On Tuesday, April 23, basketball player was given the , an honor issued by the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) to the best amateur American athlete at the collegiate or Olympic level. The AAU is a youth sports league juggernaut with 800,000-plus members, aligned behind the soaring motto, “Sports for All, Forever.” Clark, 22, is a worthy recipient of the winner’s statuette—her second win in as many years—after vaulting women’s collegiate basketball to stratospheric popularity and media attention during her run to the NCAA finals with the University of Iowa.

“The AAU Sullivan Award is an incredible honor,” Clark said. “I have been inspired by so many athletes that came before me and I hope I can be that same inspiration for the next generation to follow their dreams.”

But Clark’s records and her passion for inspiring young women athletes isn’t at all what the award’s namesake, James Edward Sullivan, had in mind. Sullivan, who founded the AAU in 1888 and died in 1914, was dead set against women competing in sports. In fact, Sullivan’s actions and writing presented opinions on race, gender, and equality contradicting the stated “Sports for All” mission and the essence of the modern AAU, which has for years sought to better identity and celebrate diverse athletes.

“Right here rests the salvation or ruins of athletics in this country,” Sullivan said in a 1914 interview in Los Angeles’ Mercury magazine. “Women have little or no place in athletics.” Later in the same article, Sullivan was more specific in expressing his sexism. He was set to direct the upcoming 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, which was billed as the biggest athletic event ever in the U.S. “You can take it from me that women will not figure in the Panama-Pacific meet—that is, not in public,” he told the publication.

I came across Sullivan’s writing and work over the past few years during my research for a forthcoming book on barrier-breaking swimmers who helped launch the modern Olympic age. Titled Three Kings, the book examines the obstacles that class and race played in the 1924 Paris gold medal dreams of the German immigrant Johnny Weissmuller, the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, and Japanese newcomer Katsuo Takaishi. But at least those three had access and opportunity. Women athletes who came before them didn’t, and this was partly due to Sullivan’s handiwork.

In my research I read comments from an American diver named Ida Schnall who was so exasperated with Sullivan that in 1912 she wrote a letter published in the New York Times. “He is always objecting to girls competing,” she lamented. “He has objected to my competing in diving at the Olympic Games in Sweden because I am a girl.” According to Schnall, Sullivan objected to so many elements of female athletes—their comfortable bathing suits, for example—that Schnall said she felt imprisoned in the “last century.”

When I recently presented this information to an AAU spokesperson and asked why the organization has not considered changing the name of its most prestigious award, or at the very least begun a public conversation, he vaguely said he would talk to a few people. I didn’t get another call nor an answer to my follow up email. I also reached out to Clark’s professional team, the Indiana Fever, for comment, but did not get a response. She’s hardly the first celebrity athlete to win the prize: the list of Sullivan Award winners includes swimmers Michael Phelps and Janet Evans; NFL players Peyton Manning and Tim Tebow; and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, among others. NBA legend Bill Walton took home the award in 1974.

Sullivan was a man not to be trifled with. Tall, broad shouldered, and a boxer in his youth, he was easily the most powerful person in amateur athletics in the early twentieth century. He was born in New York City, the son of Irish immigrants, and was a good all-around athlete at the East Side’s Pastime Athletic Club where he wrote about sports even better than he played them. He rose quickly in the amateur sports establishment, editing and publishing the then-bible of the athletic world, Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac.

By the early 1900s he led the most influential New York club and sporting authority in the country, the Amateur Athletic Union, and was presidentially appointed to organize the American Olympic teams competing in Athens (1896), Paris (1900), London (1908), and Stockholm (1912). He controversially revoked gold medals—most famously that of Jim Thorpe’s in 1913, for taking money in baseball’s minor leagues—and discarded world records—Kahanamoku’s in 1911, for not taking place in the mainland U.S. In overseeing the AAU, Sullivan controlled hundreds of regional sports clubs that made the rules for competition, ratified records, and enforced violations. His contemporaries dubbed him “Big Chief.”

Sullivan’s ugly behavior didn’t stop with sexism. In 1904 he was the director of the Olympics Games in St. Louis, and during the event he helped organize a two-day eugenics experiment called “Anthropology Days.” Sullivan staged parallel games and enlisted indigenous visitors to do western sporting events—the shot put, high jump, long jump, among others—in an effort to prove the superiority of white American athletes to, as he put it, the “average savage.” He had fielded his competition with native men from Japan, Argentina, and elsewhere who had been shipped to St. Louis for a human zoo exhibit at the concurrent World’s Fair. “Barbarians Meet In Athletic Games,” announced a headline in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Sullivan tested his subjects in Olympic disciplines they had never seen, never heard of, nor were particularly interested in. His towering presence can be seen in the background of a photo featuring a kneeling Ainu archer from northern Japan. When his Anthropology Days contests were over a satisfied Sullivan declared in his own Spalding’s Official Athletic Almanac for 1905 he had proved “conclusively that the savage has been a very much overrated man from an athletic point of view.” The ethnologist William McGee, who Sullivan recruited to his project, believed the competition established in “quantitative measure the inferiority of primitive peoples, in physical faculty if not in intellectual grasp.”

Sullivan’s deeds and published commentary are , and for years athletes, , and even have called out his opinions as being deeply problematic.

Schnall, the diver, was one of them. She went on to become captain of the New York Female Giants baseball team, but because of Sullivan neither she nor her teammates went to Stockholm in 1912 for the first women’s Olympic swimming and diving competition. While other nations like host-nation Sweden fielded a robust women’s squad, the U.S. prohibited women from “any event in which they would not wear long skirts.”

By contrast Great Britain, Germany, Austria—half of the swimming nations—fielded squads in the inaugural Games. It would take Sullivan’s sudden death in 1914 to clear the way for full women’s participation in the Olympics Games in 1920. And even then Sullivan’s voice still carried. “[The opposition] wasn’t from the general public, it was from the ruling body—they didn’t want women to compete in any sport in the Olympic Games,” recounted Aileen Riggin, a gold medalist in springboard diving, in an oral history she recorded with American Olympic non-profit LA84 Foundation.

Sullivan’s U.S. Olympics teams were successful and his friends adored him, one later eulogizing him as a “great and grand character” whose purpose was “the betterment of the race.” But plenty of others didn’t share those views. Around the same time the Los Angeles Times memorably described him as a “pompous little insect.” Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, called his interpretation of the Olympic Games in 1904 “an outrageous charade.”

Some might see Sullivan simply as a product of his times in which race based science and barring women from sport weren’t unusual. He was a NYC Board of Education member and a powerful friend to the city playground movement and the Public School’s Athletic Leagues, which he founded and fostered. At his funeral procession, 50,000 young members were enlisted to line the route. These facts are all part of the established Sullivan resume, some of them listed on the engraved plaque on the permanent AAU/Sullivan trophy on display at the New York Athletic Club.

But Sullivan’s extremist views about gender and race in sports, which were beyond the pale even in the times he lived in, aren’t publicly discussed. The AAU and the New York Athletic Club, the host of the Sullivan Award ceremony, wouldn’t be the first elite institutions to refrain from a deeper look at a founding father.

Todd Balf is the author of the forthcoming Three Kings (Scribd/Blackstone) to be published in July.

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In 1896, Marshall “Major” Taylor finished the Six Day Bicycle Race in Madison Square Garden, having completed a record 1,732 miles on the 0.1-mile track. Survival was no small feat. Half the field dropped out because of crashes, exhaustion, or “queer in the head” hallucinations. The New York Times correspondent described Taylor as the “wonder” of the event, in part because of his age and inexperience. He was only 18, and it was his first professional race. He was also the lone African American in the otherwise all-white field.

Bike racing was almost incomprehensibly huge at the time of Taylor’s pro debut. Big stadium tracks and a national race circuit brought in rowdy crowds looking to see how long athletes could last or, as Taylor was soon to show, how fast they might go. The best riders were featured on cigarette packs and buttons and lionized in bike ad posters.

Taylor’s Garden debut launched an unrivaled career. He became sprint world champion in 1899 and a true international superstar when he traveled to European capitals and later to Australia, winning everything and everywhere. He won in front of tens of thousands at the Parc des Princes in Paris and the Sydney Cricket Ground, two of the world’s most iconic sporting venues. Taylor did it all in the face of bigotry and hostility in a then big-time sport where he feared for his life. His attempt to train and race in the American South drew death threats and a rider boycott. Promoters in Louisville, Kentucky, scrambling for a substitute to satisfy the paid gate, had him race a horse.

A sliver of Taylor’s pioneering story is now being relayed to a contemporary audience through a high-profile, big-budget voiced by the rapper and hip-hop artist Nas. The theme: “What is it that you’re fighting for?” One of the ads, which portrays Taylor blasting past white competitors on a period-era track, is getting favorable early reviews in the hard-to-please competitive cycling community. “So good,” tweeted former professional racer Christian Vande Velde, tagging the ad. A shortform documentary, , also sponsored by Hennessy, is set to debut on ESPN on Sunday, April 22.

The film, directed by Colin Barnicle of Brooklyn, New York, is framed around Taylor’s six-day race, using a mix of archival images and film to animate the long-ago story. A voiceover inspired by Taylor’s autobiographical writing adds narrative depth. Several recreated scenes were filmed last month at the new Dale Hughes–designed in Detroit, Michigan. Woven into the telling are the stories of contemporary African American athletes Taylor has influenced, including aspiring pro road bicycle racer Ayesha McGowan and pro BMX rider . “You’re talking about 30 years after the abolishment of slavery being in some of these races, where there’s no one who looks like him, no one that was from his environment, no one that understood what it was like to be him,” Sylvester says in one snippet from the film. “I want to smash through glass ceilings similar to Mr. Marshall Taylor.”

There is some irony in Taylor’s story being adopted by a cognac maker—he was deeply religious and abstained from alcohol. And yet the company has done its homework and has in place a 2018 campaign that doesn’t really have any commercial equal when it comes to popularizing Taylor. Hennessy commissioned a modern bronze sculpture (Kadir Nelson’s The Major) and is co-organizing tribute rides around Taylor’s November birthday with the . Apparel designer Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss is rolling out a cycling-inspired MMT clothing line in June. “We feel it’s important to shine a light on this story and hope it inspires people around the world to push the limits of their own potential,” said Giles Woodyer, senior vice president of Hennessy U.S.

Melvyn Akins, an amateur track cyclist from London, doubled as Taylor in the ad campaign, which was filmed over ten days at a velodrome in Lviv, Ukraine, and in a forest outside Kiev. The latter served as a trippy portion of the ad where Taylor gets lost in his imagination mid-race and pounds through dark, gloomy, malevolent surroundings. The metaphor is pretty plain. “I have few sporting idols,” Akins said. “But I can say I’ve now had the honor of getting to portray my number one.”

Akins said he was shocked when he got to Ukraine and counted 100 people on the production team. “It suddenly hit me how big a deal this was, and my first thought was, ‘It just got real.’”

To those who’ve watched and wondered with exasperation as the Major Taylor story was unjustly ignored—or at least never quite turned the corner—the sudden, rarefied blast of hip exposure feels more than a little unreal. I mean, Nas?

Probably no one can speak to that more than Karen Brown-Donovan, Taylor’s great granddaughter. “I’m really jazzed,” she told me. Brown-Donovan is featured in the mini doc, and her struggle to get the story its due is itself a marathon drama stretching across decades. She heard firsthand stories about Taylor from her late grandmother Sydney, Taylor’s only child, named in honor of the Aussie city where Taylor raced. Brown-Donovan later wondered why he was never included alongside names like Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson. “It was frustrating his story didn’t get the attention [my grandmother] and I thought it deserved,” she said.

Of course, some know the story. There are several books; an Otis Taylor blues song, “He Never Raced on Sunday”; a limited-edition , circa 2007, with a Voltage Yellow swoosh; an SAT reading comprehension passage and question; a handsome monument in Worcester, Massachusetts; and a hardworking advocacy group, the . Despite all that, nothing has quite pushed the story into the common collective conscious. (Full disclosure: I wrote a Taylor book, , and self-advertised with a T-shirt that teased “Who Is Major Taylor?” Few bothered to stop me for an inquiry. The book barely eked into paperback.)

The Taylor story arc has long seemed like easy movie material. He rose from nothing to stardom, at one time becoming one of the top moneymakers in all of sports. He died penniless in Chicago in 1932 as he attempted to peddle his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World. In it, he famously listed his “Dozen Don’ts,” including “don’t be a pie biter” and “don’t be a big bluffer” and “don’t forget to play the game fair.” He might have been forgotten entirely, but 15 years after Taylor’s death, a group of 19th-century cyclists and Schwinn bicycle company chief Frank Schwinn paid to get him a proper funeral service and burial site, including a bronze memorial plaque dedicated to the “world’s champion bicycle racer who came up the hard way without hatred in his heart.”

Film-wise, the only treatment to reach the screen is an Australian-made two-episode TV miniseries, Tracks of Glory, which came out in 1992 and featured Taylor in an imaginative opening sequence keeping pace with a passenger train. He was good, but not that good.

In 1989, Taylor was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. In 1996, he received a USA Cycling lifetime achievement award, an honor Brown-Donovan helped accept on behalf of the family. At the time, she thought widespread recognition and a film might be imminent. There had been rumblings. She was wrong.

At various times, everyone from Whoopie Goldberg to Spike Lee to Lance Armstrong has been rumored to flirt with the movie idea. The family has seen at least a dozen concepts for film or video. Lynne Tolman, founder of the Major Taylor Association, has long served as a go-between, curating the more credible pitches and passing them on to the family. She recalls one suggesting “some kind of Caddyshack ČčČÔČ”±ô±đ.”

There are assorted theories for why critical mass hasn’t been reached to find a star and studio financing. Recreating an era that nobody can quite believe is part of it, and recreating a sport nobody has familiarity with is another. Track racing and velodromes aren’t part of the mainstream sports vernacular—“a niche within a niche” is the sort of thing you hear.

According to Barnicle, the idea of focusing on Taylor’s Six Day experience was a natural given the Garden’s prominence and the easily relatable suffering of the athletes asked to ride day and night through a tobacco-smoke haze. The Six Day was one of the country’s biggest sporting events, with a prize purse of almost $5,000 (around $130,000 in today’s dollars). Part voyeuristic spectacle, part rolling advertisement for the booming bike business, the race’s final 24 hours drew capacity crowds of more than 8,000 strong. Racing journals and the New York Times covered the race with a level of statistical detail that knew no end. Published tables reported the mileage totals every six hours, and scientists charted food intake to see what a man might need to keep going. Taylor proudly recalled in his autobiography a stretch where he rode continuously for 18 hours. Though Taylor was one of several riders who surpassed the 1,600-mile record from 1893, he finished eighth, about 150 miles behind the winner, Irishman Teddy Hale. (The latter was immediately trotted off post-race to a vaudeville show, where he performed for patrons on a home trainer. There might be nothing better that speaks to the popularity of cycling in 1896 than people paying to watch a man ride on a bicycle trainer.)

The more reflective reporting on the solo six-day doomed its future existence. Writers described the latter stages of the race as inhumane suffering, with exhausted riders falling asleep on their bikes and haplessly crashing onto the banked wooden track. There were reports of stimulants like cocaine and strychnine to keep competitors alert. As the film points out, Taylor dangerously crashed multiple times, especially in the closing stages. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that patrons hissed at trainers who were attempting to “get him on his wheel” after a crash a half-hour before the end of the race and applauded when Taylor was mercifully carried off. Fourteen of the 28 starters finished in the one and only year that Taylor raced, but the following year’s race was the beginning of the end for the single sixes. The Times opined, “An athletic contest in which the participants go queer in their heads and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them is not sport, it is brutality.” In 1899, then New York governor Theodore Roosevelt banned the solo six-day, apparently agreeing with the Times and the humane societies. When a Madison Square Garden promoter rebranded the six-day as a tandem event, it took on its contemporary nickname, the Madison.

