On January 2, Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin on the field. After nine minutes of CPR, medical personnel revived his heartbeat and rushed him to a hospital where he remains in critical condition.

Some that he suffered something called commotio cordis, where a direct blow to the chest causes the heart to go into a fatal rhythm. A typical commotio cordis arrest involves a small high-velocity object striking the chest—usually a baseball, softball,Ìęor lacrosse ball. Athletes in outdoor sports, who are less likely to encounter flying baseballs, face a much lower risk of commotio cordis, which is an extremely rare occurrence in any population. But Hamlin’s episode follows a number of high-profile cardiac arrests in athletes, including soccer star Christian Eriksen in 2021, who survived and later played in the 2022 World Cup, as well as the fatal arrests of , last year, and marathon runner Ryan Shay, in 2007. All of which have renewed discussion about the risks sports pose to an athlete’s heart.

What Causes Sudden Cardiac Arrest in Athletes?

Overwhelmingly, exercise is good for cardiovascular health. It lowers the chance that you’ll develop high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, all of which can lead to blood-vessel damage, the main cause of fatal heart attacks. And exercise keeps the heart muscle itself strong. But there’s a well-known paradox about exercise and the heart: any time your heart is stressed, your risk of a cardiac event goes up a little. In other words, if you have an underlying cardiac issue, going for a run or playing sports might provoke a problem, even if it makes you healthier in the long run.

For athletes in endurance sports, there are four buckets of cardiac issues to watch out for: electrical disorders like arrhythmias, heart muscle disorders like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, genetic coronary artery disorders, and obstructive coronary artery problems like arteriosclerosis. Athletes under 35 are more likely to have problems from the first three buckets, while athletes older than 35 are at risk from the fourth bucket. They’re also at a much higher risk overall.

Does Exercise Cause Heart Problems?

This is an area of controversy among sports cardiologists, some of whom argue that years of intense aerobic exercise can raise this risk of cardiac issues, most notably a problem called atrial fibrillation, where the upper chamber of the heart beats ineffectively. Some research also suggests that lifelong endurance athletes have higher amounts of scar tissue in the heart, as well as stiffer coronary arteries. Whether these findings translate to higher risk of death is uncertain.

The relationship between exercise amount and cardiac problems appears to fall along a U or J shaped curve, where people who don’t exercise have a higher risk of issues, people who exercise moderately have low risk, and people who exercise all the time might have a slightly elevated risk compared to the moderate group. But “it’s not fair to say that there’s a hard stop for exercise dose or intensity, where the increased risk outweighs the benefits,” says Dr. Tamanna Singh, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Sports Cardiology Center.

What to Look For

Athletes often know their bodies well, Singh says, and should be attuned to a sudden drop off in performance. The classic example is of a middle-aged man breathing hard while walking upstairs, but for athletes accustomed to running six-minute miles, the change might be more subtle. Other signs to watch for are erratic heartbeats, dizziness or fainting, and of course chest pain. Some well-intentioned doctors, even cardiologists, may disregard cardiac symptoms in young, healthy athletes, but Singh prefers that patients err on the side of caution.

The Wild Card: COVID

In the aftermath of a COVID infection, a small number of people—probably around 0.6 percent—experience an inflammation of the heart muscle called myocarditis, which can lead to sudden cardiac arrest. If you’ve had COVID and are experiencing any symptoms, it would be wise to see a doctor. But Singh is not worried about heart problems associated with COVIDÌęvaccines. It is “not true,” that vaccines raise the risk of cardiac arrest, she says, despite research showing that some young men experience myocarditis after vaccination. The incidence of myocarditis following infection is much higher, and, she says, “the benefit of vaccination far outweighs the risk.”

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In 2020, lots of things have had to adapt, including , the beloved annual climbing film tour. With in-theater movie watching not an option this year, its 15th installment will stream for 72 hours this weekend starting tonight at 9 P.M. Eastern Time ().

Reel Rock has always showcased hard, cutting-edge climbing—think , or —and that’s still the case this time around, but this year’s lineup puts a particular focus on climbers with more diverse backgrounds than the tour’s films have featured in the past. The most traditional of the films is Action Direct, about French climber MĂ©lissa Le Nevé’s first female ascent of the late Wolfgang GĂŒllich’s famous 9a/5.14.d, in Germany’s Frankenjura. Next, Deep RootsÌętells the story of California climber Lonnie Kauk’s second ascent of Magic Line, a 5.14c trad route established in Yosemite by his father Ron in 1996. First Ascent/Last Ascent is about—notice another trend here?—several trad first ascents, this time by British climbers Madeleine Cope and Hazel Findlay in remote Mongolia. Finally, Black Ice, the most interesting film from this year’s tour, follows a group of Black climbers from Memphis, Tennessee, on a trip they take to Montana to go ice climbing and winter camping.

That’s a lineup that, for only the second time in the tour’s history, does not include any big names like , Adam Ondra, , or Dean Potter. (Technically, Conrad Anker makes an appearance in one.)

The first three films are standard fare: pro climbers on quests to climb the unclimbable. For the most part they’re adequate or, in the case of First Ascent/Last Ascent, which focuses on Findlay and Cope’s charming friendship, even a bit better. But Black Ice is something entirely different.

The climbers in Black Ice are connected through Memphis Rox, a climbing gym in a tough part of south Memphis with no other gyms or recreational facilities to speak of. Memphis Rox is a non-profit with admission on a sliding scale and an orientation toward community. It’s been the subject of some , largely for introducing climbing to a community of Black people who might not otherwise get to climb.

While the setup of the film felt a bit cringeworthy, it becomes much more compelling once it begins to tell the story of a climber named S’Lacio, a 20-year-old who is recovering from a hard childhood and near-fatal gunshot wounds suffered several years earlier. The North Face-sponsored trip to Montana is S’Lacio’s first time leaving Memphis, his first time on an airplane, his first time camping, and, it seems, his first break from the trauma and stress of his life. He ends up having a profound experience of connection and perspective, and the film is a great example of how climbing can be vital, and why it is so important that more people get to do it.

