“Oh my, is that one in the flesh?”

Joe, an older guy with an aging electric Hyundai Kona, is approximately the 40th person to ask me about the pick-up truck I’ve just plugged into a charging station in Bakersfield, California. We’re 8,000 feet below the Sierra’s rugged southern spine, where we put the new truck through its paces, and I’m getting used to the attention. Joggers on suburban streets, SUV drivers at stoplights, transients down by the Kern river—everybody wants to talk about this truck.

“Is that thing all electric?” someone yells out from behind us. “What’s it called?”

“It’s a Rivian,” I say to a man improbably dressed in full Hare Krishna attire, “and yeah, all electric, 300-mile range.”

“God bless you,” the saronged man says to us, bowing as he walks away.

Clearly, Rivian Motor’s new electric truck, the R1T, is one of the most anticipated vehicles in years. When the first R1Ts rolled off the line in late 2021, early reviews were rapturous. The phrase “” was bandied about a lot. Motor Trend named it . Rivian, a new manufacturer, can’t run the production lines fast enough to keep up with its 90,000-plus pre-orders.

The excitement makes sense. The R1T is a mid-size, all-electric pick-up at a time when gas prices are punishing. It’s got stylish, traditional lines when are taking design cues from Blade Runner. It’s a luxury truck tailor-made for off-road adventures, complete with absurd bells and whistles like a built-in kitchen, a masterful four-wheel drive unlike any you’ve heard of, and mind-boggling storage capacity—all without wrecking the climate and ruining the natural spaces you want to explore.

It is a lot of hype to live up to.

So, when Rivian offered șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the truck for a long weekend, I did not hesitate. I’m no auto journalist, just a guy who enjoys camping and off-roading. So we decided to put the R1T through all the paces any normal weekend warrior could imagine. I rounded up an eclectic cast of motorheads—friends and friends of friends with off-road vehicles who love to explore and push their gas-guzzling rigs hard—and planned a route that would challenge the truck and its moderate range and contrast it with some of the best gas off-roaders available. We would have two new Bronco owners, a Land Rover Defender driver, a work truck owner who drives muscle cars on the weekends, a jeep guy who rides motocross,Ìęand a pair of Tacoma owners. More than a few were skeptical of an EV off-roader, but everybody was on board for the plan: caravan a new Bronco, a Defender, and the R1T across two mountain ranges and a desert, and hit some technically difficult terrain along the way.

As the trip loomed, I fretted over range and routes, pouring over Gaia maps and cross-checking EV charging apps. But I also wondered if the R1T could win hearts and minds. Could a near-silent vehicle appeal to serious off-roaders and the kind of petrolheads who read the roar of an engine like sheet music?

A lot is riding on the electrification of your daily driver. I’m not going to say the fate of the world depends on it, but the government’s Energy Information Agency said last year that if America is to have a snow ball’s chance in hell of reaching its emission reduction targets by 2050—and, you know, avoiding catastrophic climate change—a full 60 percent of all new vehicles sold in the U.S.Ìęwill need to be electric by 2030

Right now, EVs account for just 5Ìępercent of new cars in the country. That may sound puny, but the numbers are trending up. Electric vehicle registrations increased 60 percent in the first quarter of 2022, even as overall new car registrations dropped 18 percent. Bloomberg analysts think we may be at , like the moment where we all ditched our Nokia bricks for smartphones. In some places, it’s already happening: overÌę86 percent of all new vehicles purchased this winter were electric.

Of course, it won’t be easy. While California just sales after 2035, the governor of Virginia, a state that typically follows California’s lead on air regulations, the Old Dominion would not mimicÌęthe “ludicrous” ban. Electrical vehicles, like everything else, are part of the culture wars. They are the ride of choice for limousine lefties, aging hippies, and Elon Musk, a man who needs attention the way my old Tacoma needs motor oil.

If anything is going to win over Americans, though, it’s the pick-up truck, the vehicle class that has led U.S.Ìęsales for decades. Automakers are well aware of this trendline. Ford’s electric take on the ever-popular F-150, the F-150 Lightning, hit dealerships this summer and is already all but unobtainable. A pick-up Hummer EV (seriously) is newly available, too. Also on the way: an electric Chevy Silverado, a GMC e-Sierra, Tesla’s Cybertruck, the Toyota Tacoma electric,Ìęand more.

Rivian, a start-up with initial backing from Amazon and Ford, beat ‘em all to market. Its demographic is more Subaru-driver-who-longs-for-a-five-foot-bed-but-feels-bad-about-their-carbon-footprint than cowboy cosplay: an off-roader the “” target demo can feel good about. And behind the wheel, it’s a hell of a lot more exciting than a hay bale hauler.

“This is the most fun I’ve ever had in a car!” Louis Werbe screamed, as the R1T powerslid around a hulking granite boulder. We were up the San Bernardino mountains, 100 miles east of Los Angeles, and we had just discovered the R1T’s “Off Road Rally” drive mode. For Louis, a Rivian skeptic who drives a Ford F-150 for work and a ‘67 Mustang on the weekends, the dirt trail was turning into a Road to Damascus.

“WOOOOO,” he yelled.

Our day started 6,000 feet lower, in Los Angeles, in what Rivian calls All Purpose drive mode. The R1T isn’t like any other truck you’ve driven before, Rivian’s reps had assured me. It comes with four motors, each of which delivers power to a wheel as the on-board computer sees fit. There are no differentials to lock or 4×4 button to engage as you drive—the truck just does its computations and, depending on which of the you select from the responsive touch screen, your vehicle becomes either a sporty street racer, an aggressive four-wheeler, or a work horse capable of towing 11,000 pounds.

In All Purpose mode, the Rivian became our dutiful daily driver: The drive height (aka ground clearance) lowered to 11.9 inches and the suspension softened. The inordinately smooth ride and luxurious interior, complete with supple leather, panoramic glass roof, and a generous backseat, kept all the passengers content. The electric engine’s 835 horsepower and instant torque also kept the driver engaged. On the 100 miles of freeway between Rivian’s and the mountains, the R1T passed other cars in a way no truck should—its zero-to sixty time is a sphincter-clenching three seconds—and cornered with surprising authority. Even at 18 feet long, the R1T was somehow more Miata than Subaru Outback-

Once we hit dirt, though, the R1T began to really show off.Ìę We aired the tires down—the R1T comes with an onboard air compressor, located in the bed, which works well and is the ultimate flex over your off-roading buddies—and mashed the “Off Road Auto” button. The truck’s ride height climbed to 13.5 inches (not its highest setting, mind you), the suspension loosened, and the torque was split evenly between front and back wheels. Shallow water crossings and mid-size rocks were nothing to the R1T. The trail we’d chosen to take up the mountain was rated “moderate” for a few off-camber spots, but almost no technical skill was required of us—we just pointed the vehicle at an obstacle and the high clearance (15 inches on “Off Road Rock Crawl” mode) and the four electric motors did the rest. Obstacles that would have halted most stock pick-ups passed almost without notice. Thanks to the truck’s unparalleled clearance, breakover angle and departure angle, we giddily climbed 6,000 feet in luxury.

This bit of off-road hand-holding is probably wise. Most of the R1T’s reservation holders—up to 70 percent, Rivian’s senior product designer Matt Gaskins told me—have never owned an off-road vehicle before. For these drivers, the easy confidence the R1T inspires on dirt will be appreciated. The newbies are also in for a startlingly comfortable off-road experience, since the R1T’s suspension system automatically adjusts ride height, changes damping rates, and minimizes body roll on the fly. Add a near silent engine and our time on the trail was almost peaceful.

At 6,000 feet the trail opened up into a wide, beckoning fire road. Cautiously, we selected “Off Road Rally” mode.ÌęThe height dipped to 11.9 inches, pedal sensitivity increased, and traction control was reduced. What followed was a revelation. A 7,000-pound truck hitting 60 miles per hour on a dirt road in under five seconds is an impressiveÌęthing, sure. But entering a power slide around a towering pine with gleeful abandon until, just as the panic begins to well in the pit of your stomach, all four tires dial-in and seize the earth simultaneously and you and the truck are propelled out of the uncontrolled slide with the precision and ferocity of a bullet train? Now that’s impressive.

A few more corners and we were all delirious. Louis, our ’67 Mustang driver, was converted. “This is the Porsche 911 of off-roaders,” Aria Miran, our Land Rover Defender owner declared. “The suspension inspires so much confidence, it just sucks up whatever you throw at it—but somehow it still feels planted,” he marveled, giving the truck’s suspension higher marks than his Defender. John Rajaee, a new Bronco owner, asked how he could get an R1T for himself.

This, unfortunately, is where the euphoria bursts. For John to get an R1T, he’ll have to plonk a reservation down and wait at least 12 months. Rivian, thanks to global supply issues, is many months behind on its preorders. But the wait will be the least painful part. After a recent price increase, the R1T we drove costs around $93,000. The base truck, which will come with just two motors, 260 miles of range and none of the off-road goodies, now starts at $73,000.

In the new world of EV trucks, these eye-watering numbers aren’t unique. that the average EV costs $19,000 more than the average gas-powered car. Ford’s new electric F-150 Lightning starts at $47,000 and has 230 miles of range, but the upgraded version with 300 milesÌęof range will run you at least $85,000. The first edition of the EV Hummer starts at $110,000. These prices put EV trucks out of reach of most Americans. Though it’s worth noting that pickups aren’t exactly cheap anymore: the average price of a new mid-size truck in August was $41,872 and Ford’s gas-powered off-road ready F-150 Raptor starts at about $69,000.

Still, could an EV truck possibly be worth the cost of a down payment on a home?

Of course not.

But, if you have the money to spare?

Hell yes.

The hardest part of our Rivian journey, it turns out, came before we even hit the road.

If day one had been a test of the truck’s off-road capabilities, day two was an effort to see how the R1T—or any electric vehicle, really—can handle wilderness camping, far from any electrical outlets. Up until this point, charging the truck had been easy: we charged at the base of the mountain, just off a major freeway, and at the top of the mountain, in the town of Big Bear Lake. But today we planned to cover about 300 miles, at least 60 of them off-road.

This part of the journey required serious advanced planning. Our R1T came with a 300-mile battery, though the company says bigger and smaller battery packs will be on offer soon. In normal usage, this is more than enough. Plug into a 220v outlet, like the one your dryer uses, and the truck charges fully overnight in your garage. But road tripping isn’t quite as simple. While it may seem like EV chargers are popping up at every mall in America, most public chargers aren’t powerful enough for use on long trips—they’d take about tenÌęhours to fill your battery. Instead, road-trippers are reliant on a paltry network of “fast-chargers,” mostly operated by Electrify America. (Tesla, it should be noted, manages a much more robust proprietary Supercharger network; the company says that it will allow competitors to use its network in the near future.) Although EA’s fast chargers only take 30 to 45 minutes to fill up the battery, stations are few and far between and . A drive on the Interstate between major cities is easy enough—the truck’s navigation plans charging stops and range anxiety is minimal. But heading deep into the wilderness off road, where Motor Trend , isn’t so simple.

Routes deep into the high desert were scrapped early. Though we wanted to explore some high plains hot springs that appeared just within the truck’s reach, fretting the whole return route didn’t seem worth the stress. So instead we did what any EV off-roader will have to do—we compromised. Fast charger locations would dictate our route. We would cross the southern Sierra, a line that would take us off road for about 70 miles and on pavement for another 80. Although the mileage was low, I still couldn’t help but worry.

We powered down the San Bernardino mountains (drive mode: Sport. 10.5-inch ride height, stiff suspension, reduced traction; like driving a Porsche Macan with a bed) and across the Mojave, on both highway and salt flats (Drive mode: Off Road Drift. 11.9-inch ride height, stiff suspension, no traction control; donuts galore). We tried out Driver+, the R1T’s version of hands-free driver assist, which kept distance well and handled turns easy enough, but decided it didn’t inspire as much confidence as Tesla’s leading Autopilot feature. (It also only worked for me on large, divided highways.) We ate a leisurely breakfast in the town of Mojave while the truck charged for 45 minutes, then hit Jawbone canyon.