Taylor had been the early favorite for the 1897 race, but he wisely backed out. His specialty was never endurance but his explosive, second-to-none sprint. His final race was an old-timers event, in 1917, which neatly bookended his career since he won that, too. “Had he not been a marvel of pluck, speed, and skill, he would not only have been the world’s very best, but he would have either been killed outright or disabled years ago,” wrote the Referee in a retirement tribute to his career. “For he was hustled and hated as only a colored person can be by the superior men in God’s country.”

Other groups may still bring forward either a longer documentary or a feature. One recent group speculating on a film is headed by ultra-cycling legend John Howard and Rashid Bahati, the father of former U.S. criterium champion Rahsaan Bahati. Their trailer, “,” came out last year in an effort to attract funding. Still, whatever comes next, there’s something fitting in the underdog Brown- Donovan getting to the finish first. In the ESPN documentary, she’s given special acknowledgment in the final credits.

“After the screening in New York last week, I overheard somebody say, ‘Why haven’t we heard this story before?” Brown-Donovan said. “It summed up how I have always felt. People should know this story.”

The post Why Haven’t You Heard of Marshall “Major” Taylor? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I can see him in his glass-fronted Cambridge office from the foosball table in the light-filled central atrium. He’s standing there talking to a visitor and seems to be finishing up. This entire side of the third floor in MIT’s new building is partitioned with glass, and professor and his colleagues and whatever madness they’re up to in their offices and the open, gadget-filled, lower-floor lab are on display. Several people, myself included, are peering down, hoping to see a bit of magic.

Months ago, when I e-mailed Herr to propose writing an article about him, I told him about my rare bone cancer and resulting partial paralysis below the waist as a way to explain my interest in his work. Though I didn’t tell him this, I also harbored a secret wish that he could help me. People write to Herr, a 52-year-old engineer and biophysicist, daily about his inspiring example. They’ve heard him promise an end to disability. They have conditions that medicine can’t fix and futures they can’t stand to consider. They’re wishing for his intervention, wanting of hope. Crossing his threshold, I’m the lucky one. I’m here.

for your iPhone to listen to more longform titles.

Herr welcomes me into his office, a clean, well-ordered space. There’s a round glass table with a laptop on it, a handful of hard office chairs, and a pair of prosthetic legs Herr designed that are arranged like statuary behind us, one in either corner. Above us on a wall looms a large mounted photograph of another pair of prosthetics. These are hand-carved from solid ash, with vines and flowers and six-inch heels. The real-life legs were famously worn by a friend of Herr’s, the amputee track-and-field athlete and actress Aimee Mullins.

I have hobbled into Herr’s office with a dented $20 stock metal cane on one side and a foot-lifting Blue Rocker brace on the other. (The dent is from my recently firing the cane at the wall.) I had imagined Herr noticing the cane and asking more about my story to see how he could fix me, like he has fixed so many others. The moment I realize that the meeting I’d imagined isn’t the meeting we’re going to have—I’m here as a reporter, not a friend or patient, after all—I start to stammer. Herr deftly resets the conversation by suggesting we look at his computer. 

On it are the PowerPoint slides of his next big project, a breathtaking $100 million, five-year proposal focused on paralysis, depression, amputation, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease. Herr is still trying to raise the money, and the work will be funneled through his new brainchild, MIT’s , a team of faculty and researchers assembled in 2014 that he codirects. After exploring various interventions for each condition, Herr and his colleagues will apply to the FDA to conduct human trials. One to-be-explored intervention in the brain might, with the right molecular knobs turned, augment empathy. “If we increase human empathy by 30 percent, would we still have war?” Herr asks. “We may not.” 

As he continues with the presentation he’s been giving to technologists, engineers, health researchers, and potential donors—last December alone, he keynoted in Dubai, Istanbul, and Las Vegas—each revolutionary intervention he mentions yields a boyish grin and a look that affirms: Yes, you heard that right. In a talk I hear him give a few weeks ­later, he’ll dare to characterize incurable paralysis as “low-hanging fruit.” In his outspoken willingness to fix everything, even things that some argue should be left alone, he knows how he sounds. “If half the audience is frightened and the other half is intrigued, I know I’ve done a good job,” he says.

Herr calmly ticks off one condition after another. He shows me an animation of an innovative surgery that will restore an amputee’s lost proprioception, giving a person the ability to feel and control a prosthetic as if it were their own limb. In another slide, of a paralyzed man in a bulky walk-assisting exoskeleton suit, he asks me to imagine a futuristic treatment that uses light to control cells in muscle tissue. Then he presents a video clip of a rat with a severed spinal cord dragging around its paralyzed hind legs. 

Having dragged my mostly unresponsive left leg around for two years, I think I know something about the rodent’s life. In the next clip, however, that rat, just 90 days later, is walking on all fours. A team at the MIT center led by Herr’s colleague Robert Langer successfully regrew the rat’s spinal cord by implanting a dissolvable scaffold seeded with neural stem cells. In Herr’s world, the limbless can be whole again, the paralyzed can walk. Making the extraordinary seem ordinary is maybe the whole point. 

Herr himself is proof positive. Trim, fit, and handsome, he is the showpiece for the Center for Extreme Bionics. “I’m kind of what they’re selling,” he says. The fuss over Herr has been building for decades but reached new levels in 2014, courtesy of , which has now been viewed in excess of 7.3 million times. In it, Herr describes the horrific 1982 winter climbing accident in New Hampshire’s White Mountains during which he suffered severe frostbite, leading to the amputation of both legs below the knee. Then 17, Herr was told he’d never climb again. Instead, he rebuilt himself almost immediately, willfully reshaping his artificial legs and realizing that he wasn’t handicapped, “the technology was.”

By hacking his prosthetic devices for his “vertical world,” he was able to quickly return to climbing, becoming the first athlete—decades before Oscar Pistorius—to blur the line between para and not. His accomplishments landed him on the cover of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű a year after his accident, something that sticks with him not because of the many accolades other climbers bestowed on him, or even the controversy it reignited around the tragic death of one of his rescuers, but because of the questions the article raised about how far Herr would be able to go. “I was a sad case. I was going to end up in this machine shop, disabled,” Herr recalls of the piece, pausing to let the perceived insult ripen in his mind. “Yeah, it’s a real sad story.”

The triumphant, fully realized man in the TED Talk is a marvel. His outrage at the unnecessary suffering from disability is fiercely personal. What first-time viewers like me invariably fixate on is the way Herr gracefully owns the stage. He’s wearing pants that end above the knee, revealing shimmering high-tech silver and black prosthetics. Herr is focused on what he’s saying, not what his artificial legs are doing. The crime of physical impairment is that it often steals from a person’s sense of self. If you didn’t look below his knees, you’d never guess that Herr is missing half of each leg. He walks through the world the way we all would hope to. 

He has effectively ended his disability, or at least the perception of it, just as he said he would. Inspired by his accident, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at MIT in 1993, followed by a Ph.D. at Harvard in biophysics. Ever since, Herr has produced a string of breakthrough products, starting with a computer-controlled artificial knee in 2003. In 2004, he created the at MIT, a now 40-person R&D lab drawing on the fields of biology, mechanics, and electronics to restore function to those who’ve lost it. Three years later, the team produced a powered ankle-foot prosthesis that allows an amputee to walk with speed and effort comparable to those with biological legs. Called the emPower, the apparatus weighs a few pounds and houses 12 sensors, three computers, tensioning springs, and muscle-tendon actuators. The ankle system is manufactured by a private company Herr started called .

Last year, Herr advanced another of his lab’s goals, to improve human performance “beyond what nature intends” by creating a brace-like exoskeleton device that reduces the metabolic cost of walking. The implications for people who want to get places faster—or perhaps a soldier trying to conserve energy on a long march—are vast.

In the near future, Herr and his colleagues at the MIT center are committed to, among other things, reversing paralysis. Herr’s goal is to develop a synthetic spinal cord that 
aids the damaged original. A prosthesis, in other words. 

In his office, Herr draws up his pant leg and rolls down a silicone sleeve to show me a newly developed fabric that lines the socket of his prosthetic and cushions the problematic intersection between the biological stump and the man-made limb. The “exquisitely comfortable” fit—digitally derived, he explains, but highly personal—is something he delights over with a savoring gush.

With our first meeting nearing its end, I grow distracted thinking about the wounded few Herr has smiled upon. In 2014, he worked on a bionic prosthetic for the dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the Boston Marathon bombing. Currently, he’s working with Hari Budha Magar, a double-amputee former Gurkha soldier who plans to climb Mount Everest in 2018, and also Jim Ewing, an old New Hampshire climbing buddy. Ewing was climbing a wall on vacation in the Cayman Islands in 2014 when he fell with his teen daughter on belay. She couldn’t brake the rope, and he plummeted some 60 feet, shattering his pelvis and left foot on impact.

The dancer, the Gurkha, the climber, and Herr himself are examples of what he often describes as the millions of humans who might appear broken but are not. Haslet-Davis, on a bionic limb embedded with dance intelligence, brilliantly performed the rumba again, and Ewing underwent a pioneering amputation procedure developed by Herr’s biomechatronics team in partnership with MIT colleague and surgeon Matthew Carty, who performed the operation at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, to prepare Ewing for an advanced prosthesis. Magar will be outfitted with short prosthetics to reduce leg drag and sophisticated crutches for speed as he attempts Everest history. 

The stories Herr tells, the future he sees, the beautifully functioning artificial limb before me—it’s all I can do not to show him my atrophied left leg and ask for his godlike intervention to fix what I know is broken. But I don’t, not yet.

When I wrote Herr to tell him about my interest in his work, I summarized my case history. I explained how in the summer of 2014, I found myself with increasingly debilitating nerve and lower-back pain. When I finally got an MRI, I learned that I had an extremely rare bone cancer called chor­doma that had spread from my lower lumbar vertebrae into my right hip flexor. Radiation and a difficult multi-stage surgery successfully removed the softball-size tumor, but months later, possibly due to a loss of blood to the spinal cord, I’d yet to regain sensation or strength in my hips and legs. The doctors didn’t know if it was permanent, but the prognosis didn’t look good. 

I’d expected a rapid, maybe even exceptional recovery. I am an athlete and adventurer who has had the good fortune to do a lot of cool stuff over the years. I’d become a whitewater guide, climbed Grand Teton, raced the hill climb at Mount Washington on foot and by bike, and mountain-biked half the 3,000-mile-plus Great Divide route. I expected to complete the other half someday. 

I’d progressed from a walker to a cane, from a recumbent tricycle to a pedal-assist e-bike. Then my nerve regeneration halted. In May 2015, after the surgery, I’d contacted Boston neurologist Bill David for muscle and nerve testing. An avid cyclist and kindred spirit, he’d hopefully stuck needles into my skin every six months to chart my recovery. Late last year, he confirmed what I had already sensed. Short of a miracle, I’d gone about as far as I could. “I really wish that we had met on a mountain or river as opposed to a medical clinic,” David said. 

I’d negotiated several stages of recovery, but the one I feared most was right now—at the end, my future fixed. “I’ve been coming to grips with who I am as an ‘incomplete’ paraplegic and figuring out how to make the best version of this new person,” I wrote 
to Herr. 

I’d imagined a stirring epilogue to our encounters, a moment perhaps when a radical trial arose and a crazy volunteer was needed. To be closer to the person I once was, I would try anything—injected viruses, exoskeletal suits, implants. When I got together with a close friend for lunch, I told her how the story with Herr was progressing, and how the limbs he created were so advanced that I’d read about people wanting them even though their leg complications didn’t medically require amputation. She listened carefully. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Would you, um, get your legs cut off?” 

Exactly when in his childhood Hugh Herr decided to become the world’s best climber is impossible to pinpoint, but the goal was nurtured during family road trips across the West. He and his older brothers climbed, fished, and hiked in the American and Canadian Rockies, whetting the youthful Herr’s appetite for adventure. The Shawangunk Mountains in New York were a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the Herrs’ home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Gunks were an emerging mecca in the seventies, and Herr quickly established himself as a prodigy, “climbing this stuff when I was 11 that only adults had done, and at 15 that no one else had done,” he says.

When he and Jeff Batzer, a friend from Lancaster, drove to New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in January 1982 for a weekend ice-climbing outing, it wasn’t to do anything audacious. They’d attempt a classic route in Huntington’s Ravine, and maybe, depending on the weather and avalanche conditions, summit Mount Washington before racing down for the 12-hour drive home. Herr was a 17-year-old junior in high school, his friend Batzer, 20.

The decision to tack on the summit of Washington turned out to be a tragic mistake. They left a sleeping bag and bivy sack behind to reduce weight but encountered howling winds and blizzard conditions near the top, and they ended up losing their way, mistakenly descending into a different valley from where they’d come. 

After four days trekking through a storm in deep snow and below-freezing temperatures to find their way out, Herr was no longer able to walk. Early on in the odyssey, he had punched through a frozen streambed into shin-deep water, soaking his boots and pants, and was suffering from severe frostbite. In , a biography by Alison Osius, Herr said that he had reconciled himself to death when a backcountry snowshoer saw some of Batzer’s tracks and followed them to a makeshift shelter the two were bivouacked in. The climbers were evacuated to a nearby hospital in Littleton, where doctors treated both for hypothermia and frostbite. Herr’s legs were in terrible shape. At the hospital, he learned that doctors might not be able to save them and that a member of his search party, a 28-year-old climbing-school instructor named Albert Dow, had been killed in an avalanche. Two months later, doctors amputated Herr’s legs four inches below the knee. Batzer’s fingers on his right hand were amputated, along with his left foot and the toes on his right foot.

“I asked my doctor after the amputation what I’d be able to do with my new body,” Herr recalls. “The doctor said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said I wanted to drive a car, ride my bike, and climb. The doctor said you’ll be able to drive a car, but with hand controls. He said I would not be able to ride a bike or return to climbing.”

Herr did all of the above within a year. He worked closely with his prosthetist on one pair of artificial legs after another and tinkered on his own in the machine shop of a vocational school he’d begun attending in 1981. He soon figured out that he could hack his artificial limbs to suit the requirements of particular climbing routes. He built limbs that extended or shortened his stature; he carved out feet with wedge ends to slice into crevices. He began to knock off routes that he hadn’t been able to do previously, including leading an ascent of Vandals at Skytop, the first 5.13 on the East Coast. It ignited a new controversy: that his adaptations were a form of cheating. Herr likes to tell audiences that he invited his affronted rivals to chop off their own legs.

“Some people were bitter and angry” about the accident, says Jim Ewing, a summer roommate of Herr’s in the 1980s, “and with Hugh coming back and climbing so well, they started making up excuses, saying things like, ‘He can stand on a dime, his feet don’t get sore, he doesn’t have calf fatigue.’ I’d just look at these people and think, By God, you haven’t seen this guy crawl to the toilet in the middle of the night because he doesn’t have his legs on. He is handicapped; it is a handicap. People had no idea.”

While there was a lot of media attention about Herr’s accident, he kept private the struggles and self-doubt he faced after he lost his legs. When he returned to New Hampshire to climb again 18 months later, the unease from locals over Dow’s death and Herr’s resurgence was palpable.

The harsh early views of Herr didn’t soon go away. When I asked him what he thought when the last year honored him at a celebratory awards evening in Denver, he said he was stunned. They had named him a new inductee of the Hall of Mountaineering Excellence “for lasting contributions on and off the mountain.” “It shocked me,” he said. “The initial story line of the accident was that these young, irresponsible, incompetent climbers caused the death of an experienced, beloved local climber. That narrative went on for a very long time. So for two decades at least, I wouldn’t even expect the American Alpine Club to invite me to be in the audience.”

When Herr talks about Albert Dow, who he never met, it’s with the fondness of a friend. “That was Albert!” he recounts about Dow’s insistence that he go looking for Herr and Batzer because he’d want someone to do the same for him. Last year, Herr told a Reddit audience that he strives to honor Dow. “I hate the idea that his death somehow enabled me to live so I could do good work,” he says. “What I like is that his kindness and who he was—and his sacrifice—inspired me to work really hard.” 

