If Courtney Dauwalter could travel back in time, this is what she would do: She’d join a wagon train crossing the American continent, Oregon Trail-style, for a week, maybe more, just to see if she could swing it. It would be hard, and also pretty smelly, but Dauwalter wonders what type of person she’d be if she deliberately decided to take that journey. Would she stop in the plains and build a farm? Could she make it to the Rocky Mountains? How much suffering could she take, and how daunted might she be by the terrain ahead of her?

“If you get to Denver and this huge mountain range is coming out of the earth, are you the type of person who stops and thinks, ‘This is good’?” she wonders. “Or are you the person who’s like, ‘What’s on the other side?’ ”

Dauwalter is probably the best female trail runner in the world—a once-in-a-generation athlete. She’s hard to miss at the sport’s most famous races, and not just because of the nineties-style basketball shorts she prefers. (Her explanation: she just likes them.) It’s because she’s often running among the leading men in the sport, smiling beneath her mirrored sunglasses. The 38-year-old is five foot seven and lean, with smile lines and hair streaked with highlights from abundant time spent in high-altitude sun.

Dauwalter shared her historical daydream with me while sipping a pink sparkling water at her house in Leadville, Colorado, after a four-hour morning training run. Her cross-country wagon musings get at why she’s the best female trail runner ever to live: Dauwalter is curious. She’s curious about pain, about limits, about possibility. This quality is fundamental to what makes her so good.

Over the past seven years, Dauwalter has won almost everything she’s entered. In 2016, she set a course record at the Javelina Jundred—an exposed, looped route through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. That same year she won the Run Rabbit Run 100-miler in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, by a margin of 75 minutes, despite experiencing temporary blindness for the last 12 miles (she could only see a foggy sliver of her own feet). Because of ultrarunning’s huge distances, it’s not unheard of to beat the competition by so much, but it doesn’t happen with the frequency that Dauwalter manages.

In 2018, she won the extremely competitive Western States 100 in California; it was her first time on the course. A year later, she set a new course record while winning the prestigious Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), besting the second-place finisher by just under an hour. In 2022, she set the fastest known time on the 166.9-mile Collegiate Loop Trail in her backyard in Colorado, and she won (and set a new course record at) the Hardrock 100, a grueling high-altitude loop through the state’s San Juan Mountains.

Dauwalter is also one of the few runners of her caliber to seriously dabble in the really long distance races. In 2017, she won the Moab 240—yes, that’s 240 miles—in two days, nine hours, and fifty-five minutes, ten hours ahead of the second-place finisher. She ran even farther at Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2020, a quirky test of wills where athletes complete a 4.167-mile course every hour on the hour until only one runner is left. Dauwalter set a women’s course record of just over 283 miles.

Given everything she’s accomplished, it’s hard to believe that this summer was her most successful yet. At the end of June, she returned to Western States, where she smashed the women’s course record by more than an hour and finished sixth overall. When she passed , who finished ninth, he remembers how calm and collected she looked, running all alone. “My pacer looked back at me and said, ‘Jeff, I can’t even keep up with her right now,’ ” he says. Less than three weeks later, she won Hardrock again, taking fourth place overall and setting a new women’s course record. The race changes direction on the looped course each year, and she now holds both the clockwise and counterclockwise records.

In the interest of testing herself one more time, in late August she traveled to France to run the UTMB again. She won that race too, becoming the first person in history to win all three races in a single summer. “She’s one of those humans who defy even the concept of an outlier,” says Clare Gallagher, a former Western States winner who has raced against Dauwalter in the past. “I look at her summer and I have no words. It’s truly hard to conceptualize.”

Dauwalter led UTMB from the start, and she finished more than an hour ahead of the woman in second place. As she descended the final stretch of trail, she was followed by a barrage of cameras and a handful of people who looked like they just wanted a bit of her magic to rub off on them. As crowds roared on either side of the finish line in Chamonix, she looked back at the spectators and clapped in their direction, never raising her hands above her head or pumping her fists in the air. After hugging her parents and her husband, 39-year-old Kevin Schmidt, she jogged back in the direction she’d just come to high-five hundreds of fans.

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The is a perfect piece of granite, rising from the Yosemite Valley floor like the point of a crown and forming the spillway of Bridalveil Fall. Climbers know it as one of America’s most continuously overhanging cliffs, and the way it leans gives an impression that is both gentle and imposing.

For Mason Earle, the tower has deeper significance. This is where he was climbing on the day when, as he puts it, he died.

On May 11, 2018, around 5 P.M., the golden hour of a Yosemite spring evening, Earle and his climbing partner Nik Berry were finishing a productive session together. Earle had sent the crux pitch on a route they’d chosen, called Wet Lycra Nightmare. He was exhausted, but it was the settled-in kind of fatigue that comes from working hard.

They rappelled off the cliff and were starting the walk back to their vehicles when Earle suddenly felt an excruciating pain in his neck, along with the overwhelming sensation that his whole system was crashing. “By the time I reached my van, the only thing I could think was, Something isn’t right,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, This isn’t something that’s going to go away.”

