If the roller-coaster Tokyo 2020 Olympics did anything, they stoked our enthusiasm for the return of global sports with their rivalries, , superhuman athletic feats, and moments of that can make a rugby player cry. The Tokyo 2020 Summer Paralympics kick off on August 24, and they promise to feature just as much set against a backdrop of . If witnessing dedicated athletes realize their dreams gives you some joy amid all the uncertainty, it’s easy to see these games as the sporting event of the summer.

Tokyo is the first city to host the Summer Paralympics twice; back in 1964, 378 athletes competed in nine sports. This year, 4,400 athletes from about 170 nations will compete for gold in 22 different sports. Some are familiar events like swimming and track and field; others, like goalball or boccia, are wholly unique to the Paralympics.

Badminton and taekwondo will make their debut and replace sailing and seven-a-side soccer. Additionally, medals this year will include circular indents on the rim (one for gold, two for silver, three for bronze) to better serve visually impaired medalists. With COVID-19 cases still surging in Japan, the stands will be mostly empty (though this might not bother athletes during events like goalball, which requires silence so visually-impaired athletes can hear the jingling ball’s position on the court).

Here’s everything you need to get primed for the games—and stay tuned for continuing coverage.

Paralympics History

The first version of what would become the Paralympics debuted just after World War II. After fleeing Nazi Germany, doctor Ludwig Guttman founded the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 for British veterans with spinal cord injuries. The coincided with the Summer Olympics Opening Ceremonies in London; 16 men and women competed in a single event (archery).

Dutch veterans joined in 1952, kicking off an international competition that now trails only the Olympics in size and scope. The Summer Paralympics debuted in 1960 in Rome. Every four years since, winter and summer versions have taken place a few weeks after the Olympics conclude.

How to Watch the Paralympics

This year, the Paralympics will make its prime-time debut on NBC on Tuesday at 7 A.M. ET. Over 200 hours of live and delayed events will be broadcast across NBC, NBC Sports Network, and the Olympic Channel, while 1,000 more hours will stream through NBC’s streaming options like Peacock. Get the and a .

Classification System

The Paralympics classification system is at the heart of all Para sports competition: it both determines eligibility and levels the playing field. The latter is important given the diverse range of impairments, so that winners can be determined by skill, fitness, and performance in any given event. In goalball, for instance, players are all required to wear eyeshades so athletes with different levels of visual acuity can play together while maintaining the same level of competitive advantage.

There are ten different impairments that determine if an athlete is eligible to compete in the Paralympics: impaired muscle power, impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency, leg length difference, short stature, muscle tension, uncoordinated movement, involuntary movements, vision impairment, and intellectual impairment.

The layers of classification can be complex, and are often customized for each sport. Track and field, for instance, comprises 32 different classes for events, ranging from T/F11, T/F12, and T/F13 (for different levels of vision impairment) to T/F34 (for athletes who compete in a wheelchair). Cycling is divided into four classes: C (cycling), H (handcycling), T (tricycle), and B (tandem for the visually impaired). A subclass numbering from one to five is then appended to indicate severity of impairment (C1, C2, C3, C4). But classification is not always standardized across the sport: B1, B2, and B3 tandem all have a sighted pilot rider with them, and thus all compete in the same event. (In sports that require them, the guides or pilots share medals.)

Other sports, such as basketball, include players of varying abilities and apply a point value to each player depending on level of impairment.

to Paralympics sports classification.

Athletes to Watch

The United States’ Paralympic roster of 234 includes 129 returning Paralympians and 51 champions. Here are some of Team USA’s brightest stars.

Tatyana McFadden

Paralyzed from the waist down since birth because of spina bifida, this 32-year-old already has 17 Paralympic medals, including six from Rio. She won the “grand slam” of wheelchair marathons (London, Boston, New York, and Chicago) in 2013. McFadden has come a long way since she began “scooting” around sans wheelchair to keep up with friends in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia. She will compete in a slew of events in Tokyo, including the 100-meter, 400-meter, 800-meter, 1,500-meter, 5,000-meter, 4×400-meter relay, and marathon wheelchair events. McFadden is also one of nine athletes featured in the Netflix documentary , which she co-produced.