Reel Rock has included stories about people other than climbing’s larger-than-life white men in the past, but this year’s lineup feels deliberate. While not always quite hitting the mark, the films remind us that a more diverse climbing culture isn’t just important, it’s also more surprising and interesting than the status quo.

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In October 2018, just before his 52nd birthday, endurance athlete and podcast host Rich Roll offered up the short version of his life story on :

I didn’t reach my athletic peak until I was 43.
I didn’t write my first book until I was 44.
I didn’t start my podcast until I was 45.
At 30, I thought my life was over.
At 52 I know it’s just beginning.
Keep running. Never give up. And watch your kite soar.
He ended with two emojis: a hand giving a peace sign and a plant. (Roll is vegan.)

If this kind of self-help poetry makes you squirm, you’re probably not among the rabid fans of the , which is one of the most popular interview shows in the world, with some 68 million downloads and counting. In an era of high-paced everything and outsize personalities, his appeal is his patience and humble inquisitiveness. His guests range from elite athletes (climber Alex Honnold, Olympic triathlete Gwen Jorgensen) to meditation acolytes (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, comedian Russell Brand) to spiritual leaders (yogi , pastor ). With everyone, Roll is “unrushed and caring,” says entre­preneur and life coach , who has been on the show twice. “He’s like the endurance-athlete version of Oprah.”

Roll’s approach grew out of the personal journey he outlined in that tweet. He was a talented swimmer at Stanford but developed an alcohol problem that later ended up destroying his first marriage—during the honeymoon—and nearly derailed his career as an entertainment lawyer. He sobered up after a stint in rehab, then became a workaholic, spending the next decade toiling toward burnout. At age 40, realizing that he was miserable and dangerously unhealthy, he went vegan and started endurance training. Two years later, he finished 11th at the , an infamous three-day swim-bike-run sufferfest in Hawaii. He wrote a book about his transformation, 2012’s , quit his job, and started recording conversations for a podcast. Back then nobody listened to him. Now lots of people do: mostly because nobody does a better job of helping us understand how we can improve our lives by being more patient and less, well, maxed out.

I spoke with Roll inside his recording studio at his home in Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains, where he lives with his wife, Julie Piatt (a vegan-cookbook author and host of her own podcast), and the youngest two of their four children.

“What happens in the secret-society rooms of addiction recovery stays there. What I can say is that you become a skilled listener. You develop a huge capacity for empathy. And you learn how to be vulnerable. It’s not a mistake that a lot of successful podcast hosts are in recovery.”

“I don’t think of myself as a member of the wellness industry. I’m just following my curiosity.”

“When I got sober, I was intent upon becoming a productive member of society. I repaired my relationships with family and friends. I became a successful corporate lawyer. I drove a sports car and lived in a very nice house. From the outside, it all looked really groovy. But on the inside, I was coming to terms with the fact that I was chasing somebody else’s life.”

“I’m constantly dispelling this myth that I’m some crazy gifted athlete. In my first half-Ironman, I barfed during the swim. By the time I got off my bike, my legs were so cramped up that I ran 100 meters and just stopped. It was a DNF. My beginnings in triathlon were very humble—but I loved it.”

“I had a bad bike crash in the spring of 2009 and ended up in the ER. It really made me question what I was doing. I’m going to crack my head wide open for what? I was laying there and Julie asked me, ‘If this was the end, do you regret it?’ I said, ‘No, this is what I want to do.’ Somehow, my compass was being calibrated.”

“A lot of people read self-help books and think that they’re changing their lives, but they’re not implementing any of the advice. Mood follows action. It’s not how you feel. It’s not the ideas that you have. It all boils down to: What are you doing to improve your life?”

“Having everything go your way isn’t a learning experience. My second Ultraman was the perfect race for me. After leading by ten minutes on the first day, I crashed my bike, ending any chance at the podium and shattering my ego. But I still had to pick it up and finish. I love everything about how that ended up.”

“After my book came out, we spent years being totally broke. We couldn’t pay our mortgage. We had our trash cans taken away because I couldn’t afford the garbage service. I was talking about spiritual principles and how you have to trust your heart, but my faith in those ideas was tested. At times I thought, I’m full of shit. These journeys can be gifts, but when you’re experiencing them, you feel like you’re going to die.”

“It’s all about emotional connection. The information is secondary. With each guest on my show, I need to figure out a way into this person so that I can understand them.”

“Left to my own devices, I would not be doing any of these things. I’m very rational. But my wife has shown me the limits of that operating system—and the expansiveness that comes when you believe in possibility, trust your intuition, and act on inspiration.”

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When Todd and Steve Jones, the cofounders of action-sports media companyÌęTeton Gravity Research,Ìęstarted making —a look at the storied skier’s last year on the World Cup circuit—they were imagining very different material from what they got. Their plan was to be behind the scenes as Vonn pursued one of the sport’s most coveted records: Swedish slalom racerÌęIngemar Stenmark’s 86 total World Cup wins. Vonn was only four wins away, and it seemedÌęwithin reach. But then, last November, she hurtÌęher knee before the season’s first downhill competition. She recovered—sort of—in time to ski five more races, but the filmmakers had to pivot.Ìę

The resulting film, which premieres on HBO on November 26, is arguably a lot more interesting. It follows Vonn as she fights to return to the World Cup and chase Stenmark’s record, or at least end her legendary career on a high note. A few elements of the documentary felt off to me—I’m not sure I would have used Billie Eilish in a film about a ski racer down on her luck, and Liev Schreiber’s stentorian voiceover appears at seemingly random intervals. But the Jones brothers and their team had close access during her recovery and comeback, and the result is the most comprehensive and intimate portrait of Vonn I’ve ever seen.

