Years ago, I had a roommate who worked out every day and would also consume Dionysian amounts of Entenmann’s cake. My kind of guy. We got along, in part, because of a shared conviction that the pursuit of physical fitness didn’t preclude putting away vast quantities of processed sugar. Not to brag, but in my prime I could eat an entire family size package of Chips Ahoy as a post-run snack. The glories of youth.

But you get older and, you’d like to think, wiser. When I recently saw my former roommate, he mentioned that he’d started taking the popular daily supplement powder AG1 as a form of nutritional insurance. He is not alone; the brand was valued at $1.2 billion in 2022 and has been dubbed a “unicorn” in an overcrowded supplement market.

Part of this success can be attributed to seductive messaging: the AG1 website tells us that it is a “science-driven supplement that supports physical health and mental performance” and is “designed to replace multiple supplements by providing a comprehensive blend of nutrients in one tasty scoop each day.” That tasty scoop consists of 12 grams of greens powder, which are meant to be mixed with 8 ounces of water and consumed on a daily basis. Its purported benefits include increased energy, immunity defense, and improved gut health.

An optimized nutritional boost in an easily administered dose. Needless to say, we’ve heard similar promises before. But such miracle elixirs make us ever-keen to ask the question: Could it be true this time?

What Is AG1?

Formerly known as “Athletic Greens,” AG1 is one of the more prominent examples of the recent powdered greens craze.ÌęThe brand was founded in 2010 by Chris Ashenden, an entrepreneur, athlete, and fitness enthusiast from New Zealand.

Earlier this year, AG1 announced that Kat Cole, a former COO and president at the franchise restaurant group Focus Brands (now named GoTo Foods), would be succeeding Ashenden as the company’s CEO, though Ashenden will remain on the board of directors.

According to the AG1 website, the supplement is for anyone “who wants to ensure their nutritional needs are met on a daily basis” in an “obsessively curated product” that contains multivitamins and multiminerals, pre- and probiotics, antioxidants, and buzzy “superfoods” whose supposed health benefits are touted by the brand. Other ingredients include: rose hip fruit powder (“a source of phytonutrients that are foundational for the body”), dandelion root (“known to help soothe the stomach and support digestive enzyme secretion”), and slippery elm bark powder (“known to soothe the gut lining”).

Obsessive curation doesn’t come cheap; a monthly supply of AG1 will set you back $79. By comparison, a month’s worth of Greens and Superfoods from Bloom Nutrition costs about $35. But AG1 has a unique set of ingredients and a carefully crafted image of exclusivity, positioning itself as the Cadillac of the supplement world.

It’s certainly true that no other greens powder company has AG1’s celebrity firepower. The brand has been endorsed by athletes like Olympic runner Allyson Felix and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, as well as an endless roster of wellness and fitness influencers. Hamilton has invested in the company, as have Hugh Jackman and Cindy Crawford. Alex Honnold, who also holds a minority stake, is another AG1 fan. In an email, the Free Solo star told me that while it was hard to put his finger on what exactly he loved about the product, he nonetheless regarded it as “part of a healthy morning routine.”

“It helps me feel generally well—sick less often, fewer stomach issues, etc.,” Honnold said.

Like many brands, AG1 has an affiliate , partnership opportunities for content creators, as well as the tried-and-true discount for subscribers who get their friends to sign up. According to its website, the company pays out a 15-percent commission on subscription sales by referral.

The company has also been smart about partnering with some of the biggest names on the self-optimization podcast scene, including Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Rich Roll, and Andrew Huberman. Although the Huberman Lab didn’t respond to a request for comment on the nature of its partnership with AG1, the podcast’s sponsorship page notes that they “only work with brands whose products we personally use and love.”

Do We Need Multivitamins and Greens Powders in the First Place?

On AG1’s website, under a subheading that asks “What products does AG1 replace?” I found the following: “One daily serving of AG1 eliminates the need for other supplements such as a multivitamin, probiotics, greens, and superfood powders, vitamin B complex, and vitamin C tablets.” The product, we learn, “supports brain, gut, and immune health.” A single-arm study (which means a study with no control group) with 35 participants funded by AG1 found that most users felt “more calm” and that their “digestion improved” after three months of using the product.

Of course, increased calmness and improved digestion are rather vague and subjective metrics by which to proclaim efficacy. Purveyors of dietary supplements have to be careful about any purported health claims, lest they end up being classified as a drug—at which point they would need to be vetted by the FDA. (On the AG1 website, there’s an asterisk attached to pretty much all of the alleged benefits of its ingredients to inform us that “these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration” and that “this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”)

Case in point: in 2023 the marketing and manufacturing companies behind dietary supplement Balance of Nature had to temporarily pause operations following an warning that the company was not in compliance with federal regulations because its health claims technically made it a “new drug” that required FDA approval. In a separate case earlier that year, Balance of Nature had to pay a $1.1 million settlement as part of a in California that took the brand to task for alleging it could help treat or prevent serious diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

As șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű has covered in the past, many prominent voices in the medical community don’t think daily multivitamins are necessary. David Seres, a professor of medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center, has long beat the drum for us to take a more skeptical stance toward multivitamins and the broader supplement market. Seres told me that AG1 was another example of what was essentially a “freeze-dried salad of exotic fruits and vegetables.”

Seres was adamant that, unless one has a known deficiency of a particular vitamin or mineral, multivitamins have no proven benefit. He also advised against taking daily multivitamins as a preemptive measure. “To my knowledge, there is no high quality evidence of any health benefit from multivitamin supplementation in the general population,” Seres told me. “And there is evidence that there is potential for harm.”

Seres referred me to a in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which pooled 84 separate studies to conclude that vitamin and mineral supplementation was associated with “little to no benefit” in preventing cancer and cardiovascular disease. (AG1 was not a part of this analysis.) As for the what’s-the-harm-in-taking-a-supplement-anyway approach, Seres of men in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico that appeared to link an increased risk of prostate cancer with vitamin E supplementation.

When I ran this summation by a spokesperson at AG1, she provided the following statement: “Each of the ingredients in AG1 is backed by peer-reviewed literature. Our team of scientists and researchers have reviewed thousands of studies as part of the formulation and continuous improvement process for AG1.”

It should be noted that the academic community is not unanimously against multivitamin use. A by university scientists, for instance, found that multivitamins might help counteract cognitive decline in older adults.

Nor is everyone as dismissive of greens powders as Seres. Emily Prpa, a registered nutritionist in the UK, told me that for some groups—like first-year college kids with “very beige” diets of processed foods—the multivitamin-as-insurance approach probably does make some sense. As for the possibility of doing harm through a potential vitamin overdose, Prpa told me that, generally, the body was very good at handling excess nutrients.

However, Prpa stressed that her approach was “food first” and that people can “meet their vitamin and nutrient needs through a well-balanced diet.” She suggested that the “natural” way of getting one’s nutrients was preferable anyway, since certain fat-soluble vitamins (like vitamin A) are more effectively absorbed with food.

Prpa also explained that large doses of one mineral might get in the way of your body absorbing other micronutrients ingested at the same time—a concept known as competitive absorption. “With some of these proprietary blends where they are just mixing a lot of things together, that’s possibly a red flag,” Prpa said. “Are you actually getting all of those vitamins and minerals that they say you’re gonna get from one scoop? It’s unlikely.”

The Research Behind AG1

A company spokesperson for AG1 sent me the following statement: “We have worked with third-party experts to conduct studies and research to further validate the benefits of AG1 as a whole, beyond the research and studies for ingredients. These are published on and peer-reviewed scientific journals, and show significant evidence of the efficacy of AG1.”

There’s a on the company’s website labeled “Research,” which lists peer-reviewed studies, albeit ones that are funded by AG1 and largely co-authored by AG1 employees. According to the AG1 spokesperson: “As is standard for the industry, the studies on AG1 are funded by the company and conducted by independent third-party experts and labs. These studies are in addition to a wide body of third-party literature to support efficacy and safety of the ingredients in AG1.”

It’s worth noting that most of these studiesÌęinvestigated the product’s potential beneficial impact on the gastrointestinal tract using a simulator that “mimics the physiological and biological conditions found in the human gut” and were not conducted on actual humans. There’s nothing wrong with that—in vitro studies are safer and less invasive—but as the authors of the studies themselves , further investigations are needed to verify the product’s actual health benefits for humans in a clinical setting. The verdict, in other words, is still out.

The company’s website also mentions a clinical trial on human subjects that involved a double-blind trial with 30 participants in which healthy adults were given either AG1 or a placebo for one month. ( was just published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition in October.) Subsequent stool samples purportedly revealed that AG1 enriched the microbiome by “more than doubling the levels of healthy bacteria known to bolster digestion.”

The healthy bacteria in question appear to be Lactobacillus acidophilus UALa-01 and Bifidobacterium bifidum UABb-10, which are both listed on AG1’s ingredients list. However, while L. acidophilus and B. bifidum are some of the better known species of probiotics, there isn’t much proof that the specific AG1 strains have any health benefits.

The only study that comes up when you look up Lactobacillus acidophilus UALa-01 in the National Library of Medicine’s database, PubMed.com, is a on the effects of the probiotic on bone mineral density and calcium levels in postmenopausal women. The conclusion of the study notes that: “The consumption of L. acidophilus probiotics daily for 12 weeks among postmenopausal women does not affect the profile of BMD, but it may help in stabilizing bone turnover . . . However, it is worth noting that three months of probiotic supplementation could potentially disrupt calcium and glucose status in postmenopausal women.”