In 1985, Herr free-climbed New Hampshire’s exceptionally steep and unpro­tected Stage Fright, with his friend Jim Surette on belay. It was a significant and life-threatening milestone, and afterward Herr  had a dream that set his new path. He describes a nightmare in which Surette, bunking on a neighboring couch, throws off his covers to reveal mangled, bloody, ampu­tated legs. “We both go ‘AČčČčłó!’ in the dream,” says Herr, “but then I turn to Jimmy and say, ‘Don’t worry, Jimmy, it’s just a dream. I’m the one without legs.’ Prior to that, in all my dreams I would be running and jumping, and I would have my biological legs. It was the first time my brain recognized my new state.”

Some might’ve interpreted the nightmare with melancholy, an attempt to come to terms with a sorrowful lifelong condition. Herr saw it as a beautiful vision.

The auditorium is full at the Princeton, New Jersey, headquarters of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, all 150 in attendance looking stage left as Herr introduces an image of himself in a New Hampshire hospital room decades earlier. “What do you see?” he asks.

It is Herr in the moments after his legs have been amputated. The 17-year-old is gazing down at a white sheet and the outline of his stumps. The audience is riveted.

“What do you see?” he asks again. “I see a new beginning,” he declares. “I see beauty.” 

Herr, who prefers to use the term łÜČÔ­łÜČőłÜČč±ô instead of handicapped or disabled, often says that he wouldn’t want his biological legs back. He loves the legs he started building after the accident and has steadily improved upon for the past several decades.

His meteoric rise in academia is almost as improbable as his comeback to elite climbing. “I actually graduated from high school not being able to take 10 percent of 100,” he says. “I had no idea what a percent was.” His older brothers were all in construction. He understood that the family trade was unavailable to him, so he shut himself away and applied the same obsessive focus to science that he’d once reserved for climbing. He read everything he could find and enrolled at the local college, Millersville University.

“We’d watch all these films of animals locomoting to try to learn about motion,” says Don Eidam, his first adviser at Millers­ville and an unapologetic superfan who writes a newsletter about Herr. “He’d put all these ideas on my blackboard, and the chalk would literally be disintegrating. He’d call me at midnight with an idea. I’ve never met anyone so committed or intense.”

In 1991, Herr became the first student from Millersville to be accepted at MIT. The academic degrees, innovations, and honors have since overflowed. He is the holder or coholder of over 100 patents. The powered prosthesis he developed for ankle-foot amputees was the product of a special mind with a special motivation. By copying the behavior of a biologically intact leg, Herr and his biomechatronics lab were able to create a breakthrough replacement. In 2011, Time crowned him the “leader of the bionic age.” Last year he won Europe’s top prize for inventors, the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award. 

“In Hugh’s mind, he has not successfully innovated until people are able to benefit from his innovation,” says Tyler Clites, a Harvard-MIT student who has worked in Herr’s lab for six years. “He has said to me, ‘Look, Tyler, I’ve invented hundreds of times, but I’ve only ever innovated twice.’ ” The two items, his prosthetic knee and the ankle-foot, are the only ones commercially available to others.

The idea of an endlessly upgradable human is something Herr feels in his bones. “I believe in the near future, in a decade or two, when you walk down the streets of Boston, you’ll routinely see people wearing bionic systems,” Herr told ABC News in a 2016 interview. In 100 years, he thinks the human form will be unrecognizable. The inference is that the abnormal will be normal, beauty rethought and reborn. Unusual people like Herr will have come home.

At a small luncheon after his talk in New Jersey, the organizers ask me to say a few words about my condition. I give a five-­minute recap of my struggles with cancer, the spinal-cord complication, and my up-and-down recovery. It is my first time speaking publicly about my situation. As I do, I sneak a glance or two at Herr. I wonder what he thinks hearing me tell my story. He is sitting immediately to my right, raking through a towering salad. 

There is no clear signal from him, but I leave feeling that I’ve pulled ever so slightly into his orbit. I am also beginning to understand the weight he bears of being a savior. A friend who saw his impassioned SXSW talk in 2015 told me how she raced up to thank him afterward, only to encounter a different guy. He was polite but aloof. She was put off, but I think I understand. The man has to set boundaries. He can’t save everybody. 

You might say that Herr’s the sort of disrupter the research world needs, or you might say he’s overpromising. One spinal-cord-injury scientist I spoke with wasn’t so sure that a bold tech solution is the answer in a field long focused on the biology of nerve regeneration.

Nicholas Negroponte, the cofounder and former director of the MIT Media Lab, says Herr’s sense of humor helps him handle any negative commentary. “It’s particularly important when you do and say risky things, some of which invite harsh criticism,” he says. “You smile and keep going, because you know you’re right.”

A week after his talk in New Jersey, Herr and I meet up at a seafood restaurant near his MIT office. I arrive 30 minutes early, wanting to get situated. Having lived with my disability for some time now, I understand that I can’t just sweep in like I used to. Herr, to my surprise, given his packed schedule, arrives ten minutes early.

Herr told me earlier that he rarely pushes himself on climbs anymore. He proudly mentioned his two preteen, homeschooled daughters, who are avid hikers and spend almost every weekend with Herr’s former wife, Patricia Ellis Herr, in the White Mountains happily exhausting themselves. They long ago summited Mount Washington and have high-pointed in 46 of the 50 states.

Herr and I talk at length about some of the people he has worked with and why. The Haslet-Davis project took a group from his biomechatronics lab 200 days to create the prosthetic, counting down to the 2014 TED Talk. “She said she wanted to dance again. I really related,” he says. He told himself, I’m an MIT professor, I have resources. The timeline was tight enough that there was a TED Talk plan A (with her) and plan B (without). As everyone knows who has watched the video, Herr’s team hit its deadline. Haslet-Davis unforgettably danced again, and there wasn’t a dry eye because of it.

But as incredible as the moment was, it’s a source of frustration that the prosthetic can’t be permanently handed over to Haslet-Davis. While Herr would love to give it to her, it’s a prototype that would cost millions to reproduce. As for Herr’s climbing buddy Jim Ewing, that’s a similarly uncertain situation. Months after Ewing had his foot amputated, he was fitted with a newly designed ankle-foot prosthetic that responds to his brain waves and allows him to feel his appendage. It is also a prototype that Ewing will eventually have to return.

Haslet-Davis and Ewing understood that they were part of a research project and wouldn’t be able to keep the prototypes. Meanwhile, Herr’s knee and ankle prosthetics, which cost tens of thousands of dollars, aren’t yet widely covered by insurance and remain too expensive for most who have a need for them. Herr has been in discussions with insurers to try and change that. According to Amputee Coalition of America estimates, there are 185,000 new lower­extremity amputations annually in the U.S. By contrast, there are only 1,700 emPower ankles in circulation right now. About half of them are worn by vets, paid for through reimbursements covered by the .

“Herr’s work is important and coming from a good place,” says Alisha Sarang-Sieminski, at the Massachusetts-based Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, a school involved in numerous projects related to lower-cost accessibility design. “But people have different needs for different contexts. Also, so much of the high tech is really not accessible to very many people financially. Should people keep building them? Definitely. Should we also explore basic solutions? Yes.”

Still, Ewing’s pioneering amputation is a huge success for Herr’s group, the Brigham and Women’s surgical team, and, most notably, Ewing. When I visited him at a climbing gym near Portland, Maine, he was planning a trip back to the Cayman Islands. For Ewing, the amputation has reduced the acute pain he used to feel in his biological foot and dramatically changed his outlook. He says that after his accident, he contemplated suicide. “Being alive isn’t enough,” he says. “Breathing isn’t enough. I had to do something. Hugh understood my motivation probably better than I did.”

Herr hadn’t seen Ewing for years when he got an e-mail from him asking for advice about his foot. “He was in a bad place,” says Herr. “Also, I really felt for his daughter. I know guilt so well, that poor girl.”

Ewing says that the way he’d set up the ropes is to blame for his daughter’s inability to brake the fall. Though she has returned to climbing at the gym and bouldering, she wasn’t interested in rope climbing in the accident’s aftermath, and Ewing worried that he’d ruined the sport—a passion they’d shared for years—for her.

Meanwhile, the gift Herr has given Ewing is exceptional. It might be the first time Herr is not the most technologically advanced lower-limb amputee. Herr often describes himself and others facing disabilities as “astronauts testing new life-enabling technologies.” As for his own legs, Herr wants to go even further but would need to leave the U.S. to undergo the operation he has in mind. “I’d love to do it,” he says, without revealing any details about the procedure. “I’m just weighing the risk. I definitely don’t want to go backwards.”

In the short term, he’s using a newly designed set of titanium legs and pushing forward on his work, noting hoped-for funding this year from the military “to show we can synthetically take over a paralyzed limb.” Herr then asks about my rehabilitation experience. This is finally my chance, I think, to ask if there’s anything he can do for me.

I tell him that I identify with amputees and often wonder how some people without legs are more adept than some of us with them. Every time I watch a person with artificial legs walking, I selfishly wonder, Why not me? Why not us? Herr says they have some good ideas but acknowledges that the field has been way more successful in the amputation arena than with spinal-cord injuries. “It’s hard,” he says.

While Herr has complete autonomy selecting projects in his lab, his interventions are rare, and they don’t happen unless the time and circumstances are right. “Often, people ask for help and I don’t have the resources or the solution,” he says. Exceptions like Haslet-Davis and Ewing come from “feeling deeply about it and being in the position to make it happen.” 

I realize talking to Herr that it’s not my story that’s weak, it’s the technology. I’d incorrectly understood his comment about an imminent cure. Paralysis is “low­hanging fruit” in that it’s a condition they can impact in ten to twenty years instead of fifty. There are no toys to play with in Herr’s lab closet. Not yet. 

Before Herr and I wrap up our last visit, I ask what he’d do if he were at an impasse. It’s clear, at least to me, that I’m talking about myself. Being a scientist, he focuses on process. He says he throws everything and anything at a problem. He visualizes each idea as a rock and starts turning them over. He mentions an acquaintance who came to see him earlier in the day who was struggling with depression. Herr started in, imagining at hyperspeed all the places the person might go and hadn’t yet. “Acupuncture? No? Meditation? No? Are you running? No? What medications have you tried? One? One! There’s like 20 antidepressants! Go, go, go!” he says he wanted to plead. He chuckles at his overexuberance, but his belief is real. This can be solved! 

When I say goodbye to Herr and watch him bound down from the upper level of the restaurant to the rain-drenched sidewalk, I’m struck by a malaise. Maybe it’s the rain. Maybe it’s the opportunity lost. Maybe it’s the way he flipped a switch on his emPower ankle and raced effortlessly into the street. But then I think about Herr turning over one rock at a time and the span of possibilities he presented to help with depression. I’m not out of options. There are hundreds of researchers working on a paralysis cure, and I immediately think of a world map I saw recently on a website with dozens of bright red circles representing centers of innovation. I can hear the words of my neurologist, who on my last visit leaned in with something else when he said goodbye. “Keep moving,” he urged. There’s even a clinic in New Hampshire I heard about where they’ve produced exceptional walking recoveries using a robotic gait trainer available nowhere else in the U.S. 

I begin to wonder, was Herr’s story about his depressed acquaintance allegorical? An on-the-spot intervention? Had I just been, ever so lightly, smiled upon, too?

Longtime șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Todd Balf is the author of . is an °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đÌęcontributing photographer.

The post The Biomechatronic Man appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Elite amateur Josh “Harry” Harris looks like he’s on his way to a record mile time at the historic Rawlinson Track in Melbourne, on May 3, 2014.

Pixie-size, with legs pinwheeling, the 23-year-old Australian runner is about to arc through the first bend of the bell lap and is a half-lap ahead of the 30-person chase field when he unexpectedly comes to a near stop. Something is wrong. The rowdy spectators who’ve spilled onto the track’s outer lanes to bellow “Go, Harry, go!” fall hushed.

Stumbling, Harris glances over his left shoulder to see if anyone is close. Later he’ll recall thinking, Oh no, it’s gonna come up. The crowd leans in, keenly waiting for it. Then, suddenly, Harris lifts his head, pushes off hard, and heads into the backstretch. He’s managed not to puke his pre-race meat pie, and he’s running again, with 300 meters to go.

It is the burden of the beer mile’s finest competitors to endure hellish gastric moments like this one. Retching is possible at any instant. Much of the field at Melbourne’s Autumn Classic, the most decorated event in the sport, is wondering where the burping ends and the barfing begins. “You pray for mercy,” a racer explains.

The beer mile isn’t a new phenomenon—especially here at the , which has played host to nearly 200 participants and Harris’s over the past several years. But lately it has garnered a surprisingly large worldwide audience. The race is defined by the task of running four laps on a standard oval track—that’s the mile part. The beer part is the requirement to drink a 12-ounce can or bottle of suds with a minimum of 5 percent alcohol before each lap. The most consequential of the broadly accepted rules governing the event is a penalty lap if you hurl. Finish times with video links are submitted to for ratification.

Many of the beer mile’s most avid participants are world-class runners. That guy lining up in the front row at the New York City Marathon or in the blocks for the 1,500 nationals in Eugene, Oregon? Chances are he’s had a go at the beer mile. The holy grail is a sub-five-minute time.

“Beer miles are what we do for fun instead of gambling in Vegas,” says 35-year-old James Nielsen, an NCAA Division III 5,000-meter champ who has been doing beer miles since his senior year at the University of California at San Diego. “It’s always been a big deal for runners. It’s just that now everybody else has started to hear about it.”

American , a 30-year-old two-time Olympian and 800-meter silver medalist at the 2013 World Track and Field Championships, in Moscow, attempted a sub-five-minute beer mile in 2012, then after his Moscow medal. It was akin to Roger Federer winning Wimbledon but saying in his victory speech that he longed for the beer-pong title that got away. For beer milers, at least, Symmonds’s publicized quest made perfect sense. “Why pander around being the 2nd best 800m runner in the world when you can be the number 1 beer miler,” one commenter wrote. At the time, in August 2013, the record was 5:04.9, set by Harris. Though Symmonds was hopeful that he’d break it in early 2014, his busy competition schedule and an injury kept him from trying.

But on April 27, only five days before Harris’s sub-five-minute attempt in Melbourne, the aforementioned Nielsen, a comparative unknown in the beer-mile fraternity, snuck onto a track in Marin County, California, and drank and ran faster—4:57!—than anyone had ever done before. The resulting , shot by his wife and posted on April 28, complete with Nielsen’s colorful explanation of his yearlong training program, was evidence of the first-ever sub-five-minute beer mile. “Holy shit,” he heaved as he emerged from hunched-over agony. “Oh man.”

Nielsen’s video quickly reached 1.2 million hits. The beer mile, a niche indulgence among track stars, triathletes, and former college runners, was suddenly a viral sensation.

“I think I can do a 4:53,” Harris announced before the Melbourne race, clearly still a bit shaken by the unexpected news from California and intrigued that a much larger audience was now paying attention to his performance on this rainy, gale-battered Saturday night. Three video cameras were rolling, and a Deadspin reporter eight time zones away, in Nashville, Tennessee, was awaiting a post-race comment. The bookmaking site was taking wagers on the outcome. “I’m running faster than I ever have,” 1.25-to-1 favorite Harris said. “But I’m afraid I’ve been running a lot more of late than I’ve been drinking.”

In Melbourne, the 30-person field of male and female participants showed proper IDs to confirm they were of drinking age, but otherwise the paperwork was minimal. Organizer Hamish Beaumont, a local attorney who won the inaugural four-person Melbourne event in 2006, explained that a signed liability waiver would legally suggest that the event existed, which wasn’t in any organizer’s best interest. A ran on the wall. The highlight was footage of a woman careening off the course and heading for a green recycling bin, where she buried her head and heaved—repeatedly.

Beaumont, 38, is a member of the and a coordinator for the city’s popular cross-country series. He first learned about the beer mile a decade ago from a friend who had traveled to Canada, researched it, and found examples of other pioneering efforts. Old-timers from the “uni’s” club told him about the days when spectators would choose a runner during a 10K and drink each time that runner started a new lap. “I can’t recall anyone finishing,” shrugs Beaumont.