Near the beginning ofÌęThe Final Season, we watchÌęVonnÌęinjure herself on a practice run before the start of last year’s season, and follow her to the hospital where she reacts emotionallyÌęas she learns she’s suffered fractures around her knee that will require at least six weeks of recovery. Vonn has becomeÌęa world-class rehabber after enduring nearly a dozen surgeries, but this time, the knee doesn’t really cooperate, and she struggles in her first races back. In January, she travels to a World Cup downhill event in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, where she broke the women’s overall wins record in 2015. She finishes well behind the leader, Mikaela Shiffrin, who is on her way to supplanting Vonn as the greatest women’s ski racer ever. Another skierÌęgives Vonn a bouquet of flowers, and she weeps.Ìę

Why force another comeback on a body hanging together by worn cartilage and sutures? Vonn’s motivation is clear—she decided to become the best ski racer in history as a young girl, and she won’t give up so close to the World Cup wins record. The Jones brothers, treading carefully, also hint at another motive: earning the affection of her demanding and rigid father, Alan Kildow.Ìę

As a young racer, Vonn fell out with Kildow over her relationship with Thomas Vonn, her first husband, and they didn’t speak for six years in her 20s. After Lindsey and Thomas split in 2011, she and Kildow reconciled. Of the divorce, Kildow says, a little too smugly, “There was a certain predictability to it, a certain inevitability to it.” I think The Final SeasonÌęgets Lindsey’s relationship with her father, a former racer, right. It’s hard to missÌęhow, in what should be a friendly interview, they light and position KildowÌębehind an imposing, dark desk, wearing a Nordic ski sweater, with a severe look on his face. After we’re introduced to Kildow, we see clips of Lindsey skiing as a young girl, with her fatherÌębehind the camera complaining about her technique. It’s clear he’s been a looming presence in her life, even when they weren’t speaking.Ìę

After Cortina, Vonn, in pain, announces that she’s at the end of her rope, and will finish her career at the World Championships in Are, Sweden. Her coaches urge her to reconsider. “Everyone is trying to convince me to keep going, and it’s like, don’t you think I’m trying everything I can?” she asks her media manager. “It just shows you. It’s like any other athlete. You’re a commodity. When you extinguish your usefulness, they move on to the next one.” It comes as a relief to see that a few members of Vonn’s entourage actually seem to have her best interests at heart. Namely, her physical therapist Lindsey Winninger, who is always by her side looking out for her body, and her dog Lucy, an irresistible Spaniel rescue who travels with Vonn to Europe. “She has no idea what ski racing is,” Vonn says.Ìę

Before the world championships begin, Vonn has a barrelful of fluid drained from her knee, and gets a cortisone shotÌęto quell the inflammation in her damaged peroneal nerve. In super-G—a race also won by Shiffrin—Vonn suffers another brutal crash, blackening her eye but leaving her knee intact. At a press conference before the downhill, a reporter asks Vonn what it’s like to race knowing she probably won’t win. Vonn responds, icily, “Who said I won’t win?” Ìę

The downhill goes as well as could possibly be expected: Vonn is third, earning her an eighth World Championships medal. She retires with the 82 wins—Stenmark’s record survives. Afterwards, Alan Kildow says that it was never really about winning, but about leaving a mark on ski racing, which, well, seems a bit dubious.ÌęVonn, though, talking to reporters in the finish zone, looks content for the first time in the film. “I’ve accepted where I am in my life,” she says. “I’m happy and I’m excited for the future. I’ve cried enough tears, and now it’s time to enjoy it.”

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A great deal of ski racing, Shiffrin told me last summer at a photo studio in Los Angeles, is logistics management. How do you get thirty or forty pairs of skis, seven pairs of ski boots, plus speed suits and poles and helmets and goggles across Europe, during winter, on time, without losing anything? It’s a challenge that doubles or triples if you plan to race in all six of skiing’s disciplines, which almost nobody else does, because that’s crazy.Ìę

Two days before the World Championships began last February, in Are, Sweden, Shiffrin had raced and won a slalom in Maribor, Slovenia. Only a few skiers planned to race both the Maribor slalom and the super-G in Are, but Shiffrin was one of them, which meant she needed to charter a plane from Slovenia to Sweden to give herself a day of training before the World’s race began. She arrived on time, but her coaches and much of her equipment did not. That meant she and her mother, Eileen, had to go on a hunt to find basic pieces of equipment, including gloves and a pair of goggles that complied with International Ski Federation rules. She won the super-G, but other problems arose: although her coaches eventually arrived, their bags did not, and they needed to rent ski clothes. Then Shiffrin got sick.

Every professional skier races through a cold now and then, but this wasn’t just a cold. Shiffrin had a chest infection, and it was causing her coughing fits. It left an impression: I had arrived at the L.A. photo studio with a set of detailed questions, but she spent roughly 30 minutes telling me about the cough. It started with dizziness, a fever, and weakness. “Every time I moved, my heart rate would spike. I’d breathe harder, and then I’d have a coughing fit,” she said. She began to fear even limited movement. Before the slalom, lying on a bench in the ski lodge, she had a fit so violent that it knocked her over and left her convulsing on the floor underneath a table.Ìę

Shiffrin skied the first slalom run at 70 percent effort, she said, which put her 0.15 seconds out of first. In Are, slalom ­racers come off the chairlift, take a left turn, and ski down a cat track and under a bridge to the start gate. Before the second run, as Shiffrin approached the bridge with her physiotherapist and Eileen, another coughing fit started, this time with a twist: she coughed so hard she threw up. (Beginning around 2016, Shiffrin started puking before important races. But this vomiting, she told me, was different from vomiting caused by nerves.)