The dirt route up the eastern side of the Sierras was beautiful and generous. “This is so crazy, this is so crazy,” Kleber Silva, our photographer, kept muttering. He’d been riding in a 2021 Ford Bronco most of the trip, an undeniably fun vehicle but one that lets you know when you’re off road. As high desert yielded to oak forest, the Rivian felt like it was gliding down a highway. The speed and maneuverability on dirt felt closer to riding a sport bike, Kleber marveled. As the foliage turned to pine forest and rain turned to hail, we found the heated steering wheel feature. “Everyone should have this,” Louis said. “Healthcare and this truck.”

At some point around 8,000 feet, thanks to a jagged rock and some very inexact driving, we got to test out the R1T’s tire change kit and full-size spare, which was stored under the bed. The change also gave us a chance to use what we’d dubbed the “recovery frunk.” Like other EVs, the R1T doesn’t have an engine up front. Instead, it has a massive storage compartment under the hood or “frunk.” In ours, we easily fit a shovel, traction boards, jumpers, jacks, a tow rope, tarps and towels, with plenty of room to spare. (Thanks to drains at the bottom, the frunk can double as a very Instagram-able cooler.)

As we crossed the PCT and crested the Sierra, our range anxiety, like most anxiety, turned out to be a waste of mental energy. The R1T’s range indicator is dynamic and changes based on your driving. We still had 172 miles in the tank—not bad since we’d gone about 65 miles since charging, and most of them had been driven off road and maniacally. Rather than camp in the snow and hail, we cruised down the range and actually gained mileage as the regenerative breaking created and stored energy. We parked on a patch of Sequoia National Forest land overlooking the upper Kern River to set up camp.

At the time, I reparked and maneuvered the truck several times to find a level plot of land. But if I were taking the trip today, I wouldn’t have to. Since lending us the truck, Rivian has released a “camp mode” which uses the hydraulics to level out the vehicle perfectly. The new mode was released for free “over the air”—one of Rivian’s periodic updates and upgrades, which, like Tesla’s, are downloaded via WiFi, right in your garage. (Similarly, our R1T had eight different drive modes included when I borrowed it, but it now has nine; the new “Sand mode” would have been very welcome during our donuts in the Lucerne Valley.)

At the campsite, the R1T’s storage capacity came in handy. The truck includes a “gear tunnel,” a 65 inch-long, 11 cubic foot storage space that runs behind the backseat. It is something of a wonder. Things that fit during my testing: a snowboard and a set of women’s skis; brooms and landscaping gear; and, on this trip, my enormous plus three sleeping bags, a Big Agnes backpacking tent, four pads, two folding chairs, pillows, and several duffel bags. If you don’t need the space, for a cool $6,750, Rivian will drop a into the tunnel, induction range and kitchen sink included.

As darkness set in, we grudgingly conceded that two of Rivian’s most ridiculous extras—a powerful flashlight hidden inside the driver door and a removable Bluetooth speaker and lantern that lives beneath the center console—are actually quite useful. We also learned that the gear tunnel’s door, which can support up to 250 pounds, makes an ideal seat for a beer.

Around the campfire, it became clear that after 500 miles of dirt, scree, sand, and crumbling California highway, the R1T had overperformed in almost every setting. Our drivers were all blown away; two threatened to pre-order R1Ts or its sister SUV, the R1S. Were it not for its range limitations—and the jumbo price tag—it would be hard to find a fault in this truck.

With the adrenaline from the day depleted, the other drivers zipped up their tents or cowboy camped around the fire, and I clambered up into my co-branded Yakima-Rivian rooftop tent (available for just $3,100) and slept like a baby.

The post The Rivian R1T Is the Best Truck I’ve Ever Driven appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Looking to buy the kids their first pair of performance skis this Christmas? Think the boyfriend might like a new ski helmet? Considering getting into snowshoeing this winter?

Good luck.

More than a year after a bicycle shortage laid bare the complexities of international manufacturing, the global supply chain for the outdoor gear industry remains in shambles. And as winter sports and activities commence, industry insiders say, it’s not getting any better.

This fall, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű spoke with leading winter-gear manufacturers about the challenges of making outdoor equipment and apparel in the age of COVID. Mervin Manufacturing, the parent company of Lib Tech snowboards, was waiting for a container ship off the coast of Seattle to dock—and had been for weeks. And it wasn’t alone. In a normal year, Vista Outdoor, the owner of dozens of companies, including ski-helmets maker Giro, figures 10 percent of its goods or materials are stuck in transit at any given time; in October, a full third of its items were stuck in transportation limbo. In some cases, similar delays kept manufacturers on edge. The supply-chain lead at DPS, the Utah-based ski maker, noted each time the company almost ran out materials and ground production to a halt—they had been on that precipice 15 times as of December.

“It is absolutely crazy,” says Vista CEO Chris Metz. “We’ve never seen anything like this in our entire careers or lives.”

And the problems will likely continue for months.

COVID-19 outbreaks across Southeast Asia, Trump-era tariffs in China, and an unprecedented backlog in international shipping have forced outdoor gear manufacturers to scramble to keep skis, snowshoes, and helmets on the shelves. “We have weekly supply-chain meetings,” says Anthony DeRocco, Mervin Manufacturing’s CEO, “and every Monday morning, if we get out of that meeting without a surprise, we are fired up.”

Pair this mess with outdoor recreation’s staggering post-lockdown boom, and demand for gear this season is at an all-time high—which means if you haven’t done your holiday shopping yet, you may be wishing you had.

Retailers and manufacturers figure that most gear won’t be completely unobtainable—except perhaps nordic skis and snowshoes, which have exploded in popularity. But if you’re seeking something specific, act fast. “If it’s in stock, buy it,” says Thomas Laakso, vice president of product and operations at DPS. “But don’t buy more than you need.”

The supply-chain crunch has exposed just how profoundly interconnected the manufacturing sector is. Consider a pair of DPS performance skis, which are made in the company’s Salt Lake City factory. Every ski DPS sells is comprised of 30 parts, and is each of those are made of myriad materials that are mined or molded or felled somewhere different—a lightweight wood called Paulownia that’s only grown in east Asia, for example, or a sintered race base only produced in Europe. All of these components have been delayed or unobtainable at one time or another in the past year, the company says.

“Yes, we’re made in America, but we’re dependent on the world,” says Laakso.

The uncertainty has forced teams to think creatively and work longer hours than ever before, as brands search for components in stock elsewhere or commission new manufacturers entirely. “There are a lot of small ski makers out here,” says Tim Shoaf, DPS’s enterprise resource planning and supply-chain manager. “If I have enough extra material and somebody calls me and asks if we can exchange or buy some material, we’ll do it.”

Tracking down the right components is critical, because substituting raw materials is exceptionally difficult in the high-end-gear world. Materials are chosen for specific reasons, insiders say. “We spent years, if not decades, zeroing in on these best resins we could use for snowshoe bindings,” says Doug Sanders, vice president of operations at Cascade Designs, which owns Mountain Safety Research (MSR). The plastic in snowshoes has to be extremely tough, able to withstand a huge range of temperatures, and never brittle. “And then suddenly we get hit from our injection molder. ‘We can’t get it,’ they say, ‘we can’t deliver.’”

So instead of one 10,000-pound resin shipment delivered to MSR’s Nevada factory, the team has to spend the week in search of 2,000 pounds of resin here and another 3,000 pounds there, until the total is met. Such disruptions might sound like simple annoyances, but if MSR doesn’t have all the components on hand to make its snowshoes, the production lines shut down entirely. “It’s a firefight with no rule book,” Sanders says. “Nobody’s been through this before.”

The problems start, for many manufacturers, in Asia’s manufacturing hubs. As COVID outbreaks ebb and flow across the region, production of many component parts and materials are disrupted. (The latest material crunch appears to be magnesium, much of which comes from China and is an essential element in the production of aluminum; this will make ski poles, tent poles, or bicycles harder to find in the coming months.) Outbreaks across Southeast Asia this summer and fall shuttered the mills where many of the world’s garments are sewn. And for Burton Snowboards, the shutdown curtailed jacket and thermal production right when the company needed to ramp up to meet winter demand. Last month Burton Snowboards vice president of global supply chain Rachel Grogan said the company had about 70 percent of its outerwear in stock. “That’s better than 20 percent!” she laughed.

And even when brands have been able to secure raw materials abroad, finding space for goods on container ships has been a constant struggle. Vista’s Metz estimates that for every container it manages to get shipped to America, 16 are sitting on docks abroad. Port shutdowns in China earlier this year, the blockage of the Suez Canal in May, and pent-up demand for products after months of lockdown are all to blame.

Even empty containers themselves are in high demand. Vista has gotten scrappy, offering to take up 1/100th of a container if another company can’t quite fill their “can.” At the same time, the average cost of shipping containers around the world is eight to nine times the pre-pandemic rate, the freight-tracking company Freightos. The average price of a can now tops $10,000, but the busiest routes, including from China to the West Coast, now run outdoor retailers up to . Still, shipping costs are nothing compared to air-freighting goods, which Vista and other retailers now utilize to get smaller, high-value items to the American market. “We never considered doing anything like this in the past,” Metz says.

The problems don’t end once containers of supplies finally make it to American shores. Any surfer in Southern California can tell you about the miles-long lines of cargo ships stretching from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach down to Orange County, waiting weeks for a docking. Like fast-food restaurants and grocery stores, the country’s biggest ports are suffering from and there just aren’t enough hands to offload the goods piled up offshore. “And now it’s moved down the food chain—there aren’t enough truck drivers now, too!” Mervin’s DeRocco says.

Consumers, it seems, have learned to live with the shortage. “The idea of seasonality has just gone out the window,” says Ben Johns, REI’s general merchandising manager for action sports. Consumers are buying whatever is in stock, whenever they can, he says. In November, he reported, REI was “seeing triple-digit increases in every facet of snow sports, but also in bicycles and in kayaks and stand-up paddleboards.” Needless to say, most Novembers aren’t considered prime season for kayak manufacturers. For MSR, demand for snowshoes used to tail off by January. But last year, the company sold them in February, March, April, and all the way into summer. “The season never stopped,” Sanders says.

When will it all end? Analysts think the supply-chain crunch , but leaders across the outdoor gear industry expect it to stretch deep into next year. And the effects will continue to ripple across the entirety of outdoor recreation. Tents will be “massively constrained” this summer, Sanders says. Mervin anticipates struggling to meet its surf orders for spring 2022. Any high-tech gadget with a microchip in it will be scarce for the . “We all have big challenges ahead,” DeRocco says.

Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. At DPS, Shoaf, the supply-chain manager, maintains that the crunch has forced his company to streamline and improve. “We won’t go back to the way it was,” he says. “As difficult as the chaos has been, it’s forcing us to do things better—just maybe not on the timeline we wanted.”

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A lot of factors add up to your name-brand synthetic down jacket’s $249 price tag.

There are the raw materials, the research and development, and the marketing, of course.ÌęBut if you’re looking for a comprehensiveÌęexplanation, says retail analyst Matt Powell, it comes down to a mindset. “The industry is entirely focused on the ‘pinnacle consumer,’” Powell, a vice president at the , says. The jacket’s materials are impossibly packable yet breathable; its prototypes were tested and retested in labs and real-world conditions; maybe someone like Conrad Anker wore the thing on the face of Meru. Add it all upÌęand you get an extremely high-quality down jacket for the cost of a car payment.

That’s what makes walking into such a discombobulating experience.

When I entered the French outdoor retail mega-chain’s downtown San Francisco shop this fall, the first product I saw was a ten-liter backpack, with a few simple pockets and a passing glance at style. Above it, a poster announced the price in large script: . The shock and awe pricing continued: ski poles for $8.95, wetsuits for $16.90, tents for $48.90, down jackets for $57.90. For an American raised in the cult of carbon fiber, a worshiper at the altar of brand-name gear, itÌęwas dumbfounding.