Meanwhile, the sport was taking off on other shores as well. Back in the early eighties, I ran with a group called the Barleyhoppers, the best-known U.S. antecedent, started by a crew of runners out of Boston’s famous (a.k.a. the Cheers bar). Their annual championship event, the Great Boston Beer Chase, was a five-to-ten-kilometer road race that required drinking five-ounce beers at anywhere from six to twelve bars. In the downtown edition, which roughly shadowed the city’s Freedom Trail, I raced for the finish but was undone by bloating and Boston’s long wharfs. I puked everywhere.

The modern performance era of beer racing didn’t emerge until the early nineties, when athletes on the Queen’s University cross-country team in Kingston, Ontario, developed and popularized a new approach. They’d heard of chug runs, recalls team member John Markell, but Queen’s runners adapted the concept to their preferred distance—the mile—and inaugurated an annual event, the Kingston Classic. The widely accepted rules they came up with—a beer before each lap, a prescribed drink zone near the start/finish area of the track, a penalty vomit lap—were disseminated over the course of a collegiate meet in Pennsylvania, according to Markell. They would later be dubbed the Kingston rules.

In short order, a relatively standardized beer mile was taking place at a bevy of fine New England schools, including Tufts, Amherst, and Wesleyan. Times were recorded and league titles claimed. Runners talked to other runners. When Markell moved to the Bay Area, he brought the beer mile with him, launching the annual in 2006. The same year, Patrick Butler, a beer-miling enthusiast from Wesleyan, acquired the domain name beermile.com to archive results. The unsanctioned events tended to attract a small and trusted circle of runners, for fear of open-container arrests and community scorn. In 2005, near San Diego, an elite band of triathletes (including a Kona Ironman winner or two) gathered around the holidays but kept things hush-hush by not releasing details until 24 hours beforehand.

According to Beermile.com, there were 159 events in 2013, from Bahrain to Brooklyn. The site is a beehive of results and records, broken down by country, state, and type of beer. Thanks to decades of record keeping, we know that Budweiser is favored by an almost four-to-one margin and that holds the record in international waters from when he and his brother, Brian, went toe-to-toe on a cruise ship off Belize.

The new interest in beer miling and the surprising widespread affection for it has brought the sport, its organizers, and its participants out of the shadows. The former angst over public shaming, recriminations from coaches, and potential job terminations seems over. When The Wall Street Journal last spring, it was like an all-clear sign had been waved. “The Beer Mile makes the front page of the Wall Street Journal; hell drops a few degrees,” Beermile.com .

In just the past year, the love affair has mushroomed on the strength of Nielsen’s million-plus YouTube hits and Harris’s 100,000 before that. In August, Nielsen tweeted that he’d been officially sponsored by the management company Soul Focus Sports to do a . Symmonds confirmed that he would help promote and run in the first , which would be held on December 3 in Austin, Texas. The organizing sponsor, Flocasts, is a new-media company that chronicles elite running and other underrecognized sports. It planned to bring in , like Canadian Corey Gallagher (), Aussie Jack Colreavy (), and Elizabeth Laseter, a former Johns Hopkins track and cross-country runner whose is 25 seconds off the current women’s record. Harris cannot attend, and Nielsen hadn’t committed as of press time. “There has never been a field like this,” said event organizer Joe Williamson. “The world record is going to get broken, and Nielsen should come try to do it again.”

Symmonds told me matter-of-factly that he got interested in the sub-five-minute quest because it sounded fun and, well, track racing could use a little fun. There were bragging rights to be won and America’s reputation to defend against Canadians, Brits, and Aussies. As normal as that sounds, it’s important to note that it’s really not. Symmonds is a professional track and field superstar. There is something culturally extraordinary about the intersection of high-end running and low-end entertainment. It’s a true window into the sick, secret world of runners.

A few days before the Autumn Classic, I accompany Harris to a practice session at a large open training ground behind Melbourne’s Aussie-rules football stadium. It’s early evening, and much of the pitch is taken up by frenetic youth teams. Except for the strange, overstuffed-looking “footie” ball and the exotic Southern Hemisphere bird chatter, it could be any field in the U.S.: there are coaches with whistles, schoolkids racing through cones, parents on the sidelines.

Harris weaves his way through this slice of sporting life with a backpack full of clinking Coopers 62 bottles. He positions his drink zone behind a large metal light pole. It helps that he doesn’t look like a degenerate. He is in a purple singlet trimmed in bright orange that matches his shoelaces. His fresh face and light brown locks make him appear young and angelic enough that if he’s caught drinking in public, I have no doubt that I’ll be blamed.

Tonight’s training session, he explains, won’t involve all four beers—he needs to do some normal, nonalcoholic training afterward, so he’ll drink some and run some to get a read on where he is.

Harris loops the grassy field three times, and prior to each lap he chugs a beer. The running is just plain running, but the drinking is special. One foot is slightly ahead of the other. His back is straight and his head is tilted back so his eyes point almost straight up. The beer can’t wait to rush down his throat. It’s over in five or six seconds. He doesn’t run that far—maybe a half-mile, all told—but that’s not the point of this exercise. “I really like the way I’m drinking,” he exclaims.

Harris leads a seemingly quiet life. His nonalcoholic athletic accomplishments include steeplechase and 5,000-meter titles in Tasmania and 42nd place representing Australia at the 2012 World University Cross Country Championships, in Poland. He remotely attends the local uni in Launceston, Tasmania, where he’s getting his master’s degree to teach. He lives with his mother to save money and races on the weekends. His PR for the 1,500 is 3:51.2.

The beer-mile mastery came about almost by accident. On his first try, during a camping trip, he ran an eight-something. With a little refining of his drinking technique, he lowered his time into the sixes, then the fives. Two years ago, he showed up at the Autumn Classic and, in a performance soon to go viral, set the unofficial world record at 5:02.5. The record wasn’t confirmed, however, because he forgot to flip his finished beers upside down over his head to prove completion. The next year he ran a 5:04.9 and received official record confirmation, by five seconds. Harris might have gotten a sub-five but for a last-lap struggle with the twist-off cap on his Coopers 62.

Frustratingly, science has been slow to answer the question: How hard is a sub-five-minute beer mile? One way to look at this is to consider that there are a limited number of 4-to-4:20-milers in the world—which is the pace parameter for potential record success. More limited are the number willing to drink and run. Four beers might take a talented drinker eight to twelve seconds each, averaging 40 seconds total. That takes a 4:10-miler up to 4:50. Of course, few can go as fast as they normally do with large amounts of gassy liquid rumbling in their stomachs. Mid-fifties lap times easily become mid-sixties—though Harris has done a 58-second split. The effects of the alcohol aren’t to blame: elite runners barely break form, since it takes five minutes for the alcohol to move through the small intestine, into the bloodstream, and to the brain. The overdose of CO2, on the other hand, wreaks cruel havoc on the system, and side-searing cramps are common. A five-minute beer miler has to burp on the exhale and breathe on the inhale. “Burping is the key,” Harris says.

A water-torture analogy isn’t a bad one. It can feel like you’re suffocating—especially, as Harris feels compelled to relate, when “you throw up in your mouth.” Mentally you’ve got to want it. As record chasers lament, there’s always a little piece of them saying, “It’s OK, go ahead, vomit.”

Where is the gravitas that substantiates a superhuman effort in drinking while running? Does the motivation come from doing something better than one of the world’s best? When Symmonds, a 3:34-minute 1,500 man, ordained the beer mile as part of his 2014 rĂ©sumĂ©, the unknown territory below five minutes intoxicated the imagination, a Death Zone for elite runners only. In Harris’s words, something often viewed as semi-stupid became semi-awesome.

James Nielsen perfectly understood the moment the beer mile was having. At UC San Diego, he could run mid-five-minute beer miles without any special preparation and wondered what he could do if he tried. What if he took a lifetime of lessons learned in training for serious objectives like, say, the Olympic Trials (which he qualified for in 2008) or the NCAA Division III 5,000-meter championships (which he won twice) and applied them to achieving the first-ever sub-five-minute beer mile? He’d retired from competitive running six years earlier to work at a tech company and raise his family, but he was still fit. “I’d always wanted to do a sub-five beer mile,” he says. “I know it sounds silly, but it was on my list.”

Between April 2013 and April 2014—as Harris was mistakenly thinking his record was safe from everyone but Corey Gallagher and Symmonds—Nielsen surreptitiously went all in. He added Saturday track workouts and searched for ways to drink faster and retain liquid better. “I read about the competitive food eaters and how they were able to expand the capacity of their stomachs through training,” he says. While famed hot-dog-contest record holder Joey Chestnut relied on water and pasta feasts, the weight-conscious Nielsen seized on another stomach-stretching technique: watermelon loading, which took the form of routinely procuring the largest watermelon he could find and devouring it in one sitting. He improved his beer drinking by perfecting the pre-swallow, which he says “opens the upper sphincter of your esophagus so you can empty the thing in just a few seconds.”

His plan was to unleash his beer-mile record attempt at his annual college-reunion running event, the Gut Check Mile. The date, May 3, was within days of the 60th anniversary of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, on May 6. It had been Nielsen’s dream to make his sub-five-minute attempt on the Bannister anniversary. However, as the month drew nearer, he noticed the tweets coming from Melbourne. The Autumn Classic event was also planned for May 3 but would precede the Gut Check by about 12 hours because of the time difference. In late April, Nielsen did some test 400s and decided he was ready. “I came home fired up and told my wife, ‘I’m not waiting. If this guy [Harris] beats me by 12 hours, I’m going to shoot myself.’ ”

On April 27, Nielsen performed his time trial at a Marin County track with only his wife, Mimi, in attendance. She kept the time and yelped for him to pick it up when he seemed to be flagging. In an almost divine intervention, Nielsen recalls an unexpected cough/burp/dry heave that freed him from distress and sent him flying into the bell lap. He crossed the line in 4:57, notching his last lap in the same time as his first, an astonishing 63 seconds. He’d had to dig deep. He later that he had stomach cramps on both sides. “It’s kind of a miserable experience, to be honest,” he related. “There’s nothing fun about it.”

Most assumed his talk of a stomach-stretching routine was a joke. He swears it wasn’t. “Not only did I run the fastest beer mile in the history of mankind,” he says, “I ate the most watermelon in the history of mankind.”

In the days afterward, Nielsen acknowledged the need for a true race, with rivals all in one place going stride for stride and belch for belch. Meanwhile the video of his world record was certified by the arbiters at Beermile.com, but questions linger. “I’m not saying it isn’t legitimate,” says Harris, “but did you see how fast he drank that beer on the second lap? I just want to know how he did it!”

Of course, Nielsen had the answer: his upper sphincter.

Right before the start of Melbourne’s Autumn Classic, the racers receive their last-minute instructions. Beaumont, in a kilt, tie, and tall socks, says he has no doubt they’ll have a good time and reminds them that “if you make a mess on the track, you’re expected to clean it up.” There’s a low groan, then the runners scurry to the start, filling all eight lanes three or four rows deep. Many are in costume, including top amateur Ash Watson. Returning from injury, he won’t be able to push Harris tonight, he says, but promises to be good for the post-race celebrations. He’s dressed as a beer can.

Harris is in lane three with a Coopers 62 in hand. At the gun, he raises the beer to his lower lip, tilts his head back, and lets it flow. “Put it in the hole!” someone screams, and five seconds later a deafening roar erupts as Harris explodes off the line and slams his empty into the recycling bin. “Harry! Harry!” the cheer rises up.

Harris builds his lead to ten seconds after the first lap and doubles it again after the second lap and third beer. He needs a fast but not impossible 1:02 over the final 800 to beat Nielsen’s record. But the third lap isn’t as quick, and on the first turn of the fourth he stumbles to a standstill, nauseous.

A desperate attempt to make up ground fizzles a few moments later when another wave of nausea hits him on the final turn. His 5:28 finish is nowhere near his best, but it’s easily good enough for a record fourth Autumn Classic victory.

Later, Harris will say that he might have misjudged it all. After setting the record a year earlier, he’d focused on real running, not beer running, hoping to transition into an elite marathoner. Maybe being a young man with a promising amateur career still in the balance made him uncertain of where his true destiny lies. There are very few men in the world capable of a 2:15 marathon, and according to Harris’s coach, he might be one of them. But being a 2:11 marathoner isn’t going to get you on TMZ, The Tonight Show, or ESPN. The choices are confusing.

“I think I’ll lay low for a while,” Harris says. “I’m still young.”

What’s to become of the beer mile in the aftermath of a year unlike any other is uncertain. Nielsen says he has no doubt that his record will soon be eclipsed, because yet another “4:10-miler nobody knows will come out of the woodwork who can drink ridiculously fast.” If Symmonds gets serious about the drinking—he’s a slower drinker but a faster runner than either Harris or Nielsen—nobody will be surprised if he breaks the mark with relative ease.

In the lead-up to the Beer Mile World Championship in Austin, slated to feature prize money and celebrity relay matches, Symmonds said he believed the winner would notch a sub-five-minute time. “I’m training hard to make sure that person is me,” he said. His mile repeats were going well, and he was getting in some drinking on the weekends. He wasn’t overdoing it, he said, since “I have a lifetime of beer-chugging experience accrued from my days in the Sigma Chi fraternity.” He was aiming for 12-second beer splits—slow in comparison to Harris and Nielsen but likely a record-securing pace for Symmonds, given his speed advantage.

When I ask the Kingston pioneer John Markell if he’s worried that the renegade, free-spirited character of the beer mile might be changed by the World Championship and lots of media hoo-ha, he surprisingly says no, that he’s happy to see it get its due. It reminds him of a little story: Years earlier, in an executive job interview, he was asked if he’d done anything that had inspired others and been widely passed on. He thought for a minute, and then it dawned on him. “Well, yes,” he answered. “It’s called the beer mile.”

Todd Balf (@toddbalf) is the author of .

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In January, a rash of heavy snowstorms made the sparse hunting sparser. Provisions ran dangerously low. Elisha Kent Kane turned to what he called “such small deer”—the seemingly infinite supply of shipboard rats. The sled dogs, suddenly a low priority now that there were no trips in the offing, starved from reduced rations. In the fall, Tiger, their best remaining dog, was seized with a fit of Arctic hysteria and, in the delirium that followed, “ran into the water and drowned himself,” according to Kane. In the absence of anything else to give them, Kane boiled up the dead dogs for their surviving brethren. “In spite of the proverb,” he remarked, “dogs will eat dogs if properly cooked.”

The panging, insatiable need for fresh meat was a persistent theme throughout the winter. The awful symptoms of scurvy, held in check for a time, were reappearing: malaise, receding gums, reopened wounds on the amputees. “Brooks grows discouraged,” wrote Kane of his first officer. “The poor fellow has scurvy in his stump, and his leg is drawn up by the contraction of the flexors at the knee-joint. This is the third case.”

Kane was comparatively healthy—and as pleasantly surprised as anyone. “It is a merciful change in condition that I am the strongest now of the whole party, as last winter I was the weakest. The duty of collecting food is on me.” Unfortunately, his repeated attempts failed. On one occasion he and Hendrik sledged for hours to the customary seal-hunting hole only to find it frozen up; on another trip, his sled and dogs crashed through the ice and Kane nearly drowned.

Throughout the winter, Kane, Hendrik, and the few other able-bodied members of the party retrieved just enough fresh meat to avert famine. Once in late October and again in late winter, Hendrik succeeded in reaching Etah and bringing back walrus meat. On the latter trip, he was sobered to find the Inuit nearly as badly off as they were. In February they’d resorted to slaughtering and eating their dogs, he reported to Kane.

Each time the raw meat was delivered—or a “cordial” of deer blood, as Kane prepared once—the men briefly recovered. But by late February and March, when food was again scarce, they were barely hanging on. On February 7, Hendrik bagged a large reindeer, but much of the meat had to be disposed of after it was improperly stored in the extreme cold. There were only two or three men, Kane included, who were well enough to do the shipboard chores, hunt, and nurse the sick.

Kane’s journal is a record of unbroken misery. On January 17: “The present state of things cannot last.” On January 31: “Our sick are worse.” A week later, with the first glints of a returning sun skimming nearby hilltops: “Given up all hope of rescuing our little vessel.”