Eileen is Shiffrin’s mother but also her best friend, and it must be said, she’s not a softie. After the vomiting concluded, Eileen told Shiffrin that she didn’t need to race if she didn’t want to. That was a shock. Inside ski racing, a World Championship title is more coveted than an Olympic medal, and Eileen is often an unyielding coach. Her permission to sit out the event took some of the pressure off. Suddenly a chest infection didn’t seem like such a big deal, and Shiffrin decided to race. She won by more than half a second. It was a lesson in resilience.

A year earlier, before the Olympics in South Korea, Shiffrin made the mistake of mentioning that she might like to win five gold medals, which was never going to be an easy goal. There was the media, which is a given, and also Shiffrin’s nervy stomach, and a crappy stretch of weather that wrecked a carefully planned race schedule. She started out strong, winning the opening giant slalom. Then a series of wind-related delays arrived, she backed out of the downhill and the super-G, flubbed a gate in slalom, and missed the top spot in super combined (two races of slalom, and a run of super-G) by nine-tenths of a second. She won a gold and a silver—not bad—but didn’t come close to five medals. “The Olympics were a big success,” she said. “But there’s a little piece of my heart that aches for the slalom race and wonders what I could have done better.”

Then came Shiffrin’s 2018–19 season, during which she won 17 World Cup races (a record), stood atop the podium in four different events, captured World Championship gold medals in both the slalom and the super-G (also a first), and won both the overall title as well as discipline titles in slalom, giant slalom, and super-G. Sometimes my eyes glaze over when I see statistics like these: Shiffrin wins races at a pace so frantic it’s hard to comprehend.

One could be forgiven for assuming, as I did, that her historic season owed something to post-Olympic relaxation, which allowed Shiffrin to regain her flow after briefly misplacing it in South Korea. Well, that’s not what happened.Ìę

“The intensity, truthfully, has gone up,” her coach Jeff Lackie said. Global fame and the addition of super-G and downhill to her race schedule have added hassle and stress, and they make it tougher to do everything right. “Any time you’ve achieved the success that she’s achieved, the stakes go up, the expectations go up,” he said. “Suddenly, you’ve got Bode Miller weighing in on your career, someone you grew up idolizing. As focused and intense as she is, it’s hard not to be aware of that stuff. It’s not detrimental, but it’s something that needs to be managed.”

Shiffrin has given these pressures a characteristically positive frame. Bearing down and focusing is familiar, and therefore calming, she told me. “If I have to focus harder, that’s never been a problem for me,” she said. “Adding more events is a challenge—it’s like a puzzle.”

In person, Shiffrin is about what you’d expect if you follow her on Instagram: bubbly, charming, intelligent, self-aware. She answers questions not in complete sentences but complete paragraphs, and often in story form. She loves talking about ski racing.Ìę

You don’t have to look too closely to see that Shiffrin does a few things different than her World Cup competitors. No surprise there—since her debut in 2011, she’s won 60 World Cup races and two Olympic gold medals, and she’s well on her way to becoming the best ski racer in the history of the sport. You don’t come by that kind of dominance by doing things the way they’ve always been done.

To take one example: Shiffrin and Lackie are obsessive about logging data from her workouts. This might seem like a small thing—haven’t athletes always kept training logs?—except that in ski racing, it’s not. There are gym sessions to keep track of (a lot of them), plus days spent on the hill, plus data from the various recording devices Shiffrin uses, including a heart-rate monitor and a device that measures the velocity at which she performs squats. (Why is this important? Slalom racing requires that Shiffrin contract her leg muscles faster than during downhill races, and the velocity monitor allows her to tune her muscle coordination appropriately.) When we met in Los Angeles, she told me she had just begun using a gadget that she places underneath her mattress to measure sleep quality.Ìę

Putting together this mountain of data allows Shiffrin and Lackie to figure out exactly how hard to push, and when, and when to back off. Some of the data is subjective, some isn’t. Lackie analyzes the input with data-visualization software, but if Shiffrin forgets to log her workouts, even for a day, the whole thing becomes a bit worthless. The point is, even data management is a lot of work. Hardly anyone else is willing to do it, and it’s another place where Shiffrin is working harder than almost everyone she races against.Ìę

In the past 20 or so years, we’ve learned a lot about how to mold great athletes. Winning at the global level takes a lot more than just talent, especially if you’re in it for the long haul. As a result, there isn’t much low-hanging fruit left in professional sports—no room for the footloose rogues like Bode Miller. To be the best at ski racing means being the most physically talented, the most emotionally mature, and the hardest working in the gym. It means training with the best coaches, skiing on the fastest skis, and practicing turns from the moment you step off the chairlift to the moment you get back on it. Shiffrin is famous for her consistency: she never misses gates during training, never skips a day in the gym, never forgets her nap, never gets lazy about data logging, never loses a whole season to injury. Does this make Shiffrin an innovator? Well, nobody has ever won as much as quickly as she has, in as many different kinds of races. Winning that much is in fact quite innovative—it’s brand new.

Working with Shiffrin has made Lackie a better coach, he says. Because she’s so consistent in her approach, the moment she stops improving, he knows it’s because he made a mistake. The reason Shiffrin wins so often isn’t that she makes better turns than anyone else in ski racing, though of course she sometimes does—she certainly can. It’s that from turn to turn, she’s always pretty good. Other racers are mostly pretty good, and then, for a second or two, they’re slightly less good. That’s where Shiffrin gets the edge.

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Free Solo won an Oscar for best documentary. Jimmy Chin’s acceptance speech, before yielding the microphone to his wife and co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi: “Holy shit.”

Holy shit, indeed. Free Solo, the first true climbing film to reach a mainstream audience, chronicled Alex Honnold’s 2017 solo of El Capitan’s Freerider route. ItÌęhas already earned almost $19 million at the box office, and won best documentary at the British Association of Film and Television Arts several weeks ago. The film benefited from Honnold’s thoughtful charm on camera, and Chin and Vasarhelyi’s incredible access during Honnold’s years-long training process, including while he was thousands of feet off the ground without a rope.