Ange Diaz, Decathlon USA’s chief financial officer, has seen this reaction before. In the two decades he’s been with the company, it has conquered markets around the world (including Mexico, Colombia, and Malaysia, ). America is just the latest target. Compact and well dressed for my tour of the inaugural U.S. store, DiazÌęreacted to my aw-shucks disbelief with Gallic bemusement.

“Some brands in America only focus on the expert sports athlete—that’s their niche,” Diaz said. “So we focus on making sport available and accessible from the beginner to the expert. We try to offer all the range of products.” The company’s tagline: Sports for All, All for Sports.

Although relatively unknown in the U.S., Decathlon is a behemoth overseas. The company hasÌęsome 1,400 warehouse-size stores in 48 different countries. It sells only its own brands; no North Face or Arc’teryx here. A 700-person-strong R&D department designs products for every sport you can think of—cycling, climbing, badminton, Basque pelota—and releases, on average, a staggering 2,800 new products each year.

But despite the garage-sale prices—actual garage sale, not REI Garage Sale—Diaz recoils when I suggest that the gear is cheap. “People, when they see the product, they are amazed by the price, the value,” he says. But Decathlon, he argues, makes entirely capable gear at a price regular people can afford. “The big thing we are learning is that we have to focus on explaining the value of the product.” Clearly, it’s an approach that has resonated abroad: last year, Decathlon sold more than a billion individual items while generating over $12 billion in sales. In terms of revenue, it’s nowÌęmore than likelyÌęthe largest outdoor retailer in the world.

As exciting as cheap stuff is, though, ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s beachhead on our shores raises a question: WithÌęenvironmentally conscious buyers increasingly fetishizing gear crafted to last a lifetime and brands like Patagonia priding themselves on , is now the right time for this mass producer of cheap, fast gear to conquer America? Ìę

Certainly, the idea that quality gear can be had for cutout-bin prices goes against decades of retail experience for most American buyers.

Simeon Siegel, a senior retail analyst at who covers high-end sporting companies such as Nike and Under Armour, says that top-tier producers price their gear high for a reason. “That group of companies, they are technical innovators of products,” he says. “But at the same time, they are among the strongest marketers in the world.” The high-end companies, Siegel says, allocates an average of 10 to 12 percent of their revenue forÌęmarketing, while a typical apparel company spendsÌęperhaps 3 to 6 percent. “They pioneered the use of the influencer—they just called them athletes,” he continues. “They pay endorsers a lot of money to create a halo around the brand and help get customers to believe that the technical innovation behind these products will actually make you jump higher,Ìęplay better, and run longer.”

Decathlon, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do influencers or splashy ad campaigns. Its stores, in the words of its CFO, are “not luxurious.” The San Francisco shop is fluorescent and lined with cheap shelving; the shopping experience feels more PaylessÌęthan Patagonia.ÌęElsewhere in the world, Decathlon is frequently compared toÌęAldi, the discount supermarket chain that sells eyebrow-raisingly cheap groceries. (One Yelp reviewer, commenting on ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s San Francisco store, wrote “think REI meets Trader Joe’s.”)

When I askÌęPowell about how REI, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and other presumed competitors in the U.S. market will react to ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s presence here, he corrects me. ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s real competitors, he says, areÌęTarget and Walmart—where most consumers buy their gear. “I’ve been hammering the industry about this for some time. They keep making the products for the pinnacle consumer when the good-enough, everyday consumer is where the money is,” he says. “Ignoring that market is unwise. Some people look down their noses, but family camping is a huge business, car camping is a huge business. Not everybody is interested in doing a three-week hike-in.”

And just because ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s products are priced to move, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality is suspect. “You can make a sneaker that costs $10 wholesale—that’s not hard to do,” Powell says. “If you go to Walmart, you’ll find $20 shoes.” But instead of marking up the cost of each pair dramatically, Decathlon aims to make its money by selling millions and millions of cheaper shoes at smaller profit margins. Surfing over to ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s website, I see that, 80 years afterÌęÌęfounded REI on the idea of selling reasonably priced ice axes, Decathlon sells one for 47 percent less than REI’s lowest-priced model.

At the San Francisco shop, near a filth-strewn block of Market Street, Diaz and a couple of press people lead me through the company’s product line. Decathlon sells gear and clothing for 60 different sports in the U.S., including baseball and Ping-Pong. The company has about two dozen house brands, and the gear is separated into tiers. The most affordable tier—the stuff priced to compel beginners to tryÌęnew sports and to titillate deal hunters—is not designed for performance, Diaz says. The $4 running shirts, for example, he says, will get someone interested in taking up running through a nice short-distance jog; tackleÌęa half marathon in the thing and you might experience some chafing. And the ski pants are designed assuming that the wearer will spend a significant amount of time on his or her ass, and are thusÌęmore waterproof (but less breathable) than more expensive models.

The step-up, intermediate level improves material quality, but I wouldn’t mistake ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s $9 rash guard for something produced by, say, O’Neil. Then comes the advanced equipment, which is still around 30 percent cheaper than name-brand competitors but has familiar bells and whistles. This stuff, Diaz argues, is directly comparable to what big-name companies produce. The $109 70-liter pack reminds me of the REI Co-op intro-level offerings, if a little heavier.ÌęThe wildly popular $28.90 full-face snorkel mask, which I later bought for myself online, exceeded myÌęexpectations (several strangers asked to try it out during a subsequent trip to SoCal’s Cardiff Reef). The high-end bikes, which start at around $1,100, are “absolute cracker” value for the money, per aÌę.

Indeed, in part due to its disconcertingly low prices—a ski helmet —the company has serious admirers. “Decathlon has a reputation for selling quality bicycles and cycling accessories at very sharp price points,” the UK’s . Hit the trails anywhere in Europe and you’ll be bombarded with Quechua garb—¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s in-house mountaineering brand. Even șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s own gear team is sold. “We wanted to know whether this startlingly cheap gear was any good, so we got our hands on a sampling of hiking and camping products,” Ariella Gintzler and Emily Reed wrote. “In short, we were pleasantly surprised by how solid everything seemed.”

When I tell Diaz that the prices of some goods are so cheap that they make me question the value of everything in the store, even the high-end stuff, he explains that that’s part of the model. “Sometimes people say, ‘Why don’t you raise the prices so people will understand the quality?’” he says. “But that’s not who we are. At the beginning it’s difficult, we know, but after trying the products, people will continue to buy them. Why buy other products for twice the price?” The customer who comes in for the $6 running shorts, Diaz says, will eventually move their way up to the $27 compression socks and $78 shoes.

But ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s bargain prices do come at a cost, critics say.

Although the company talks a big game when it comes to its sourcing and supply chain, promising to put people firstÌęand ensure that , some international labor activists disagree. “They are lagging far behind the industry forerunners,” says Paul Roeland, of the , an alliance of garment-industry labor organizations and unions. While Patagonia, for example, has workedÌęto improve human rights at the factories and farms that produce its garments and raw materials—even fessing up publicly when it found wage slavery in its Taiwanese contract factories—Decathlon doesn’t talk much about specifics, activists say.

And although the company doesn’t make it easy to figure out which factories make its goods, when a reporter from theÌęGerman newspaperÌęDie ZeitÌę, she found conditions that didn’t gel with the company’s stated values. Pay was around 150 euros a week—a sum that makes it hard to afford basics like shower gel—laborers lived in single-room, barracks-like lodgings, and legally mandated benefits like sick pay and days off for holidays were not enforced. “That is a recurring theme: nice words, vague promises, but a complete lack of verifiable, transparent information and concrete, enforceable improvements,” Roeland says.

Decathlon disputes that its ethics—laid out in its code of conduct—are toothless. The company contracts with suppliers in 49 countries, all operating under a tapestry of different labor laws, and says each “must comply with all applicable laws, regulations, and general principles related to environment, labour, safety, and human rights.”

“Decathlon regularly audits suppliers’ sites, using both internal and external assessment teams. In our manufacturing centers, we have a team of managers—Sustainable Development in Production Managers—dedicated to ensuring standards are achieved by our suppliers,” the company wrote in a statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “These managers are local recruits who understand the country’s culture and languages and are continually working with production teams to improve the tools and methods they use to ensure requirements are met.”

Still, Nayla Ajaltouni of , a French pressure group that’s part of the Clean Clothes Campaign, says that although Decathlon appears to have good intentions, its business model prevents it from paying fair wages to international laborers. “It’s based on minimizing production costs and thus wages—that’s the basis of selling large quantities ofÌęcheap garments,” she wrote in an email. This is why companies like H&M, Primark, and other producers of fast fashion will never be labor leaders. “Up to now, we’ve had no improvement of working conditions and salaries in garment-producing countries, because this business model is profitable and decision makers in the company have not decided to change it.”

Decatholon says that it has lofty environmental goals, too, and that it aims to use only sustainableÌęcotton and polyester by 2020. It’s a laudable target, though the company’sÌę2017 sustainable-development report showed that the company was a long way from reaching its goals, using less than 10 percent sustainable polyester and 55 percent sustainable cotton.

Rather than focus on the price of its products, Decathlon and its employees like to talk about accessibility.Ìę“What is the sport you always wanted to try?” . “We’re a gateway into learning new sports, because sports can be so expensive,” Diaz says. And in an era when the outdoor industry has woken to its upper-middle-class whiteness, the point isÌęa good one. “We want people to start sport, to practice sport,” Diaz says. “If we can offer them the product at a lower price, it works for us.”

As my tour of the San Francisco store winds town, Diaz and the PR team walk me through ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s expansion plans. The downtown location is just a foothold.ÌęThe next store, , will be a whopping 47,000 square feet. After a year of operation in the States, talking to consumers and working with local sports clubs, the retail team believes it has a better idea of what Americans want—and how to convince real athletes that Decathlon is worth a shot. “If a person comes in for the $3 backpack and it lasts more than the two weeks they expected, they’ll come back in and look around,” Tom Mulliez, ¶Ù±đłŠČčłÙłó±ôŽÇČÔ’s head of outreach, told me. “All of a sudden, selling them on a $159 jacket is not all that inconceivable.”

On the way out, as we exchanged pleasantries, Diaz and the team gifted me one of those backpacks with a grin. Go to town on it, they told me, it’s got a ten-year guarantee.

The post Decathlon Is Here to Disrupt the Gear Industry—Will It? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

West, Texas

It was April 2013, and all across the small Texas town of West, the treetops were on fire. An ammonium nitrate explosion at the West Fertilizer Company’s storage facility had carved a 75-foot crater from the earth, flipping cars and coiling nearby train . Some two dozen first responders had been on the scene before the burning plant unexpectedly blew; 12 of them were now dead. It was a catastrophe, an unimaginable horror for a town of 2,800 and the moment the regulatory wheels of the federal government began spinning.

Regulation is a dirty word—understandably so if you run a small business or interact with the federal bureaucracy with any frequency. In politics today, it is a third rail you piss on at your own peril, particularly if you are a member of the Republican Party. Scott Pruitt, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was finally defenestrated in July 2018, built his legacy on the promise of rolling back as many environmental regulations as he could. Former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement at the EPA, is far better schooled in Washington politics. And his goals are the same as Trump’s and Pruitt’s—to continue the most ambitious deregulatory agenda the country has ever seen.

Some regulations, however, exist for a reason. Gina McCarthy was the acting EPA administrator when the plant at West exploded. A Boston native, she was already reeling from the bombing of the Boston Marathon two days earlier, and the chemical disaster struck a nerve. The EPA, McCarthy likes to say, is first and foremost a public health agency. In 1970, after Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burned and smog reduced visibility in Los Angeles to a few hundred feet, created a new “strong, independent” executive agency to clean up the air and water. In 1980, as Love Canal oozed hazardous chemicals into backyards and schools, Jimmy Carter worked with Congress to order the adolescent EPA to create the Superfund program.