When I asked AG1 why they chose these specific strains of bacteria despite a relative lack of published research on them, a company spokesperson replied: “The probiotics in AG1, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum, are well researched and chosen for their safety profile across a variety of populations.”

Professor Gregor Reid, a distinguished professor emeritus at Canada’s Western University and author of the 2023 book , told me that “people are getting sort of carried away with the idea that everything that is Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium is a probiotic and that’s not the case.”

“For the consumer, it’s a shame because they seem to think that all probiotics are the same and therefore, if you’re taking a probiotic, it must be good,” he said. “But unless there’s clinical data to support it then you really don’t know what it’s doing.”

Reid is on the scientific board of the probiotic supplement company Seed, and might be incentivized to be critical of a rival brand’s product. However, Reid was adamant that he is not claiming that AG1 is a bad product, but that the onus is on a probiotics company to prove the nutritional value of its specific strains. As he puts it, “The question is where’s the clinical data showing these two strains have a probiotic effect and what is the effect?”

As a practical resource for people who want to do their own research, Reid recommends a —a fairly expansive directory of products that lists probiotic strains and applications, as well as relevant studies, which is put together by the Alliance for Education on Probiotics. Lest he be accused of bias, Reid pointed out that neither AG1 nor Seed are listed on the site.

So What’s the Takeaway?

Should you take AG1? The tacit promise of a product where every ingredient is “backed by peer-reviewed literature” is that a proprietary blend of those ingredients will confer an optimized synthesis of every alleged benefit and minimal side effects. At present, there have been no independent studies that verify that AG1 does this.

But it’s also not hard to find people who, like Honnold, believe that their daily greens powder fix does have some positive effect. Whether that perceived improvement is a consequence of AG1’s formula, or because investing $79 per month in a trendy wellness product makes you more likely to take ownership of your health in other ways, remains up for debate. But to paraphrase the , why not just eat a few more damn vegetables?

Indeed, usually when articles come out questioning the claims of some new superfood-laden wunderproduct, they will conclude with a reminder that there isn’t a way to outhack the conventional healthy diet. (AG1 does not claim that its product eliminates the need for healthy eating.) It’s always so disappointing. Because who doesn’t want to live in a world where the adverse effects of last night’s boozy bacchanalia can be neutralized with an ashwagandha root smoothie?

Our collective desire for the nutritional panacea comes at a moment when distrust toward experts might be at an all-time high. According to Seres, part of the reason why so many people prefer to listen to influencer health gurus rather than scientists is that the latter group often hasn’t done a good job in communicating dietary advice to the general public. (AG1’s website notes that the company has an “in-house team of doctors, scientists, and researchers.”) The result is a certain amount of cynicism; Seres said the first question he hears when new guidelines are announced is, “OK, are eggs in or out this time?”

“People follow the recommendations of scientists and nutritional guidelines for the three most important reasons possible: they want to live longer; they want to live healthier; and they want to be happier,” Seres said. “When we change our minds as scientists—which we don’t do frivolously but based on new evidence—we need to do a better job of explaining why, so that people are actually willing to listen to us.”

If Seres has any words of comfort for those who may be dismayed that we can’t cancel out our food vices with a greens powder supplement, it’s that we should regard perfect nutrition as a utopia, rather than something we need to beat ourselves up for not achieving.

As he puts it: “Shooting for the ideal diet is the goal; achieving it is not.”

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In 2018, I was on one of the press vehicles for the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, the 106-mile race around the Mont Blanc massif that is widely regarded as the most prestigious event on the ultra circuit. At around 3 a.m., on September 1, a local guide led some members of the media on a hike up the Grand Col Ferret section of the course–a vaunted mountain pass between Italy and Switzerland. With its views of the PrĂ©-de-Bar glacier and sublime panoramas of granite and sky, the Col Ferret is a highlight for the legions of hikers who travel to the massif every year.

Unfortunately, most of this mountain splendor was lost on me as I was focused on trying to keep up with our guide. We needed to get over the pass before the race leaders came through so that the photographers could get their shots. This meant pushing the pace. Never mind basking in the moonlit glories of a late-summer night in the Alps; I was just trying not to puke.

That is the UTMB in a nutshell: the tantalizing proximity of beauty and pain. According to Strava, the ascent portion of the Col Ferret features 2,540 feet of elevation gain over 2.69 miles, with an average grade of 17.5 percent. It definitely felt that way. I was in decent shape at the time, but this mere amuse-bouche of the UTMB suffer-fest was enough to almost bring me to my knees. At one point, I remember looking back and seeing the bobbing headlamps of the race leaders in the distance and thinking: What kind of person would try to race the whole damn thing?

Many people, it turns out. Last year’s UTMB had 1,758 finishers (and 931 DNFs), but the annual number of applicants always exceeds the number of available spots. Getting to the UTMB start line is an endurance event unto itself; most bibs are allotted via a lottery system where your odds correlate to how many UTMB-branded events you’ve completed in the past two years. ( is thrilled with the company’s increasingly hegemonic presence on the international trail running scene.) Even in an era where ultras abound, the UTMB experience still holds a particular allure, partly because the race has a reputation for being very hard.

Competitive Entry

Doug Mayer, a Chamonix, France, resident who has run two UTMBs and recently published a ,Ìętold me that the daunting entry process can make participating feel like a special privilege and an opportunity one dares not waste. “It’s everybody’s ‘A’ race, and there’s so much drama that there ends up being a lot of self-imposed pressure,” Mayer says. “Everyone who is at that start has worked for several years to get there.”

I heard something similar from Stephanie Case, a human rights lawyer for the United Nations who has contested ultras all over the world, including the UTMB. “Runners might only get one shot at the course, and it can be hard for them not to let it mess with their heads,” Case told me.

As Mayer puts it: “It’s easy to make stupid mistakes when you’re caught up in the drama of the event.”

Massive Climbs and Unique Terrain

Mayer notes that the UTMB course includes roughly “nine or ten really big climbs” and that runners “really need to play their cards right.” This is, of course, true for any race, but the stakes are exponentially higher when the race in question includes roughly 33,000 feet of elevation gain and, for the average UTMB finisher, around 40 hours on the course.

The pros have learned that lesson the hard way, too. When I watched the leaders come through that year on the Col Ferret, the American runner Zach Miller had what looked like an insurmountable cushion on the rest of the field, along with Frenchman Xavier Thévenard. Seeing Miller rip down the mountain into Switzerland, I wondered if he might become the first American man to win the race. However, by the time Miller got to the relatively serene terrain of Champex-Lac, only 15 miles later, his race was done.

In an email, the elite American runner Stephanie Howe, who won the 2014 edition of Western States, told me that many American stars had historically struggled at the UTMB because they were unaccustomed to such steep terrain and tended to go out too fast and blow up. “Even those that come over four to five weeks ahead of time, that’s not enough time to really slow down and get proficient at hiking. I think it takes years to hone this skill,” Howe told me.

She noted that Jim Walmsley, long the undisputed king of Western States, had to live in the French Alps for almost two years before he finally won the race last year in his fifth attempt.

Needless to say, the vast majority of amateur runners can’t move to France for a year of course recon. Nobuyori Takeda is an ultrarunner from New Jersey who has raced the UMTB and several North American ultras, from big-ticket events like Western States to small field races like the Wyoming Range 100-Mile Endurance Run. (Takeda is also a friend of mine and former training partner.) He agreed that the UTMB can be especially challenging for flatlanders and that being familiar with such a technical course definitely provides a mental edge. As Takeda points out, the only flat-ish section of the race comes during the first five miles. After that, you are either climbing or descending–for one hundred miles. Hence, as he puts it, the UTMB is “not for the rhythm runner and more for the grinder who is able to navigate the terrain and the gradient.”

Jet Lag

Takeda also echoed the point that Americans (or, more generally, runners who don’t hail from Central Europe) might have an especially tough time. For one thing, the effects of jet lag are exacerbated when you’re potentially going to be racing through not one but two nights. (The UTMB starts at 6 p.m. local time.)

Unfamiliar Aid Station Food

What’s more, unlike many 100-milers in the U.S., the UTMB does not allow pacers on the course. And the on-course fueling options reflect a local palate heavy on charcuterie. “The unfamiliarity with European aid station foods like cold cuts and cheese doesn’t help individuals coming from places like America or Asia,” Takeda told me.

Amelia Watts, a physical therapist from the UK who ran the UTMB in 2015 and 2018, says she avoided the official race fueling stations altogether and relied exclusively on her pre-made meals; in her case, pureed Bolognese and rice. Her support person would drive ahead and give her food at designated checkpoints.

This speaks to a logistical challenge that might be more prevalent at the UTMB than at comparatively small-scale events. “The UTMB is a big race, so I think if you’re in the main pack, sometimes your support group can get stuck in some pretty bad traffic,” says Watts. “I know people whose support team just hasn’t gotten there on time.”

Variable Weather

Then, there is the extremely variable mountain weather. Watts told me that the first time she ran the race, it was so “phenomenally hot” that there were medics at the top of many of the big climbs to treat runners for heat exhaustion. The second time she ran, athletes were required to pack cold-weather gear. Indeed, that year, thanks to strong winds and rain, the conditions had forced some runners to DNF because of hypothermia.

A Unique Start Time

UTMB’s evening start time is another key factor that sets the race apart from some of the better-known ultras in the U.S. Western States, Leadville, and Hardrock, for instance, all begin in the early morning. For Watts, running through the night knowing that she still had (at least) one more full day to run through constituted a unique psychological challenge.

As she told me, “I have a really distinct memory from my first year of going up this one particular hill quite early on and literally saying to myself: I just need to get to the halfway point of the race, and then I’m going to stop. Because this is horrible. It’s dark. I can’t see where I’m going, and this hill feels like it’s going on forever.’”