Earle, 29 at the time, was considered one of the best crack climbers in the sport. Sponsored by Eddie Bauer, he’d put up bold first ascents in places like Venezuela and Canada’s Northwest Territories, and he’d completed one of the , a 5.14 overhanging finger route called Cobra Crack in Squamish, British Columbia. He’d also appeared with Berry and Alex Honnold in Sender Films’ 2016 production Showdown at Horseshoe Hell, a in which Earle and Berry comically portray a pair of scrappy underdogs.

Earle treated climbing like a job, but he also found time for other interests. He played guitar, banjo, and lute. He built things, including a decorative steel fire pit and other functional art. Before his mysterious episode in Yosemite, he was planning to get married to his great love, Ally Coconis. They’d met at the national park in their early twenties. She was working for its wildlife-management program—a summer job linked to the career she was considering in wildlife science—while he was living out of his Volvo and climbing. “It was a romantic and carefree beginning,” she says. “We were very young and living our best lives.”

In September 2017, they bought a house together in Salt Lake City, where she worked at the while he made regular trips to Moab. Earle was nearly always doing something, even on rest days. He’d work on their house or on art projects. He loved riding bikes and kept a fleet of strange rigs he’d built or modified—including his pride and joy, a bike with a lightweight, propane-powered engine on the back that shot flames. They had good friends and were part of a tight-knit community. There was a lot of lightness in their existence.

But there was something hanging over 2018. Earle had been getting sick a lot that spring. Little colds here and there, then a case of the mumps. He didn’t know it at the time, but that day on the Leaning Tower would be his last as a climber.

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Maps don’t always tell the truth. Maybe you already knew this. Maybe, like me, you’ve ended up in the sort of road-to-nowhere predicament that only a willfully oblivious reliance on Google Maps can achieve. The left turn onto a dirt road that is supposedly a shortcut in reality leads the wrong way into the middle of nowhere on a quarter tank of gas.

We place so much blind faith in maps—we assume that the size of a town, shape of a continent, or length of a trail is true and fixed. But maps are created from data, and data is collected by humans. If we get the data wrong—say, the or the precise bend of a river—then our map will be inaccurate.

Maps lie in many other ways, too: with symbols, through generalizations, because of scale, by omission. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli mused in his 2019 book, , about how a map’s point of view inherently warps reality. Consider, he writes, “those maps in mountain villages showing routes that can be walked with a red dot next to which is written: You are Here. A strange phrase: how can a map know where we are? We might be looking at it from afar, through binoculars. Instead, it should say ‘I, a map, am here’ with an arrow next to the red dot.”

Maps lie from the get-go when they transfer three-dimensional space onto a flat plane. This process, called projection, inevitably warps that space by pressing it into two dimensions—like an orange peel spread onto a table. We owe some of our enduringly skewed perspective of Earth to a man named , who in the 16th century created one of the more familiar renderings of a flattened globe. Mercator’s map shows a giant Greenland and the Western world at its center. To Mercator’s credit, his map was created for the purposes of navigation, and it does this well—but it sucks for visual accuracy.

It’s not just about clarity—maps can also be manipulated to reinforce power dynamics. For instance, , which have never been consistent or accurate, don’t come close to representing the convoluted history and politics of the region. By reducing the complexity of a given place, these maps control—and censor—the political narrative. A map of California real estate listings will advertise schools and walk scores but omit the proximity to in an effort to conceal the health risks of buying in that area. The practice of manipulates electoral districts to favor one party over another, which is how you wind up with such strange contortions and thin, snaking appendages on legislative maps.

But more often than not, maps lie to make things easier to understand. Cartography is both an art and a science. It’s an attempt to make things both clearer and more beautiful. , a retired geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the preeminent scholar of cartographic deception, , “There’s no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.”

Every map is drawn based on a hierarchy of information: it includes the most relevant details and subtracts the rest based on what the map is ultimately intended for. You could call this lying by omission. Take, for instance, the New York MTA subway map. The is the result of a showdown in the late 1970s between an Italian modernist designer named Massimo Vignelli and a cartographer named John Tauranac. centered on conflicting priorities. was geometric and beautiful: it pared the whole system down to a series of lines on a grid and omitted street names and other spatial features. Tauranac, who was serving as head of the MTA’s map committee, wanted landmarks and fewer conceptual right angles. The debate, which was described in the recent documentary , as “the most controversial of the New York design scene, ever,” on a small stage at the Cooper Union in April 1978. Tauranac won: accuracy over elegant simplicity. It’s the map that is still in use today: a simplified version of the system but with parks, rivers, and other spatial reference points.

A map presents only one of many possible stories. Even Tauranac’s subway map doesn’t show us, for instance, the population density of Rattus norvegicus seen scurrying across the tracks with leftover slices of pizza or the crowdedness of each car. Neither of these information layers are necessary for navigation, even if they are part of the human experience of taking the subway. On the other hand, something like crime statistics or train delays might influence your decision-making in the same way that real-time weather information on a trail-mapping app could affect your route.

Static maps don’t update in real time like this and must sacrifice a holistic representation of place for the sake of clarity. But digital mapping apps now can include multiple layers of information. They allow users to add, eliminate, and organize the relationship between layers of information. A hunting app like OnX can help you better understand the movement of an animal through a given landscape. Others let you in a location or on the way to the crag. Even the MTA recently launched a of a live subway map (based on Vignelli’s original design) that allows you to add a layer for COVID-19 vaccination clinics.