But, like Man on Wire, which won an Oscar in 2007, Free Solo’s drama isn’t only physical. As Honnold told Lisa Chase last year, Chin and Vasarhelyi could have oversold the physical risks, but instead stayed close to Honnold’s emotional experience, particularly as his friends and girlfriend Sanni McCandless contended with the possibility of his death. Vasarhelyi saw that Honnold was sometimes unreachable, and her intuition made the film great. It has deservedly reached a wide audience.

Still, climbing hasn’t ever been a mainstream sport in the U.S., and it feels unexpected that the two mass-appeal climbs of the past decade are Honnold’s free solo and Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s 2015 first ascent of the El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, which was covered pitch by pitch in the New York Times. Most climbers are sport climbers or boulderers. A tiny percentage will ever get on El Cap, and many fewer will ever solo a hard route.

So for climbers, it may be strange days ahead. After the Dawn Wall, it was important for climbers to point out that Caldwell and Jorgeson had freed the world’s hardest ever multi-pitch sport route, but not the world’s hardest ever free solo orÌęthe world’s hardest-ever sport climb. Free Solo’s reception in the broader culture—where all kinds of rock climbing are seen as daredevilry—has been slightly different than in the climbing world, and Free Solo has already created some confusion about Honnold’s status. CNN called Honnold the “greatest rock climber of all time”; The Washington Post said Free Solo was a top-notch mountaineering movie. Honnold was a good person to make a documentary about, but it’s weird that nobody in the real world knows who Adam Ondra or Alex Puccio are. “The bottom line is, free soloing sucks,” Climbing magazine editor Matt Samet. People die too easily, and climbers know how many free soloists are gone. Climbing will keep covering Honnold because he’s newsworthy, Samet wrote, but not with much enthusiasm.

Anyone who has watched Free Solo has probably wondered how a climber as obsessive as Honnold has held up on a film tour that began in September. (Hopefully he has a good travel hangboard.) Last night, after an evening of pre-Oscars parties, Honnold texted that he was feeling good, and humbled that so many people had seen the film. But the ceremony was “the end of a very long ride,” he wrote. “We’ve been touring with the film nonstop for six months so one way or another it’s pretty great for it to finally wrap up.”

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On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley without a rope. The ascent, which involved astonishingly insecure and difficult climbing, is among the most impressive in the history of rock climbing. Working in secrecy, a film crew led by Jimmy Chin captured both the climb and two years of Honnold’s preparation. The resulting documentary, Free Solo, produced and directed by Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, opens nationally in theaters on Friday. It is a dramatic, gorgeous film, and its subtle presentation of Honnold and the emotional stakes of his climb make it one of the best outdoor-sports documentaries of all time.

Helpfully for Chin and Vasarhelyi, those emotional stakes could not have been higher. Nothing about free soloing is theatrical, and many of the climbers who paved the way for Honnold—Dean Potter, John Bachar, Dan Osman—are dead. In interviews, Honnold is careful to emphasize that free soloing is not something he does casually, but considers a “peak experience” that he prepares and plans for obsessively. He certainly is obsessive and it is true that he free solos very hard routes only occasionally. But those facts undersell soloing’s recklessness, and, as the film shows, it falsely reassures us that Honnold is in control. “People who know a little bit about climbing are like, ‘Oh, he’s totally safe,’” Tommy Caldwell, one of Honnold’s best friends, says in the film. “People who know exactly what he’s doing are freaked out.”

This is the uneasy tension at the heart of Free Solo: If Honnold dies, how responsible are the filmmakers, his friends, and his audience? That’s an age-old question in the outdoor industry, which works with extreme risk to sell jackets and magazines. Still, few of us would watch a film about a man playing an actual game of Russian roulette. What exactly is the difference between Russian roulette and free soloing?

By now, most of us already know the film’s main character. Honnold, 33, has put up a series of astonishing ropeless climbs on some of the sport’s most iconic multipitch routes, including solos of Moonlight Buttress in Zion National Park; El Sendero Luminoso, a 15-pitch climb in Mexico; and, , the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome in Yosemite. For many hard climbers, El Capitan’s 3,000-foot granite face, across the valley from Half Dome, is the holy grail; for a soloist, it’s more like a white whale.

Honnold, though, isn’t a wild man. On screen he is irreverent and thoughtful, a picky eater with strong fingers who has lived in a van for almost a decade. Early in the film, answering questions at his old high school in California, a kid asks Honnold how much money he has. “I’ve got about $40 in my wallet,” he jokes. “I mean, I have a lot of money. Probably as much as a successful dentist.”

But Free Solo suggests that there is another dimension to Honnold. His late father may have struggled with something like Asperger’s syndrome, and as a kid, Honnold started soloing because he was too embarrassed to ask for a belay. As an adult, he seems consumed with perfection.

As we watch Honnold learn the route, however, we see where his cracks are. He struggles with both lacerating self-doubt and injuries, including a busted ankle from a roped fall low on Freerider’s tricky slab section. Later on, during his first attempt to solo Freerider, he bails in the same section, and a cameraman helps lower him down. On the ground, the filmmakers capture Honnold in conversation with Peter Croft, a legendary free soloist who is now in his sixties. “You made a perfect choice,” Croft says, congratulating Honnold for valuing his life over the climb. “I just need it to end,” Honnold replies, looking distraught. For a moment, it sounds like an admission—the project has become a burden. But Honnold finishes his thought: “The circus,” he says. The problem isn’t El Cap, it’s other people.

“The circus” is perhaps the bigger challenge, and his often tense relationships with the people around him become the emotional core of the film. For two years, Honnold swore Chin and his crew to secrecy to keep pressure down. But the small group who know about his plans—Chin, Caldwell, and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless—still seem to oppress him. McCandless’s emotions, in particular, are a wild card: she is as transparent as Honnold is reserved, and seemingly spends half the film in tears or on the verge of them. She can’t ask him to stop soloing, but she doesn’t want him to die. “Everyone I’ve ever dated has told me that I’m a sociopath, basically,” Honnold says. Occasionally it’s hard to disagree.