She ended up finishing in 33 hours, 28 minutes, and 42 seconds.

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Back in 2016, I wrote a column with the rather glib headline: “Yes, Professional Runners Are Weak.” In my defense, I was merely paraphrasing the recently retired marathoner Ryan Hall. After hanging up his running shoes, the American record holder in the half marathon had hit the weight room hard and transformed himself from a scrawny endurance athlete into a muscle-bound beefcake. “I’ve been small and weak all my life,” Hall said in an interview with Runner’s World. “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be big and strong.”

For Hall, getting jacked was also a boon for his overall vitality. As he told CNN in 2021, his energy levels are “ten times better” now that he spends “60 to 90 minutes a day” lifting weights, as opposed to when he was grinding out 130-mile weeks. Who can’t relate?

Ryan Hall may be a physical outlier, but his example speaks to one of the more enduring debates in popular fitness culture:ÌęIsÌęone better off prioritizing cardio or strength training? (With apologies to gym bro taxonomists, in this article “strength training” will be used interchangeably with “resistance training.” While strength training is usually more specifically about gaining muscle mass, both forms of exercise involve working the muscles with some kind of counterforce, e.g. dumbbells or one’s own bodyweight.)

Although the pendulum is always swinging back and forth, the resistance-training over cardio movement seems to be gaining momentum, at least among certain fitness influencers. The popular “” newsletter, from the runner-turned-weightlifting-evangelist Casey JohnstonÌędescribes itself as “counter-programming for the alleged ‘thin is in’ era.”

Meanwhile, that explicitly promote weight loss and body fat reduction are pushing back against a perceived overemphasis on aerobic exercise. “What if I told you that by doing less cardio, you could actually lose more fat?” asks the online fitness coach and trainer Katie Neeson, who runs the TikTok account . “The number one reason that doing less cardio is going to be great is because you can spend more time getting your ass in the weight section.”

A common refrain among those advocating for more of us to get our collective asses into the weight section is that resistance training will “improve body composition,” a euphemism for “make you look hotter.” It’s a reminder that often the cardio vs. weights debate is as much about aesthetics as anything else. Indeed, if you have specific fitness goals, whether it’s to acquire a certain physique orÌęrun your fastest marathon, it should be pretty clear which form of exercise you need to prioritize.

But what about when we consider the question from a general health standpoint?

Which Is Healthier: Cardio or Strength Training?

Professor Duck-Chul Lee is the director of the Physical Activity and Weight Management Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of many papers on exercise and long-term health. Earlier this year, he co-authoredÌęa study comparing how different kinds of exercise help mitigate risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The study, published in the ,Ìęlooked at 406 adults (53 percent women) between the ages of 35 and 70, all of whom were either overweight or had high blood pressure. Participants were divided into groups doing one of the following three times a week over the course of one year: one hour of resistance training; one hour of aerobic training; 30 minutes of resistance training and 30 minutes of aerobic training; or no training at all. After one year, only the groups who had done aerobic-only or aerobic and resistance training showed an improvement in their composite CVD risk-profile, compared to the no-exercise group.

However, while the CVD-related benefits for those who focused exclusively on aerobic exercise and those who couple it with strength training were almost identical, the latter group also showed additional improvement in metrics like lean body mass. “The message that I wanted to deliver from that study was that if people switch half of their cardio with resistance training, they get the same magnitude of benefits to reduce CVD risk factors, but they get extra benefits like increased strength and muscle mass,” Lee says.

This isn’t the first time that Lee has published a study implying that many of the benefits of running can be gleaned from relatively small doses. A in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) that looked at the relationship between running and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in over 55,000 adults found that running as little as five to ten minutes a day at slow speeds showed similar benefits to running over three hours per week.

“Runners were not happy about those findings,” Lee told me, noting that he received a fair amount of hate mail from hardcore endurance athletes who felt that their fanaticism was being put on trial. But according to Lee, the contentious question of whether it’s possible to is still undecided.

What about overzealous weightlifters? A from the Japanese sports science professor Haruki Momma found that resistance training did, in fact, reduceÌęone’s risk of all-cause mortality, but that the maximum benefits appeared to top out at 30 to 60 minutes per week. The study cautioned that more research is needed to determine the potential benefits (or downsides) of high volume muscle-strengthening exercise. To that end, Lee told me that he had just received a grant to conduct a year-long study to compare the effects of a weekly weightlifting regimen of varying degrees of intensity–from zero to 120 minutes per week.

The Difference in Benefits for Men vs. Women

Unsurprisingly, more research is also needed when it comes to assessing the relative benefits of exercise forÌęmen and women. That was the upshot of another JACC published this year, titled “Sex Differences in Association of Physical Activity With All-Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality.” The authors of the study examined the relationship between the exercise habits of 412,413 Americans (55 percent women) and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality from 1997 through 2019. Looking at the data for nearly 40,000 deaths in this time period, the authors of the study found that men got the greatest mortality benefit (18 percent risk reduction in all-cause mortality) from 300 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Notably, women got a similar benefit from only 140 minutes per week of MVPA.

Sex difference was significant when it came to the specific benefits of muscle-strengthening exercises, too. Among those who regularly engaged in muscle-strengthening activities, men showed a cardiovascular risk reduction of 11 percent, while among women, the risk reduction was a whopping 30 percent.

There are certainly caveats with this study (as with most large-scale fitness studies, all exercise behaviors were self-reported), but the central point that sex differences should probably be given more consideration when making general exercise recommendations seems hard to argue with. As Susan Cheng, a professor of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and one of the lead authors of the study, told me, “A certain person, with a certain physique, might get a lot more out of 75 minutes of exercise, thanÌęsomebody with a completely different physique and body stature, who might need 350 minutes to get the same benefits.”

Another co-author ofÌęthe study, Professor Martha Gulati, who among other things is the president of the , told me that “anytime I see identicalÌęrecommendations for men and women, my usual question is: ‘Where did that come from?’ Because chances are the data is not strong.”

The Bottom Line: How Much Cardio and Strength Training You Need

Nonetheless, while more studies need to be conducted to fine-tune sex-specific recommendations, the current evidence suggests that most people, regardless of gender, would still be well-served to target the of 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic activity, combined with at least two days a week of moderate-to-high intensity muscle-strengthening activity.

If that sounds a little ambitious, everyone I spoke to was adamant that the difference between doing a small amount of exercise–as little as five to ten minutes a day–and doing nothing was far more significant than discrepancies in health gains between those on the other end of the spectrum.

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“The easiest way to turn your kids into geniuses by the time they’re seven is to front load huge amounts of experience, including dangerous experience.” This is the advice of, the writer and educator who is perhaps best known for his compulsory schooling. For Gatto, one of the ominous signs ofÌę “well-schooled kids” is that they are easily bored, afraid of being alone with their own thoughts, and in constant need of affirmation from authority. To avoid this outcome, Gatto recommends that parents “challenge their kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.” The bit about turning kids into geniuses is less about molding our progeny into mini Mozarts than it is about nurturing a desire for adventure that is inherent in all children. Gatto, again: “After a long life, and 30 years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” He is fond of an anecdote from Richard Branson: the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group claims that when he was four years old, his mother once kicked him out of the car miles from home and told him to find his own way back.

I’m going to assume that many parents would be a little hesitant to repeat this experiment. Those who want to nudge their children towards being more independent—but want to avoid awkward conversations with the cops about why their four-year-old was rambling around solo on the interstate—might be drawn to the “” initiative. Founded by Ginny Yurich, a Michigan-based writer and homeschooling mother of five, the project, which quotes Gatto , is based on the uncontroversial premise that today’s youth spends too much time staring at screens and would benefit from more unstructured outdoor play. After witnessing the miraculous effects of the latter on her own children, Yurich started a blog in 2013 to chronicle her family’s al fresco exploits. The concept eventually evolved into a movement, which challenged families to spend 1,000 hours outside each year—an average of 2.7 hours per day. Yurich has since developed it into a business. There’s an selling branded backpacks, water bottles, and T-shirts. Yurich has and the account has nearly 700,000 followers. You can buy an app for $3.99 to track the time you spend frolicking in the great outdoors, away from the influence of your phone.

I’ll admit that my first reaction to the idea of thousands of people fastidiously logging every moment they spend outside was that the incentive felt kind of silly, if not contradictory. Is it a sign of civilizational progress that we’ve gamified the idea of going for a walk, or having a picnic in the park? But as a parent of two young children in New York City, I also spend a fair amount of time fretting about my kids’ limited exposure to nature and engaging in absurd negotiations to get them out the door. Isn’t that exactly what’s going on here, only scaled up for the general public?

Of course, exposure to nature and time spent outside are not necessarily the same thing. A quick perusal of the 1,000 Hours șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű website implies that the ideal we should be striving for involves forests, lakes, and other such scenes of pastoral bliss—not so much the asphalted glories of the big-city playground. But when I reached out to Yurich and suggested that her movement seemed geared towards families with easy access to nature, she pushed back and insisted that the concept was “location agnostic.” She noted that, while there are always pros and cons to any location when it comes to getting outside, big cities often have the benefit of “walkability.” What’s more, the relative close proximity of friends could be a strong motivator for getting kids out of the house. As for the recreational opportunities in urban spaces, Yurich says that: “The asphalt urban playground is an absolute blast. It includes freedom, fun, challenge, friends, full-spectrum light, breeze, thrill, insects, chirping birds, and so much more.”