Jessica Long

With 23 medals—13 of them gold—Jessica Long is the second-most decorated Paralympian from Team USA and a dominant force in the pool. Born in Siberia with fibular hemimelia, to amputate her legs below the knee as a child, shortly after her adoption by a U.S. family. She got her start swimming in her grandparents’ pool, where she pretended to be a mermaid. Now, after training for years with Michael Phelps, she has a new nickname: “Aquawoman.” Look for her to crush again in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle, 400-meter freestyle, 100-meter backstroke, 100-meter breaststroke, 100-meter butterfly, 200-meter individual medley.

Allysa Seely

Seely was a nationally ranked triathlete when a diagnosis of chiari II malformation, basilar invagination, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome led to neurological difficulties, brain and spine surgery, and an eventual below-the-knee left leg amputation. Three years later, she won gold in triathlon’s Rio debut, which she’ll defend in Tokyo.

Brad Snyder

A former swim team captain at the U.S. Naval Academy, Snyder was injured by an explosive device while serving in Afghanistan. The explosion left his limbs intact but required the removal of his eyes. He took gold in the Men’s S11 100-meter freestyle in the 2012 London Paralympic Games one year to the day after losing his vision. He switched to triathlon in 2018, and hopes to medal in Tokyo.

David Brown

Known as the “fastest blind man in the world,” David Brown holds the world record in the 100 meters (T11, 2014) alongside his guide Jerome Avery. They nicknamed themselves “BrAvery” and won gold in the 100 meters in Rio. The pandemic disrupted the duo’s training regimen, which requires close proximity, but they remain medal favorites in Tokyo.

Oksana Masters

Masters was born three years after the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, which likely caused the birth defects that led to eventual amputation of both legs and reconstructive surgery for thumbless hands and webbed fingers. But now she’s an aspiring multi-season master: after winning bronze in rowing in London, Masters took gold in Nordic skiing in Pyeongchang before adding hand-cycling to her summer portfolio ahead of Rio, where she narrowly missed the podium in road (4th) and track (5th) races. Tokyo could finally bring a summer gold to match winter.

Melissa Stockwell

In April 2004, Melissa Stockwell lost a limb in active combat when a roadside bomb exploded next to her vehicle. She was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, and in 2008 became the first Iraq War vet to qualify for the Paralympics as a swimmer in Beijing. She switched to paratriathlon and took bronze in Rio behind fellow Team USA members Allysa Seely and Hailey Danze, who she will challenge in Tokyo.

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If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255.

In February 2010, Steve Mesler stood atop a podium at the Vancouver Winter Olympics—but he might as well have been standing on top of the world. The gold medal around his and his teammates’ necks in the four-man bobsled competition was the first captured by Americans in 62 years. It was the culmination of a lifelong pursuit of Olympic gold that began with Mesler’s days as a college track star and ended on the fast (and deadly) ice of the Whistler Sliding Centre.

“It’s kind of like the stages of grief—the first stage is speechlessness,” says Mesler from his home in Calgary. “It’s a strange thing to realize you’ve accomplished this dream you had when you were 11. Who does that? But it shakes you to your core when you realize two or three weeks later it doesn’t make you as happy as you thought. For driven people, there’s nothing that keeps them happy forever.”

In 2017, his teammate and fellow medalist Steve Holcomb died of a drug and alcohol overdose. His close friend and Vancouver silver medalist, aerial skier Jeret ‘Speedy’ Peterson, died by suicide in 2018. Another former bobsledding teammate of Mesler’s, Pavle Jovanovic, took his life soon after. Despite the disturbing , Mesler thought he had avoided the worst of it: he joined the board of the U.S. Olympic Committee and ran the successful nonprofit Classroom Champions that . But in 2019, Mesler noticed something was off. He often had trouble completing his daily 5:30 A.M. workouts in his basement. Sometimes he fell back asleep on the couch; some days his wife found him on the ground in what he calls “a sobbing puddle.”