The task of administering to the sick took a particular toll. He couldn’t contain the spread of scurvy, and the men who’d been his stalwarts—Morton and McGary—were fading fast. The frostbite on Morton’s heel had become an open wound, and Kane feared he also had lockjaw. He’d been useless since October, but Kane didn’t dare undertake the necessary surgery on account of the poor, dark conditions of the living quarters. McGary was bedridden, too. “Happily he has no notion how bad he is,” Kane wrote.

The picture that emerges is one of Kane as the beleaguered caregiver, his men in constant need, some none too grateful. When they got stronger, Kane wondered, would they give answer to their mutinous thoughts? The situation was tenuous enough that he feared going away on an extended hunt because of what might occur in his absence. In February he morosely found himself on deck cutting frozen rope to use for fuel. They’d cut almost everything out of the ship they could without rendering it unseaworthy.

The only thing that seemed to rouse Kane was reciting his plan for how they’d all get through this, a journey of “alternating ice and water for more than 1,300 miles.” If they could get well, they’d have a chance. With daylight—the best medicine, he stated—their dank, miserable “kennel” would cease to be a terminal hospital ward.

Excerpted from , a Byliner Original available as a Kindle Single at Amazon, a Quick Read at Apple’s iBookstore, a Nook Snap at BarnesandNoble.com, and at Kobo.

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I’VE FLOWN 3,000 miles from Massachusetts to get turned on in San Francisco. At the corner of Greenwich and Columbus in North Beach, a block or two from the City Lights bookstore, I see the young, stringy guy I’m looking for, standing in front of a place I still can’t believe is for real. It’s a two-week-old bike shop called the New Wheel, which deals exclusively in electric bikes—or e-bikes, or “pedelec” bikes, or buzzy bikes, or whatever Americans will end up calling bikes equipped with a 350-watt motor that helps you scoot up hills.

Trek's 2011 FX + WSD e-bike

M55 Terminus

“There really isn’t a good name yet,” says Brett Thurber, a 25-year-old graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who owns the New Wheel. Thurber is a smart, earnest entrepreneur who believes his stable of e-bikes represents a “complete transportation solution.” He’s clearly devoted to the cause: before he owned a store, he sold e-bikes to customers one at a time, using a trailer-towing e-bike to deliver the machines all over the city, even to nosebleed areas like Potrero Hill.

“It was pretty funny to see Brett with this trailer dragging behind him, with a bike tied down on it,” says Jane Goldman, a friend of Thurber’s who lives in Potrero. “One guy, two bikes. He was sweating even with the motor.”

Thurber is well-positioned to catch a big retail wave. According to green-tech analysts at the consulting firm Pike Research, annual U.S. e-bike sales are expected to more than double in the next five years, from 350,000 to 800,000. Meanwhile, in bike-crazed countries like Holland and China, the revolution has already arrived. In Holland, every fourth bike sold is battery powered. In China, there are 120 million ­e-bikes on the road.

Bike snobs may grumble, but the new generation of e-bikes hitting Europe and the U.S. are stylish, technically sophisticated, and hard to dislike. Steve Roseman, founder of the San Francisco—based Electric Bike Network, told me that riding one felt like “a fairy godmother tapped you on the shoulder and made you twice as strong.”

I’ve ridden an e-bike before, but never in a hilly, trafficky city like San Francisco—the perfect setting for a test of their utility. Thurber and I saddle up on a pair of handsome aluminum-framed Ohm Urbans and head for the steepest, most commuter-aggravating challenge we can find. That turns out to be the southeast face of Telegraph Hill, one of the fabled Seven Hells of San Francisco and an incline that organizers of the Coors Classic pro cycling event chose for the race prologue in 1985 and 1988. The uphill grades are somewhere between 20 percent and Oh My God.

After tapping the buttons on my handlebar-mounted computer—roughly the size and shape of a cigarette pack—and selecting level three (next-to-highest in terms of motorized assist), then level four (maximum), I find myself gliding to the top with quiet ease. I pass a haplessly laboring ten-speeder and almost feel compelled to apologize. Automobiles bumper-to-bumpering their way up the hill watch me whiz past and want some of what I’m having. I notice things I wouldn’t notice if I were grinding away under my own steam: the tight, lush scenery on Lombard, the sweet aroma of bursting cherry blossoms, the hangnail on my right pinkie. It takes us maybe five minutes to gain several hundred feet, at which point we jump off the bikes and grandly survey the gorgeous city below, unburdened by sweat, pain, or thirst. Puritan-leaning New Englander though I am, I like it.

Later, I check Coors Classic records for times of the world’s best racers on Telegraph Hill. It took Tour de France champions Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault—their heart rates redlining, no doubt—pretty much the same amount of time it took me and Thurber. Who, I might add, was wearing jeans.

IT’S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE just how popular e-bikes might become if gas hits $5 a gallon. Manufacturers like Giant, Trek,Kona, Brompton, Optibike, and Breezer are already producing models of several types, everything from city commuters and mass-­transit foldies to mountain, touring, and cargo bikes. At the 2010 Interbike trade show in Las Vegas, e-bike manufacturers set up a special test-track area for reviewers. Edward Benjamin, an industry consultant, told The New York Times that e-bikes are a “gift from God” for manufacturers, even in a steep price category currently ranging from $1,500 to $3,000.

In most cities, you might not see much evidence of the e-bike invasion just yet, but in San Francisco you do. David Chiu, president of the city’s board of supervisors, rides one, and he predicts that e-bikes will “change how people think about bikes in urban areas.” Blazing Saddles, the city’s major bike-rental business, offers e-bike tours across the Golden Gate Bridge, and e-bikes are increasingly showing up beneath the butts of commuters on bike-path arteries like Market Street and Golden Gate Park’s JFK Drive.

By 2020, the city hopes that 20 percent of its inhabitants will use bikes (of all kinds) as a frequent mode of transportation. (The current figure is 6 percent.) In a place as hilly and windblown as S.F., that number would barely seem feasible without widespread use of e-bikes. Meanwhile, in the hills of Marin County—where mountain biking was born—the e-bike’s charms are being tested in novel ways. Some riders have taken to e-biking up steep climbs to feast more easily on what matters to them most: downhills.

As it happens, some of mountain biking’s biggest names are in on the e-bike action. This year, Bay Area mountain-bike ­pioneers Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher rolled out commuter and cargo e-bike models like the $2,800 Transport+, part of the Gary Fisher Collection by Trek, a sweet-looking cargo bike with a long-charge lithium-manganese battery. You could almost hear the gasps in traditional bike shops, but for Breeze the decision to enter the market was a no-brainer. “It’s part of the future,” his marketing coordinator, Mitch Trux, told me. “Why wouldn’t Joe want to make a great one?”

For Breeze and others, the idea of adding one more bike to the quiver would hardly seem controversial. But it is, in part because e-bikes, to some, don’t qualify as bikes at all. “Buy an electric bike, kill a Chinese worker,” wrote a Montreal blogger a couple of years ago, linking e-bikes to toxic lead-acid batteries and poor production practices abroad. E-bikes made in Europe and the U.S. use lithium-ion batteries, but to some purists, bike means a human-powered machine, and riding one involves use of legs and lungs only. An e-bike is no different from a scooter, you’ll hear shop owners say, plus they’re a bitch to fix because they involve unfamiliar parts like circuit boards and engines. A wrench-turner at a San Francisco bike shop told me that initially “they required almost an electrician’s level of skill” just to remove the back wheel and fix a flat.

And it isn’t just bike snobs who have their concerns. San Francisco is home to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), the largest city-based bicycle-advocacy group in the nation. Until recently, SFBC hadn’t paid much attention to e-bikes, because they hadn’t really been on the radar. For them and for other urban bike-advocacy groups looking to green up city streets with bike paths, e-bikes are issue-complicating newcomers. They’re not exactly unwelcome—in principle, SFBC adores the idea of more people riding—but in places where bikes are controversial, bikes with motors are bound to be more so.

SFBC doesn’t see e-bikes as a potential problem but would like to monitor their use if they become common on dedicated bikeways, which are being planned and lobbied for in numerous cities, including San Francisco. And there’s the question of how much support you want to put behind a machine that costs so much. SFBC places a growing emphasis on bike-riding families. Is it realistic to imagine e-bike-riding families?

Even so, the new generation of e-bikes is bound to win hearts and minds. For starters, they’re designed well and they look great. The motor is tucked away in either the rear or front hub, and in some models the battery reclines like a hardcover book on a rear bike rack. The bikes’ lithium-ion batteries, which are standard on the high quality e-bikes sold in the U.S., last long enough for most commutes—30-plus miles—and ­recharge when you brake, go downhill, or stop for a 20-minute plug-in. If you don’t want to buy a new e-bike, you can buy a kit. Almost any bike can be retrofitted for around $1,200.

E-bikes, it should also be noted, reward effort. You have to pedal them for the motor to kick in, and when it does the engine cuts out once you hit 20 miles per hour. A drive-train torque sensor detects pedal force and relays the information to the system’s computerized brain, which in turn tells the motor how much juice it has to deliver to help your cadence stay honey smooth. Translation: an e-bike performs better for riders with a stronger stroke.

They’re also potentially democratizing, making bike commutes possible for people who’d normally opt out. Last year, on a transportation forum called Streetsblog Network, a poster identifying herself as “taomom” made the case in response to an e-bike hater who said that e-bikes were, by definition, a crime against bicycling.

“I live in San Francisco,” she began. “The last half-mile home for me is entirely up a ­ginormous hill. With an electric-assist ­motor in the back wheel, I’ve replaced a third of my car trips with carbon-free biking.
 Electric bikes are certainly not for everyone, but they allow people who live on hills, who transport children or cargo, who have bum knees, or who have 10-plus-mile commutes to get around without a car. Bicycle purity is one thing; the fate of the planet is another. Let’s go for the planet, folks.”

CONFESSION: I WAS A bike snob once. My own “pedelec” awakening came two years ago, when I took an assignment in which I signed up my family for a car-free month. I forgot to tell my wife. She doesn’t ride. She’s fearful of city traffic and unsteady in maneuvers that regular riders take for granted, like remounting the bike after a stop. I grudgingly borrowed a Giant Hybrid Twist e-bike for her, thinking she might find some traction with a bike you don’t have to, um, ride. She loved it. She felt safe and happy.

Truth be told, I liked the bike, too. It kept me out of the car. I felt the good vibe of being on a bike without all the pedaling. I’ll always ride regular bikes for the fitness rewards, but taomom has a point: e-bikes open up roads for people who wouldn’t ride otherwise.

“I used to be a skeptic,” says Tim Blumenthal, an avid Boulder-based cyclist who heads the leading national bike-advocacy group, Bikes Belong. “To put it bluntly, I used to put e-bikes in the same class as Segways, but my thoughts have changed.”

Blumenthal saw the light during a test ride in Madison, Wisconsin, where, amid a throbbing crowd of thousands, he found that he could spin away most of the time but call on an e-bike’s amps when warranted. E-bikes, he decided, could and should become a powerful mass-transit tool. “I needed to come off my high horse and not be so smug,” he says. “I get it now.”

Part of what Blumenthal gets is a lovely counterintuitive notion: that the best way to ensure people are safe on their bikes is to get more bikes on the road. Studies have shown that when you increase the number of riders on city streets, the average motorist begins to change his behavior and adapt to their presence. In the estimation of e-biking proponents, these machines are the best and perhaps only way to get a huge number of people quickly deployed.

In San Francisco, as Brett Thurber and I tool around, there’s a poignant moment when we park our bikes on the Market Street sidewalk in front of the S.F. Bicycle Coalition. I go in, but Brett stays outside and fiddles with his iPhone. He would have liked to pop in and press the flesh with Leah Shahum, who runs the group, but he knows he must bide his time. His constituency, energetic as it is, is still small.

Clearly, the chief obstacle to that wished-for broader acceptance is price. Right now it’s anybody’s guess how and when e-bike prices will come down. The most obvious answer is that they’ll drop when demand
increases and the expense of production—mainly having to do with battery costs—
decreases. Until they do, proponents would do well to look for ways to make them available to ordinary people, not just as two-wheeled Priuses for bike freaks and prosperous first-adopters. Thurber says he’s closed a deal that connects e-bike buyers with green ­financing. Another sliver of light might be the pilot bike-share program that’s currently being studied far away from San Francisco at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

In a small but vigorous rollout, UT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Christopher Cherry is overseeing a campus bike-share model that will ­include e-bikes. The campus is large, hilly, and spread out, and its students are not ­exactly reluctant to reach for the keys to get around. This isn’t the campus culture of Berkeley or Madison, and a beefy, typically bombproof bike-share bike might not be enough to wean folks away from their gas-guzzler of choice. But what if an e-bike fills a necessary pragmatic niche—a populist way to get people from place to place that doesn’t require a highly fit user?

Needless to say, UT’s about-to-launch pilot is being watched closely—by potential investors, opponents, supporters, and Cherry himself, who really doesn’t know how it will turn out. Who will ride what? How many car trips will be saved? Can neophytes handle a process that involves card-swiping out a bike and paying attention to a battery charge? He realizes that e-bikes, with all their good green promise, are also more expensive. In this economy, more expensive isn’t good for the mass rollout of any consumer product.

But what if the economy gets better and gas prices stay up? The seeds have been sown. In London, Hertz is already renting e-bikes along with their Audis and Mercedes. Other cities are likely to follow, and it’s not hard to envision e-bikes pouring into Peoria and beyond. Prices would come down. The revolution would be here.

I smile when I consider the impact. The New Wheel would be a kind of birthplace of the revolution. And Brett Thurber—who was once scraping by and wishing on a dream—would be a wealthy man.

LONGTIME CONTRIBUTOR TODD BALF WROTE ABOUT BUILDING DIY SURFBOARDS IN OCTOBER 2009.

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I’M NOT THE OBVIOUS candidate to design and build my own surfboard. I don’t surf, and I’m not very good with tools, so I’m like a guy who can’t play piano deciding to construct a two-story pipe organ. Knowing the distance between who I am and what I strangely want, I’ve signed up for an intensive, weeklong workshop offered by Grain Surfboards, a New England–based manufacturer of classic wooden waveriders. For $1,575, Grain’s craftsmen will teach you how to make your own custom board, which they call “a totem to the past, a nod to the sport’s noble roots.”

I like that kind of talk. Still, as I look up at the blond and glassy totems lining the shop walls at Grain’s rustic headquarters, in the coastal town of York, Maine, each seems to be saying the same thing: “Not in your lifetime.”

FIVE A.M. on Mount Washington, near Gorham, New Hampshire. The sun has yet to rise, but hundreds of gear-stuffed cars with out-of-state license plates cram a makeshift parking lot at the foot of New England’s highest peak. I am aware of a large mountain lurking out there somewhere, but it’s the buzzing foreground that holds my attention: Clans of cyclists—fathers and sons, husbands and wives, club riders, elite pros—sit on stationary trainers, the robust hum of spinning wheels filling the air. For the 600 riders who are about to start “racing” at four miles per hour—the average pace of the Volkswagen Mt. Washington Auto Road Hillclimb—going nowhere in the dark is an appropriate prelude.

Mountain Biking Up Mount Washington

Illustration by Tavis Coburn

The Rockpile, as Mount Washington is unromantically nicknamed, towers 6,288 feet above sea level. We’ll be climbing the uppermost 4,727 feet, over a mere 7.6 miles. (For perspective, one of the toughest races in the Rockies, the Mount Evans hill climb, near Denver, rises 7,000 feet over 28 miles.) With an average grade of 12 percent and sustained stretches of 18 percent (highway grades rarely exceed 7 percent), Mount Washington is steeper than L’Alpe d’Huez or any other climb in the Tour de France, Spain’s Vuelta, or the Giro d’Italia. Mile for mile, it is arguably the toughest one-day bike race on the planet.

There are a whopping 72 turns on the Auto Road course, and the longest straightaway is only a few hundred yards—on dirt. Most hill climbs ease off at the top, allowing riders to drop into a more muscular gear and enjoy a burst of acceleration. Not on Washington. In the final 100 yards—a section alternately called the Corkscrew, the Ladder, and the Wall—the grade steepens to a horrifying 22 percent.