There’s certainly room for the unexpected: when my son was three he accidentally pricked his finger on a discarded syringe while playing hide-and-seek in our local park, which resulted in me having a long conversation with a New York University infectious disease specialist about the odds of him having contracted some horrible virus. This was also an experience with a hint of danger, though perhaps not the kind of experience that Yurich and Gatto would have had in mind.

I romanticize my own childhood, which was spent communing with forest spirits in the ±«°ù·ÉĂ€±ô»ć±đ°ù of central Germany and included endless hours of unstructured recreation, back when that was just the default way that people dealt with their kids, rather than a marketable parenting philosophy. For better or worse, I was very comfortable being alone with my own thoughts. It helped that I was an only child with a large backyard and low threshold for self-amusement; I spent hours lobbing crab apples into the air and trying to skewer them with homemade spears—a clear sign of well-adjusted prepubescence.

Since that is my basis for comparison, I can’t help but worry that my city-bound kids (aged one and six) will grow up somehow spiritually bereft, destined to turn into neurotic adults because they didn’t spend quite as much time in their formative years getting stung by bees, or whittling rudimentary ordnance out of sticks. These concerns are compounded by my inevitable awareness of those Edenic towns in other parts of the country where access to the outdoors constitutes a significant part of that intangible thing we call quality of life. (Call it an occupational hazard of working in outdoor media.) I spend more time than I’d like to admit envying what I assume is a vast population of supremely even-tempered children in, say, Telluride, or some hamlet in the Adirondacks that hasn’t yet been ruined by yuppies like me, where robust preschoolers are surely splitting firewood by hand.

All of which is to say that I understand the parental anxieties that have fed the popularity of the 1,000 Hours șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű movement. This enthusiasm, I suspect, comes as much from a generational paranoia about the increasing ubiquity of screens as from a belief in the wholesome effects of nature play. My fellow cohort of young-ish parents and I are the last generation that experienced childhood in the prelapsarian era before smartphones and the internet corrupted everything. (I find myself constantly toggling between thinking that this kind of panic mentality is exaggerated, and thinking that, no, actually, there is something genuinely sinister about the way that my one-year-old daughter covets my phone.)

Thankfully, there’s an easy cure for overindulging in the back-in-my-day mindset: I find it helps to remember that my own father grew up on a farm in post-war Austria. In his own telling, he spent his entire summers outside, sleeping in an alpine cabin and wearing the same disgusting pair of lederhosen every single day while he fished for trout in mountain streams. (Talk about romanticizing your youth.) Compared to him, my own boyhood was impossibly sheltered. And I still like to think that I turned out only moderately deranged.

It’s a useful reminder that we should resist the notion that there’s some kind of hierarchy of outdoor experience, at least when it comes to our kids. But I agree with the general ethos that we should embrace whatever version of nature might be available to us. As Teddy Roosevelt, another famously self-mythologizing outdoorsmanÌęallegedly once said: Comparison is the thief of joy.

Over the past several years, my son and I have developed a ritual where we go to Coney Island at least once in early summer. We’ll thrash around in the wild Atlantic before being beckoned by the lights of the boardwalk, the humid energy of a June carnival at dusk. It’s hard to think of any outdoor play venue where your thrills are more predetermined, more structured, than the amusement park, but I’d like to think that that counts, too. Not that I’m keeping score.

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Six years ago, Kevin Love, at the time a power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers, published a now-famous titled “Everyone Is Going Through Something.” The piece describes an in-game panic attack that had blindsided Love earlier in the season, and his subsequent struggles to talk about what had happened. Love writes that he eventually started seeing a therapist, but that it hadn’t been easy to take this step. Since childhood, he’d subscribed to a notion that equated emotional vulnerability with weakness—an attitude which, Love argues, is pervasive in the cutthroat world of pro sports.

When it was published, Love’s essay was celebrated as an encouraging sign of the times; if even super macho pro ball players were opening up about their psychological struggles, it must signify a broader trend of acceptance. (Love has said that his essay was partially inspired by DeMar DeRozan, another NBA star, who had made about dealing with depression the week before.) And, indeed, conversations around athlete mental health seem to have proliferated in recent years, with some of the biggest names in sports—Michael Phelps, Dak Prescott, Simone Biles, and Naomi Osaka, to name just a prominent few—publicly addressing the psychological toll of their profession.

This is undoubtedly a positive development. That said, one of the potential pitfalls of the sudden ubiquity of mental health discourse is a tendency to indiscriminately apply it to all forms of seemingly aberrant behavior. It may be true that “everyone is going through something,” just as it’s true that all of one’s actions are ultimately related to one’s mental health, but such totalizing language isn’t much help when it comes to the question of individual accountability. Late last year, there was a fevered, if esoteric, surrounding the suspension and league-mandated counseling for Draymond Green, after the Golden State Warriors forwardÌę had multiple violent outbursts on the court. The question, in a nutshell, was whether Green was really experiencing a mental health crisis, or whether he was just being an asshole.

To help get some perspective on this issue, I recently spoke with author and journalist , whose new book comes out this week. Kliegman, who has written extensively on athlete mental health for outlets like The Ringer and Sports Illustrated, chronicles some of the early history of the discipline, before examining more contemporary examples in both collegiate and professional sports. Although she spends a good deal of time with some of the high-profile cases mentioned above, one of the virtues of Mind Game is that we also get to hear about less well-known instances: The UFC champion who has a positive experience with psychedelics after traditional psychiatric medicine only exacerbates his depression. The National Women’s Hockey League retiree who faces an identity crisis after stepping away from the sport. The Major League pitcher whose debilitating bouts of anxiety eventually force him into early retirement.

OUTSIDE: At one point early on, you write that there’s no evidence to suggest that elite athletes experience mental illness at a rate higher than the general population. What was the impetus behind writing a book that focuses specifically on athlete mental health? Why is it useful to consider this as its own category?
KLIEGMAN: There’s certainly space for plenty of books to delve into different aspects of mental health. There will be many more, I hope. In terms of focusing on athletes, I thought it was relevant because athletes face all these incredible pressures, both some that we as a general public do as well and then some that we as a general public do not. Athletes are in a bit of a unique situation in that we pay so much attention to them. So I think it’s worth examining how we think about them, how we treat them, and how they treat themselves. And there’s a whole lot of stuff they face that we don’t necessarily automatically understand.

There are professional sports that seem like they would be very conducive to anxiety. You are performing in front of thousands of people, sometimes with millions of dollars on the line, and an entire industry of critics who will scrutinize everything that you do. Do you think it’s fair to suggest that being a pro athlete—at least in certain sports—puts someone at increased risk for mental health issues?
I think if you have a problem with mental illness it will certainly risk exacerbating it given that you have to perform on a certain stage. I don’t know that it will create an issue out of nowhere and I don’t think experts know that either, but it will certainly toy with the worst parts of you, or the parts of you that you’d like to quiet, if you’re not directly addressing it.

Mental health discourse has proliferated in recent years. There are many ways in which this is obviously a good thing, but a downside is that the term becomes so ubiquitous that its meaning gets diluted. In your book, you make a distinction between athletes who are concerned with the mental side of their sport from a performance perspective and those who are concerned with their mental health more generally. Can you elaborate on that distinction?
I think when we are talking about mental performance, a lot of the time what we are talking about, for instance, is the player whose throws to first base are just kind of off and he doesn’t know why. I think there’s a big difference between something like that and something like “I’m too depressed to go to the ballpark today.” Although one person could certainly have both of those issues. They can be related. But not everyone who sees a sport psychologist for performance reasons has a diagnosed mental illness. They could just be seeking to improve their performance. And, on the flipside, not everyone who has a mental illness necessarily has issues with their performance. It’s probably likely that they will at some point, but a lot of times athletes describe sports as their “zone.” So it is possible to not be having a great time in your personal life, but to still be able to switch it on and off at work. Just like the rest of us can at times.

Do you think that ability to be very functional, in public, is part of the reason why we can overlook mental illness in athletes? It reminds me a little bit of the Britney Spears saga. She’s not a professional athlete, but someone who was performing at a very high level for many years while dealing with a lot on the inside.
I think it’s definitely true. Not to focus too much on Britney, but I was reading her memoir and she talks about going out every day and going into an almost robotic state for her show in Vegas every night and doing it the same exact way every time and executing at that high level. And I do think there’s a similarity between that and what athletes do, where we look at them and are like, “Oh, but you won the game last night.” Or: “But you’re making so much money.” We don’t know what is going on beneath the surface, so it can be easy for us to overlook what’s really happening.

I think one of the virtues of your book is that you cite examples of athletes who have been outspoken mental health advocates while at the same time being flawed individuals. It’s helpful, I think, to remember that mental health ambassadors aren’t always these paragons of virtue. On that note, at one point in your book you write that “mental illness is no excuse for bad behavior.” So what are some ways that we can distinguish between an actual mental health episode, and when someone is just being a jerk? For instance, there that the NBA’s mental health framing around Draymond Green’s recent suspension was a little disingenuous.
I think that can be a very difficult thing to parse for a lot of people. Especially, as you said, as discourse around mental health becomes more prominent. It also becomes cheerleader-y in a way where everyone who is going through something needs to be put on this pedestal. And I don’t see that as particularly productive. So when you look at someone like Draymond—you and I don’t know what he is, or isn’t, going through, but it does feel a little cheap to attribute his situation to mental health without offering more information. One way to distinguish, and to your question, I think it’s important to remember that people who are mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it. So, while there are mentally ill people who are violent, I don’t want that to become a one-to-one association. I think when the NBA, or the Warriors, say stuff like that about Draymond, I do think it risks re enforcing that stereotype.Ìę Ìę

When Simone Biles got the twisties at the 2021 Olympics and withdrew from the team and individual competitions, there was this weirdly bifurcated reaction: On the political right, she was essentially accused of betraying her country and, on the left, she was celebrated as a hero. I found both of these reactions kind of absurd. It’s why one line in your book really struck a chord with me. You write that: “That area in between being exalted as superhuman for being tough and being exalted as superhuman for being vulnerable is going to take a massive cultural mindset shift to pinpoint.” What did you mean by that?
I think this dichotomy between “so-and-so is so brave” and “so-and-so is so tough,” it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Bravery and toughness and vulnerability, all those things can go together. It’s not an either/or scenario. I think, just as it’s bad to demonize athletes with mental illness, it’s almost equally harmful to put them on these pedestals and ascribing moral value to a decision that they just made for their personal health. There are a lot of great advocates for mental health among athletes, and at times they deserve praise for that, but that’s a little bit different than just making a personal decision that you have to make because of your health.