Of all the stories emerging from Tokyo 2020, athletes choosing to prioritize mental health could have the longest-lasting impact beyond the games. When Simone Biles cited her struggle with mental health issues as the reason for bowing out of the majority of her competitions, she redefined the meaning of athletic resiliency and strength and shed light on the complex interplay of anxiety, stress, and the relentless pressure that and normal humans alike struggle with.

The stakes might get higher the harder you train: while exercise is often associated with better mental health, recent data analysis from more than 1.2 million adults found that have a higher mental health burden than those who exercise three to five hours a week. (A very important caveat: both the study’s authors and experts we spoke with point out that it’s difficult to determine if excessive exercise causes mental health issues, or if overexercise is the expression of underlying mental health issues like anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, or obsessive compulsive disorder.)

The Olympics are over, but the conversation about how to center mental health in our athletic lives is just beginning. We asked Mesler to share a few lessons that all athletes can incorporate to balance self-care and performance in their own practice. Then we asked experts to weigh in on why they work and how you can take care of your brain while you train—whether you’re a gold-medal aspirant or a weekend warrior.

Mental Injuries = Physical Injuries

Even as Mesler found himself in the grip of deep depression, he had trouble recognizing the signs, especially when squaring it against his achievements. But his wife could, and she insisted he get help immediately. Upon completing a self-assessment for a doctor, Mesler imagined he’d get counseling. But his diagnosis was severe enough that the doctor prescribed medication right away.

“There was no waiting—that’s how bad off I was. I didn’t know what was happening. I was ashamed, I couldn’t make decisions,” says Mesler. “It was only when I could put it in physical terms that I understood. Having a hamstring tear or a dislocated shoulder doesn’t take away from my athletic ability or accomplishments, and it’s fine to talk about it. So why would having a torn brain take away from the accomplishments that I’ve had or the accomplishments that I will have?”

Seeking out help and embracing vulnerability can be especially hard for elite performers. Age-old stigmas die hard, but envisioning mental impairment as equivalent to physical injury convinced him to push past any perceived weakness, treat depression with the seriousness it required, and lean on loved ones for support.

“It can be hard to come to terms with an illness that affects the mind. If you don’t have control over your mind, you can’t help but wonder ‘who am I?’” says Brad Stulberg, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor and author of the forthcoming book . “Sometimes you need more. If you are in a deep hole, there is nothing better than seeking out a professional, be it a psychiatrist or therapist.”

Make Play Part of Your Practice

Four years before winning gold, a seventh-place finish in the Torino Winter Olympic games led Mesler to believe his Olympic dreams were slipping away, plunging him into what he recognizes now as early signs of depression. “I spent the last four years head down, doing this one thing training for these games, and I went out and got my butt kicked,” he says. “I needed something to clear my mind and brain. I needed a hobby. So I decided that summer to learn how to fly fish.”

With his training grounds in Calgary a mere cast away from gold-medal trout streams, Mesler ditched workouts on Sundays to hike deep into the Canadian Rockies in search of lunker browns and rainbows. His coaches were enraged when they found out; they worried that two-and-a-half-hour drives and ten-hour hikes threatened his speed and strength and invited injuries that could erase decades of conditioning.

They didn’t stay angry long: soon after, Mesler posted personal bests in sprints, squats, cleans, and all power work during Monday morning training sessions. “The stress relief of going out and being on the river and not thinking about training or a failed dream helped boost everything else in me,” he says.

Dr. Todd Schroeder, director of the Clinical Exercise Research Center at the University of Southern California, agrees that low intensity outdoor activities like fly fishing can help balance the cocktail of hormones we need to train and recover effectively. It can effectively lower stress hormones, including cortisol and epinephrine, while boosting endorphins.