Airtime is also given Honnold's interactions with Chin and his crew, who appear throughout Free Solo. Chin, of course, has already made a feature-length climbing documentary, Meru, with himself at the center of the action, and initially it wasn’t clear he needed to be in this one, too. But his presence poses an interesting question: Are the filmmakers themselves putting Honnold at risk? Chin means it literally—he worries that a camera operator could distract Honnold and send him to his death—and philosophically: Would Honnold want to solo Freerider if nobody knew he was up there?

In Free Solo’s expertly filmed white-knuckle climax, Honnold asks McCandless to leave Yosemite Valley, then begins the climb. As he makes his way through a delicate, technical sequence 2,000 feet off the ground, someone aims a camera at Mikey Schaefer, a pro climber and member of Chin’s crew, who can’t bring himself to look through the viewfinder on his own camera. Watching this moment, it seemed clear to me that the tension and grief felt by everyone around Honnold is probably a proxy for his own inner turmoil. If you want to know what it’s like to be Alex Honnold, watch the people around him wincing and weeping as he climbs out of view.

Should the rest of us watch him climb? In the months since I first watched Free Solo, I haven’t settled on a satisfying answer. Honnold sometimes strikes me as a tragic figure, wrapped so tight that he can’t acknowledge how much pain he causes those who care about him. “For Sanni, the point of life is happiness,” he says. “For me, it’s performance.” His priorities are all wrong.

Still, I’m not sure Honnold’s career would actually look much different if he’d never gained an audience. Talking with Croft, Honnold muses about the sense of calm and freedom that he feels high on the wall. He’s chasing a weird, deadly form of meditation, but one that is probably familiar (in a diminished form) to any climber who has stuck a sketchy move when they needed to, or any skier who has threaded the needle in a high-consequence couloir. For many of us, learning to do something hard and scary when the stakes are high is essential to being alive. Honnold has carried that idea to its extreme and beautiful limit. “I think when he’s free soloing he feels the most alive, the most everything,” Honnold’s mother, Dierdre Wolownick, says. “How could you even think about taking that away from somebody?”

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Jim Walmsley is known for two races, the ÌęinÌę2016 and 2017. In 2016, Walmsley attacked from the gun, at times running as much as 45 minutes under Timothy Olson’s course-record pace. Jenny Simpson, the world champion 1,500-meter runner, used to train with Walmsley in Colorado Springs, and she tweeted updates on his progress, keying in a broader section of the competitive running world. It was a good story: an almost completely unknown runner was dismantling the course record of the country’s most famous ultra. Western States begins at altitude near the Squaw Valley ski area, in eastern California, then drops gradually westward to Auburn, outside Sacramento.ÌęBy late afternoon, Walmsley was on pace to break Olson’s 14:46 record, but at mile 92Ìęhe made a wrong left turn and ran two miles off course. Discouraged and exhausted, he reversed direction at a walk and finished in 20th place. Still, the race was a sensation. Scott Jurek, who has won the race seven times, called to offer a mix of condolence and congratulation, and Hoka signed him to a sponsorship that allowed him to quit his job at a bike shop in Flagstaff, Arizona.

In 2017, Walmsley intended to prove that his race the year before had not been foolish. Myke Hermsmeyer, Walmsley’s friend and unofficial documentarian, produced an emotional short film about the 2016 race, and a group of his fans and friends came to watch and crew; many wore T-shirts that read STOP JIM, an homage to the STOP PRE T-shirts that Steve Prefontaine fans wore in the 1970s.ÌęOne had been edited to read, in smaller letters, FROM GETTING LOST. In 2016, Walmsley had covered a steepÌęearly section of course fast, and in 2017 he went out even harder even thoughÌęparts were snowed in. Shortly after the start, Ryan Sandes, a top South African racer, asked if Walmsley planned to attack the course record again. Walmsley said yes, and Sandes let him go. By midafternoon, however, temperatures were in the high nineties, and at mile 52 Walmsley’s stomach began to give out. He vomited profusely while leaving the Foresthill aid station at mile 62, and dropped out at mile 78. Sandes won in 16:19.

On June 23, Walmsley will race Western States for a third time. Unlike in either of his previous attempts, he is now both well-known and seasoned, with course records at half a dozen of the country’s top ultras, including the Lake Sonoma 50 Mile, where he broke his own record by nine minutes in April. At distances below 100 miles, he is the best ultrarunner in the country. Ultrarunning is a sport that favors a tortoise-over-hare mentality that irritates WalmsleyÌęand that his running style challenges. But he still hasn’t won Western States, and the question he has posed to the sport—why can’t he race 100 milers hard from the gun?—will again be the subtext of this year’s race. “He hasn’t stuck it yet,” said Bryon Powell, the editor of running website . “He’s going for the 1080 flip that no one has ever done, but he hasn’t landed it.”

Western States “gets brought up every day of my life,” Walmsley told meÌęin May. “It’s almost a part of me, I guess. If you can get it done at Western States, you got a good year.”

Walmsley, who is now 28, is tall and gaunt, even for an ultrarunner. When I met him in Flagstaff on a warm Sunday night this spring, he was wearing sweatpants, sandals, and aÌęlarge down jacket; Walmsley doesn’t have much body fat. In conversation, he would be a familiar character to anyone who has spent time around a college or high school cross-country program—he’s a running nerd. Over drinks one night a few days later, he took ten minutes to explain that closed-cell insoles absorb less water and are lighter than the open-cell insoles that come standard in running shoes. “I can talk about running forever,” he said.

Walmsley grew up in Phoenix, where he was a state champion cross-country runner and qualified for the Foot Locker National Championships. After graduating, he ran at the Air Force Academy, where he was a second-team all-American in the steeplechase, running 8:41. He had a PR of 13:52 for the 5,000 meters. Those are decent times for a D1 runner, but they stand out in the world of ultras, which more often attracts athletes who have a talent for grinding and sufferingÌęrather than running fast.