After the disaster in West, EPA investigators pieced together a pattern that suggested chemical plants still weren’t exactly drowning in safety rules: More than 2,200 similar incidents had occurred from 2004 to 2013, injuring 17,000 people and killing 59. Nearly 177 million Americans—more than half the population—lived near facilities that handled potentially dangerous chemicals. To make matters worse, no regulations required companies to work with first responders to produce detailed emergency plans or transparent information about which chemicals were on site.

The EPA bureaucracy, roughly 15,000 employees strong, lumbered into action. McCarthy’s point man on chemical plants, assistant administrator Marty Stanislaus, traveled the country to meet with company owners, plant managers, and first responders. Emergency workers told him that, as in West, they often had no idea what chemicals were burning in these accidents. Managers of well-run facilities told him how they prevented accidents. The process took more than three years. “I challenge anyone to have the same kind of dialogue that I had around the country,” Stanislaus says.

For five decades, this is how things have worked at the EPA. Rules are hammered out, haggled over, and tempered by the input of hundreds of stakeholders over months and years. Environmentalists threaten to sue because the regulations are too weak, companies threaten to sue because they’re too tough, and often both sides end up suing at the same time. As McCarthy puts it, the federal rule-making process is grueling and laborious, and that’s the point. “It’s not supposed to allow radical change,” she says, “nor are you supposed to interfere in the economy or human beings’ lives without good reason or in more than a moderate way. We have to have a reason for government intervention.”

The new chemical disaster rule—technically an amendment to the EPA’s —was exceptionally moderate. Completed in January 2017, it didn’t restrict storage of the chemical that decimated West, but it did mandate that facilities share information with first responders and make better emergency plans. Environmentalists didn’t throw victory parties, and industry lobbyists didn’t gloat to reporters. No side “won.” The rule reflected what Stanislaus called the “hard balance” regulators must manage: keep plants running and communities safe. “I was proud of it,” McCarthy says.

Two months later, with a new president at Pennsylvania Avenue and an EPA administrator intent on crippling the agency, the EPA delayed the implementation of the chemical disaster rule.

Then, in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey rolled into Houston.

Washington, D.C.

If you believe , the final straw that ousted Scott Pruitt was a report that he had asked the president to fire Jeff Sessions and install Pruitt as the new attorney general.

In actuality, his was a death by a thousand scandals. Ever since candidate Trump campaigned on abolishing what he erroneously called the Department of Environment, the chaos inside the EPA has been one of the Beltway’s most salacious stories. Pruitt’s fall from John Galtian hero to Beltway swamp monster was almost impossible to turn away from. There were the first-class flights, of course, and the $43,000 soundproof privacy box. But who could forget the $130 fountain pens or the used Trump Hotel mattress? It would have been funny were the situation at the EPA not so desperately serious.

Andrew Wheeler, the new acting administrator, is another kind of Washington creature. A coal lobbyist who worked at the EPA during the first Bush administration and then served as an aide for Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, one of the country’s leading climate deniers, Wheeler is a well-respected operator. On behalf of energy companies, he has lobbied for shrinking Bears Ears National Monument and against regulations that would have limited pollution from power plants.

Under Pruitt and now Wheeler, the EPA’s working agenda is impressive: On the past 19 months, the agency has gutted regulations on methane emissions, decided not to ban a likely neurotoxic pesticide it had previously planned to outlaw, loosened regulations on air pollution, halted efforts to increase gas mileage in new cars, relaxed rules on how coal plants store toxic coal ash, delayed implementing Obama-era smog-reduction rules, suspended regulations against unpermitted dumping in streams and wetlands, opted not to ban cancer-causing asbestos, and moved to rewrite regulations to reduce haze in national parks. All told, the agency has removed or is in the process of rescinding 76 different regulations. In the EPA’s first full year under Trump, penalties against polluters were , compared to the first years under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

But the public outrage has been relatively muted, glued as we have been to the mess unfolding in Washington. To really see the fallout from the Trump administration’s concerted attack on the EPA, you have to get outside the Beltway. For the past year, I’ve been talking to environmentalists, EPA bureaucrats, politicians, and everyday citizens. I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of the administration’s disdain for the environment. Out here in the hinterlands, away from the clickable headlines, the water is dirtier, the air is smoggier, and the chemical plants are more dangerous.

Houston, Texas

The chatter over the radio was urgent and clear: “Get out of the cloud. Get out of the cloud.”

Christy Graves, director of operations for emergency services in northeast Harris County, which includes Houston, Texas, was tailing an ambulance, following a path her team had devised earlier to avoid the wide-scale flooding. It was August 31, 2017—a week after Hurricane Harvey had made landfall—but the rain had come so hard and fast that many of the one-lane ranch roads in this corner of northeast Houston were still underwater.

The first responders were gunning it toward the Arkema chemical plant, in a suburb called Crosby, and the reports were chaotic and conflicting. A few blocks from the facility, they hit the unnaturally dense white cloud. Graves’ car filled with a strange smell, like bad nail polish or rotten eggs. She inhaled and immediately her sense of smell vanished. A moment later, her cellphone rang—a paramedic calling in the first victim. “It’s a cop,” the medic said, frantic. “Now I have two. Now I have three.” Graves suppressed an upwelling of panic and continued toward the burning facility.

Two days earlier, the last Arkema engineers had been evacuated by boat, leaving behind a flooded facility filled with organic peroxides—chemicals used to produce plastics. Just how unstable these would become as the generators failed and the compounds heated up was anybody’s guess. The worst-case scenario, the one scrolling across CNN’s ticker, was that the facility would soon explode. The plan, hastily devised by Arkema and local first responders, was to evacuate anyone nearby and wait for the blast.

Harris County sheriff’s deputies were manning a barricade a mile and half away from the facility. Two of the first responders who recounted their ordeal to me asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution in their jobs. One deputy, whom I’ll call Sam, felt the effects first. There had been no explosion, but soon his eyes burned and he started coughing uncontrollably. An unearthly cloud hugged the ground as it enveloped them. Some deputies were gagging; others were down on their hands and knees. “Oh my god, what’s happening?” someone said. By the time Graves arrived on the scene, her paramedics were gasping for air, turning blue. Unable to speak in more than a croak herself, Graves tended to a thrashing, wild-eyed EMT in the back of an ambulance. The cops began to pile everyone into their service vehicles and drive away, struggling not to vomit in their laps.

Once they made it to the hospital, it became evident that no one was in immediate danger of death. Doctors treated the symptoms—persistent high blood pressure, headaches, burning throats—conditions ultimately diagnosed as “chemical pneumonia.” After the nurses left, Graves broke down and cried. “You can’t fathom what it feels like to be the director of an ambulance and understand that you’ve called in additional people and exposed them—to watch a paramedic writhe and wiggle,” she recalls. “I thought he was going to die. And for a brief moment, the terror that came over me was so intense that my brain was saying, ‘Get control, don’t start hysteria, get control.’”

In an email to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, an Arkema spokeswoman stated that the company had warned emergency-response coordinators that the organic peroxides would likely burn, and that any first responders in the vicinity should be wearing protective gear. It also maintains that it disclosed sufficient information to both first responders and the public on the chemicals stored inside the plant, a point that lawyers for the first responders dispute. Arkema had argued publicly against the chemical disaster rule—its delay may have allowed the company to put off completingÌęa detailed, coordinated emergency plan with local first responders by the rule's original March 2018 deadline. The nonprofit environmental law organization Earthjustice figures there have been nationwide since the EPA halted the rule in March 2017.

On August 3 of this year, a Texas grand jury for “recklessly” releasing a toxic cloud during Hurricane Harvey. Graves is also suing Arkema. She’s joined in the suit by more than a hundred others, including 23 first responders. The cops and EMTs who spoke with me are still feeling the effects: headaches that won’t go away, fluid in their lungs, decreased respiratory capacity. They’re all still under doctors’ care. “The effects we’ve got now, let’s say they clear up,” says Sam, who is also a party to the suit. “But what were we exposed to that was carcinogenic? Am I going to be getting cancer ten years down the road?”

Hurricane Harvey is the kind of nightmare scenario that regulations are designed for, when stringent safety rules can help both communities and industries most. But when the EPA moved to scuttle the chemical disaster rule, it said it was responding to concerns from “facility owners and operators.” Killing this regulation, the petrochemical industry had argued, would make business run smoother and keep costs down. Revealing what chemicals were stored in each plant, companies including Arkema claimed, would create major security risks.

Although Trump’s EPA has been particularly responsive to the interests of industry—Wheeler, the new administrator, is already taking flak for with regulated companies—another group of actors has been instrumental in defanging regulations: conservative states like Texas, which have to halt new rules in recent years. That’s why activists here and in other right-leaning states are particularly worried about a new tenant of Trump’s EPA that its political leaders call cooperative federalism. The agency’s website defines the theory as “working collaboratively with states, local government, and tribes to implement laws that protect human health and the environment, rather than dictating one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington.”

The practice can be seen in full bloom in Oklahoma, where the state was recently allowed to hack back federal rules that dictated the safe storage of coal waste products. Activists fear that in low-regulation havens where industry holds serious sway, cooperative federalism will be a wrecking ball. “I’m sure places like Texas are going to feel emboldened to do whatever they want and still get the approval of the [federal EPA],” says one EPA employee. That may be already in evidence. The watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project has found that over a five-year period, the state of Texas issued fines in less than 3 percent of reported illegal releases of air pollution, or 588 fines for 24,839 pollution releases. (In a press release, the state of Texas has claimed it’s more like 7 percent.)

Nowhere is this more evident than in Harris County. The neighborhoods and incorporated cities that make up the southern half of greater Houston look like villages built into the clearings of a forest of refineries. At the turn of the new century, the air quality in Houston was ranked dead last in the country. It has since inched down to 11th most polluted city, thanks, environmentalists say, to new local and EPA rules, some enacted during the Obama years.

In Galena Park, a small town built into the industrial-chemical sprawl that stretches from Houston to the Gulf of Mexico, I took a “toxic tour” with Juan Flores, a community outreach coordinator for the Houston Air Alliance. The air’s never been clean in this corner of Houston, says Flores, who wears a gold chain with a large crucifix over his purple dress shirt and is running for mayor of Galena Park. Flores doesn’t even notice the smells anymore, he tells me as we drive around. But I sure do: Everywhere, the air stinks of sulfur and gasoline and shit.

Flores can signpost his life in Galena Park with industrial explosions and chemical disasters—which ones shook the glass and threw open doors in his elementary school classes, which ones dusted his family’s car with mysterious white ash, which ones killed or maimed or just plain stank. But now that the EPA has begun the process of rolling back more clean air regulations, the troubles him.

“I’ve got a two-year-old daughter now,” Flores says as we drive past his child’s daycare. “She was actually born with a tumor in her left kidney area. She went through three surgeries, four rounds of chemo, and all that. I don’t know if this had anything to do it with it. Probably didn’t. I don’t know. It’s always in the back of my mind.”

Missoula, Montana

One day last winter, late for an interview and with snow funneling down into my boots, I found myself standing on a ponderosa-lined promontory a few miles east of Missoula, Montana, staring down at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers.

To an outsider like me, Montana can feel like the headwaters of the United States. Earlier in the day, on the other side of the Continental Divide, a similar magnetism had drawn me to the birthplace of the Big Muddy itself, the Missouri, where Lewis and Clark camped 213 years ago at the convergence of the Jefferson and the Madison. The waters that trickle down each side of the Rockies here, you quickly realize, feed flows that reach Oregon and Colorado and Kansas and Louisiana. The Trump administration is targeting at least four major regulations that keep water clean, including a key component of one of the country’s most important environmental laws. Out here in Montana, where the rivers are cold and the fly-fishing is a way of life, the future of these rules feels particularly vital.

The Blackfoot, which ends its 132-mile race down the mountains just outside Missoula, is the semi-mystical waterway of Norman MacLean’s classic novel A River Runs Through It. It’s “no place for small fish or small fisherman,” as MacLean famously put it. It is also, according to David Brooks, executive director of Trout Unlimited’s Montana chapter, one of those rare things in environmental remediation: an unbridled success.