Used effectively, digital maps can illuminate things like how roads might affect elk migration patterns or which cultural, spiritual, and historic sites could be destroyed by uranium mining. Still, these layers can’t show us everything at once, and too much information on a dynamic map will be confusing. A map of Bears Ears National Monument, digital or otherwise, can’t precisely show all of the area’s Indigenous place names, boundary changes over time, species distribution, Native American spiritual grounds, and roads and campsites at once without some comprehension being lost. Not to mention the fact that you’re limited to the frame of whatever device you’re using. It’s hard to look at even a small part of the world on an iPhone screen. In his paragraph-long short story “On Exactitude in Science,” Argentine writer writes of an empire that finally achieves a perfectly accurate map; to do so, they draw one that is the size of the place itself.

We are mostly passive map readers, and many of the stories they tell us go unchallenged. As we navigate the world, we should ask ourselves: who made this map and how, with what sources and what authority? What’s been modified? What’s been left out? To a landlocked elementary schooler, the color of the ocean is the innocuous powder blue of a laminated classroom wall map. The ocean, of course, is not always blue and almost never that specific blue—a light color chosen according to design principles of hierarchy to better make the continents stand out. But we base so much of our geographic imagination, our understanding of Earth, on these visual cues. I still half-expect the ground to change color when I cross state lines.

Want to learn more about using a map in the wilderness? Check out our online course on , where șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű+ members get full access to our library of more than 50 courses on adventure, sports, health, and nutrition.

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It’s been nearly a month since we last heard anything about the mysterious monolith in Lockhart Basin, Utah. To recap:Ìęit was discoveredÌęon November 23 while wildlife biologists were conducting a survey of bighorn sheep, soon attracted a flurry of tourists, andÌęÌęfour days later. It wasÌę by four self-described adventurers and members of the Moab slackline and BASE-jumping scene: Andy Lewis, Sylvan Christensen, Homer Manson, and an anonymous companion.Ìę

But the monolith is back, mostly intactÌęand now in the custody of the Bureau of Land Management after a torrent of death threats, a federal investigation, and the launch of a nonprofit. YetÌęthe question still remains: Who put it there to begin with?

First, the investigation.Ìę

After the monolith’s removal, the U.S. District Attorney’s office in Utah opened an investigation looking into who took the pieceÌęand who put it there in the first place. Christensen had already posted a video to TikTok claiming responsibility for the theft, so answering the first question was easy. But holding on to the monolith while the second half of the investigation was underway would be considered an obstruction of justice. “The idea is, because someone abandoned art and knew a location, and for whatever reason that caused environmental damage, they have to investigate who put that in there,” Lewis (who is also known by his nickname,ÌęSketchy Andy)ÌęłÙŽÇ±ô»ć șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű on a video call. “SoÌęthey need to look at it and see if they can find clues.” Following a cooperating agreement and the involvement of attorneys, it was determined that the men would return the monolith to the BLM at an established date and timeÌęandÌęwould not be prosecuted or investigated further.

This is standard procedure for the BLM. Essentially, anything that happens on BLM land is the business of the BLM, even an investigation into property that wasn’t the agency’s to begin with. And itÌędoesn’t want to set a precedent that people can just go out onto public lands and take things away. This raises a greater philosophical question ofÌęwho art belongs to, as well asÌęhow the BLM will treat attempted art on public lands in the future.Ìę

BLM officials wouldn’t comment on any specific details of the investigation. “We understand the public has a strong interest in the status and outcome of any investigations into the installation and removal of the illegally installed structure known as the ‘monolith,’” a BLM spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will notify the public when we have information to share.”

According to the four slackliners, the decision to steal it was an obvious one. “There were a lot of conversations surrounding the monolith, like who put it in there,” saidÌęLewis. “The whole thing just unfortunately cascaded. It’s because it’s, like, a symbol, right?”Ìę

A symbol of what is unclear. A symbol that this has been a tough year and we all needed something else to focus on? A symbol that we should stop and consider our impact on public lands? A symbol that no one upstages Sketchy Andy in his own backyard?Ìę

But the cascade Lewis mentioned isn’t an understatement. In the days following the monolith’sÌę, thousands of people poured into Moab, a small town on the edge of the desertÌęalready buckling under the weight of tourism. Copycat monoliths showed up inÌę,, and, only to disappear soon after. On Christensen’sÌęInstagram feed, shortly after the monolith’s removal,Ìę, “We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands 
 the mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite people behind the real issue here—we are losing our public lands—things like this don’t help.”Ìę

Lewis referred to the removal ofÌęthe monument as a “chaotic-neutral” judgementÌęcall he and his friends made.Ìę“It obviously can’t stay there,” said Lewis,Ìędescribing their thought process.Ìę“It just can’t, because it became a destination. We obviously don’t want to take it—it’s not ours. And we don’t want to destroy it, because it is art. Our decision as a crew was that the chaotic-neutral decision was to remove it as fully intact as possible.”Ìę

They also said that they started hearing rumors of other plans to steal it. “We heard from other people who were like, ‘Oh good job, we were right behind you,’” said Manson, who was born in Moab. “We literally passed them, and they were the next people coming to take it down.” Still, in their haste, the group lost the top of the monolith, which was already loose from numerous visitors attempting to pry it off. “We want whoever has the missing piece to return it,” said Lewis, who stored the monolith in pieces at a friend’s house and in another undisclosed locationÌęuntil he was forced to return it to the BLM.