When Walmsley graduated from the Air Force Academy, he had hoped for a billing as a logistics officer near a major city, but was instead assigned to Malmstrom Air Force Base, near Great Falls, Montana, to pull 24-hour shifts supervising nuclear-missile silos. On a day off in 2013, after going for a 40-mile bike ride and a 14-mile run in the morning, he met a friend to go rock climbing. They hiked to a crag but realized they both had forgotten to bring a rope, and retreated to a bar. LaterÌęthey met the friend’s wife for dinner and split a bottle of wine. On the 90-minute drive back home, Walmsley realized that he was dehydrated, sleepy, and had had too much to drink, and he pulled over to nap. He awoke to a Montana state trooper tapping on his window. After taking a field sobriety test Walmsley blew 0.081 on a breathalyzer and was arrested for operating under the influence.Ìę(In Montana, as in many other states, it is illegal to have physical control of a car while intoxicated, even if you are not driving it.)

The Air Force placed Walmsley on probation and pulled him off silo duty. Though embarrassing, the DUI likely wouldn’t have permanently threatened his military career. But around that time, a involving readiness exams for missileers consumed Malmstrom. According to Walmsley and various news reports, many officers viewed the tests as pro forma, and cheating had been common for years. More than 100 officers at the base were eventually implicated, including most of Malmstrom’s senior command and the commanding general, who later resigned. Junior officers were generally spared from serious punishment, but Walmsley had admitted to cheating, and, with the DUI, it became hard for the Air Force to keep him around. He was given a general discharge, a form of separation that is less serious than a dishonorable discharge but still indicates that something in his service went wrong.

Walmsley was humiliated. He returned to Phoenix depressed and suicidal, and moved in with his parents. “It felt like the first time in life that I was failing, that I failed,” he told me. His parents were supportive, and he began seeing a psychiatrist, who recommended that he make running a bigger priority; it seemed to help him cope. Last year, in the video that Hermsmeyer produced before Western States, Walmsley spoke openly about being depressed, and the rawness of that interview has since lead people with similar problems to reach out. But the post-discharge period still feels extraordinarily painful, and he avoids discussing it in detail. “People want me to talk about it,” he told me. “‘How did you get through it?’ In a lot of ways I never got through it. I just moved on.”

In 2015, Walmsley left Phoenix and moved to Flagstaff, and began training hard. He reconnected with Tim Freriks, a 2013 graduate of Northern Arizona University whoÌęWalmsley had known in high school, and entered a series of the country’s top ultras. Racing under the radar and without a major sponsor, Walmsley won the JFK 50 Mile, and set course records at the Bandera 100K and Lake Sonoma 50 Mile. Freriks and Cody Reed, another NAU runner, traveled to Sonoma with him, and Freriks finished second. After the race, the three started calling themselves the Coconino Cowboys, after the nearby Coconino National Forest.

Last year, Eric Senseman and Jared Hazen moved to Flagstaff, after helping crew for Walmsley at Western States. Both now run with the CowboysÌęand, with Reed and Freriks, qualified to race Western States this year. Except for Hazen, who withdrew this week with a hip injury, all will be on the starting line in California.

Hoka picked up Walmsley after his 2016 race, but the Cowboys are members of perhaps the only elite training group that is uncoached and not unified by a single sponsor. (They do have small deals with Squirrel’s Nut Butter, an antichafe balm, and Pizzicletta, where they eat for free on Sunday evenings.)ÌęLike small groups of friends across the world, they have the ability to be unambiguously cruel to each other and still sound loving: Hazen, who finished third at Western States in 2015, is called Tank, because he is physically small.ÌęAt dinner one night, I heard Reed ask Tommy Rivers Puzey, who also trains with the Cowboys, if he would pace him after mile 60; Puzey said no, because he wasn’t sure Reed would make it that far. The next night, as Walmsley signed promotional posters for Squirrel’s Nut Butter, he told me thatÌęif Senseman tried to run with Walmsley for the win, he would “crack Eric like an egg.” Hermsmeyer, sitting across from Walmsley and trying to offer a note of moderation, said, “There’s equal shit talking.” Walmsley thought for a moment. “Tim doesn’t talk shit,” he said finally. “He’s a pretty nice guy.”

Without the wrong turn in 2016, Walmsley thinks he would have finished seven or eight minutes under Timothy Olson’s course record of 14:46. There is a consensus among the group, which Walmsley alternately accepts and rejects, that he went out too hard in 2017. (Between the two races, he told me, “I’ve had 165 out of 200 miles go pretty awesome. I’m doing some things well.”) In 2017, after building a nearly 20 minute buffer over his 2016 pace, which was already quick, he gave it all back fighting through snow-covered trails on the descent to Robinson Flats, at mile 30. Then it got hot. By mile 62, he was off record pace but still holding a lead of an hour,Ìęand was greeted by a crowd of dozens and a film crew when he arrived.

“I didn’t expect how many people would be waiting,” he said. In retrospect, he should have taken 20 minutes to collect himself, cool down, and rehydrate, but the crowd spooked him. “The publicity and attention I was getting was all brand new,” he said. Instead of waiting, he chugged a bottle of fluid and took off, jogging a matter of feet before vomiting. That was the end of his stomach. (Two months later, with that experience under his belt, he fought off similar stomach distress to finish fifth, behind Kilian Jornet and Francois D’haene, at the 105-mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc.) “It wouldn’t surprise me if Jim does hold back a bit the first half, the first 30 to 40 miles,” Freriks told me. “Running super aggressive hasn’t paid off for him the past couple years. But who knows. Jim just likes going for it.”