Protecting rivers is a long game, Brooks explains. A rangy environmental historian and activist who wears his business-casual unconvincingly, he says that the Blackfoot had “gone to complete shit” by 1991, when Robert Redford shot his film adaptation of A River Runs Through It. Decades of mining spills and runoff from livestock and logging operations had so fouled the river—a 1975 study showed trout numbers were down by 83 percent in places—that principal photography for the film had to take place on the Gallatin, outside Bozeman.

The river might still be unfishable were it not for the Clean Water Act, a landmark piece of legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in 1972. The law barred companies from dumping into the nation’s rivers without a permit and tasked the newly formed EPA with protecting all the “Waters of the U.S.”— that regulators later decided covered nearly all the nation’s waterways, from ephemeral streams to the Mississippi. Protecting all those small wetlands and creeks is how, ecologists argued, you protect the rivers they eventually flow into. “Water flows downhill, streams and wetlands lead to rivers,” Brooks says. “The public got it.”

In 2015, after a series of lawsuits challenged that broad interpretation of Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS, to those in the know) and the Supreme Court , Obama’s EPA stepped in to clarify the rule in 2015 and codify nearly 45 years of policy.

Within months of taking office, Trump began the process of undoing all this. In January 2018, the EPA formally suspended the Obama-era WOTUS rule, blocking regulations that helped prevent pollution and fertilizer runoff from reaching nonnavigable waterways—the source of a third of America’s drinking water.

Watching sheets of ice flow down the Blackfoot, it’s hard for me to imagine why we would do anything that could threaten the health of a river like this again. But if you’re looking for a technical justification for this deregulatory pogrom—a rationale for all of this—it’s probably what the Trump appointees have taken to calling “EPA originalism.”

Under Obama, EPA originalists argue, the agency began enforcing decades-old regulations far more aggressively than their authors ever intended. The new WOTUS rule, Trump has said repeatedly, is “such a horrible, horrible rule,” adding that it is “one of the worst examples of federal regulation” and “a massive power grab.” By 2016, the rule was so unpopular with rural Americans that then-candidate Trump began name-checking it at rallies and Republican congress members signed onto statements decrying the “job-killing” water rules. Pruitt, , called it “breathtaking in its overreach, and flatly contrary to the will of Congress”—the antithesis of EPA originalism, he argued.

Thomas Jorling, one of the primary authors of the Clean Water Act in 1972, disagrees. A Republican staffer on the Senate Ways and Means Committee in the early 1970s, Jorling and two colleagues labored for a year and a half over the language of the law. “The intention of the Congress was to reach as far into the hydrologic cycle with the regulatory program as it could,” he told me. The goal, he says, was simple: to protect all drinking water.

The Clean Water Act passed the Senate with 74 votes, Jorling reminds me. In his day, he adds, “Nobody could have expected that a new administration—Republican or Democrat—would come in with an agenda to unravel the bipartisan legacy of conservation and environmental protection like this.”

In few places is the clash between the extractive industry and outdoor recreation so clear as in Montana. But in recent years, the state has awakened to the fact that its staggering natural beauty is a selling point.

Extractive industries are built into the state’s DNA—they don’t call Montana the Treasure State for nothing. The territory was settled in large part thanks to the hundreds of silver and copper and gold veins that snake across it, and the nonenergy mineral mining industry—basically everything but coal—still employs thousands and was last valued at $1.3 billion, in 2013.

Meanwhile, the Outdoor Industry Association reckons that outdoor recreation is now the largest sector of Montana’s economy, bringing in $7.1 billion last year. In addition, 12 million tourists spent $3.3 billion last year en route to places like Yellowstone and Glacier.

“It’s enlightened self-interest for us to want to protect the places where we play,” says K.C. Walsh, president of Simms Fishing, from his office overlooking the flats of eastern Bozeman. We’re sitting above the factory where Simms employs 180 people to construct the kind of high-end Gore-Tex waders you lie about when your significant other asks how much they cost.

We’re talking about a proposed mine on the Smith River, a project that’s about as welcome as an outhouse breeze in this liberal pocket of the state. The Smith is the only river in Montana you need a permit to float. Snagging one of those licenses is like winning the nature lottery—only about a thousand are given out each year. The prize is five days with no cell service on the kind of cold, deep water that 15-inch rainbow trout love. “It’s part of that ‘last great place’ mentality of Montana,” Walsh says.

As the bulletin board in any hip Bozeman coffee shop will quickly alert you, a mining company called Sandfire Resources America, part of an Australian-owned conglomerate, wants to dig along a rich vein of copper that abuts a tributary at the headwaters of the Smith. Boosters say the mine will create 200 new jobs. But Walsh and others worry that a spill on the Smith would be devastating, not just to the ecology but to the 70 or so people that studies show make their living off recreational fishing on the river.

Montanans are no stranger to mining spills, which happen when a dam holding back polluted water breaks, releasing heavy metals into the water table. An Earthworks study suggests that 74 percent of gold mines nationwide, for example, have experienced spills. Because of this history, repeated again and again across the state, Obama’s EPA devised a rule that would require mining companies to prove they could fund a cleanup. This was good news for Montana’s coffers, says Bonnie Gestring, Northwest program director at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “We’ve had about five major bankruptcies in the last 20 years,” she says, ticking off mining companies that went bust and left torn-up landscapes in their wake. “In none of those cases was the financial assurance sufficient to cover the cost of cleanup.” Gestring estimates that Montana and the EPA have spent perhaps north of $200 million mopping up after failed mines.

On December 1, 2017, Trump’s EPA decided that mining companies do not need to have as much money on hand. “EPA is confident that modern industry practices, along with existing state and federal requirements, address risks from operating hard-rock mining facilities,” the agency said in a statement. Additional financial assurance, it added, “would impose an undue burden on this important sector of the American economy and rural America.”

Montana is a place, in my mind at least, almost defined by its stream and rivers: Missoula and the Clark Fork; Billings and the Yellowstone; Bozeman and the Gallatin, where Simms workers often get some casting in before or after work. “Do you think tourists will come see a denuded or diminished landscape?” Walsh says.

All these waterways are under threat from mining or agricultural waste, yet the EPA under Trump has undermined clean water regulations at a rate unseen in generations. The effects will be felt everywhere that water flows.

San Francisco, California

While the list of deregulatory goals at Trump’s EPA can feel exhaustive—chemical plants, air pollution, more haze in national parks, keeping asbestos legal—there is one target, a “hoax created by and for the Chinese,” in the president’s words, that rises above the rest. That is, of course, climate change.

On a surprisingly warm day late last winter, I attended a public hearing in San Francisco—a contentious and unhappy legally mandated meeting to discuss the repeal of Clean Power Plan. Proposed in 2014 under Gina McCarthy, this is Obama’s most controversial EPA legacy, a rule that aims to fight climate change by promoting cleaner energy sources at the expense of coal. (Repealing the “so-called Clean Power Plan” was item number one on an action plan sent by coal baron Bob Murray, Andrew Wheeler’s former boss, to the Trump administration shortly after inauguration. The wish list has proven a valuable guide to the administrator’s agenda, environmentalists say.)

The San Francisco meeting was held on what must have felt like enemy territory for the EPA political appointees on hand. In front of cameras and reporters, California politicos and environmental leaders strutted up to the microphone and made their outrage known. “We in California have already made our choice. Our future is in clean energy,” said Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board. “Now more than ever is the time for the United States to be a leader and a partner in this effort.”

California is often held up as an environmental leader, though it has eight of the ten cities with the highest ozone pollution in the country, according to the American Lung Association, and remains a major oil-producing state. Still, says Jared Blumenfeld, former head of the EPA’s Region 9, which includes California, “It’s a place where you’ve got the political will. People move to California because they love the outdoors; they want to recreate and surf and fish. So you have people that vote that way.”

The state also feels singled out by the Trump administration. While “cooperative federalism” at the EPA has allowed Oklahoma to cut its coal regulations, in California it has meant to the state’s longstanding right to institute strict emission standards on new cars. In a liberal state run by politicians jockeying for position within the self-appointed resistance, the EPA’s threats were like punting a hornet’s nest. “This administration’s decision to place another target on California’s back will be met with a fight,” said Senator Kamala Harris in April. Unsurprisingly, the state has become a leader in pushing back against the Trump administration’s agenda. California is party to against the administration, on issues ranging from net neutrality to the separation of undocumented immigrant families. At least ten of the suits are over EPA regulatory rollbacks, including WOTUS, methane emissions, and drilling on Native American land.

California’s suits, legal experts say, may slow down the EPA’s deregulatory agenda enough to “run out the clock” if the president isn’t reelected in 2020. That’s because it turns out that undoing a regulation can be just as laborious as making one. Trump’s EPA, most of the lawsuits charge, didn’t jump through the legal hoops required. “Either by design or inadvertence,” says Joseph Goffman, a former EPA assistant administrator who is now at Harvard, “Pruitt’s administration found themselves trying to see how much they could get away with. Now they’re running into the limits that administrative law imposes.”

Lawsuits aside, it’s hard to be too optimistic. Jared Blumenfeld, who attended the Clean Power Plan meeting for his podcast, , figures that even if Trump isn’t reelected, it’ll take another eight years to replace the hundreds of staffers the EPA has lost. And as Christine Todd Whitman says, “So much of the current Republican pushback is not about environmental regulations—it’s about regulations, period.” Gallup polls may show that people support clean air policies and increased gas mileage, but who is about to stand up for increased regulations?

Blumenfeld thinks the movement has lost its way. “In the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans,” he says, “the environmental movement has been all mind and no heart. We need to bring the heart back. The only reason we protect something is because we love it. The only reason we love it is because we experience it. Get outside—be the fuck outside. Go hiking, and once you feel that connection to the mountain, or the stream when you’re fly-fishing, that connection to nature is what will give us the momentum and inspiration to have these fights. Otherwise it’s just about technical language in the federal register.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the meeting in San Francisco, environmentalists cheered and honked and promised they’d continue to #resist. Children beat drums and politicians mugged for the cameras. Behind the podium, a woman wearing a heavy polar bear costume enthusiastically waved a sign that read PRUITT—KEEP YOUR PAWS OFF THE CLEAN POWER PLAN while the suits pontificated. A few minutes later, the polar bear fainted from the heat.

It was hard not to make something of the symbolism.

The post The EPA Is Gutting Regulations That Keep Us Safe appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last November, runner, mountaineer, and all-around fastest woman you’ve never heard of Suzanne “Sunny” Stroeer crushed the women’s speed record on the Annapurna Circuit, a punishing Himalayan trail that includes a 17,769-foot pass.

The 136-mile trek, which is among the most popular in Nepal, normally takes hikers about three weeks. Stroeer finished in just under four days—more than 14 hours ahead of the previous fastest known time. And the icing on the cake: Stroeer, who was in Nepal to lead a mountaineering group, hadn’t even been planning to go for the FKT.

“I was looking for something to do, and I could see the mountain from here, so I figured might as well go on the trail,” Stroeer says from eastern Nepal. “I intended to do the trail to just explore and see how it was, maybe to see if I could guide it or something. Then I started thinking about the speed record. Then I realized I’d have enough time.”

The Harvard-educated Stroeer started racking up FKTs after she quit her corporate job in 2015 to take up van life and lead expeditions around the world. Earlier this year, Stroeer broke the women’s base-camp-to-summit record on Aconcagua, South America’s tallest mountain, . (And she locked that record down with an upper respiratory infection.)

, Annapurna’s most dedicated Western booster—and on-and-off holder of the men’s FKT, at around 72 hours—praised Stroeer for mostly sticking to Annapurna’s tougher trails and avoiding the paved roads that can help shave hours off the trip. “She picked up some trails that I’ve actually missed,” Wolpin said. “She did a great job. She took more sleep breaks than I did—which means she must have been really flying when she was running.”