Right, because talking about mental health in this way almost mystifies it in a way that we would never do when an athlete talks about, say, needing knee surgery or something like that. I hate this word, but it’s about “normalizing” mental health talk.
I think that’s exactly right. And “normalize” is probably the best word available to us for that, even if it is kind of annoying. I think normalizing it is the thing that is going to make everyday people comfortable talking about their problems and seeking help.

A large part of your book focuses on the NCAA athlete experience and how the student-athlete’s sporting career can be all-consuming. You touch on this idea of identity foreclosure. To what extent do you think it’s fair to suggest that the quasi professionalization of college sports in this country has created its own mental health crisis?
I don’t know if it’s created a mental health crisis, but I do think the NCAA system has exacerbated it. I say that because you can look at college students who are not athletes and they are very often in crisis as well with their mental health, so we know that college is already a tough place to be and a tough time of your life. It’s incredibly expensive; it’s incredibly demanding; there’s so much expected of you—of your time and your emotions—while you’re still maturing. So adding sports to that equation, it’s no surprise to me that it’s igniting a fire if you are already predisposed to mental illness. There are a lot of positive things happening in college athletics; I would personally consider the transfer portal . And yet, even those positives, as I point out in the book, have stressors directly associated with them.

In terms of what can actually be done to improve mental health outcomes for athletes, we hear a lot about “increasing awareness” and “reducing stigma.” As you note in your book, these terms have become kind of clichĂ©, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t true. In what ways can increased awareness have a tangible positive impact, and what are the limits of awareness, or the dangers of putting too much stock in it?
Well, I think awareness is clearly helpful in that, if you see someone on TV talking about mental illness, someone that you look up to or respect, you are more likely to get help or at least talk to someone. But I certainly think we can’t stop there, because stopping there ignores structural barriers that are in place. You can’t just always say “Get help,” without acknowledging that it’s harder for certain demographics to get help. We need to ask why that might be. And digging into and solving those problems often tie into big issues our country faces, like racism, or sexism, or economic class, or anti-LGBTQ sentiment—things like that keep people from getting help on a very real level. So I would encourage everyone to treat awareness like the good thing that it is, but also I would challenge everyone to not stop there.

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I’ve always been a little leery of mindfulness. Not the general concept, but the broader industry that seems to have spawned innumerable charlatans hawking everything from meditation apps, to glitzy yoga retreats, to self-help literature that mostly reminds you of stuff you already know. It sometimes feels like mindfulness is just about repackaging the obvious. On the other hand, just because something is glaringly self-evident doesn’t mean it’s always easy to remember. As George Orwell : “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

Everyone knows that part of the quote, but the succeeding lines are less frequently cited: “One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. ” Orwell was referring primarily to the political realm, as he believed that people were less likely to engage in self-delusion when it came to their private lives. I’m not sure that that is true. But, either way, the notion of holding yourself accountable by regularly giving your thoughts a tangible reality on the page seems like an eminently sensible idea.

That’s the basic premise behind the method, a minimalist approach to journaling that touts itself as “a mindfulness practice designed as a productivity system.” Founded by digital designer Ryder Carroll in 2013, Bullet Journaling–or “BuJo” as it is known among acolytes—is essentially a glorified version of the to-do list, but with an additional nudge towards introspection. Practitioners—of which there are over one million, worldwide—are encouraged to record daily and monthly logs using a nifty notation system that distinguishes between tasks, events, and notes. The idea is not only to try and stay on top of your various obligations, but to continuously assess their relative urgency and importance. If you keep putting off a particular task, the thinking goes, you should probably ask yourself whether it’s really worth your time. In mindfulness lingo, this is called marrying your “what” with your “why.”

As a chronically distracted person, I have always wondered whether the key to a more productive and fulfilled existence was about finding a way to impose some kind of structure on my life. (Ideally, without becoming a Scientologist or joining the military.) One appealing aspect of BuJo-ing is that it doesn’t cost anything. Although the website sells everything from Bullet Journal courses to stationery to Carroll’s internationally best-selling book, anyone can try the method. All you need is a notebook and a pen.

Or, you can do what I did and purchase the “official” Bullet Journal—a customized model from the German stationery company Leuchtturm—for $30. (șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, in an instance of media-industry largesse, allowed me to expense this.) I also decided to log all my entries using a fancy fountain pen that someone gifted me years ago and had been languishing in my desk. Why not set myself up for success?

Following the instructional videos on the Bullet Journal website, I began by creating a “Future Log”: two notebook pages dedicated to mapping out the next six months of my life. I wrote down everything from the aspirationally optimistic (January: “Ask boss for a raise”) to the mundane, but necessary (March: “Book annual physical”), to pre-scheduled trips (February 17 to 24: “Ski week in Maine”). If any event triggered a specific emotional response in the moment that could be distilled into bite-sized notation, I recorded that, too. (“Hope I’m still too young for a colonoscopy.”) Next, I created a log for the current month.ÌęAlthough Carroll stresses that there is no one right way to setting up your Bullet Journal, the basic format for the monthly log is to dedicate one page to a calendar-style overview, and one page to a bullet-point summary of things you hope to get done in the next 30 days.

The most substantial part of Bullet Journaling is the daily log, in which you take some time every morning to outline tasks and then proceed to check in throughout the day, either to cross items off your list or to “rapid log” your thoughts. Any tasks left undone can be “migrated” (to use the BuJo term) to the following day, or crossed off because, on further reflection, it turns out they weren’t that important to begin with. Easy enough, in theory. Although I was able to be disciplined about taking five minutes to check in at the start and end of every day, I often struggled to use my journal consistently in the interim. More than anything, this was a matter of practicality; I spend half my workweek sitting in front of a laptop, where journaling can be a useful form of procrastination. But the rest of the time I work in arboriculture—“in the field” as it were—where busting out a six-by-eight-inch leather-bound notebook and fountain pen felt weirdly cumbersome the few times I tried it.

Having said that, if the principal objective of becoming a BuJo disciple was to make myselfÌęslightly more organized and intentional with my time, I think the experiment was a success. As an organizational system, the Bullet Journal method was a vast improvement on my previous approach, which was to just try and remember shit. This will sound painfully obvious to all the people who already do it, but taking a few minutes to force myself to compose a daily task list had a dramatic impact on my ability to get stuff done. The effect was less pronounced when it came to big, externally imposed tasks like work deadlines or signing up for health insurance—i.e. the things that you’re going to do anyway—and more noticeable when it came to getting the ball rolling on zany side projects, or maintaining personal relationships. In other words, the kind of thing that you are always thinking that you should do, but that no one is going to insist that you must do.

This, at least for me, is the real value of Bullet Journaling. It’s easy to be seduced by the bombastic promise of the enterprise—the notion that it’s possible to subject every aspect of your life to a kind of internal audit to see how it contributes, or doesn’t, to your personal flourishing. (There’s a “What” and “Why” Venn diagram on the inside cover of my official edition BuJo.) Rather than forcing a grand realignment of my personal priorities, I found that the practice mainly made me a little better at following through with the small stuff that can so easily fall through the cracks: Writing postcards to friends. Finding time to read. Doing push-ups before bed. Small things, to be sure, but also the substance of your life.

As for the mindfulness aspect, I confess that I am still working on becoming more diligent about transcribing some of the demons in my head to the page. (My default way of dealing with stress is still to have imaginary arguments with the people who have wronged me, a habit which doesn’t do much to enhance the quality of family dinners.) However, and as any journaling veteran will be able to tell you, the mere action of crossing items off a list can have a soothing effect. It might be a stretch to call it “therapeutic,” but there’s a reason why the Bullet Journal, which was conceived by a digital designer, is a resolutely analog system. (Though, naturally, there’s also a companion app.) Part of it is just about minimizing distraction—the eternal temptation of clicking away to the next stimuli—but, more fundamentally, writing things out in longhand demands an additional level of focus.

Of course, there’s a point at which the fevered pursuit of self-optimization can start to look a little like self-indulgence. After a month of prolific logging, my Bullet Journal entries were conspicuously light on family commitments. When I proudly showed my journal to my wife one morning, she couldn’t help but observe that my day’s to-dos included the essential task of sewing a button back onto my Hawaiian shirt, but somehow didn’t mention that I was taking my kid in for a doctor visit that afternoon.

“Maybe,” she suggested, “you should write a ‘BuJo’ entry about how you’re finally going to learn how to use our Google Calendar.”

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It’s almost a wrap for 2023, which means it’s time for our annual list of fitness predictions for the coming year. As in the past, we reached out to several experts to ask what we should expect for 2024. Beyond forecasting a specific food fad or workout craze, these predictions are often about identifying a subtle shift in the zeitgeist when it comes to how we think about what it means to live well.