On Sunday, Lewis posted a of the monolith, gleaming in the sunlight of what looks to be a backyard, followed with a lengthy post about the reasons they removed itÌęand the ways in which a monolith is different from the slacklines, climbing bolts, and space nets that he and his friends regularly erect in the desert. (Among other things, the crew has been accused of taking a hypocritical stance on human impacts to the desert.)Ìę“Everything has its place,” the post read. “This is what conservation is about. It was a tragedy to remove the Utah Monolith—as it was beautiful; and we do apologize.”Ìę

The backlash surroundingÌęthe monolith’s removal has been relentless. The men received death threats and calls to the businesses where they each worked. “I had a guy call me and just breathe into the phone,” said Lewis. “People saying they were going to hunt us down,Ìęthey were going to end us.”Ìę

Still, the men stood by their convictions, citing Leave No Trace principles. “Andy put it good earlier,” said Christensen. “We’re all basically adventurists and public-land users in this area and through that have gained a knowledge of the misuse and the ignorance and some of the problems that we’re facing.”Ìę

Which brings us to the nonprofit. “I think we decided on a name,” said Christensen. “The Desert Canyon Collective.” Their goal now, and their hope for the future as a result of the monolith craziness, is to create awareness around ethical recreation on public lands, as well as to help other area nonprofits already dedicated toÌętheÌęissue. They also saidÌęthey’ll be conducting their own cleanups of desert trash, which Christensen and Manson described as anything from downedÌęairplanes and abandoned cars to broken glass along the river. “[These are] places we use regularly,” said Manson.Ìę

And what about the monolith? The investigation into its origins is still ongoing, and thus far, no one has legitimately come forward to claim it. (Though some are to on the cultural phenomenon.)ÌęBut once that concludes, the men who stole it hope that the whole experience will generate a conversation around designated places for art on public landsÌęand, more broadly, around shared use and good behavior in these places. Christensen referred to a gentlemen’s agreement to place it in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah’s Red Butte Garden. “We took it out because we wanted to have the voice and the power to gift people the perspective that they need,” said Lewis. Christensen noddedÌęand added, “We didn’t destroy the art. We kind of changed its direction and made it a bigger thing that surrounds environmental awareness and ethical land recreation.”Ìę

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At this point, it’s old news: thriving on a meatless diet can be done. Ultra-­endurance athletes like Scott Jurek and have ­forsaken animal protein with tremendous results.Ìę wants to help the rest of us do the same. “Our aim is to create simple, filling meals to fuel workouts and life,” says vegan health coach Stepfanie ­Romine, who cowrote the book with ultramarathoner Matt Frazier. “It’s a combination of Matt’s favorites and recipes I cook with my husband, who often bikes 200 miles a week and needs 3,500 calories a day.” Hitting numbers like that without calorie-dense meat is oneÌęof the challenges they hopedÌęto address. Ìę

The result is an uncomplicated guide to fueling a team of cyclists or a family of four. Dishes range from quick pre- and post-workout smoothies to slow-cooked meals, and the book includes guides to broad topics like oil-free cooking and vegan protein. Romine’s favorite recipe isÌęthe Calorie Bomb CookiesÌę(24 of them deliver ­nearly 6,000 calories), which she developed in 2012 for her husband when he biked the .

Ca­lorie Bomb ­Cookies

Ingredients (Makes 24 cookies)

• 4 cups rolled oats
• 1Âœ cups whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• Âœ teaspoon salt
• 3 ripe bananas
• 1 cup raw cane sugar
• 1/3 cup coconut oil
• ÂŒ cup plus 2 tablespoons water
• 2 tablespoons chia seedsÌę
• 2 teaspoons vanillaÌęextract
• 1 cup dark chocolate chips
• 1 cup raw walnut pieces
• Âœ cup raw sunflowerseeds
• Âœ cup shredded coconut (optional)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pulse 2 cups of the oats in a food processor until finely ground, then transfer to a large bowl. Combine with the flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining oats. Blend the bananas, sugar, oil, water, chia seeds, and vanilla until smooth. Add to the oat mixture and stir until combined. Add the chocolate chips, walnuts, sunflower seeds, and coconut. With wet hands, form ÂŒ cup of dough into a ball for each cookieÌęand flatten to about one inch thick. Bake cookies for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Store in an airtight container and wrap in parchment paper for on-the-go eating.Ìę

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For decades, outdoor brands gave little attention to women’s products. That’s changing fast. We asked a field of expert female athletes to nominate the best new performance tools in a range of sports—starting with running.

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Janji Women’s Ombre LongsleeveÌęBase Layer ($54)

With a pattern inspired by the Masai, this base layer conjures the spirit of the world’s most celebrated marathoners. The soft polyester-rayon weave is comfortable next to skin.