“The last pitch throws you over backward,” cautions a post on the popular Racers Forum section of the race’s official Web site, . “Without very low gears it is a series of linked track stands and wheelies.”

I have come to race for the first time with my friend and neighbor Neil Stanton, both of us being part of the amateur hill tribe who hurl themselves against this course for no greater glory than to see if it can be done. Heightening the mystique, the privately owned Auto Road is open to cyclists only twice a year: for a practice run in July and on race day, in mid-August.

These days, dozens of uphill bike races scattered across the U.S. cater to a burgeoning number of climbing fanatics, inspired in part by American superstars like Tyler Hamilton and Lance Armstrong, whose pain-seared faces and gutsy triumphs in the mountains have provided irresistible viewing. For cyclists who crave a heaping spoonful of this suffering, Mount Washington is Mecca.

Since its inauguration, in 1973, the Mount Washington event has drawn a core of top racers, but mostly this is a party for the people. They come by the hundreds from all over the U.S. They include Calvinistic northeasterners for whom painful penance never fails to seem enchanting. They are folks like Donna Smyers, 46, who did the annual footrace up Washington a month earlier. They are Alan Johnson and Michael Arciero, forty-something hardbodies who have coached cycling at the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point.

“This is fun for us,” Arciero told me when I met him at the July 2003 practice day, attempting to explain why he drove ten hours, slept in a campsite, and arrived predawn with the intent of riding the course twice.

The tribe also draws a large number of zealous would-be exercise physiologists who offer an array of theories aimed at solving the only problem racers really care about: getting your (m)ass up this insanely steep incline. Floating around the Hillclimb Web site are Ph.D.-level insights on “overgearing” (training in big gears, bike racing’s version of weight lifting); eight-month cardio workout regimens; and even deep-diving techniques to enhance lung capacity. Though the Hillclimb may be the most analyzed 6,288 feet in cycling history, one veteran Forum participant has the key: “Just fucking train.”

By first light on race day, the sky is clear, and it’s already pushing 80 degrees. By 6:30 I’m anxious about how my legs feel: For months I’ve lavished attention on them with fire-tower climbs, town-line sprints, and scenic day trips in the hills far from my home in Beverly, Massachusetts. Now I look, I knead, and then I try to put them away till later, like a freshly ironed shirt.

Soon enough, we assemble at the starting line. Promptly at 7:40, the start is signaled by a broadside from a Civil War–era cannon. By 7:42 the majority of the field understands Washington’s harsh reputation: The pavement tilts up abruptly and the click-click-click of shifters shifting sounds like a plague of cicadas. We are, in the slowest possible sense of the word, under way.

AT THE FRONT are the pros, including the men’s and women’s course record setters, Tom Danielson, 25, and Canadian Genevieve Jeanson, 21. I’m in the claustrophobic middle of the throng, flanked by Neil on one side and Ross Kennedy—a.k.a. Spamman, a 43-year-old financial adviser from Boston and a hero to the Forum junkies—on the other.

Spamman’s presence is considerable. For the last three years, on weekends before the race, he and people with cybernames like Spankyman, Canoli, Way2Big, and Midlifecrisis have rendezvoused at other difficult paved climbs in New England, from Mount Ascutney, in Vermont, to Pack Monadnock, in New Hampshire. Afterwards, club members flood their Web pages with ride reports, details on gearing experiments, and pictures of postworkout pub-crawling debacles.

This year, Spamman has gotten serious. He’s 37 pounds lighter than his 2002 heft of 205 (thanks in part to marriage troubles) and sits atop a rig that looks as if it’s been filched from another galaxy: a gorgeous 13-pound Dave Lloyd track bike painted a deep admiral blue, stripped to a single, perfect gear. Bowing to the every-pound-costs-you-30-seconds rule, the bike is also brakeless.

“What do I need brakes for?” he had announced to his rapt public as we rolled off the starting line. “We’re only going up!”

As Spamman knows, the effort to gain a mechanical advantage ascending Washington has a rich, if mixed, history. In 1861, horse-drawn wagons clip-clopped to the top of the newly completed carriage road in a plodding three hours. At the turn of the century, auto manufacturers like Mercedes and Stanley brought their fastest cars to the mountain and wheezed to the top in two hours. By the time the Hillclimb was introduced, in ’73, the public’s fascination had shifted back to human power. The first winner was John Allis, a three-time U.S. Olympic cyclist who completed the ride in one hour and 15 minutes.

Held in October that year, the race saw below-freezing temperatures at the base and a howling nor’easter above tree line, at 4,000 feet. The next year, under better conditions, Allis shattered his mark by almost 14 minutes. In 1980, the record fell again when Olympic road cyclist Dale Stetina finished in 57 minutes and 41 seconds, a time that stood for the next 17 years.

Then along came a kid named Tyler.

“There’s B.T and A.T.,” says Richard Fries, 43, a field reporter for the Outdoor Life Network and editor of The Ride, a regional racing magazine based in Boston. “Before Tyler, Washington was a good local hill climb. After Tyler, it has become the unofficial world championship of hill climbing.”

In 1997, Hamilton, fresh from a spectacular Tour de France debut with the U.S. Postal Service team, arrived at Mount Washington and stomped to the top in 51 minutes and 56 seconds, obliterating Stetina’s 17-year-old mark by almost six minutes. Afterward, Hamilton said the climb more than equaled anything he’d ridden in the Tour, a declaration that attracted international racers like French superstar Jeannie Longo.

Hamilton’s endorsement also lured the best from the West, aspiring pros and climbing specialists who knew that a good performance on Washington could help launch a career. “Last year my agent e-mailed some of the teams we were talking with and told them I was going to break Tyler’s record,” Tom Danielson, a pro cyclist from Durango, Colorado, told me. “I was like, ‘Jeez, what are you thinking? I’ve never even seen the course.’ I was pretty uptight for a while.” The last two winners—Danielson, who did set the current record in 2002 with a time of 49:24, and Tim Johnson, who won the Hillclimb in 2000 and 2001—both now race for Division I European teams.

WELL BELOW the badasses, I’m grinding along with the tribe. I hit the Horn, the midway point, at 43 minutes, on track to finish under my goal of one hour and 30 minutes and perhaps under the magic 1:20 “top-notch” time, an honorific earned by only 77 men and three women in 2002. Long views stretch in every direction, especially to the northeast, over the Great Gulf Wilderness. On practice day, at this same spot, a veteran rider tricked me into believing I was near the top.

“You’re not far now,” she deadpanned, setting me up for a demoralizing final 3.8 miles. I’m wiser now but can’t help feeling excited that I’m zipping along in such ideal conditions, pushing toward a stellar time in my first race.

By Five Mile Grade, a brutal section heightened by an unimpeded view of the entire ridge, the road starts taking its toll. Riders on the upper slopes have tossed everything they don’t need—packs, clothes, food, spent water bottles. Around me, polite small talk has been replaced by muttered expletives and the occasional wry observation: “You know you’re going slow,” says the man next to me, “when the blackflies catch you.”

Weather has always been Mount Washington’s X factor. The highest sustained surface wind speed on earth, 231 miles per hour, was recorded on Washington’s summit in 1934, and during 30 years of the Hillclimb, there have been some epic days. In 1986, icy roads cut the race distance in half. In 1990, the temperature dipped below freezing, with 30-mile-per-hour winds. (This is in August, remember.) Two years in a row, in ’93 and ’94, the whole thing was just plain canceled. The last three years were remarkably nice, but this year the veterans have been skeptical.

“People are getting a bit spoiled,” Andy Orsini, the chiseled 43-year-old race director, warned at the pre-race meeting. “If you ask me, we’re definitely overdue.”

He’s right. The punishment is unleashed on the last switchback of Five Mile Grade, where I plunge into the hostile world of fog and wind. It’s impossible to see, difficult to stay on the bike, and suicidal to take a hand off the handlebar to grab a water bottle.

As Spamman knows, everyone is humbled by the mountain. One year he pedaled so furiously in the first half-mile that his crank fell off four times. Another time he had to enliven his excruciatingly slow progress by singing the Supremes’ “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Finally, there was the day in 2002 when he heard a croaky voice behind him: “Keep a straight line, sonny!” Spamman figured he was about to be passed by some speedy young whippet, but the voice belonged to a gray-haired woman.

“I couldn’t hold her wheel,” he laments. “Granny dropped me.”

Pedaling into the gale, Spamman is determined to stay on his bike, worried about his $4,000 investment getting kited into the beyond. Neil alternately walks and rides, giving in to the elements. Fantasizing that I am locked in an Everestian battle for survival, I dig out a packet of Gu, tear it open with my teeth, gulp down the contents, and feel a surge of energy hit my legs.

Much of the field is going nowhere. Dozens of spent riders are walking, standing, and, in some cases, lying on the road. A 120-pound woman named Debbie will later report that she was blown over four times in the space of a mile. My goals are now elemental: Don’t get knocked off the bike. Don’t stop.

LANCE ARMSTRONG has said that in the final stages of a climb, he is half delirious, driven onward by fear and predatory instinct. “The beauty of a difficult hill climb,” says veteran U.S. cyclist Drew Miller, “is that tactically there is not a lot going on. Everything is in your control. You throw down what you have, and the strongest guy is going to be there at the end.”

For almost two miles, with the mountain’s upper 1,500 feet shrouded in mist, the steadily isolating effect of a difficult climb becomes complete. Riders are invisible to one another, the road a blur, the end nonexistent. Then, somewhere ahead, you hear a light ding-ding-ding coming through the atmospheric quagmire, then a shriek, then you see a few shadowy figures jumping and waving. A gap of silence follows—a bend in the road—and finally there’s a large crowd in front of you, screaming, with ghostly, parka-clad figures pointing at where you should go, where you shouldn’t go, but mostly yelling, “PUUUUSH!”

Later, at the finish, there is excited chatter about all the riders who were flung off their bikes when crosswinds caught them on the Wall. One of them is the women’s winner, Genevieve Jeanson, who finished third overall with a time of 59:58, six minutes off her course-record time. “I tried to get back on my bike, but the road was too steep,” Jeanson tells the press corps. “I had to walk.”

Danielson, on the other hand, has swept upward with grace and grit, completing the course in 51 minutes and five seconds—a minute and a half shy of his own record from the year before. Philip Wong finishes second in 55:23, a performance that earns him rider-to-watch honors and an invitation to race with Fiordifrutta, the nation’s premier amateur cycling team. “I just got interviewed by OLN,” he gushes. “Cool.”

Farther down the list comes Spamman, who improves his personal best by five minutes and sets his sights on an elite 1:20 next year. Alan Johnson, one of the West Point guys, beats his previous time by ten minutes. Johnson is so energized at the finish that he charges up the last climb and accelerates the last few yards—when he suddenly remembers he’s riding a bike without brakes.

“I was screaming, ‘No brakes!’ thinking I was going to run somebody down,” he says. “But I was only crawling, and some folks reeled me in. My mind was wasted; maybe I thought I was roaring along at this huge speed.”

AS FOR ME, out of the mistaken belief that the top-notch cutoff time is 1:30 and not 1:20, I push myself the last 2.5 miles with dreams of grandeur. I finish in 1:30:56 for a non-dreamy 201st place. Still, the fact that every finisher is received like a survivor from some misbegotten Arctic expedition is nice. Neil, disoriented, misses the summit turn and is headed into the roadside crowd when his 12-year-old daughter catches up with him, steers him back on course, and runs with him across the finish line.

There are dozens of crash tales, rumors of dogs and squirrels wind-driven into the air like old leaves, and the specter of not one but two finishers vomiting on the race announcers. Many riders acknowledge being ripped off their bikes in the last mile. Well past the three-hour all-clear time, there are still folks on the course weaving precariously between descending cars.

A few months ago, when I told a friend who once ran to the top of Mount Washington that I planned to enter the cycling race, he offered some advice. You will look for the top of the hill, he said. It is natural. It is human. But it will kill you. Don’t look up, he warned, because the top won’t come.

At 9:12 a.m., I’m wearing a warm fleece blanket and an Olympic-style medal around my neck. I look up at the last 100 yards of the mountain, but still can’t see the top through the fog. It doesn’t matter. For me, the other commoners, and several pros, there is a new and wonderfully preoccupying thought: Next year.

The post Tribe of Pain appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The four riders have been on the road for a few hours when the sign for the town of Marble Falls comes into view. They’ve already shed their tights and jackets, the day turning warm and sunny in the rugged Texas hill country west of Austin. The hills roll up in swells, each scrub-brushy summit an overlook upon a seemingly infinite spread of premium longhorn and Brahman ranchland. In far-off thermals, teams of turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks orbit with calculating grace—rising and falling, searching for their next meal with no discernible effort.


This is Armstrong’s favorite ride, a 120-mile circuit around sprawling Lake Travis, past Nameless Road to the Circle K, and back to Austin. Armstrong happily grinds along in a big, macho gear over the rolling terrain, good-naturedly baiting his partners to follow his lead. “Meow, meow,” he purrs, leaking a dimpled smile from beneath his sunglasses.


Along for the ride today are Frankie Andreu, Björn Stenersen, and George Hincapie, Motorola teammates who’ve descended on Austin to train with Armstrong before heading for the Tour of Mexico. They don’t respond to Armstrong’s taunts until he starts flicking his head around to take stock of who’s where and jockeys into position for a sprint. The 20-year-old Hincapie, a newcomer to the team this season, is in trouble. He’s gobbling Fig Newtons when he sees Armstrong swivel around, and now he’s madly trying to stuff them down.


Too late. Armstrong bursts out of the saddle as if he’s heard a starter’s pistol. In the moment they all break it looks like some whimsical pantomime, a kind of vaudevillian flurry of arms and paddle-wheeling legs. Heads are down, chests pinned to handlebars to shed the headwind. The bikes violently rock side to side in the flail of effort, torqued so hard that it’s amazing they don’t slam right over. The sprint lasts perhaps 100 yards. Armstrong wins. He always wins. “Hey, he’s world champion,” says Andreu, who was Armstrong’s roommate last year in Europe. “He’s supposed to kick our butts.”


It isn’t that Armstrong looks domineering. He’s of average height and weight—five-foot-ten, 165 pounds—with the square shoulders, broad smile, blemish-free skin, and glossy, gapless white teeth of a milk-ad model. When he goes unshaven, his beard looks more like an act of adolescent desperation than the menacing accent on a game face. What’s menacing, of course, is what’s underneath the hood.


At this point in his career, Armstrong’s coaches say he is physically and emotionally suited to one-day races, the sport’s abusive, eight-hour, 200- to 300-kilometer marathons. Specifically, he is one of the handful of riders who can make an explosive surge even with 150 miles in his legs. “A lot of riders can race at 200 kilometers,” says Jim Ochowicz, Motorola’s general manager and directeur sportif, who brought the first U.S. squad, then Team 7-Eleven, to Europe in 1985. “Lance is one of the few who can do it at 250.” Some explain the ability as one-in-a-million genetics. Edward F. Coyle, who oversees the human-performance lab at the University of Texas, says that Armstrong generates perhaps only one-fourth as much fatigue-causing lactic acid as most elite cyclists. Others, like his mentor and former national-team coach Chris Carmichael, attribute Armstrong’s capabilities in large part to something else: his predatory instinct.


To grind out a win in a long, one-day cycling race, says Carmichael, you’ve got to want to inflict pain. “Ever read how people say it’s really personal when you stab somebody?” he asks. “Well, a bike race is that kind of personal.” There’s nothing neat or clinical about it, he explains. There’s no divorcing the passion and emotion from the act. It’s visceral.


Watching Armstrong, the comparison can almost be taken literally. He often imagines himself as a boxer, and when he drops an opponent in the late going he sometimes can’t help himself. As he rides away he lifts his right hand from the handlebar, winds up with a clenched fist, throws the knockout punch, sees the head snap.