Over the years, a consistent theme has emerged: How do we embrace advances in science and technology without losing sight of the tried-and-true, or letting them corrupt an essential humanist element? This question has probably never been more urgent than in our era of accelerated machine learning. When I recently spoke to my friend Scott Lachut, a industry, he told me that he’d come across a few examples of gyms that offer AI-based trainers with different “personalities.” Depending on whether you wanted to be coddled or subjected to dominatrix-style abasement, your virtual coach would be able to accommodate your needs.

“I personally think that generative AI being able to offer personalization at scale is going to be pretty interesting, if a bit Big Brother-y,” Scott told me. This reminded me of that frequently cited proverb of uncertain origin, “May you live in interesting times.” Depending on your source, the line is either meant as a blessing, or a curse.

Non-Processed Food Will Be Increasingly Celebrated

My guess is that “ultra-processed” will be the food term of the year as everyone who cares about what they eat realizes that they need to cut down on foods that are industrially produced, use industrially extracted ingredients, and are designed to replace real foods and be “addictive.” Much evidence associates these foods with overweight and obesity-related chronic diseases (heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc), and overall mortality. One clinical trial supports the addiction hypothesis; it demonstrates that people who eat ultra-processed diets as opposed to matched diets based on minimally processed foods take in many more calories. I would not be surprised to see non-ultra-processed products starting to be advertised as such.

—, professor emerita at New York University and author of the

The Next Bro-Science Fad Will Be Inspired By Rodents

Sometime in 2024, we will learn of an epochal breakthrough in the quest for longevity. There will be a molecule that, when given in sufficient quantities to certain transgenic rodents, extends life by an amount that, when extrapolated from rodent-years to human-years, is statistically significant. Human trials will be planned; venture capital will flow like red wine; extremely long podcasts will be recorded. Obscure herbs that contain molecules distantly related to the breakthrough will flood the Internet. The global wellness market will reach a of $6.6 trillion. Life expectancy in the United States will continue its decline.

–Alex Hutchinson, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Sweat Science columnist and author of

The Slow Running Movement Will Continue to Grow

For too long, runners at the have felt left behind by the larger running community. Few running clubs provided support for the 12-minute (or more) mile crowd, and many race organizers packed up water stations or ran out of medals before the slowest runners crossed the finish line. Thankfully, this is beginning to change, largely due to the work of slow-running activists like Martinus Evans, founder of the Slow AF Run Club, who published a book by the same name last summer. As Evans’s star has risen, so has support for his cause: The virtual club is now more than 18,000 members strong, and runners around the world have been inspired by his calls for greater inclusivity in fitness. The past few years have also seen the launch of several in-person . As more slow runners feel welcome at running events, the for many major races, including the New York City Marathon, is slowing down. “The stigma of being a back-of-the-pack runner is slowly going away,” the marathon’s race director, Ted Metellus, recently The Washington Post.Ìę Most of us face plenty of barriers to simply lacing up sneakers and finding the time to move. I’m hopeful that, for growing numbers, speed will no longer be one of them.

—Danielle Friedman, journalist and author of

We’ll Stop Overcomplicating What It Means to Live Well

Amidst the increasing chaos and tumult of everyday life, people will crave stability and simplicity from their health and fitness routines. There will never be a shortage of those who are into the latest fad or bro-science gimmick, but it seems more and more people are becoming tired of this. There is already so much noise in the world, and one’s health and fitness approach need not contribute to it. I suspect it’ll increasingly be back to basics—because not only do basics work, but they aren’t so exhausting. Out with the social media hype speeches from $8,000 cold plunges at five in the morning, in with a morning pot of coffee or tea, reading a book, and 30 to 60 minutes of movement that you can do consistently. The former sounds cool. The latter is the path to actual health and well-being.

—, executive coach and author of

We’ll Reach Peak Marathon Majors

Social media can have an unfortunate flattening effect—it can feel like every person on your feed wants the exact same thing. Angels Landing is the only hike worth doing, Yosemite the only public land worth visiting, and the six big-city marathon “majors”—New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Berlin, and Tokyo—are the only footraces worth contending. Interest in these races has boomed (Boston qualification , lottery applications to Chicago have ) even as smaller marathons stagnate or even decline. Something has to give, just as a matter of pure arithmetic, so perhaps this will be the year of flexing on your followers with a PR in your local grassroots 10K.

–, deputy site editor and wellness editor at GQ.com

We’ll See Unstructured Play for Adults

Everyone is lonely. We are starved for human connection and contact. We are starved for reasons to go outside. We are all withering and calcifying, physically. The natural answer is, of course, stay with me, PvP zones. What is a PvP zone, you ask? PvP zones, in open-world video games, are designated areas where players are able to directly interface with—OK, attack—one another. I do not mean for there to be actual violence, obviously. But a place for adults to engage in relatively unstructured play? We need it, now more than ever. I see you shaking your head, but that only proves how badly you need to engage with your fellow humans in a PvP zone. You may think I’m joking, but I am entirely serious. I take my dog to the dog park, and then I sit there roiling with jealousy for 45 minutes. How is it that we have a place for her, a dog, to get up to shenanigans with her fellows, while the only acceptable thing for me to do outside is sit on a bench? It’s preposterous. I, we, have basically all the same needs as a dog for play and exercise and, most importantly, fun with others. We are grown adults. We should, theoretically, be allowed to do whatever we want. Why is “goofing around in parks” the provenance of only dogs and children? Why are we not allowed to do some good old-fashioned light roughhousing, to chase one another in and out of trees, just because it’s fun and funny only if you, very crucially, don’t think about why or what for at all? If you are thinking “You’re just describing jiu jitsu class, or recreational softball”: sort of. But the most crucial aspect of the PvP zone is that it’s structureless, a place where no one loses and skill doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone would argue that many of us think entirely too much now. Perhaps the solution to all of our ills is to just designate an area of our parks where it is acceptable to go up to another person you don’t know and say “tag, you are it” and then run away. PvP zones. It could, and should, and by my estimation will, happen.

—, creator of the newsletter

A Greater Focus on Preemptive Solutions Will Help Us Spend Less on Healthcare

A combination of sustainable lifestyle changes and personalized solutions will reimagine sick care. I think health spending will shift from reactive to proactive care in the coming decades. More movement and healthy food should be the first line of defense. Building on that foundation, health trackers, preventative diagnostics, and coaching/care platforms will help save the U.S. healthcare system trillions of dollars in the long run.

—, co-founder of the newsletter

Low-Intensity Workouts Will Have (Another) Resurgence

People have come around to the fact that shorter workouts still have benefits (see exercise snacks!) and that high intensity workouts do not have to be long. What we are going to see next is the swell of lower intensity workouts having a lap in the spotlight. More men taking Pilates, people walking, lower intensity steady state exercise (Zone 2 and otherwise), and wanting to feel better instead of just being fitter. As millennials’ life responsibilities start to pile-up as this cohort of individuals who were born into the wellness boom continue to age, the wear and tear that intense workouts have on the body will rear its head. Additionally, people are starting to understand more of the science behind benefits of lower intensity steady state work, especially for the heart. The “soft life” mindset will show up in the gym.

—, founder of The Ocho System and

Medical Breakthroughs Will Be Balanced With Common Sense Solutions

We’re at a point where I think we’re going to have to redefine how we see health and wellness in a number of ways. On the one hand, we’re going to have to reckon with the environment we’ve created. There’s an increasing acknowledgement that having phones everywhere, at all times, is causing some disastrous mental health in teens and young adults. And for the rest of us, the impact of neglecting green space, parks, walkable areas, and so much more in our day-to-day living is setting us up to fail. On the other hand, the promise of medical discoveries like GLP-1 drugs bring much needed avenues for meaningful change. The first legitimate drug for obesity will force us to wrestle with how we see health, from both a personal and medicalized approach. My hope is that we find ourselves wrestling with the nuance in the middle, finding ways to utilize medical breakthroughs, while creating an avenue for long-term sustainability by making our environment invite healthier actions.

—, track and field coach at the University of Houston, coauthor of and , and cofounder of

The Era of “Not Too Sweet” Will Continue to Gain Traction

Growing up in an Asian-American family, the greatest compliment anyone in my family could give about a dessert was, “.” This aversion to cloying sweetness, which was hard coded into my palate from a young age, has caught on with the mainstream. Starting with long overdue realignment of the soda industry toward sparkling water as the hero, to the continued rise in popularity of Asian food with its greater emphasis on savory over sweet, to the all-too-common experience of asking your server for a wine recommendation that’s “on the drier side,” sweetness continues to be marginalized. But while sugar has been demonized for decades from a nutritional standpoint, eaters are now reducing sugar intake for purely taste reasons, not just health ones. Even people who aren’t militant about avoiding sugar are moderating it because they want to actually taste their food, not have their taste buds smothered in a wave of sweetness. And with rising negative sentiment around the healthfulness of artificial sweeteners and the general affinity for more unadulterated foods, diets in 2024 and beyond might not only continue to reduce sugar levels, but whatever small amounts of sugar they do eat will come from natural sources, not synthetic ones.

—Mike Lee, Founder of , a trend forecasting company for the food industry

We’ll Start Biohacking Our Beach Vacations

You used to have to go to a sterile clinic to get a longevity boost with Vitamin IV drips and stem cell therapy but resorts are now partnering with longevity centers to offer onsite treatments. Guests at Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea can get a poolside NAD+ IV drip. Katikies Kirini in Santorini now has an outpost of a ZOE Bio Regenerative Wellness Clinic where guests can get live blood analysis. And Six Senses Ibiza has partnered with biotech company RoseBar to offer guests full diagnostic testing that can inform biohack treatments like localized cryotherapy.