Stance Painted Low Socks ($15)

When the last thing you want to do is train, crazy-bright socks can make all the difference—especially when they’re anatomically designed and made of a wicking polyester-nylon blend.

Sunday Afternoons Northwest Trucker Hat ($28)

With a just-right brim—wide enough for adequate sun coverage, thin but never floppy—and vented mesh back, this lid fits the bill as a runner’s best friend.Ìę

Rabbit Hopper Shorts ($52)Ìę

I love the attention to detail in Rabbit’s well-curated apparel line. The slim-fitting Hoppers are perfect for hot days when you want as little fabric on skin as possible.Ìę

Cotopaxi VelozÌęHydration Belt ($35)

This svelte accessory has pockets for the included soft flask, a phone, and your keys. A compartment for the strap allows for belt tightening without that escaped-dog-on-a-leash look.

Brooks Sure Shot Racer Sports Bra ($38)

Only one in a hundred sports bras ever makes it past the first date. This lower­impact model is my match for life. The supportive bottom band and compression holds everything in place on long days.

SuuntoÌęSpartan Ultra All Black Titanium Watch ($799)

Plenty of fitness wear­ables boast GPS these days, but the Spartan Ultra stands out for its built-in barometer and water resistance down to 300 feet. The watch syncs with the Suunto Moves­count app, allowing you to see how much you’ve climbed or how many miles you’ve run, and the included chest-strap heart-rate monitor lets you dial in your training.

Saucony Type A8 Shoes ($100)

The A8 was made to go fast on roads, but I also dig it for mellower trails. It’s a light and responsive shoe that’s served me well on every­thing from short bursts to 50Ks.

The North Face Flight Series Warp CaprisÌę($120)

Strategically engineered ventilation zones make these capris ideal for runs that start cold but warm up as soon as you’re rolling. I like them just as much for the flattering fit.Ìę

Salomon S-Lab Hybrid Jacket ($250)

The S-Lab Hybrid excels in rough weather, achieving the tricky balance of keeping the elements out and letting sweaty, damp air escape. The body-mapped fit leaves no extra fabric to distract or chafe—whether I’m going long or sprinting an uphill mile.

The Expert: Crushing long­ distance trail races is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű correspondentÌęMeaghenÌęBrown’s favorite pastime.

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Among the world’s most celebrated long-distance footraces, the is known for being particularly brutal.

The 106-mile course through the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps climbs more than 33,000 feet as it loops around its namesake peak. The weather can be savage—heavy rain, frigid nights, hot and humid days. In August 2013, Rory Bosio took off from the start line without grand expectations, having never won a major event. She trailed well behind the leaders for the first six hours. But as the race stretched into the evening and most competitors slowed, ­Bosio held her pace. When the lanky, brown-haired American runner in pink shoes and a blue running skirt crossed the finish line in 22 hoursÌę37 minutes, she’d Bosio took seventh place overall, becoming the first woman to crack the top ten at the event and beating dozens of elite pro men.

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It wasn’t the first time a woman broke through at a major endurance competition. In the early aughts, . Back then her victories were considered anomalous, especially since the next fastest women were more than seven hours behind her. ­Bosio’s Mont Blanc race, however, is just one of a recent string of noteworthy female performances. A year earlier, obstacle racer Amelia Boone took second overall at the World’s Toughest Mudder, a 24-hour championship race during which she covered 90 miles. She finished a full ten miles ahead of the third-place finisher, also a woman.

Last summer, Lael Wilcox became the first woman to win the Trans Am, a 4,300-mile unsupported cycling sufferfest from Oregon to Virginia. She completed the route in just over 18 days after passing Greek rider Steffen Streich in the middle of the final night. (When she caught him, Streich proposed that they ride together to the finish. Her response: “No way, it’s a race.”) In in ultramarathons across the country, with 42-year-old race in Texas.

To be clear, female victories in mixed-gender events remain rare. In the marathon, top women ­finishers are about 15 minutes slower than the top men. But the growing number of standout performances by women in ultra-distance events has athletes, coaches, and researchers believing that ­women may still be far from achieving their full ­potential as athletes. The sentiment is buoyed by the simple fact that women have been compet­ing in ­endurance sports in large numbers for a ­rel­atively short amount of time. The first woman wasn’t allowed in the Boston Marathon until 1971, seventy-four years after the event was born. Scientific understanding of women athletes is also sorely lacking. Until Bill Clinton signed the , which required most federally funded research to include them, women were excluded from the majority of studies of exercise and biomedicine. Even now there are only a handful of researchers focusing on female athletic performance.

The consensus among scientists is that men have several key over women that make their edge at the elite level insurmountable in all but a few highly specialized sports. But they also concede that we’re only beginning to understand what women endurance athletes are capable of. A growing pattern of race results suggests that the longer and more arduous the event, the better the chances women have of beating men.

In 1992, UCLA exercise physiologists like the marathon. Twenty years after the enactment of , which barred the exclusion of women from educational programs or activities at schools receiving federal funding, female participation in sports was booming and records were being constantly broken. According to Whipp and Ward, that they were on a clear trajectory to surpass them.