The Annapurna Circuit runs through the Annapurna range of the Himalayas and includes more than 30,000 feet of elevation gain (and subsequent descent), all in the shadow of the Tibetan plateau. Although the route was once mostly unpaved trails, today roads and jeep trails are common along the trek, teahouses are frequent, and thousands of foreigners tackle it each year. Despite its popularity on the multiweek trekker scene, it’s still a high-mountain trail in one of the most unforgiving places on earth—in 2014, a powerful snowstorm who found themselves trapped on the circuit.

Annapurna was Stroeer’s first experience going after an intense, multiday speed record. “I have never done anything that required me to plan out sleep strategy,” she laughs. “I definitely didn’t have a concrete plan going in.” Stroeer stayed in teahouses on the route, opting to get at least a few hours of shut-eye each night and aiming to preserve headlamp batteries. “You go to sleep at night just wasted and nuked, then you get up five hours later and you’re like, ‘I have to go,’” she says. (While Stroeer, who is sponsored by Mountain Hardwear, didn’t run with a support team, she still considers her trek “supported” since she stocked up on meals and snacks at villages and teahouses along the route.) The occasional sleep and rest made the trek marginally easier than other long-distance runs she’s done, Stroeer says: “I managed to avoid hallucinations on this trip, which was really nice since that hasn’t always been the case.”

For Stroeer, who is relatively new to the world of ultrarunning, the route came with a handful of revelations about what it means to carry on.

“Even for me—and I love doing this—but even while I’m out there, there are times where I’m like, ‘Why am I doing it again?’” she says. “Your mind gets tired because you’re trying to keep focused. But you keep pushing. And then, all of a sudden, there is nothing else that matters. Just that next footstep. Are you fed? Hydrated? Warm? Do you know where you are? Hours turn into minutes. You get into the headspace where you hold the same thought for what feels like forever. It’s active meditation. There are no complications. It’s beautiful.”

The post Sunny Stroeer’s FKT on Annapurna Circuit Is Crazy appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It’s never an easy thing, convincing a person to give you their feces.

The instructions are simple enough: defecate, swipe the provided swab across a wad of used toilet paper (no need to be aggressive—so long as the tip is brown, you’ll have enough material for analysis), pop the newly defiled cotton bud into its test tube, and wash up.

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Still, even if the donations are for science, the gross-out factor means that people tend to make excuses. They’re too busy or too tired, or their sample was “off” that morning. No matter. For , a scientist at the University of California at San Diego, the value of a fecal sample is too high to let a little thing like squeamishness get in the way. That’s why she has a spiel she’s honed in weight rooms across the squintingly sunny campus. We all have these microorganisms living inside of us, she tells the collegiate tennis players and point guards. What would you do if you knew you could use them to your advantage, to help you perform or recover better? We hope it’s true, but we still need to do the research to find out—she pauses for effect—and you can help by giving us your poop. Hyde grins. “The word poop goes over well with them.”

Hyde manages the at the university’s , which is five years into a deeply ambitious effort to map the average American’s bacterial makeup—what scientists call the human microbiome. But her pet project is studying whether athletes have different, healthier microbiomes than everybody else. And the best way to find out what’s happening inside a person, it turns out, is to analyze what comes out. So far she’s tested upwards of 150 samples from professional and amateur athletes. But if there’s a specific ­superbiome for performance, it has remained elusive.

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Hyde, who is as small and compact as you’d expect a weekend half-marathon addict to be, leads me by airtight chambers used to culture oxygen-phobic bacteria (most of your gut, I learn, is an anaerobic space), past pipetting lab techs and postdocs corralling data. Since it was founded by microbiologist Rob Knight in 2004, the lab has been responsible for some of the most exciting revelations in microbiome studies. Scientists here and elsewhere now believe that our personal microbial universes are intertwined with a host of conditions, including acne, allergies, obesity, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disorders, and even cancer.

Only a decade or so into this young field, the connections can still astonish. The bacterial content of an autistic child’s gut looks significantly different from the general population’s. Bacteria found in multiple-­sclerosis patients may contribute to sending the immune system into overdrive and causing the disease’s devastating symptoms. And as Rob Knight himself helped discover in 2013, you can make a sterile rat gain weight simply by giving it bacteria from an obese human’s microbiome.

“Everyone responds to diet in their own way,” Knight says, thanks in part to their bacterial makeup. “Some people gain twenty pounds; some people lose ten pounds.” His work, exciting as it is on its face, has also elucidated a fundamental aspect of the microbiome: the bacterial community inside us is always changing—and we can influence it, too. As Knight says, “There’s a lot of potential in terms of being able to, I don’t want to say diagnose, but classify people according to their current level of performance and—more excitingly—their potential for future performance.”

That’s why Hyde’s eyes light up as she opens freezer number seven and pulls out a small tray with 96 individual wells, each containing the raw genetic contents of various athletes’ bacteria. This clear liquid, extracted from feces, could be the key that will one day make us run longer, recover faster, and stay fitter.

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To the uninitiated, the microbiome can be a difficult thing to come to terms with. In your colon, your mouth, your eyes, your skin, your genitalia, are trillions of microscopic bacteria. There are as many of these bugs—among them pill-shaped rods and spherical blobs so small that tens of millions of them are no larger than a grain of sand—as human cells. According to some metrics, in fact, you are as much host as human. Forty thousand different species of bacteria can call your gut home, along with smaller numbers of viruses and fungi. And on a genetic level, your microbial residents dwarf you. The human genome, the sum of all those snippets of DNA you get from your parents and pass along to your offspring, contains some 20,000 genes; your microbiome contains millions. To fully consider the microbiome, you first have to reconsider yourself.

It can be unnerving for a person raised with a healthy fear of pathogens to embrace the idea of a legion of foreigners inside us. But despite any experiences you may have had with members of the genus Salmonella, the vast majority of microbes that inhabit your body do you no harm. They’ve taken up residence for their own reasons—to eat mucus or feed off fiber or break down resistant starch (found in foods like lentils or cold potatoes that don’t break down in the small intestine). And humans and our bacteria, we go way back. Over the millennia, we have evolved together, our bodies offshoring jobs to our bugs, finding it easier for, say, Helicobacter pylori to help regulate hunger hormones than to do it all by ourselves.

“People call the microbiome the forgotten organ,” says Erica Sonnenburg, a micro­biologist at Stanford University who has made big strides connecting the microbiome and the immune system. “These organisms aren’t reactive. They’re holding some of the reins themselves.” And their composition in your gut—which species are most prevalent at any given moment—is critical to daily function. “They affect how our bodies work,” says Jack Gilbert, director of the at the University of Chicago. “Our immune systems, our hormone levels, our neurocognition, how we behave—things that you wouldn’t even consider. How much brown fat versus white fat you have in your body, your insulin levels, the functioning of your kidneys and liver
”

The more discoveries we make, the more we realize how little we know. Thus far the American Gut Project has found our digestive tracts to be so diverse in microbial content, and so unique to us and our individual lifestyles, that researchers really can’t yet say what a “normal” gut should look like—let alone an elite athlete’s gut.

What we do know: of those trillions of bacteria, a small core of species rule our ecosystems. The vast majority of people have guts dominated by two big phyla. Bacteroidetes break down complex indigestible plant matter into stuff our body needs, like nutrients or fatty acids; Firmicutes, the other big phylum, are even better at turning fibrous and starchy foods into beneficial things such as anti-inflammatory butyrates. Like greedy kids holding up the line at the buffet, these bugs’ dominance may keep other malicious bacteria from gaining a foothold in our guts. But despite the good flora in the phylum Firmicutes, some studies have shown that obese people are more likely to have guts dominated by these bacteria than by Bacteroidetes. Frustratingly, nobody is entirely sure why it plays out this way. Scientists still don’t have enough evidence to tell people how to eat for a “skinny” gut, but most told me that they personally eat a diet high in fiber—close to double the amount the average American eats—as well as loads of plants and grains.

But in their quest to figure out just what the hell a healthy gut looks like, researchers realized that most of their subjects looked a lot alike: middle-class, white, desk job. (In other words, people you can easily find walking around a university campus.) So they sought samples from other populations—Inuits, hunter-gatherer tribes in remote parts of East Africa and the Amazon, the young and the old.

It was almost inevitable that as researchers learned more about the gut and our health, they started to wonder what was going on inside the superhumans scoring goals on TV and breaking records in their sports.

One of the first scientists to really target the link between the microbiome and performance was Fergus Shanahan, director of an interdisciplinary group at Ireland’s University College Cork. Shanahan’s colleague Mick Molloy had been a team doctor for the national rugby team, and in 2011 Shanahan asked him, “What do you suppose the microbiome of a professional athlete looks like?” Molloy made some calls, and the team agreed to help the researchers find out. (“We had to sell it to them,” Molloy remembers. “But when we talked about possibly improving performance—well, you know, they’d eat cow dung to increase performance.”)

The men in green went on to lose the Rugby World Cup that year, but Shanahan’s research team won big. “We stayed with them for days on end. We photographed their food, and we got their stool samples,” he says. The scientists found that the players’ gut biomes boasted dramatic diversity—an African savanna compared with the frozen tundra of the couch-potato control group—with double the number of phyla represented. Firmicutes were higher than average, which made sense for men with a high body-mass index burning lots of energy; and the quantity of Akkermansia mucini­phila (a bacterium often found in skinny folk but not obese people) was exceptional.

Shanahan and his team inadvertently birthed a whole subfield of microbiome studies, and it has professional teams salivating. In the lead-up to the America’s Cup last summer, Scott Tindal, the nutritionist and physiotherapist for —the yacht-racing syndicate that represents the United States—was running the numbers on the crew’s health. Perhaps unsurprising for a team sponsored by a tech company that has made billions selling database software, Oracle Team USA prides itself on metrics. Sailors’ lives were being analyzed down to the hour, with nutrients tracked, heartbeats per minute monitored, and calories uploaded. But Tindal was obsessed with a more obscure data point, something the trainers called availability—the amount of time the crew was fit to train.

Studies have shown that elite athletes get sick more often than average healthy people. Marathoners, for instance, are two to six times more likely to come down with something after a race. Furthermore, research suggests that athletes who get sick within two months of a competition rarely match their training bests. “Being available to train and sail is a massive marker of their ability to perform,” Tindal says. From January to August 2016, he tracked 17 different infections among the crew, which led to 50 days of missed training and 40 days of lost sailing. It was a dispiriting total. “We were in the gym six days a week and on the water at least four days, and quite often five or six,” remembers Andrew Campbell, a sailor on Team USA. “There was an obvious correlation. You’d spend two cold weeks fully ripping into the training, and guys would get sick. You see the cause and effect.”

Then Tindal had a chance encounter with Erika Ebbel Angle, a Ph.D. biochemist and CEO of , a startup that formulates supplements, including probiotics, based on your microbiome. “I was a bit skeptical,” Tindal says, but he was familiar with the growing research connecting the micro­biome to the immune system. Resident bacteria, he knew, help the immune system measure its response to invading bugs. And probiotics—as much as the term has been commandeered by yogurt, juice, and granola companies—do indeed impact resident microbes. Although studies are mixed, a few have been shown to provide real benefits to the immune system.

Tindal decided to take a chance and signed Team USA up for Ixcela’s supplements and a regimen of foods designed to promote microbial diversity. (“Things like kefir, which the guys had most mornings,” he says, “and sauerkraut, which all of them definitely did not.”) After nine months, he ran the numbers. “We saw a 30 percent reduc­tion in upper-respiratory incidents, a 47.5 per­cent reduction in sailing days lost, and a 54 percent reduction in full training days lost,” he says.

Many of the researchers I spoke with doubted the ability of any company to personalize probiotic regimens based on an at-home blood test. “I can’t do that here,” said Gilbert, of the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center, adding, “There’s a lot of snake oil out there.” Ixcela, like many of the new microbiome companies, has not yet published peer-reviewed papers ­attesting to its products’ efficacy, though it does plan to publish a study about Team USA’s results. This doesn’t mean they don’t work. But it’s a common scenario in an exploding field where even seemingly simple things like proving causation versus correlation is still maddeningly hard.

