending 1,210 stairs inside a 55-floor Manhattan skyscraper, she wasn’t as physically capable as younger members of her team.

“There’s no question she has incredible drive,” says Hackett, of the Institute for Altitude Medicine. “She had a strong team with her, and that improved her chances. Nobody, however, carries you up K2.” A very long 16 hours after they began, all 12 team members, including the oldest woman ever to summit K2, stood atop the peak.

Yet O’Brien knew she was only partway through the day’s journey. The exhausted team’s descent finished, seven hours later, in the dark. Reflecting on the effort, she believes that her team made mature decisions. She’s also old and humble enough to believe that prayers were answered, and that the group enjoyed some luck.

“No loss of life, no frostbite, no accidents,” says O’Brien. “But we definitely took additional risk, and that was personal choice. Terms like ‘threading the needle’ and ‘once in a lifetime’ come to mind.” 

Next up for O’Brien, if she has her way? A trip to explore the Pacific Ocean’s ridiculously deep Marianas Trench.

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