The researchers were wrong, and the study was criticized as overly simplistic—­statistical modeling taken to an extreme. But the work called attention to the phenomenal advances of female athletes over the previous two decades. Most of the progress was the . Fewer than 300,000 girls played high school sports before 1972; . In 1972, ; in 2016, more than 12,000 women finished.

Performance improvements have been equally dramatic. n timeÌęof 2:15:25, set at the 2003 LondonÌęMarathon, is 30 minutes faster than the women’s record from the mid-1970s. (The men’s time dropped by only five minutes over the same ­period.) ­Women triathletes cut two and a half hours from the fastest ­female time in 1980, while men have shortened theirs by an hour and aÌęhalf. In professional tennis, the top-ranked women now routinely hit ­faster serves during matches than some of the men do. The top three ­women golfers on the LPGA tour outdriveÌęlower-ranked pro men.

Across many sports, though, the closing of the gender gap has largely stalled out, with the in cycling, swimming, speed skating, rowing, kayaking, and the marathon. . Over the past decade, the rising popularity of especially punishing mixed-gender contests like 100-mile-plus runs, cross-country-cycling events, and grueling obstacle courses have given women the opportunity to compete directly alongside men, with intriguing results. According to Ultrarunning magazine, between 2000 and 2016, the number of ultramarathon finishers jumped from about 13,000 to more than 88,000, with women increasing from less than a quarter of finishers to more than a third. At the infamous , a woman has been among the top ten at eight of the past nine events, with two women breaking the top ten in both 2015 and 2016. Women have also begun to crack the top 20 at the prestigious , with Ìęand doing the same the year before.

Researchers, meanwhile, suggest that women are going to con­tinue to improve at a much faster rate than men. According to Sandra Hunter, a professor of exercise science at Milwaukee’s Marquette University who has spent the past 20 years with an emphasis on athletes, the difference in current participation rates accounts for roughly 34 percent of the gap between men’s and women’s race times.

Female athletes are well aware of this kind of data. “Women’s fields are growing fast, and records are falling,” says Rebecca Rusch, 43, a seven-time world-champion mountain biker who has com­peted against men in endurance events for 25 years. “Which just means we haven’t got anywhere close to maxing out our genetic ­capabilities yet.”

In endurance sports, five phys­iological factors play a big role in determining athletic ­potential. Men have definitive advantages in three of them—heart size, lean muscle mass, and VO2 max (the body’s ability to ­deliver oxygen to muscles). But then there are those other two, central drive and movement economy. The former is the rate at which theÌęnervous system sends signals to muscles and is critical to maintaining an ­intense effort over time. The latter is how efficiently the body moves, which is dictated by coordination and joint stability. Both central drive and movement economy can be improved through training, and along with a host of smaller variables, they may have an equalizing effect on male and female athletic potential, especially in endurance sports.

A 2012 study by researchers at England’s Canterbury Christ Church University found that improvements in propelling effi­ciency of swimmers can account for sizable differences in performance
between athletes who have a similar VO2 max. Earlier work has shown that athletes with lower VO2-max scores can perform at the same speed and intensity of their more genetically gifted rivals in a range of activities by developing superior movement economy.

“Proper form counts way more than many athletes realize,” says Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner, a renowned expert on health and human performance. “Depending on the sport, you can often overcome having a smaller engine if you’re a better driver.”

, where small inefficiencies add up over thousands of strokes. So it’s not surprising that, as Swiss sports scientist Beat Knechtle has pointed out in several published papers, worldwide: the , off Southern California, and New York’s . (Men are faster in the third, across the English Channel.) Similarly, there’s no difference between the genders in sport climbing, a discipline that requires precise movements. In 2012, 11-year-old Ashima Shiraishi became the youngest person, male or female, to complete a 5.14c route.

“While men are stronger, technical climbing involves a lot more than pure strength,” says 24-year-old Sasha DiGiulian, the 2011 ­female sport-climbing world champion. “There’s a lot of technique and endurance. Women can outperform or at least match men.”

Another significant factor is , an exercise-induced reduction in performance. In a review of ­existing studies published last year in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Hunter wrote that the available data, though limited, indicates that women are more resistant to muscle ­fatigue than men during long efforts. In 2004, Hunter conducted a study that measured the fatigability of subjects completing an isometric arm contraction. Women were able to perform a task until failure ­almost three times longer than men, 23.5 minutes ­versus 8.5. Hunter says this is due ­largely to two factors. The first is the ­difference in muscle properties between the ­sexes—women have a greater number of fatigue-­resistant fibers, which are utilized during sustained low-­intensity exercise, while men have faster-­contracting fibers, which are better for powerful short movements. The second factor is blood flow: men have larger muscles that demand more blood, so their hearts have to work harder.

“Women have smaller muscles, but their muscles don’t tire as quickly,” says Hunter. If a man and a woman put the same amount of effort into a long, slow physical task—one that mostly involves muscle endurance or is more skill based—the woman will take longer to fatigue, she adds. Other research indicates that women are faster to recover from physical exertion than men, regardless of the intensity of the effort.

Female endurance athletes also have a metabolic edge, by , when performing moderate-­intensity aerobic exercise. This is a distinct advantage in longer events, because fat is a slower-burning fuel than carbohydrates. While men must consume calories hourly, if not more frequently—an action that itself requires more energy than simply metabolizing available fat—­women can keep trucking along.