And so we keep exploring. Change your diet and the bacterial population shifts; spend enough time in the dirt and your ­dominant bugs may switch. Remove a species and hopefully cure a disease. Add a new one and maybe improve your personal best. Is it really that easy?

That’s what Jonathan Scheiman wants to find out. For two weeks in 2015, he drove around Boston, chasing down runners who’d competed in the Boston Marathon to collect their fecal samples. “We want to understand what makes elite athletes elite—from a biological perspective—then extract that to benefit everyone. This isn’t just some scientists cooped up in a lab working on esoteric stuff. This has real-world applications,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I got my hands dirty for this project.”

Scheiman, a former Division I basketball player at St. John’s University in New York City, harbored dreams of going pro throughout his twenties. He couldn’t quite make it, though, so he settled for a Ph.D. in biomedical science from New York University and a life of research at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. He’s now a postdoc working under George Church, one of the most famous geneticists alive. Church’s interests range from nanobots to bringing woolly mammoths back from extinction, but Scheiman’s focus is narrower. He’s built a veritable Augean stable at Harvard—he scooped up even more elite feces from Olympic hopefuls in the run-up to Rio—in search of a bug that will make people better athletes.

Early in his research, Scheiman discussed his work with someone affiliated with the NBA. “The first question he asked was, ‘Can we use gen­omics to predict the next Michael Jordan?’ My response was, ‘The better question is, can we extract Jordan’s biology and give it to other athletes to help make the next Michael Jordan?’ ”

He thinks he may have found just the microbe. In a meeting of the American Chemical Society in August, Scheiman told the world about a type of bacteria—one he wouldn’t name publicly—that he saw blooming in large numbers in marathoners shortly after they finished races. The bacteria accu­mulates in the bloodstream after strenuous exercise and appears to break down the ­metabolites associated with ­fatigue. The bug, which doesn’t show up at significant levels in sedentary subjects, ­almost appears to be a natural response to the buildup of lactic acid in our muscles during workouts—a recovery mechanism we may have outsourced to our microbiome mil­lennia ago.

Scheiman’s bacteria, as one hypothesis goes, may have been cultivated by these elite runners over years of intense training. By producing ­punishing, thigh-burning quantities of lactic acid throughout their lives, the marathoners created an ideal environment for the bugs to thrive. Lactic acid became a plentiful food source, and the bacteria most capable of breaking it down flourished. In a sense, the marathoners may have earned their ability to recover quickly.

Scheiman has already isolated the bacteria and is developing a startup called Fitbiomics. If all goes well, he hopes to sell a fatigue-busting, endurance-boosting probiotic to the public within two years of completing his research.

Once you are awake to the bugs crawling around inside you, the drone of people trying to sell a cure for whatever ails your micro­biome becomes a roaring din. Dr. Oz and his rotating cast of telegenic TV physicians promise the secret to weight loss through the latest “gut diet.” A company called claims that its AO+ Mist can improve your skin and “restore the essential bacteria” that modern hygiene has removed from your face. In the snack aisle at a fancy grocery store in Venice Beach, California, a $4 bag of fermented Kraut Krisps promises “one billion probiotics” per serving. We have entered an era of what University of California at Davis researcher Jonathan Eisen calls microbiomania.

Many of these promises are empty. Researchers can’t say with any confidence that there’s a take-home test that’ll help improve your health. Hyde and her team at the American Gut Project will analyze your microbiome for about a hundred bucks, but she stresses that the test is not diagnostic. You can learn a little about yourself, but mostly you’ll be contributing to citizen science. There are many tests out there on the Web that promise to improve your gut, but like Ixcela, the advice they offer isn’t yet peer-reviewed.

Still, there are encouraging anecdotal results. In Australia, Nicholas West, a researcher at Queensland’s Griffith University, has been meticulously testing publicly available probiotics on national-team athletes, based on their personal microbiomes, to help ward off pre-competition illness. He’s had some success and says he’s now working to “get an athlete on the podium, in that number-one spot—and to make sure that person is Australian.”

The Mayo Clinic recently invested in , an Israeli startup cofounded by a computational biologist and marathon runner named Eran Segal that uses the microbiome to explore how foods affect different people’s blood-glucose levels. The research focuses on diabetics, but the Israeli national basketball team is already altering players’ diets based on DayTwo’s results, as is Omri Casspi, an Israeli member of the Golden State Warriors, in the hopes of crafting diets that keep athletes from crashing. “I used to do a lot of carbohydrate loading before runs, and I would still feel tired,” Segal says. Then he changed his diet based on his microbiome. Now, he tells me, “I can do a 20-mile run and be active hours later. And I ended up doing a sub-three-hour marathon.”

So where does it all lead? Last summer, during an interview with Bicycling, Lauren Petersen, a young researcher at the Maine-based Jackson ­Laboratory’s Connecticut branch, made explicit an idea that plenty of people had only whispered. “I think I can say with confidence,” the magazine quoted her saying, “that bacterial doping—call it poop doping, if you must—is coming soon.” Petersen, an enduro racer, has published papers on the microbiome of cyclists and is deeply interested in the role Prevotella plays in endurance athletes’ guts. The ”țŸ±łŠČâ­łŠ±ôŸ±ČÔČ” story () ricocheted around the Internet and was picked up by publications as widely read as The Washington Post.

The backlash was overwhelming. The success of fecal transplants has, of course, thrilled researchers ever since 2013, when scientists proved that altering the gut biome could cure the deadly infection Clostridium difficile. But the idea of poop doping for athletic gain—even if Petersen wasn’t endorsing it—was too much. That’s because in addition to curing C. difficile, a transplant of someone else’s microbiome could result in a whole new set of problems. There are strong correlations between the bugs in your gut and a number of mental conditions, including depression and anxiety. (Clinical trials are investigating whether fecal transplants from healthy donors could help alleviate these conditions.) If a cyclist, seeking bacteria that could boost her body’s ability to, say, extract energy from carbohydrates, doped with the feces from a person suffering from severe depression, the doper could in theory become “infected.”

It’s a frightening prospect—but that doesn’t mean people won’t try. “Professional athletes will do anything to get a tiny margin of gain over competitors,” says Shanahan, the Irish researcher. At the Rio Games, the margin between gold and fifth place in the 200-meter men’s freestyle—from the top of the podium to nothing at all—was less than a second. Last year a runner came within a half-­minute of achieving a sub-two-hour marathon. Shanahan doesn’t recommend poop doping, and there’s no evidence it would even work. But, he says, “We’re talking about something completely legal. It’s not so daft, really.”

Embriette Hyde was particularly horrified by the poop-doping story. But she gets why people are interested. The microbiome is a beguiling thing; we know just enough about it for our hopes to rise. That’s part of the reason why she is now leaving the American Gut Project to become a science writer—to help explain this stuff to a confused public.

So far it appears unlikely that there is a Unified Athlete’s Gut, some mystical bacterial composition that appears across pro surfers, mountaineers, and runners. Hyde is skeptical of any easy fix, any ­yogurt or bio-drink that will turn you into Michael Jordan. But that doesn’t make her collection of samples any less intoxicating.

David Ferry () lives in San Francisco and writes for ­șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and WIRED.

The post Does Your Gut Hold the Secret to Performance? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It seems like every day, a new study claims to show how your microbiome influences the way your body converts food into energy, responds to illness, or handles inflammation. But as scientists are learning, our bugs are also affected by the way we treat them. The miles you log, the food you eat, the mountains you climb—everything seems to shape your internal ecology, too.

It makes sense, then, that microbiologists are jockeying to get a look at the bacteria inside the stomachs of some of the world’s healthiest, fittest people. How do pro ath­letes compare with amateurs? Do skiers’ guts look different than climbers’? And is there some mythical bug that all kick-ass athletes share? We don’t know—yet.

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So, in the spirit of science, 15 weekend warriors at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributed samples to the . We also corralled some extraordinary athletes and convinced them to pack fecal swabs off to the lab. Project manager and her team then compared our microbiomes with those of student athletes at UC San Diego, a cohort of surfers around the world, and all 10,000 AGP contributors. Crushingly, the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű microbiomes were nothing to write home about. The elite athletes’? That’s where things got interesting.

Meet the Microbes

The most common bugs in our athletes’ guts

BacteroidesÌę(red): A genus in the Bacteroidetes phylum made up mostly of beneficial bugs that help the immune system keep out dangerous pathogens.

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PrevotellaÌę(blue): Another genus in the Bacteroid­etes phylum. Some research has noted high levels in endurance athletes. The most common driver for a gut full of Prevotella is a vegetarian diet.

LachnospiraceaeÌę(orange): Members of this family in the Firmicutes phylum produce butyric acid—a healthy short-chain fatty acid that protects against leaky gut and other conditions.

FaecalibacteriumÌę(green): A Firmicutes genus that breaks down fiber into butyrates that aid the immune system. Lower than normal levels have been linked to diseases like Crohn’s and diabetes.

RoseburiaÌę(light green): Another genus in the Firmicutes phylum that turns fiber into butyric acid.

AcinetobacterÌę(light blue): A little-studied genus in the Proteobacteria phylum that’s found widely in soil. Scientists don’t know much about its role, but on the off chance it gets into your bloodstream, some of its members are antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

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RuminococcaceaeÌę(purple): Some in this family of Firmicutes are experts at turning resistant starches into beneficial short-chain fatty acids.

Bacillus (yellow): An understudied Firmi­cutes bug that in mice has been shown to protect against pathogens.

Clostridium (pink): Famous for C. botu­linum and C. difficile, most of the bugs in this genus are harmless and help keep the whole bacteria population stable.

Other (gray):ÌęThousands of additional strains of bacteria.

How We Stack Up

The key to making sense of a micro-biome analysis is to look for weirdness.

In general, the more diverse things are, the better. Most contributors to the American Gut Project, including °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s staff members, have relatively homogeneous guts. Two big phyla, Bacteroidetes and Firmi­cutes, dominate our gut flora. For many Amer­icans, having significantly more Firmicutes than Bacteroidetes may indicate a higher-fat Western diet, and in some cases obesity. The reverse ratio often points to a more plant-based diet and a leaner physique. That doesn’t always hold true for our pro athletes, however. All seven of them have ­microbiomes that vary considerably from the average American’s. More excitingly, Hyde says, those who compete in similar sports have similar gut bacteria. This suggests that certain factors—such as performing high levels of cardiovascular exercise or spending large amounts of time in the ocean—may affect the makeup of our microbiomes dramatically.

Alex Honnold

Home: 2016 Ram ProMaster van
Diet: “I’m probably 95 percent vege­tarian, and full-on vegan 50 per­cent of the time. I eat a fuckload of fiber, mostly a plant-based diet of roughage.”
Gut biome: Bacteroidetes dominant
Takeaway: Honnold’s gut has way more Prevotella than the average American’s. Some research has connected high levels of this genus to intense exercise, but Hyde thinks the bug—which turns complex carbs into energy—likely thrives because of his vegetarian diet.

Emily Harrington

Home: Squaw Valley, California
Diet: “I try to eat paleo. No bread, minimal carbs and sugar, and lots of vegetables, fruit, and fat from coconut, avocados, and nuts.”
Gut biome: Firmicutes dominant
Takeaway: Harrington’s gut has high levels of Clostridium, a tricky genus that contains both frightful pathogens and helpful strains that keep the gut running smoothly. In addition, she and mountaineer Adrian Ballinger, who live and train together, have similar bugs—an indication of how much your environment can affect your gut.

Adrian Ballinger

Home: Squaw Valley, California
Diet: “Emily and I eat mostly the same stuff. I probably eat more meat than she does. We both drink coffee every day and have maybe a glass or two of red wine each night.”
Gut biome: Firmicutes dominant
Takeaway: In addition to having Clostridium levels that are similar to his girlfriend, Ballinger’s microbiome is loaded with Roseburia and Faecalibacterium. Both produce butyrates, which reduce inflammation.