Armstrong and his girlfriend, Sonni Evans, climb into his curvy, coal-black Acura NSX, which, he beams, “hits 85 in second gear.” It’s his $70,000 gift to himself for winning the World Championships. Armstrong and “the Sonster,” former high-school classmates in Plano, plan to live together in Europe this season, having rekindled an old relationship only weeks ago. Today, at his mother’s request, they’re en route to a small military ceremony in which Armstrong’s uncle will be promoted to the rank of army captain. Captain Mooneyham. “Oooh,” Armstrong utters, hearing the name. He imagines dropping Armstrong, the name he got from a stepfather he hasn’t seen, or wanted to see, in more than five years, and adopting his mother’s maiden name. He sees the winner’s stand, hears the words—Lance Mooneyham—and winces.


Armstrong’s upbringing in a broken home has been rehashed so often in the cycling press that it can sound hollow. “I’m sure there are people who say, ‘Come on with the ma-and-kid story,'” he says. He feigns a melodramatic voice-over. “‘She was 17 when she had him, we all know she had a tough time, we all know he loves her and she loves him, and aw, give us a break.’ But what do you want me to do? It happened.”


Armstrong’s father disappeared before Lance was two, and his stepfather, whom his mother married at 19, was, according to Armstrong, “deceitful.” When Lance was 16, he says, they “kicked the guy’s ass out.” Linda Armstrong had never finished high school and received no support from her family. She and her son grew up together and toughed it out together—at least that’s how they felt.


Ma-and-kid weekends were spent driving to one sports event or another. Armstrong, who had found solace and a certain talent in the pool, became a top junior swimmer and then branched out into triathlon. His mother cautiously kept him motivated. “I never, ever pushed him to do any of this—I just support him,” says the now happily remarried Linda Walling. “Lance and I are both super, super go-getters.”

By 16, Armstrong was one of the country’s top short-course triathletes and a budding superstar. By 17, a senior in high school, he was done. The U.S. Cycling Federation had gotten word that a teenage racer was keeping pace on the bike with the biggest names in triathlon, and Armstrong received an unexpected invitation to train with the Junior National Cycling Team. The local school board said it would bar Armstrong from graduating if he took a six-week leave in the second semester of his senior year, so with his mother’s blessing he withdrew from Plano East.


It was the right move. Armstrong made the 1990 junior Worlds squad, competed in Moscow, and graduated later that spring from another school in Dallas. After his impressive performance, the Russian coach called Armstrong the best young American racer he’d seen in years. Just months later, Armstrong signed a contract with the Subaru-Montgomery professional/amateur racing team. And by the summer of 1992 the richer, more talented Motorola squad offered him a spot. As his mother would say, Lance had turned negatives into positives.


So when Armstrong was facing the biggest race of his young professional career—last year’s Worlds, held in Oslo, Norway—he gave Mom a call in Plano. She requested some time away from her management job at a telecommunications company, crossed the Atlantic, and took up residence with the Motorola camp. She wasn’t there to sightsee. The blond beauty became her son’s…well, his mother, washing his clothes, joining him at team dinners, and reading in the dark while he napped. They were back together again, and if the team was a little mystified by the arrangement, nobody said a word.


Lance Armstrong’s bungalow apartment near the University of Texas is pleasantly overrun with merging piles of clean and dirty cycling apparel, coming and going training partners, and the growling music of Smashing Pumpkins. The Thrift Drug Triple Crown trophy serves as a repository for pens and spare bike parts. With only a few days until the start of the season, Armstrong moves with a sense of urgency, fast-forwarding through the message machine. He’s heard from his mother, a few pals from Austin, and Hennie. Hennie Kuiper, who shares the Motorola coaching responsibilities with Jim Ochowicz from his home in the Netherlands, always calls but really never has much to say. Armstrong shakes his head. If it isn’t Kuiper, then it’s Ochowicz, keeping tabs, offering steady doses of counsel, reinforcement, mock exasperation, and occasional reprobation. You get the feeling that, from Motorola’s perspective, Armstrong is like a gleaming Jaguar that must be parked on the street every night. Someone’s got to keep an eye on it.


Sonni, sitting at the kitchen table, fishes a faxed questionnaire from a big mound of paper. “We gotta do this, Lance,” she says, explaining that it’s for a service that provides personal videos to be used in lieu of business cards. “Not now,” he stalls. “I have to think about it.” Sonni reads anyway, and Armstrong dutifully responds.


“Favorite book?”


“Howard Stern’s autobiography.”


“Most expensive purchase?”


“The car.”


“Best day in cycling?”


“Go on.”


“Worst day in cycling?”


“Easy.”


Actually there were two worst days, one at the 1992 Summer Olympics and the other coming a week later, in Armstrong’s professional debut. He’d come unglued in the 115-mile road race in Barcelona, an event in which, to much media fanfare, he was picked to win the gold but finished a disappointing 14th. The San Sebastian race, seven days later in northern Spain, was worse. With the professional field hardened from the recently concluded Tour de France, Armstrong fell behind early. As he limped along in a pouring rain—eventually finishing 111th out of 111—the fans booed and hissed, aggrieved by such ineptitude. Armstrong, never having been so disgraced, headed for the airport, figuring he’d return to Texas and think about a new line of work. “I wanted to come home and never race again,” he says. From the Madrid airport he called his mother. “She said, ‘You’ll do better next time,'” says Armstrong. “I said, ‘No, Mom, you don’t understand. I came in last place!'” Then he called his national team coach, Chris Carmichael.


Ultimately, Carmichael steadied him. He told Armstrong he’d look back on the race as the most important day he’d ever had in cycling. He’d finished when any other rider would probably have quit. He had proved something, especially to his new Motorola team. Of course, Carmichael was winging it. But he convinced the cyclist to stay on the Continent, and a week later Armstrong won a stage in Spain’s Tour of Galicia. Two weeks after that, he finished an astounding second in a World Cup race, the Championship of Zurich. Armstrong had achieved better results in two weeks than most of his teammates had all season.


He flashed hot and cold in early 1993 but began to hit his stride in America’s biggest stage race, the 11-day Tour DuPont, in May. He claimed a stage, contended with Mexican veteran RaĂșl AlcalĂĄ throughout, and finished second overall. Armstrong stayed in the United States and won three consecutive races, the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh, the five-day Kmart West Virginia Classic, and the CoreStates.


In that race, which clinched his $1 million Triple Crown bonus, Armstrong attacked on the notoriously steep Manayunk Wall. He dropped the competition, won by the biggest margin in the race’s history, and posed for the cameras afterward, one arm holding the oversize check high, the other around the mother whom some mistook for a girlfriend. “We were all there,” says former U.S. Pro National Champion Davis Phinney, who has since retired from the Coors Light team. “All the strong riders, all flat-out, going straight up the Wall. We all knew what was going on, but nobody could cover his breakaway. You’re always tempted to say, ‘I could do that if I wanted.’ But the fact is, I really couldn’t. For me it was one of those shining moments of illumination—I’d seen the future, and I wasn’t a part of it.”

The wide-eyed Motorola coaches had seen the future, too. A few weeks after dividing up the booty among team members and staff (Armstrong reportedly took home only about $25,000), they announced that Armstrong would start in the Tour de France. Many, including Carmichael, thought he shouldn’t ride it—that the impressionable Armstrong, who would be the youngest rider in the field, would overextend himself in the world’s most grueling cycling race and possibly put the rest of his season in jeopardy. But Jim Ochowicz wasn’t to be swayed; Armstrong was suddenly a hot commodity and gung ho to race.


The hope was that Armstrong would win a stage and then drop out before the difficult climbing legs in the Pyrenees, and amazingly enough that’s what happened. He dramatically stole a win in the 114-mile stage from Chalons-sur-Marne to Verdun, coming desperately close to crashing into the course barriers as he outsprinted the rest of the lead pack over the last 50 yards.


“People say because I’m 21 I can’t handle this intensity,” said a jubilant Armstrong, who had started slowly in the Tour eight days earlier. “But the fact remains that I’ve felt better every day. Today was the proof.” Four days later Ochowicz pulled him out of the race to begin preparations for the World Championships, one month away.

Armstrong’s good fortune wasn’t the only news. Not a week after the stage win, Ochowicz announced that the Motorola execs had had a change of heart and decided to extend the sponsorship for another season. The team, performing well in the Tour even in Armstrong’s absence, landed two riders in the top ten and finished fourth overall. Finally, just days before the Worlds, Armstrong agreed to a new one-year contract worth a reported $500,000, turning down a far more lucrative three-year deal worth an estimated $2.3 million with the Dutch-registered WordPerfect team. More important than the money, to Armstrong, was the familiarity. He was accepted by his teammates—Anderson and other veterans like Steve Bauer saw a lot of their younger selves in Armstrong, and the Texan had earned the respect of the domestiques and other young riders. Armstrong also wasn’t sure that he’d be the team leader on another squad. With Motorola he was the franchise.


The Worlds made Motorola’s decision appear to be a work of genius. Armstrong, coming off a grueling four-week training program, was in the lead group with the last of 14 laps to go. The race had been marred by daylong torrential rains and scores of crashes. Armstrong himself had crashed twice on the 18.4-kilometer circuit, but both times he avoided serious injury and quickly rejoined the front-runners. On the circuit’s next-to-last climb Armstrong surged, leaving Indurain and many of the others behind, and by the top he was in the lead. On the steeper Ekeberg ascent he attacked again, and after speeding down the treacherous four-kilometer descent he saw…no one. With three kilometers left he had a 20-second lead—short of catastrophe, the race was his. Armstrong was so shocked that for one terrifying moment he believed he’d made the most boneheaded mistake of his young life. “I thought I must’ve jumped a lap early,” he says. “I mean, where was everybody?” His handlebar-mounted computer, however, showed 255 kilometers. There was no mistake. In the final 700 meters Armstrong did everything but an end-zone dance, firing punches into the air, blowing kisses, and acknowledging the cheers of the sodden fans with deep, Olivier-quality bows.


Up on the Ekeberg, teammates Frankie Andreu and Andy Bishop had gotten word that Armstrong was moments away from winning. “I was just like, ‘No way,'” says Andreu. As they reached the top, they glanced up at Big Mo, the billboard-size television that was carrying the live feed, hopped off their bikes, and like the thousands of others in attendance watched with amazement as Armstrong broke the finish line, hands held high. Then they got back on their bikes and finished the race.


Within the throngs at the finish was a euphoric Linda Walling. Arrangements were quickly made to introduce the new champion to Norway’s King Harald V, but the royal aides politely told Armstrong that bringing his mother along wasn’t possible. Lance turned on his heel and strode away. “I probably came on pretty strong,” he says, “but man, I don’t check my mom at the door, I don’t care who it is.” Ultimately, the rebuffed royal aides reeled in the champ—and his mother. According to Armstrong, his audience with the king was brief and not terribly memorable. “The King of Norway, I’m sure he’s great and everything,” he says. “But I just wanted to get out of there and go party with the guys.”

By early January of this year, Armstrong hadn’t competed in four months and was antsy to do battle again. At first the time off had been welcome. He decompressed, ate lots of Mexican food, hauled back some Shiner Bock beers. But ultimately even the charms of Austin’s clubby Sixth Street weren’t so intoxicating. The rainbow jerseys had also been eating at him. The dozens he received from Motorola over the winter served as reminders of the upcoming burden he would carry—and perhaps the exposure that never came his way. He’s kept only two. “These other guys that win the rainbow jerseys are gods in their respective European countries,” Armstrong says. “They spend the majority of their off-season flying here and there, doing commercial this and commercial that, and they forget about their biking. Well, I’m real fortunate that I’m an American and nobody wants me.”


It’s a statement Armstrong struggles with. But with relatively few distractions, he did enter the season in superb shape, and his early results were good. At the Tour of Mexico, in late January, he was instrumental in helping his new teammate, RaĂșl AlcalĂĄ, win his native country’s biggest race. (In fact, Motorola’s doctors had to order Armstrong out of the race early for fear that he was already driving himself too hard.) On the last day of Spain’s Tour of Valencia, Armstrong delivered a blistering performance to finish a surprising sixth in the time trial, the race against the clock that had always been his biggest weakness. Then in April he placed second in Belgium’s 167-mile LiĂšge-Bastogne-LiĂšge, the best finish ever for an American in a one-day classic.


If Armstrong and his handlers are to be believed, however, expectations for the rest of the season are reasonable. He’ll focus on a few more one-day classics, perhaps another stage in the Tour de France, and a strong defense in the World Championships. According to his coaches, excelling in those events will make for a great season, especially since he’s now a marked man. No need to take on the Tour de France and the legacy of Greg LeMond. Not at age 22.


But the thinking is that Armstrong will get there, just as LeMond did, winning the Tour on his third try, at 25. His time-trialing and climbing capabilites will develop over years. He’ll utimately lose a few pounds in his upper body to make it easier to attack mountain stage after mountain stage. This year he’ll probably stay in the race through the Pyrenees but won’t be around for the last punishing week in the Alps. “Anybody who says Lance Armstrong doesn’t have the capability to win the Tour someday is either stupid or jealous,” says Carmichael.


The real test, some believe, will come when Armstrong leaves the Motorola nest—as he may eventually do should another mega-offer come down the pike. Will he call his own shots, hack the down times, pick his support people well? “He is very, very protected in a lot of ways,” says Davis Phinney. “He has been very lucky to have mentors like Carmichael and Ochowicz. Chris is like an older brother. He’ll tell Lance something he doesn’t want to hear, Lance will hang up on him, and then he’ll come around.”


During his less emotional moments, however, Armstrong seems to be getting wiser. He doesn’t mouth-off the way he used to, and he no longer drops his name in the same sentence as LeMond’s. As of May Armstrong was a bachelor again—the Sonster has become a touchy subject—but he’s working hard to turn more negatives into positives. “What gets written is that Armstrong doesn’t wear his helmet and that some kid is not going to wear his helmet and get hurt,” he says. “Nobody writes about the hospital visits that I make, the rainbow jerseys that I’ve sent to somebody who’s been hit by a car. But if you’re doing charitable things and not making stupid mistakes in your private life, folks will eventually notice. For the most part I think I’m a good person. People who know me—not to be an asshole or anything—they love me.”


It’s late afternoon, and Austin’s Zilker Park is abuzz with postwork activity. As he walks toward the lifesize bronze statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the late Texas-born guitarist, Armstrong points to the river overpass where locals sometimes crowd the rails to watch bats do their twilight aerial maneuvers, an exotic, instinctual dance guided by powerful, silent sonar rhythms.


Hikers, bikers, and walkers stream along the greenbelt, which extends out on both sides of Town Lake. It’s overcast, chilly almost, but not uncomfortable. Many of the passersby stop to pay tribute to Vaughan’s memory, laying flowers and guitar picks at the statue’s base. Armstrong, who has lived in Austin for four years, watches the ritual from a park bench ten feet away. Another cyclist cruises by, his helmet doffed in deference to the musician. “Man, people here really admired that guy,” says Armstrong, impressed and happily lost in the moment’s grace.


A short time later he snaps to attention. The sky is darkening, the air has gone raw, the shifting wind is now blowing off the river. Hurriedly, he buttons his denim jacket to the collar, tucks his arms in tight, and rushes to the warm interior of his car. A potential head cold averted, Armstrong’s anxiety is gone as suddenly as it came. “What time is it?” he asks rhetorically, as the traffic peels away in his wake. “It’s time for a beer.”

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Migrationally speaking, almost everything leaves New England in autumn. The exception? Tour buses, of course, fall foliage tours in the Northeast being the single most popular trip in busdom. Every year, thousands of motor coaches rumble through at the peak of leaf-peeping season—no wonder the birds, butterflies, even whales get a little antsy and head elsewhere. The indigenous primates know the feeling, too: It’s easy to view the 16-wheelers as a pestilence. But the more evolved view is this: Let the buses have their clichĂ©d itineraries—you know, North Conway, Route 100 in central Vermont, the coastal road that runs past the Bush estate in Kennebunkport. That leaves about 65,000 square miles for the rest of us.