Then there’s the mental game. Here women come out ahead in the key art of race pacing, a trainable skill that men seem to have a harder time refining. According to Danish statistician Jens Jakob Ander­sen’s massive marathon study, over the course of a race than males. “Men may be more likely to adopt a ‘risky’ pace where an individual begins the race with a fast early pace (relative to their ability), and this increases their likelihood of slowing later,” Anderson wrote in his analysis. Put another way, the boys blow up.

Rebecca Rusch has seen this play out many times on endurance-­biking courses. “All these guys will go out hot, and hours later I catch them,” she says. “They always ask, ‘Why do you start so slowly?’ And I answer, ‘Why do you finish so slowly?’ ”

While women do appear to have some biological advantages in endurance, those advantages remain poorly understood because of a lack of research. Right now it’s about what we don’t know. How do differences between the sexes translate across a range of sports and conditions? There are lots of hypotheses but no conclusions.

Within endurance-sports communities, athletes readily swap baseless theories. Among the most common—usually put forth by men—is the idea that the demands of childbirth program ­women to tolerate the agony of ultra-distance events. There is no research to support this. To date, studies of pain tolerance have asked par­ticipants to rate pain levels in surveys. Across the board, men claim that they experience less pain than women. Scientists have speculated that the responses may not be meaningful, however, since not to express how much something hurts.

Similarly, while , researchers are still trying to under­stand this dynamic. Studies have shown that hormonal fluctuations can alter metabolism, meaning that women need to fuel differently at different times in their cycle. Other work indicates that there might be an optimal window for competing. In one study, South African scientists found that almost . ­According to exercise physiologist Stacy Sims, the . That advice undercuts a long-standing practice among some elite athletes of taking drugs before a competition to prevent their period from starting, either to avoid the hassle or because they ­believe menstruation makes them weaker. Sims says that a lack of understanding has hindered both women’s performance and scientific studies. In her 2016 book, Roar, the first endurance-training manual written for women, she notes that researchers often don’t acknowledge how sharp hormonal fluctuations can influence performance data. “I’m so tired of seeing women blame themselves for results that were based entirely on their cycles,” she says.

What is certain: every day more and more girls and women will play sports. They will continue to close the performance gap with men. And in those crazy-long races when, many hours in, everything hurts and the guys who went out way too fast are bonking, and the others are stopping every 30 minutes to suck down an energy gel, women will breeze past them on their way to the finish line.

That’s Rory Bosio’s plan, anyway. “When I placed in the top ten overall at Mont Blanc, I wasn’t thinking about my place or winning the race,” she says. “I honestly just wanted to finish. It helped me run with a lightness and focus that was all my own. That might be the difference between men and women—the ability to tune out the noise and just race.”

MeaghenÌęBrown has beaten hundreds of men since she started racing ultras in 2012.

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There’s no shame in coveting six-pack abs. But on its own, a washboard won’t help you lunge for difficult holds on your next climbing project or efficiently power up a steep hill on Nordic skis.

This is because core strength refers to more than just the abdominals. The core includes all the muscles between your arms and legs—essentially everything in your torso. Having a strong core means being able to execute motions—say, lifting a bag of dog food—more efficiently by taking stress off your arms and legs. And it’s nearly impossible to build the sort of complex, interconnected core strength useful in real-world situations simply by hammering crunches while watching Stranger Things. You need supplemental strength training.

Rob Shaul, founder of the in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, learned this the hard way. After a summer spent trail running and doing body-weight circuits, the personal strength and conditioning coach figured he was pretty strong. But when Shaul added weights back into his training, he found it difficult to lift anything heavy. He was strong in isolation but lacked the ability to make his core, arms, and legs work together.

This revelation led Shaul to buck his existing core training theory—a variation of planks, bridges, and back extensions—for a new one, something he calls “chassis integrity.” “My experience last summer caused me to question three things about core training,” Shaul says. “Why are we doing so many ground equipment–based core exercises when in reality we use our core while standing? Why aren’t we training extension and rotation movement patterns since real life is dominated by these movements? And how can we train both strength and endurance beyond the standard round-and-rep format?”

Chassis integrity incorporates four foundational movements commonly employed in real life: anti-rotation, rotation, total body, and extension. Each is designed to work a specific group of muscles that will translate to on-mountain movements. By working these motions into his training programs for skiers, climbers, ultrarunners, and even kayakers, Shaul’s primary goal is to develop sport-specific routines that will translate to functional strength beyond the gym.

Below is a brief rundown of the philosophy behind each movement. Mountain Tactical Institute’s for specific exercises that fall into one of these four categories—most of which you can do at home with little more than a sandbag and some kettlebells.

Anti-rotation

Anti-rotation refers to a twisting force that one must fight or stabilize against. Real-world examples include picking up something heavy using one hand, , or getting one of your ski poles caught in a tree while you’re still moving downhill. Specific exercise: .

Rotation

This involves moving a load across your body in a rotational manner. Unlike anti-rotation, you aren’t trying to stabilize against a force, but rather actively moving the load. A real-world example could be picking up a heavy pack and swinging it onto your back. Specific exercise: .