“Paddling, hiking, gardening, fishing, walks, biking, floating yoga, recreational swimming, and floating down a river are examples of low-intensity, low-stress activities that can have positive influences on the hormonal environment,” says Schroeder. “Many people think they need to exercise at high intensity to have a benefit but low to moderate intensity exercise actually burns a proportionally greater amount of fat compared to high intensity exercise.”

Stulberg points out that incorporating goals and activities outside of your primary focus also provides an identity beyond sport. “This way, if you struggle or fail or get injured or, in Messler’s case, retire from sport, you may lose something you love but you are ,” he says.

Embrace the Suck

In the middle of the pandemic, Mesler and his former coach Stuart McMillan found themselves bored and stagnant with their training routines. Their usual methods failed to motivate them, and they felt both their physical and mental well-being slipping as it became easier to shrug off workouts or athletic goals.

McMillan and Mesler dreamed up an unorthodox remedy they called : they committed to run five miles, complete 100 reps of a 100-kilo deadlift, and do 100 pushups every day for a month, no breaks allowed. They bet that the combination of arbitrary challenge and friendly accountability might break the funk.

Mesler says the benefits started radiating throughout his life almost immediately. Mesler started writing, he got stagnating professional and personal projects off the ground, and it helped him diagnose and fix nagging issues with his feet and knees that held him back.

“By the third week, I was seeing the Matrix,” says Mesler. “I was thinking more clearly than I’ve ever thought before. It builds intention into every single activity you engage with, and gives you this mental preparedness, whether you’re an Olympic athlete or someone who just wants to go try something hard.”

Though McMillan and Messler may not have known it, Stulberg says they were practicing two core elements of groundedness: acceptance and commitment. Accept what is happening, even if you don’t like it; accept what you are feeling, instead of resisting or fighting it, and then commit to acting in alignment with your core values. Or, in layperson’s terms: “I like to say ‘you don’t need to feel good to get going; you need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good,’” says Stulberg.

Schroeder points out that Mesler’s suck might be so challenging to mortal humans that it could create adverse effects. Instead, tailor it to your individual needs and desires. “Anytime you do something different for a short period of time and include a social component, it increases compliance and often performance is improved when it comes to exercise and sport,” he says.

Wake Up Every Day with a Problem

Mesler’s Olympic ambitions began as a high school track and field competitor and then as a decathlete at the University of Florida. But his lack of strength and size along with continual injuries kept dashing his hopes of getting gold in the summer games.

The focus on the prize itself was getting in the way of Mesler’s progress and had drained the joy out of his sport. He needed a way to push the Olympic gold to the background, focus on incremental problems, solve them, and move on to the next one.

After a chance encounter led him to abandon track and try out for the U.S. bobsled team, he developed this new approach with his coaches to tackle one problem each day, and attempt to solve it. Size was addressed with upping caloric intake to eight meals a day; post-workout therapy sessions helped resolve lingering injuries and prevented new ones, one session at a time. By replacing his gold-at-all-costs mentality with a focus on the smaller rewards of incremental progress over past failures, Mesler baby-stepped his way to gold anyway.

This method can be applied to nearly any goal, be that highpointing Colorado’s 14ers or overcoming anxiety. Break each major goal into constituent problems (14ers: cost, time, technical difficulty; anxiety: triggers, support options, self care methods), and record or track your progress. Stick to your process, and you’ll slowly make headway on both fitness goals and mental health, too.

While Stulberg broadly approves of Mesler’s approach, it’s tilted to satisfy the needs of high achievers. He advises to balance it with the idea of learning to be content with what you have, with not needing a problem to solve everyday to feel fulfilled. For goal-oriented, Type-A folks, Stulberg admits this may feel like torture at first. “But eventually, you learn to just be,” he says. “Sound mental health isn’t either-or, but both-and. It’s about finding the right balance between being and doing, contentment and striving, for your own unique temperament.”