VERMONT

Flying Above the Green Mountains

Sure, the fall-color voyeurs along Vermont 100 can make the river-hugging two-lane as congested as the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. But nowhere in New England are the aviation options for foliage-watching better than right in the middle of the Green Mountains—since you can’t beat ’em, might as well fly over ’em. In the fall, the standing mountain waves—dramatic updrafts caused by prevailing westerlies—are at their best. Coming over Lake Champlain, these winds run up against a wall of 4,000-footers, contour over the rounded summits, and ricochet off more stable air below, giving whatever’s afloat a goose toward the heavens. Meanwhile, the massive Green Mountain National Forest unfolds below, a seamless canopy dolloped in the season’s glory: crimson red, flaming orange, and mind-bogglingly deep shades of purple.


Sugarbush Soaring, based at the Warren-Sugarbush Airport right off Route 100, pioneered the concept of the multiday soaring camp in 1978. Its three-flight weekend sampler for novices ($179; 802-496-2290) puts you at the controls with an FAA-certified instructor flying in tandem and will teach you how to fly level, control speed, and soar in thermal, ridge, and wave lifts. Participants are eligible for discounted lodging at The Valley Inn in Waitsfield (doubles, $65, including breakfast; 802-496-3450).


With its cooler air providing more buoyancy—and an easier time humping up a hill with 30 pounds of parachute on your back—autumn in Vermont is also ideal for paragliding. This fact was not lost on Rick Sharp and Ruth Masters, who a decade ago bought and cleared Cobble Hill, arguably the best place in the region for learning how to launch and land. Of course, when they cleared the top of the 900-foot slope 12 miles north of Burlington, they made sure to preserve its autumnal crest, a brilliant 20-acre sugar maple grove that gives customers their first airborne glimpse of the Green Mountains’ pigment extravaganza. Beyond it, the views stretch across Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks. A weekend package, which includes up to 40 flights over two days, costs $250; for an extra $25 a night, Sharp and Masters provide accommodations at their own B&B. For information and reservations, call 800-727-2359.


On the eastern slope of the range, there’s Brian Boland’s hot-air balloon operation (802-333-9254), based at the Post Mills Airport off Vermont 113. One of the country’s premier pilots (he holds 30 world records for altitude, distance, and duration) and most respected balloon makers, Boland offers customized trips in addition to his two regularly scheduled daily outings ($150 per person). The latter depart at dawn and dusk, last about 90 minutes, and cover up to 20 miles of the southern Green Mountains.


Mountain Biking near Randolph

With no ski resorts to draw crowds or chic commerce, central Vermont’s White River Valley looks much as it did 100 years ago—some huge dairy farms, a few country stores, and lots of bumpy paths through the woods. In fact, Orange County has 242 miles of maintained dirt roads and designated trails. From a mountain biker’s perspective it’s manna from heaven, providing the one thing autumnal that New England has never had: a first-class off-road multiday bike loop.


Now, thanks to a few intrepid trailblazers, there’s the Circus Ride, a single-track double entendre that’s been hailed as one of North America’s gnarliest. The 45-mile loop crosses three passes, including the 2,500-foot Randolph Gap over Rochester Mountain, on the same trail that was used to bring the circus into Randolph during the late 1800s. The route was pioneered in 1993 by the folks at Randolph’s Slab City Bike & Sport (rentals, $20 per day; 802-728-5747), who have since added side trips that let you extend the dawn-to-dusk marathon to more than 100 miles. For the less suicidal, the route can be broken up quite nicely with a couple of well-chosen overnights. The campground at Allis State Park, off Vermont 12 in Brookfield, ten miles north of Randolph, has 28 sites with potable water, flush toilets, and coin-operated showers ($10 per night; 802-276-3175). The Three Stallion Inn (doubles, $103; 800-424-5575), perched on a quiet meadow 1.5 miles west of Randolph, is a popular haunt for cyclists.

New Hampshire: Hiking and Biking Sandwich Notch

When the mobs descend on Squam Lake (of On Golden Pond fame) and Lake Winnipesaukee, Granite State locals take refuge in the high country off Sandwich Notch Road, one of the last undeveloped mountain roads in New Hampshire. Narrow, steep, and unpaved, the road runs northwest for 11 miles, from New Hampshire 113 in Center Sandwich to New Hampshire 49 near Waterville Valley. Half of this historic route—in stagecoach days it was a major mountains-to-sea trade route terminating in Portland, Maine—is located smack in White Mountain National Forest.


A half-dozen excellent hiking paths start from trailheads right on the road. Near the southern end, the 2.1-mile Wentworth Trail to the summit of 2,630-foot Mount Israel has a reputation for giving the most foliage bang for your perspiration buck of any spot in the state. On the northern end, you’ll find somewhat more demanding terrain on the 4.5-mile Algonquin Trail, with dramatic ledgy overlooks of Waterville Valley on the way to the top of 3,993-foot Sandwich Mountain. If you’re looking for a multiday route or prefer to do your rambling by fat tire, consider the rugged 16-mile trip to Flat Mountain Pond, accessed via the Guinea Pond trailhead, 5.7 miles north of Center Sandwich. The hills get steeper and the gullies get nastier as you near the pond, so even mountain bikers should plan on at least a lunch break at Flat Mountain, if not an overnight at its wonderfully secluded shelter (free; first-come, first-served; 603-528-8721). Another nearby mountain-bike option is the Dickey Notch Trail, which starts just off New Hampshire 49 north of Sandwich Notch Road and forms the first leg of a 25-mile loop around Dickey Mountain.
Before heading out, pick up a copy of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s White Mountain Guide ($17, from AMC Books; call 800-262-4455 to order), which has four topo maps as well as detailed information on nearly every trail in the state. For advice on the area’s many mountain-bike routes, as well as rentals ($24 per day), stop by the Greasey Wheel in Plymouth (603-536-3655), about 15 miles west of Center Sandwich. For a soft place to bunk, try the Red Hill Inn, atop a witheringly steep hill 20 miles east of Sandwich Notch Road, with 21 lake- and mountain-view rooms spread over 60 acres. A three-night package, including full country breakfasts and one candlelight dinner per couple, starts at $200; call 800-573-3445.

Massachusetts: Hiking the Northern Berkshires and Sea Kayaking Cape Ann

Hiking the Northern Berkshires

With 3,491-foot Mount Greylock at its spiritual, if not physical, center, residents of the Bay State know there’s little reason to venture to the northern foliage meccas. After all, every 400 feet one ascends above 2,600 is the equivalent of traveling 100 miles north, arboreally speaking. Which means that they save both time and gas by exploring Greylock or its neighbors in the state’s northwest corner, true wilderness mountains with old-growth forests and 70-mile, three-state views.


The highest point in Massachusetts, Greylock isn’t a secret. But though hordes of visitors drive to the summit, relatively few venture into the backcountry of the Mount Greylock State Reserve, which includes more than 43 miles of trails. To reach the summit under your own steam, take the 3.5-mile Cheshire Harbor Trail from the end of West Mountain Road in Adams. An even more solitary journey is to the Hopper area, a 1,600-acre bowl-shaped valley to the west of Greylock that’s home to 200-year-old stands of red spruce, hemlock, and mountain ash. To get there, take Massachusetts 43 to Williamstown, ten miles northwest of Greylock, and turn left onto Hopper Road; the Hopper Trail begins at road’s end. For a stunning overview of the state’s four highest peaks—Greylock, Fitch, Williams, and Prospect—take the Roaring Brook trail, off U.S. 7 in South Williamstown, a half-mile east to the Stony Ledge Trail; 2.5 miles later you’ll find the eponymous hunk of Berkshire schist perched 2,500 feet above the valley floor.
Maps and trail information are available at the Greylock Visitor Center (413-443-0011), off U.S. 7 in Lanesboro. Sperry Campground, six miles north of Lanesboro, has 37 sites for individual and group camping ($4-$8 per night; 413-499-4262). Longtime Berkshire resident Bob Leverett, one of the country’s foremost authorities on old-growth forests east of the Mississippi, leads rugged four- to six-hour tours of the region for a voluntary donation; call 413-538-8631.


Sea Kayaking Cape Ann

Just 35 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts’s lesser-known peninsula may pale in comparison to Cape Cod in summer, but not in fall. With barrier beaches, river estuaries, and remote islands along nearly 20 miles of coastline, the Essex/Rockport/Gloucester area is fast becoming a playground for both novice and veteran sea kayakers. Conditions are particularly good in October, when the offshore recreational boat traffic vanishes and the cape’s thickly wooded interior swells with color.


The place to start an 18-mile clockwise tour of the cape is in Essex on the Essex River, launching from the public dock at the end of Island Road, just off Massachusetts 133. Flush in front of you is Hog Island, a steep, lushly forested drumlin surrounded by salt marsh and a maze of tidal estuaries. The island has meadowy hiking, pockets of red oak amid stands of rare Norwegian blue spruce, and a natural history museum that’s open on weekends (508-356-4351). The striped bass fishing in the estuaries is excellent, so consider stowing fly-fishing gear.


To the north and east of Hog Island, Crane’s Beach and Plum Island form an 11-mile stretch of barrier-beach dunescape that’s one of the East Coast’s best migratory shorebirding spots. To the southeast, on the other side of Halibut Point, lies 52-acre Thacher Island, one-third of which has been designated a national wildlife refuge (leave your kayak on the concrete slab next to the boathouse, not on the Town of Rockport launch). Thacher, a 25-minute paddle from the route’s terminus at Gloucester’s Good Harbor Beach, has a free 20-site campground as well as a three-bedroom guest house—complete with kitchen and shower—available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call the island caretaker at 508-546-2326.


The Cape Ann Sea Kayak Company (508-356-5264) in Gloucester offers rentals for $37 per day, but only to “qualified paddlers,” defined as those with knowledge of personal rescue and navigation techniques. Other folks can sign up for a guided trip with Essex River Basin șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs ($40 for three hours or $75 per day, including kayak, guide, and shuttle service; 800-529-2504). For relaxation’s sake, don’t plan on rounding the cape in a day—though competitive paddlers can make it in about four hours—but rather chart out a couple of day trips, an approach that allows for plenty of island hopping. Shore camping is available at the Cape Ann Campground on the Annisquam River estuary in Gloucester ($15 per night; 508-283-8683), but if you’re going the guided route, you might as well stay near ERBA’s headquarters in Essex. The George Fuller House (doubles, $75-$125; 800-477-0148), a seven-room renovated colonial bed-and-breakfast, backs right up to the river.

Rhode Island: Traversing the State

A challenging multiday trail for hiking, horseback riding, and mountain biking in Rhode Island? Sure, it seems like the start of yet another joke ragging on New England’s smallest, flattest, and most green-space-challenged state. But in western Rhode Island’s rural and, yes, hilly farm country, the North South Trail parallels the Connecticut state line while linking up eight wildlife management areas over the course of 70 miles, making it possible to hike the entire state in a long weekend.


The trail was officially unveiled in 1998 and runs from Quonochontaug (try saying that fast three times—or even once) in Charlestown to Wallum Lake in Burrilville. Parking is available in most of the state parks that the trail crosses, including Burlingame, Carolina, Arcadia, George Washington, and Buck Hill. But for those who don’t want to hoof across every mile, there are a few stretches that offer a solid sampling of what the North South has to offer.
A good taste of the North South’s first stretch starts in the state’s northwest corner, near Burrillville, with a rigorous five-mile hiking-only section in the Buck Hill Management Area. Park at the reserve’s main lot off Rhode Island 100 and pick up the Follett Trail, which winds past Wallum Lake en route to the Massachusetts state line. Just four miles south of Buck Hill you can also explore the route’s second section, the eight-mile Walkabout Trail in the George Washington Management Area, which also has a convenient 45-site campground perched near the trailhead off Rhode Island 44 ($12 per night; 401-568-2013).


Another good 18-mile stretch lies further south, bisecting the 14,000-acre Arcadia Management Area, a reserve known throughout New England for its superb 40-plus-mile network of mountain-bike trails. More advanced single-track riders favor the 12-mile perimeter loop, pedaling counterclockwise from the John B. Hudson trailhead off Rhode Island 165, through stands of mountain laurel, up to the shores of Breakheart Pond. For the area’s best biking map and information on other routes, call the Eastern Fat Tire Association at 401-364-0786.


Another draw in Arcadia is the Wood River, which boasts the best flatwater paddling in the state. Hope Valley Bait & Tackle (401-539-2757) rents passable canoes ($22 per day) and can provide advice on fishing the river, as well as the required permits ($26). The Wood is heavily stocked: It recently received a drop of rainbow, brown, and brook trout from the Perryville hatchery, and for the last three Octobers the state Department of Fish and Game has also stocked the river with landlocked salmon, some weighing upward of 20 pounds.


For maps, route descriptions, and information about the North South Trail, call the Department of Environmental Management at 401-277-2776. The Division of Forest Environment (401-539-2356) handles reservations for Arcadia’s popular backcountry shelter ($15 per night).

Maine: Paddling the St. Croix River

Flowing along Maine’s eastern border with New Brunswick, the 37-mile stretch of the St. Croix between Vanceboro and Grand Falls is the state’s least famous, least crowded, and best multiday fall river trip. Most of this section is banked by boreal forest, but there are also regularly spaced pockets of meadows bordered by flaming orange, yellow, and scarlet hardwoods, ideal for riverside overnights.


A good weeklong trip begins near Forest City with two days of warm-up flatwater paddling, island camping, and fishing (the uniquely colored northern smallmouth bass are the elite of their species) on the Chiputneticook Lakes. Then comes a four-day paddle on the St. Croix, an ideal beginner’s river with enough rips and rocks—as well as one challenging Class II+ drop, Little Falls—to keep the adrenaline flowing. For a more serene St. Croix experience, make sure to stop at Porter’s Meadow, one of the best areas on the river for viewing nesting bald eagles.
If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, pick up a copy of the New England White Water River Guide ($15, from AMC Books, 800-262-4455); be aware, however, that you’ll need to bring your own boat—the closest rentals are nearly two hours south of Forest City. Consider also Martin Brown’s Sunrise County Canoe Expeditions, which has operated on the St. Croix for more than 20 years. On its guided outings you sleep in platform tents, average ten miles per day, camp on both the Canadian and American sides of the river, learn traditional Down East whitewater techniques, and are among the first Americans to see the sun rise each morning. The six-day trip costs $679; call 800-748-3730.

Connecticut: Exploring the River-hugging AT

Come foliage season, Connecticut’s northwest corner typically gets only a quick look-see from the motorcades of New Yorkers zooming north to the Berkshires. But unbeknownst to most, the blurry landscape in their rearview mirrors is the Berkshires, the southernmost edge of the range and home of one of the best, if briefest, portions of the Appalachian Trail, a 56-mile section hovering above the clear blue Housatonic River.


Start at Housatonic Meadows State Park, off U.S. 7 just south of West Cornwall. A 19.2-mile section of the AT passes through, but the river takes center stage. The five-mile stretch between Cornwall Bridge and West Cornwall, a fly-fishing-only trout-management area, is one of the East’s premier spots for hooking browns; for licenses and supplies, stop by the Wilderness Shop, on U.S. 202 in Litchfield (203-567-5905). Farther north, there’s good paddling on the 11-mile stretch between Falls Village and Cornwall Bridge, with Class II whitewater as late as October, thanks to dam releases. Kayaks and canoes can be rented at Clarke Outdoors in West Cornwall ($35 and $45 per day, respectively, including shuttle service; 203-672-6365).
Off-river, the AT offers plenty of opportunities to view foliage and wildlife. On the eastern flyway for spring and fall migratory birds, the area has seen kettles with as many as 5,000 broadwing hawks steaming overhead. A particularly good birding spot is off River Road in Kent, on the west side of the Housatonic near St. Johns Ledges, a stunning band of cliffs that rises 600 feet above the river.


Though classic white-clapboard inns and B&Bs are abundant, the place to stay is the campground at Housatonic Meadows ($10 per night). Twenty-two of its 94 sites are right on the river and hence are reserved months in advance in summer, but they’re available on a first-come, first-served basis after Labor Day. For maps and more information, call Housatonic Meadows State Park at 203-672-6772.

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