Extension

Extension refers to any movement or exercise that involves lower-back work—either dynamic movements, where you’re bending or twisting from the hip, or isometric movements, which refers to exercises that work the back without moving joints, such as a plank. A real-world example would be digging out a tent after a snowstorm. Specific exercises: (dynamic) or (isometric).

Total Body

Surprise: total body refers to any activity that uses more than one of the four movements. Real-world examples range from picking up an injured climbing partner to lifting a heavy tote full of gear from the ground onto the roof rack of an SUV. Specific exercise: .

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Earlier this month, Nike unveiled its Breaking2 project,Ìęa moonshot-style collaboration of athletes, scientists, and designers with the goal of trying to break the two-hour marathon barrier next year. In their announcement, the company was light on details in terms of how they planned to pull this history-making run off, but claimed that they will “debut a system of groundbreaking innovation that has the potential to elevate every runner.”

Last month, however, the Oregon-based company filed a for a running shoe that features a in theÌęsole. Theoretically, it would improve a runner's energy return. Though Nike could not be reached for comment, that this is partly how they plan to break the two-hour barrier.Ìę

Though significant running records like the four-minute mile or the ten-second 100m make history, the process of actually breaking them is largely mundane. Subtle variations in course profiles, weather, the specific athletes, and the shoes they’re wearing all play a crucial if fractional role in the story that ends up making headlines. It’s for this reason that many shoe manufacturers are working so diligently to produce the world’s fastest shoe.Ìę

But of course any new racing shoe technology—and particularly one with such an ambitious end goal—will face heavy scrutiny, no matter how small a benefit it ends up giving runners. “Up to now, any shoe technology that made a potentially large impact on running performance has been banned,” says Steve Magness, who writes about the sport on his website . “Even the highly touted Adidas Boost technology only gives about a one percent improvement in running economy, which translates to only fractions of a percentage improvement in actual performance. If Nike or any company develops technology that has a drastic impact on performance, it’s likely to be illegal or at the very least, skirting the bounds of the rules.”

According to Rule 143 of the IAAF Competition Rules, shoes “must not be constructed so as to give an athlete any unfair additional assistance, including by the incorporation of any technology which will give the wearer any unfair advantage.” The IAAF approves all shoes used for competition.Ìę

Puma’s Sacramento brush spike is a good example of a shoe which gave its runner an unfair advantage. In the early '60s, after the proliferation of softÌętartan tracks, runners began using spiked shoes, and in 1968 Puma built a spike with 68 needles on the sole based on the idea that it would grip better than the traditional six-nail version. Runners sporting the new brush spike immediately started breaking records. The shoe was subsequently banned by the IAAF prior to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the records were negated, and a rule was created that banned running shoes with more than six spikes.Ìę

Athletic Propulsion Labs (APL)—a specialty shoe company founded by Ryan and Adam Goldston—tried something similar in 2015 with the release of a spring loaded running shoe, the Windchill, which reportedly rebounded more quickly than traditional shoes and shaved seconds off the wearer’s times. The Windchill was never banned, likely because it was never used to win a major competition, but APL’s spring-loaded basketball shoe, dubbed the Concept, was banned by the NBA for providing “undue competitive advantage.”Ìę

Michael Joyner, a physician, researcher, and one of the world’s leading experts on human performance and exercise physiology, also speculates that a spring-loaded shoe would probably be banned in competition. But the tricky thing in Nike’s case is that their Breaking2 project is not a formal competition—it is not under the purview of a governing body. Should Nike’s runners break the two-hour marathon record sporting the company's new spring plate-loaded shoe, there will be controversy, but there will be no authority to step in and deem the run illegal.

However, Magnuss, for his part, is doubtful that any shoe technology will actually make that big of a difference when it comes to breaking two hours in the marathon. “It will be a small contributing factor,” he says. “Three minutes in a marathon at that level will take much more than shoes. At this point in time, it will take a downhill course, lots of pacers, and an inhuman performance. In other words, a lot of artificial advantages that circumvent the rules of the sport.”

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Ratio Eight ­Coffeemaker ($595)

Early-morning training is a lot easier with a good cup of joe. A simple stovetop Bialetti works fine. But connoisseurs will appreciate how spirals the water evenly for uniform extraction and smoother taste.Ìę

Hasami ­Porcelain Plates ($16)

Research suggests that smaller, dark-colored plates and bowls cause you to eat less because they alter your perception of relative size. (It’s called the .) Hasami’s keeps meal portions in check beautifully.Ìę

Ash BlaedsÌęKnife ($175)

ŽĄČőłó’s are constructed of long-lasting high-carbon steel.

HawkinsÌęNew York Simple ­Storage ­Containers ($35)

Studies show that no matter what you eat, cooking it yourself makes it healthier. With these , it’s easy to keep dry goods like beans, rice, and pasta on hand, so you’ll be less inclined to order in. And unlike plastic, glass won’t leach chemicals.

Vitamix ­Professional ­Series 300 ­Blender ($559)

Any cheap blender can make a smoothie. But with the , you can craft nut butters and whip up hot soups that would mangle or melt lesser machines.

All-Clad 4-Quart Slow Cooker ($150)

No time to cook? Throw everything in before a long ski tour and dinner will be ready when you get back.

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