—Jen Murphy, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor and longtime fitness columnist for the

There Will Be a New Trendy Booze

I think in 2024 sotol will take over from mezcal as the “it” cocktail. Cheers!

–, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor and author of

The post What Will Health and Fitness Look Like in 2024? We Asked Some Experts. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It’s been a long time coming, but with an of all NCAA Division I athletes signing promotional deals to profit off their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) in 2022, the era of stringently enforced amateurism in college sports seems to finally be over. To be fair, with a , the splashiest NIL deals are going to football and basketball players, who have been anointed by the lords of high capitalism to sell us everything to . But athletes from some of the NCAA’s non-revenue sports have gotten in on the action as well. In November 2022, just days after winning the individual title at the NCAA cross country championships, North Carolina State’s Katelyn Tuohy . (a professional contract with the brand.) Earlier this year, the University of Florida’s Parker Valby, who succeeded Touhy as the women’s NCAA cross-country champ last month, . In addition to their athletic prowess and social media clout, both women seemed like logical choices for their respective brands: since North Carolina State has an apparel contract with Adidas, and Florida is sponsored by Nike, Tuohy and Valby are in a position to simultaneously represent their school and their individual sponsor. They can do this without running afoul of the NCAA’s , which prohibit student athletes from promoting their sponsor while “on call,” i.e. in competitions, practices, or press conferences.Ìę

But not all NIL arrangements feature such a convenient overlap. Two weeks ago, Leo and Lex Young, twin brothers and alumni of Newbury Park’s storied high school cross-country program who are now freshman runners at Stanford University, partnership with On. As Stanford athletes, the Youngs are required to race and train in Nike gear, which means that they will effectively be promoting a rival brand every time they compete in an NCAA race. Roisin Willis, who won the NCAA indoor title in the 800-meters as a freshman and who also competes for Stanford, with New Balance. Earlier this year, , the 18-year-old phenom from North Carolina who has broken several national high school sprint records, signed a while also committing to the University of Arkansas, another Nike school. Meanwhile, the apparel company Tracksmith just unveiled its “Varsity Club Project”—an NIL-style sponsorship of ten college runners—despite the fact that the brand doesn’t currently outfit any university running teams.Ìę

This issue has, of course, long affected the professional side of the sport; the only time track and field gets mainstream exposure is during the Olympics and World Championships, where all athletes who represent Team USA have to wear the official Nike-sponsored kit. But, for the pros, footwear is exempt from the uniform rule. When Brooks athlete Josh Kerr pulled off an improbable upset over Jakob Ingebrigtsen to win the 1,500-meters at this year’s World Champs in Budapest, he did it in Brooks spikes. For college athletes, on the other hand, to include shoes as well. If Shawnti Jackson breaks any collegiate records for Arkansas, she’ll have Nikes on her feet. Why, one might ask, would a running brand want to sponsor an athlete who can’t promote their product in moments of maximum visibility?Ìę

The obvious answer is that old standards of visibility no longer apply in the age of Instagram and TikTok. It’s no secret that an athlete’s social media presence is the principal currency of the NIL marketplace. When it comes to brand exposure, a number of companies may simply have made the calculation that far more people will see an athlete’s Instagram post than will tune to the live feed of an NCAA track and cross-country meet. As a business decision, this may just be another example of companies shifting more of their resources . But it would be absurd to suggest that Jackson’s rewriting of the high school record books wasn’t a major reason why Brooks offered her a sponsorship. A big difference between the All-American and, say, the fashionista with 100K followers, is that the All-American’s authority as a brand ambassador is still at least partially based on her athletic performance. Which makes it all the more surprising that a running brand would want to sign her when those performances can’t come while wearing their product. What other incentive could a shoe sponsor have to sign an NIL athlete who is obligated to race in a rival brand?

“The number one thing is cost,” says Dave Meluni, an associate teaching professor in sport management at Syracuse University’s Falk College. As Meluni points out, NIL deals allow brands to establish relationships with athletes without the financial commitment of signing them to a professional contract. What’s more, even when a university is sponsored by a rival, its athletic program might be vaunted enough that companies want to be associated with its aura—even if indirectly. “Duke. Stanford. Oregon. Those are major brands in their own right,” Meluni says. “Some of the athletes we’re talking about may not be able to be in Stanford or Oregon gear when they promote their sponsors on social media, but their profile can certainly mention that they compete for these schools.” NIL deals, in other words, might be the only way for upstart brands to access the previously hyper-insulated world of college sports. When I reached out to On to inquire about their signing of the Young brothers, a company representative sent the following reply, via email: “Currently On has minimal exposure to the collegiate demographic. At this time we don’t sponsor any universities and only have one event where collegiate athletes compete (Penn Relays). NIL deals have opened up the potential to form strong relationships with these athletes and really include them as part of the family.”ÌęÌę

I heard something similar when I spoke with Garrett Heath, a former pro runner for Brooks who is now the company’s head of sports marketing. “The college system is becoming more elite and for us it’s important to be connected to this group of athletes in that part of their running lifecycle,” Heath told me. At the same time, he emphasized that the constraints of the NIL system were also encouraging companies to reimagine ways that athletes can be valuable to a brand outside of competition. For instance: NIL deals are famously not allowed to include bonuses (or reductions) for athletic performances—a standard feature of pro contracts. If the NIL model proves to be an effective marketing tool for running shoe brands, despite the lack of performance-related incentives, it might encourage more companies to reassess the value of these incentives in the first place. “I think it is a pretty dynamic time in the sports marketing world for running and forcing a bit of a lightbulb moment for a lot of brands,” says Heath.

But the NIL landscape is in flux as well, to put it mildly. As Meluni reminded me, the NCAA is currently staring down a potential from current and former college athletes who are suing the organization for depriving them of making money off their fame. (Meanwhile, against the NCAA and the Power Five conferences, which claims that it’s a violation of antitrust law to prohibit schools from directly paying athletes.) Nobody knows how all of this is going to play out, but one of the things the plaintiffs are fighting for is to “strike down all current prohibitions on NIL,” to quote one attorney.Ìę If this happens, we’ll likely see far more opportunities for NIL athletes to promote their sponsors while “on call.” This, in turn, might incentivize individual universities to renegotiate terms with their apparel sponsors, especially when it comes to footwear. Colleges might eventually have to choose between a lucrative apparel sponsor contract that mandates that all athletes wear their shoes, and potentially missing out on star recruits who would prefer to attend an institution without such constraints.Ìę

Who knows. By the time they graduate, Lex and Leo Young might be able to race for Stanford wearing On’s spikes after all. That’s what you call a good return on investment.

The post Why Running Brands Are Signing College Athletes Who Can’t Race in Their GearÌę appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“She needs to stop. Somebody needs to give her some advice to step off and stop trying to run on.”

Watching the BBC’s broadcast of this year’s London Marathon, it was hard to disagree with Paula Radcliffe’s blunt assessment of what looked to be an ill-fated marathon debut for Sifan Hassan, the 30-year-old Dutch national and track star. (Born in Ethiopia, Hassan came to the Netherlands as an asylum seeker while she was still a teenager.) Radcliffe was providing commentary for a race she herself had won three times during her illustrious career.

Hassan was clearly having a rough time, even though it was still the first half of the race. A quad injury she’d sustained toward the end of her training cycle seemed to be flaring up at an inopportune moment. Grimacing and grabbing her left hip, Hassan stopped to stretch not once but twice. She was immediately dropped by a lead pack that included reigning Olympic champion Peres Jepchirchir. As a rule of thumb, losing contact with the leaders this early in an elite marathon means that your chances of winning are effectively zero. Even Radcliffe, a notorious grinder in her day, seemed convinced that Hassan would be better off taking a DNF.

But Hassan kept going. As she later explained, she decided that extending her first marathon experience just a bit longer would put her in better stead the next time she attempted something this insane.

“When I reached 20 kilometers, I was like, ‘Let me get one or two more kilometers,’ ” Hassan says.

She got more than that. Against all reasonable expectation, Hassan rallied and regained the stride that has made her a consistent favorite in World Championship and Olympic competition. Meanwhile, the pace was slowing at the front. With a few miles to go, Hassan caught the lead pack, which had been whittled down to four runners, among them Jepchirchir. Hassan was still there when the leaders took the final turn onto the Mall with less than 200 meters to go.

This was bad news for everyone else—Hassan is the ultimate closer, a woman with one of the most notorious kicks in professional running. In London, it wasn’t even close. As soon as she opened up her stride she was gone. Her winning time was 2:18:33—not bad for a novice marathoner. (Currently, the American record for the women’s marathon is 2:18:29.) But Hassan’s finish was less significant than the way she’d managed to bounce back from disaster. It was one of the more improbable comebacks in the history of professional marathoning. Even Hassan sounded incredulous. After the race, when reporters asked her to pinpoint the moment when she thought she could actually win it, Hassan answered: “When I crossed the line.”

It was absurd that Hassan had decided to run the London Marathon in the first place. Less than two years after winning gold at the Tokyo Olympics in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and bronze in the 1,500, she was at the peak of one of the more decorated careers in track. This year she once again committed to racing all three distance events at the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary. In an era of hyper-specialization, when races are won by mere hundredths of a second and athletes are fine-tuned for maximum efficiency at specific distances, this kind of versatility flies in the face of all wisdom. But normal standards don’t seem to apply to Hassan. In fact, she is probably the only professional runner competing today who is capable of throwing down a world-class performance in every event from the 800 meters to the marathon. Later this year, in October, she set a course record in Chicago, running the second-fastest women’s marathon time ever.