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School kids never ask to sub on a bench press set or draft you on a trail run. But everywhere I take my Monkii Bars—city park, Cascade foothill, national park—there’s a goggly-eyed tyke asking if she can mimic my dips, try an archer push-up, or just swing around like a gibbon. I let them, but they usually only get a few minutes before a jealous parent butts in to give it a go.

I can’t blame them: Monkii Bars are fun as hell. But all that primate whimsy doesn’t detract from the suspension system’s impressive ability to turn the outdoors into your full-service bodywork gym. The original version launched in 2014, and I used it to keep fit everywhere from fridge-size hotel rooms in New York City to the shores of an iceberg-filled lake in Patagonia’s Los Glaciares National Park. According to company founders, over 3,000 customers have soldiered into the woods with Monkii Bars since its debut.

The next version of Monkii Bars , and will eventually include an app cataloging over 250 custom workouts, geolocated workout spots all over the world, and user-submitted training programs from the growing Monkii Bars community.

Here’s a video of Monkii Bars co-founder, former wilderness ranger, and Tarzan lookalike Dan Vinson showing them off:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XAETT1BJSmM
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I’ve been testing the mid-size Monkii Bars 2 șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Kit for about a month, putting it through its paces. Here are my initial impressions.

The concept remains basically the same. Two hollow, nunchuk-size bars with plastic endcaps contain connector straps inside. Sling an 18-foot length of nylon webbing over a sturdy tree limb or the top of a closed door using a specialized door attachment, thread the webbing through the connectors, and voilá—instant gym. Just add sweat. 

Version 2 features a few major improvements. Half-inch nylon webbing replaces thin Spectra cord, and a simple friction lock vastly improves on the hook-and-eye adjuster from the old version. Looping the spaghetti-thin Spectra cord into and around the old adjuster was a tricky affair for nonclimbers: I toppled to the ground once or twice when the cord slipped after I hadn’t looped it enough times. Now I just thread the webbing and let the lock snap in place. It's simple and bomber. The new webbing also doesn’t fray at the ends or cut into your arms like cheesewire when you accidentally press against them mid-dip. 

The U.S.-made, nine-ounce bars are made of powder-coated aluminum and come in a Skittles array of colors. While I miss the organic, yoga-studio look of the bamboo-only originals, the new versions offer better durability and grip under sweaty palms. The addition of connector straps (rather than having the entire 18-foot length of Spectra cord run through the hollow bar) also makes Monkii Bars 2 more stable than before.

Unfortunately, all that new functionality comes at the cost of packability. Previously, the entire Monkii Bar system—Spectra cord, hook-and-eye adjuster—fit inside each bar. The webbing slings and friction locks won’t, so even the ultralight version requires a minimal case to strap them to the outside. With the previous iteration, it was so convenient to toss the bars into my pack, even if I didn’t know where I would end up, just to have the opportunity to workout somewhere wild and interesting. (Then again, the two individual bars were frequently mistaken for pipe bombs by TSA inspectors—the new Monkii Bars are TSA-approved.) Still, the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Kit I used wraps into a sleek folding case about the size of an extra-large burrito. It weighs about 25 ounces total, and has extra features like a cellphone holder, so you can watch workout demos, and stirrups for exercises like suspended planks and mountain climbers. The case itself doubles as the door attachment.

But hold the door. Unless it’s raining bullets or you’re trapped in a Hanoi hotel room, these babies are best outside. There’s nothing quite like setting a lazy Sunday city run afire by capping it with some upper-body work at a random tree or rewarding yourself for breaking your own muscle-up record with a dive in an alpine lake. Performing bodywork while suspended means you’re also doubling up on balance, core, and fast-twitch strength, too. Monkii Bars are still one of the most fun ways to do all that—and make friends with a bunch of rambunctious 8-year-olds while you’re at it.

Monkii Bars 2 kits start at $119 and are .

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