Rob Krar

Home: Flagstaff, Arizona
Diet: “Very loosely I would describe it as greens and grains based—healthy eating while not denying myself the pleasures of a beer in the evening and desserts. I eat very little meat but do consume eggs, milk products, and fish.”
Gut biome: Bacteroidetes dominant
Takeaway: Krar has more Bacillus than any other elite athlete sampled—a bacteria that barely registers in most folks. Not much is known about Bacillus, but mice studies have shown that it protects against pathogens.

Amelia Boone

Home: San Jose, California
Diet: “It’s pretty normal—the standard focus on quality proteins, fats, and carbs—but I’m not super regimented. I’ll be the first to admit that I eat a decent amount of ice cream. Definitely more than I should.”
Gut biome: Bacteroidetes dominant
Takeaway: Boone’s gut is home to signif­icantly more Acinetobacter than the American Gut Project usually sees. It’s commonly found in dirt—something that Boone, a Tough Mudder veteran, spends a lot of time rolling around in.

Cody Townsend

Home: Tahoe City, California
Diet: “It’s light on grains, because I’m allergic to gluten. I look for whole foods. I can’t just be on a trip and think, I’m hungry—oh, there’s a hot dog. I have to plan ahead and go for nuts, fruit, and vegetables. It shifts my entire diet.”
Gut biome: Bacteroidetes dominant
Takeaway: Townsend’s gut has almost four times more Parabacteroides than anyone else surveyed. Parabacteroides are great at turning plant fibers into energy and often bloom in folks who consume a lot of resistant starch—like oats, cold potatoes, and cold rice—which bugs don’t feast upon until it hits the colon.

Fergal Smith

Surfer, age 30

Home: Lahinch, Ireland
Diet: “I would say it’s fairly good. I mostly just eat the vegetables I grow. And I only drink spring water.”
Gut biome: Bacteroidetes dominant
Takeaway: Smith, who lives on an organic farm, has the kind of gut that ­microbiologists lust after. Loaded with high levels of anti-inflammatory Bifidobacterium and Ruminococcaceae, plus lots of Prevotella, it reflects his vegetable-based diet and has the diversity you’d expect from a person connected to both land and sea.

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Scientists are discovering that the microbes living in your digestive system may hold the secrets to improving performance, which is why scientists are investigating just what’s inside athletes’ guts. Want to improve your own microbiotic health? Here’s how.

So I Just Take Probiotics, Right?

Er, sort of. For more than a century, scientists have been looking for a probiotic-enhanced substance—something like yogurt, kefir, or kimchi that introduces new, live bacteria into your body—to cure what ails us. In the early 1900s, Russian immunologist Élie Metchnikoff sang the praises of Lactobacillus bulgaricus, a bacteria that gives yogurt its taste, claiming that it could ward off senility. (It can’t.) Today scientists know that probiotics can indeed solve a few problems. Got diarrhea or an upset stomach from a course of antibiotics? Eat some yogurt that contains live cultures (or some unpasteurized fermented pickles or sauerkraut) for a little relief. Promising clinical trials also suggest that one day soon, probiotics may be prescribed to treat irritable bowel syndrome or even depression.

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But probiotics aren’t a panacea—and they can’t prevent you from getting sick in the first place. “The industry is predicated on maintaining wellness,” says , of the University of Chicago, “but currently there’s no evidence that long-term, continued consumption of probiotics maintains wellness.” The main bacteria in probiotics, Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, do aid with GI issues and reduce diarrhea, but there’s mixed evidence of how effective they are in probiotic form.

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The science is still young, so for now researchers suggest supplementing probi­otics with prebiotics, which feed the bacteria already in your body. You can buy prebiotic powders, but the best way to get them is with high-fiber foods such as beans and veggies. Your gut bugs break down the fiber into helpful things like anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acids. At the end of the day, scientists say, the best way to maintain a healthy gut is to—no surprise here—eat a varied diet filled with veggies, legumes, and fermented foods to get both pre- and probiotics. (Take a look at “3 Recipes to Boost Your Microbiome”Ìęfor a few ideas.)

Should I Get My Biome Tested?

3 Recipes to Boost Your Microbiome

The ideal healthy-gut diet for performance.

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Roughly half a dozen companies will analyze your microbiome for you, identifying which bacteria dominate your gut and comparing your results with other people’s. Some will also provide everything from tailored dietary advice to customized probiotic ­regimens. The largest company, ­uBiome, offers physician-ordered tests that it claims can iden­tify pathogens associated with some diseases. But a microbiome test alone, says Rob Knight, head of the , can’t diagnose anything. Still, knowing if your gut is dominated by, say, bugs in the Firmicutes phylum rather than Bacteroidetes—which are associated with a leaner body profile—can help spur dietary changes. Maybe consider laying off the hamburgers and eating some plants instead. If you do want to use your results as a diagnostic tool, bring them to your doctor to rule out any egregious quantities of pathogenic bacteria.

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Erica and Justin ­Sonnenburg, a pair of who have been studying the effects of diet on the microbiome for more than a decade, are a little bit obsessed with fiber. “Digesting it appears to be the primary profession of our gut microbes,” Erica says. At home the Sonnenburgs focus on fiber-heavy, legume-loaded meals aimed specif­ically at sustaining their most beneficial bugs. Here’s a day’s worth of eating adapted from their book, , to get your microbiome on track.

Breakfast

Muesli for Your ­Microbes

This cold cereal is heavy on fruit and nuts, and the kefir adds some probiotic strains of bacteria.

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• 4 unpeeled apples, chopped
• 2 cups plain kefir
• Âœ cup rolled cereal
• ÂŒ cup chopped hazelnuts
• 2 tbsp. flaxseed meal
• 2 tbsp. lemon juice
• ÂŒ tsp. nutmeg
• ÂŒ tsp. salt

The night before, combine all the ingredients in a bowl, cover, and ­refrigerate. Serve cold with a drizzle of honey.

Lunch

Chickpea Greek Salad

Fibrous garbanzo beans help this dish really pop.

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• 1 15-ounce can garbanzo beans
• 1 cucumber, sliced
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes
• Âœ red onion, sliced
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• Âœ cup chopped parsley
• ÂŒ cup kalamata olives
• ÂŒ cup feta cheese

Toss all ingredients with olive oil and lemon juice to taste.

Dinner

Dal with Yogurt Raita

Don’t let all the ingredient scare you—dal with raita is just as easy, and delicious, as takeout.

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Dal

• 3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tsp. mustard seeds
• 1 tsp. grated ginger
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 onion, chopped
• 5 carrots, chopped
• 5 celery stalks, chopped
• 1 tsp. sea salt
• 2 tsp. ground coriander
• 1 tsp. turmeric
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 1 tsp. cayenne pepper
• Âœ tsp. cinnamon
• Âœ tsp. ground cloves
• 1Âœ cups red lentils, rinsed
• 4 cups stock or water
• 1 18-ounce can diced tomatoes
• 1 lime, juiced
• Âœ cup chopped cilantro

Yogurt Raita

• Âœ cup yogurt
• Âœ cup chopped or grated cucumber
• 2 tbsp. chopped mint
• 1 pinch garam masala

Heat the oil on high and add the mustard seeds; fry until they begin to pop, about one minute. Reduce heat to medium and add the ginger, garlic, onion, carrots, and celery. Cook until the veggies begin to soften, about five minutes. Stir in the salt, spices, lentils, stock, and tomatoes. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. Mix the raita. When the lentils are soft, add the lime juice and cilantro. Serve over brown rice or whole wheat naan and top with raita.

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In January 2015, the received a letter from the owner of a 402-acre plot of land near Stevens Pass, roughly 75 miles east of Seattle. The landowner, a family trust, held one of the few remaining privately held patches of the Pacific Crest Trail—a parcel that thousands of Washingtonians use each year to reach alpine wilderness areas and thru-hikers traverse on their way up to the northern terminus at Manning Park. The family trust, the letter said, wanted to sell.

It was good news for the PCTA, a nonprofit that’s been laboring to preserve and protect the 10 percent of the long-distance trail that, surprisingly, still sits in private hands. But the landowner, who remains anonymous, wanted to play hardball. The trust had divvied up the plot, which lies near the popular Stevens Pass ski area, into 16 different parcels, and according to put together by the trust’s real estate adviser, the zoning meant a prospective buyer could build up to 748 dwellings in the pristine Cascade wilderness along the trail. Even more worrying, the letter made clear that the trust was willing to erect a fence across the section of the PCT that crossed its property, bisecting the trail 150 miles short of the border.

“For us, not only was it a big threat they could close the trail,” says Megan Wargo, director of land protection at the PCTA, “but we had done some fieldwork to look at what it would take to reroute the trail. It wasn’t just a simple loop around; it would have taken an extensive reroute to get around some serious topography. It would have had a significant impact on people’s ability to do a thru-hike.” Wargo estimates it would have taken a year to reroute the trail.

The PCT gets severed all the time, usually due to wildfires or the occasional newly discovered ecosystem on the route. But the threat to the Stevens Pass section of the trail underscores the little-known threat from private developers faced by the PCT and other long-distance trails.

While Congress designated the PCT as a national trail back in 1968, Wargo says, the feds, startlingly, still don’t own the whole route, despite years of programs aimed at purchasing and protecting private segments. In most cases, the government has made easement deals with the landowners, which grant hikers the right to tramp through the private lands on a small corridor of trail. But in the case of Stevens Pass and a few other areas, no such agreement had ever been inked. “This was certainly one of the biggest threats to the trail in Washington, in terms of closure,” Wargo says.

Luckily for Wargo and the PCTA, the Forest Service has a funded by the leases on offshore oil wells that is designed to purchase and protect wilderness. The PCTA worked with the landowner and the Forest Service to broker a plan to sell the land to the feds and make the parcel part of the nearby national forest. The purchase price: $1.6 million.

Unluckily for the PCTA, 2017 was a particularly bad year for wildfires, and the money the Forest Service had agreed to spend on the trail was diverted to the expensive business of putting out hundreds of thousands of acres of fire. The landowner didn’t want to wait, Wargo says, and wasn’t willing to agree to an easement deal that would allow hikers to pass through the property. “The landowner told us we couldn’t get an extension,” Wargo recalls. “We had until November 15 to close.”

At the last minute, the PCTA scraped together $400,000 from donors and the nonprofit agreed to a $1.2 million loan. Last week, the PCTA finalized the deal and is now the proud owner of 402 acres of Washington wilderness. The group will hand the tract of land over to the Forest Service once the federal conservation funds become available again—something the service has assured the PCTA will happen. “I’m incredibly grateful for the partnership,” Wargo says.

Still, the victory ensures that just one chunk of the remaining privately held portions of the PCT will be protected. No law bars private property owners from developing land right up against the trail. In Southern California, Wargo says, that’s a real possibility.

In 2014, the Trust for Public Land and the USFS of the San Bernardino National Forest to protect the areas immediately surrounding the trail and to ensure that no development came within view of the trail. Today, Wargo says, several privately held portions of the trail are still tempting developers. “I think California is certainly an area where the PCT is racing against time before properties are developed,” she says.

The PCT is not the only national trail that needs protecting. The Conservation Fund, for its part, has also provided loans to protect trails and adjoining wilderness along the Appalachian Trail, the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin, Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail in the Southeast, the North Country Scenic Trail in the Northeast, and more.

“Something I’ve learned in this work: All of the places that I love and visit and recreate on, people worked hard to protect those. Someone had to protect them. People before us had to preserve that land. And folks like the PCTA and us still are,” says Caitlin Guthrie of the Conservation Fund.

Whether negotiating with landowners who threaten to shut down the trail will convince other private owners to take up the same bare-knuckle tactics is a moot point for Wargo and the PCTA. They aim to work with any landowner willing to sell their property. That’s why the group has chosen to keep the family trust in the Stevens Pass deal anonymous—to avoid poisoning the well for any future deals. The PCTA, Wargo says, is willing to play the long game. “This trail is here for now and future generations,” she says.

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