In Walmsley’s view, going for it is the obvious way to win ultras. “You look at track, or the marathon, or cycling, there’s generally a pack,” he said. In those sports, races get broken open late, once fatigue has set in. “Ultrarunning, you can still run off the front from the beginning and get away with it.” Until the sport matures, Walmsley is willing to risk blowing up if it sometimes means winning spectacularly. He is also willing to telegraph his race plans. His approach, he said, is, “Tell them what you’re going to do, and go do it.” This is contrary to the style and ethic of the ultra scene, and helps explain why Walmsley is sometimes regarded as arrogant. “It’s off-putting to some people,” Bryon Powell said. “A hundred miles is a long distance—there are lots of variables, and things do go wrong, and maybe that’s why you should temper your own expectations.”

For the past several years, Walmsley has logged most of his training publicly, . Despite minor injuries in March and May, Walmsley has put in eight 100-mile-plus weeks this spring, including a 150-mile week with 35,000 feet of climbing. In Flagstaff, Walmsley lives in a room he rents from a retired W.L. Gore and Associates engineer in her sixties named Anita. Half of his bedroom wall is lined with blue boxes of Hoka shoes, and to their right is a framed map of the Western States course, on loan from a friend of Walmsley’s father. In 2017, Walmsley’s run up the early, steep section of the course put him far in front of the field; most everyone hikes this climb, which is the high point on the day, but he ran it. “This year, it would be nice to be a little bit slower, because I can’t fuck it up again,” he said, looking at the map. “But there’s free time right there.”

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Training essentials for road and trail.

Leki Micro Trail Vario Poles ($220)

The three-piece design on these ultralight carbon poles makes for fast and easy deployment or collapse as conditions change from rowdy to moderate. We especially liked the cork grips—a lifesaver after hours on the trail.

Tracksmith Reggie Half Tights ($68)

Named for Boston’s famed Reggie Lewis indoor running track, the Reggie half tights became our go-to for fast workouts. The Italian-made, stretchy nylon-elastane material minimized chafing and breathed well.

Brooks Ghost Shirt ($40)

The Ghost might be the thinnest, softest shirt we’ve ever worn. The polyester dries so fast, you won’t notice it’s there—almost, well, like a ghost.

Salomon Air Logo Cap ($30)

The wide mesh on the top and back of the Air Logo vented heat on midday runs, and the stubby brim did just fine keeping the sun’s rays at bay. At night, the reflective accents helped us stay visible to cars on the road.

Petzl Actik Core Headlamp ($70)

We love the simplicity of the Actik, which powers its 350 lumens via a rechargeable lithium battery that’s easy to top off before a run. No outlet? It also runs on three AAA batteries.

Arc’teryx Norvan 7 Hydration Vest ($179)

At just over nine ounces, the Norvan is silly light for how capable it is: seven liters of storage, a water-resistant compartment, and a pair of holsters for hydration flasks all cinch down to avoid bouncing.

L.L.Bean CoolMax Nano Glide Socks ($18 for two pairs)

We admire the Nano Glide’s ankle cut, and the stretchy nylon-poly mix has just enough padding in the heel and forefoot.

Mammut MTR 71 Shorts ($65)

Mammut nailed these shorts: a wide waistband keeps them in place, a zippered pocket holds a key or gel, and the poly-blend fabric never rubs.

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, one of the best marathon runners in American history, almost became a baker. As the 45-year-old writes in her new memoir, ($27, Crown ­Archetype), she was an extraordinary junior athlete in the late 1980s and early ’90s. But after becoming frustrated by injuries in college, she decided to leave the sport and open a cafĂ©. Then a chance introduction led her to legendary coach Joe Vigil, who taught Kastor as much about life as about training. Within two years she became a national champion, and later made three Olympic teams, ending a two-decade American drought in the Olympic marathon in 2004 with a bronze medal. Her 2006 U.S. marathon record of 2:19:36 has not been threatened since. The key, Kastor writes, was between the ears: learning to feel gratitude and humility, and to see setbacks as opportunities for growth. “My mind changed; it became a place of constant positivity,” she writes. “The more I looked, the more there was to be grateful for.”

Kastor doesn’t break new ground in her earnest retelling of such lessons, but it’s a useful reminder that athletic success is never simply about physical ability.

If Kastor rewired her mind to elevate her performance, Scott Douglas, author of this month’s ($20, The Experiment), has used running to soothe his. The journalist and former Runner’s World editor has suffered from chronic depression since middle school, almost as long as he’s been logging 70-plus-mile weeks. A large body of research has shown that lacing up is good for our bodies, but as Douglas reports, depressed people who exercise often feel as good as people who take antidepressants. And those who exercise regularly may be somewhat less likely to become depressed in the first place.

How come? The reasons are complicated, but running seems to increase the size of the hippocampus and strengthen neural connections linked to memory and focus—changes that are structural and lasting. And it can catalyze lifestyle changes: running offers a way to socialize, encourages goal setting, and gets you outdoors. Douglas won’t ever be completely immune to low moods. But for him and many others, he writes, “life would be immeasurably worse” without running.

The Runner’s Media Diet

Blog: She Can and She Did

Kelly Roberts, social-media buff and Boston Marathon hopeful, revamped (formerly known as Run, Selfie, Repeat) for 2018. It still features her signature quirky, honest posts and now adds other women’s voices for maximum inspiration.

Youtube Channel: Alexi Pappas

Anyone who feels energized after reading the professional distance runner and filmmaker’s Twitter poems will be delighted by . Expect unbridled enthusiasm on everything from ice baths to banana bread.

Newsletter: The Morning Shakeout

Mario Fraioli’s dives into sometimes-esoteric news and commentary for serious running nerds. But there’s plenty to chew on for all levels and interests.

Instagram feed: @firstrun

Knox Robinson, founder of run crew Black Roses NYC, serves up an of group jogs, race days, and extremely cool runners wearing sunglasses. Don’t skip the poem-like captions and detailed training logs below the photos.

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