“I think I am just a curious person,” Hassan says about her promiscuous approach to racing. “If I were only focused on one thing, I would get bored and stop running.”

The post An Improbable Mid-Race Comeback Made Sifan Hassan a Fan Favorite This Year appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Earlier this month, Jenny Hoffman, a 45-year-old Harvard physics professor and ultrarunner who has represented the United States at the 24-Hour World Championships, set a for a supported run from San Francisco to New York. She covered the 3,037-mile stretch in 47 days, 12 hours, and 35 minutes to take more than a week off the previous record, set by . For Hoffman, the feat came with a touch of redemption; she’d come tantalizingly close to pulling off the same FKT in 2019, but had to quit in Akron, Ohio, after tearing her right meniscus.

That near-miss wasn’t the only setback Hoffman experienced in pursuit of her goal. After training throughout the summer of 2022, she was going to embark on another coast-to-coast adventure last fall when she tore her hamstring mere days before she was meant to start. After months of rehab, she set her sights on a route from Los Angeles to Boston, which, thanks to the dramatic curvature of California’s coast, is roughly the same distance as what Hoffman termed the “community standard” FKT route from San Francisco to New York City. (Hoffman told me that to satisfy the requirements set by the Guinness Book of World Records, one technically “only” needed to run from L.A. to New York—a paltry 2,790 miles—but that there is an unsaid agreement among the USA-crosser cognoscenti that the chosen route needs to be at least 3,000 miles.) However, 24 hours before she was set to depart from Los Angeles, Hoffman’s crew discovered that in the wake of this past August there were no pedestrian-accessible roads out of the city. In a last-minute audible, Hoffman’s crew drove her support RV up San Francisco while she slept in the back. The original San Francisco to New York route would have to do. Let no one say endurance athletes aren’t adaptable.

I asked Hoffman about the most challenging aspects of her journey, her lyrical , and whether it’s possible to learn something about the country while logging 65-mile days on foot.

OUTSIDE: You have a solid . But it’s a pretty big jump from doing a 24-hour race to going for the coast-to-coast FKT. What made you take on that challenge, and did you work up to it by doing shorter multi-day runs first?
HOFFMAN: I was just an idiot and went in blind. I had no idea what I was getting into. It was a big experiment in 2019. I’ve always dreamed about crossing the country under my own power. When I was a kid I thought I’d do it on a bike. And then I got involved in ultras as an adult. I don’t think I’m particularly talented, but I’m pretty stubborn and hard-working. And so, to my surprise, I was more successful than I thought I would be on the ultra scene. Gradually, the idea arose that I don’t have to do this on a bike. I met Pete Kostelnick in 2017. We were both on the U.S. 24-hour team that competed in Belfast. I had a chance to talk to him about his journey and I’ve been really inspired by him. I just thought it sounded like a grand adventure. A way to bring to reality a dream that I’ve had since I was a child.

Did you train for this? How does one even do that?
I don’t think you can ever really train for this. You can ramp up your mileage, but it’s hard to know how your body is going to respond when you really just do it every single day. I Strava-stalked some people who had done it before and kind of looked at what they had done. I’ve always been a relatively high-mileage runner. I got up to a couple of 200-mile weeks and decided that the way to train for this was to hit two 200-mile weeks with a down week in the middle.

Why did you decide to specifically go after the FKT, as opposed to just running across the country for kicks?
I’m competitive and I like setting hard goals. And there’s a practical aspect: I was leaving my family and three kids. I was leaving my job. You can’t do that for too long, so you might as well do it as fast as possible.

As you are probably aware, these long solo FKT attempts are often subjected to scrutiny. What steps did you take to document your run?
FKT.com just asks for the specific GPX files and, frankly, I think that’s the strongest evidence you can have. Guinness imposes these additional requirements, like written witness statements. I got them all, but that would be really easy to fake. Just make up some names. Guinness also requires ten minutes of video every day. Again, that’s easy to fake: I could video myself leaving the RV, get ten minutes of video, and then sleep in the RV all day. So I don’t think that those additional requirements actually add anything to the evidence. I wore two watches; I had a Coros watch on one wrist and a Garmin on the other. I had my live tracker the whole time. So I had three different devices. I’ve put in 20 years as an ultrarunner, so I have a lot of races under my belt.

The live tracker seems like it’s pretty essential since it’s kind of a way of saying to the world: Here I am, come check on me if you have any doubts.
Since I am human and I have a body, I sometimes had to go and do my business in the cornfields sometimes. I would get messages from friends that were like: “Hey, I see you’re off road. Looks like you’re in a cornfield. What are you doing there?” An RV wouldn’t be in the cornfield. So, if you really want to scrutinize you’re going to find lots of little human details that suggest that, yeah, I was really out there doing this thing.

When I’ve spoken to other USA crossers in the past, they’ve mentioned the importance of using mental tricks to make something so audacious more manageable in the short term. Did you do anything along those lines?
I don’t think I have anything quite as concerted as Pete, who played golf in his head. I did spend a lot of time visualizing the next reward or something in the future that I was looking forward to. And I spent a lot of time in my head writing the journal entry that I was going to write that night. I wrote a several paragraph journal entry every night that I posted on Strava. Unfortunately, by the time I actually sat down to write it that evening, I’d usually lost the beautiful phrasing that I’d composed in my head.

Between your Instagram and Strava notes, you provide a pretty detailed journal of your trip. What did that add to the experience?
It’s a singular life experience and I want to remember it. I tried to document in 2019, but I just wasn’t as thorough and, it being my first attempt, we made more mistakes and had less time and organization, so my documentation wasn’t as good. And I was really sad by how fast it faded from memory. There’s necessarily some sleep deprivation and fatigue and you don’t form memories that well under conditions of stress. So I really wanted to make sure that I wrote these experiences down. Also, I love reading and listening to books when I train. I mostly train alone and I’ll listen to books. So, I’m listening to 40 to 50 books a year. I really love listening to memories and stories of other people’s lives and learning from their experiences. And it’s been in my head that I’d eventually like to write a book of my own about these experiences.

There’s a story in the about your run that notes that for the most part you didn’t listen to books or music and that you ran in silence. (One exception being that you listened to Des Linden’s memoir.) Why did you make that choice?
Yeah, I didn’t listen to anything, except for on this one stretch, 169 miles between Tonopah and Ely, Nevada, where you’re just going through the desert and there are no towns, or turns, and there’s no traffic. Just a couple cars per day. In one sense it’s the safest stretch of road, in another it’s the most dangerous because it’s so isolated. But traffic is a big concern. I was running primarily on two-lane highways and one of the things that I hadn’t really understood before I did this in 2019 is that, when you run facing traffic you think you are going to see all the cars coming, but on a two-lane highway, the biggest danger is people passing from behind. So I was really focused on the yellow line: I had to keep an eye on whether it was double or it was dashed. Are people going to come whizzing by me? Another problem is rumble strips. A lot of these roads are rumble stripped—you know, the scored part of the road that’s there to keep the truckers awake—and it’s really hard to run on them. Another thing: In the west, the cars are very friendly and typically if they see me, they swing way wide, so they are swinging into the opposing lane to give me plenty of space. But as I got towards the Midwest, even if there wasn’t traffic or even if there was a dashed yellow line, the cars that were coming towards me seemed to be much more like rule-followers. They didn’t want to cross that yellow line no matter what and they weren’t going to give me extra space. I don’t think it’s because they were being jerks, I just think that somehow it’s a different mindset. I think in the West, people are a little more used to bending the rules.

What were some of the hardest moments of your run?
It was very challenging to run through Nebraska during peak harvest season. The John Deere trucks, they’ve got the sharp blades coming out of the sides and take up the whole width of the dirt road. And the dust is such that I can barely seem them and they can barely see me. So that was scary. Not that that’s a challenge that can be blamed on anybody; that’s just what farm life is. So I think Nebraska was the hardest state for me. It was in some sense the most gratifying—the people were the kindest and some of the interactions I had were the best—but, also, really the most challenging physically.

When Rickey Gates did an unsupported run across the country a few years ago, he made the trip as a kind of anthropological exercise—a way for him to know his own country better. I know you had a specific performance-related goal, but did your journey have a similar effect?
Well, first of all, huge respect for people who do this unsupported and spend even more time interacting with Americans. I did feel like I got to know more about this country. I was running for 15 hours a day, but there were moments where we had to get witness statements for Guinness. I had stops with my crew every three or four miles. Often we’d be parking in someone’s driveway and the person would come out and we’d have a conversation. People were so kind. From someone offering us a dozen eggs from the chickens in her backyard to someone else with a bunch of kids offering to let us use their bathroom. Middle America is so friendly. The population density is lower and people have to look out for each other. It’s really wonderful, for somebody who comes from densely populated coastal cities where people are a little warier and focused on exactly their task in front of them, to see the middle of America where everyone is so kind and generous and supporting their community. I ran through 27 days of cornfields. You don’t think about that much when you’re in a coastal city—that so much of our country is corn. I went through the desert. I went through the mountains. And then: 27 days of corn. We kind of lose sight of how hard the rest of America works to feed the coasts of America. I ran through Nebraska during peak harvest. I ran through Ohio and we couldn’t even find a place to park the RV because they were driving their farm trucks all night long, harvesting for 36 consecutive hours because the rain was coming and they needed to save their crops. I am still trying to process and sit with that. How can we be more grateful for the rest of the country that feeds us?

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