Talon Vance, 13, lived in an apartment complex in suburban Colorado Springs with his mom and Aunt. Other relatives lived nearby. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in a different town. All of that would change in August 2022: Talon’s mother, Rebecca Vance, had hatched a plan to disappear from Colorado Springs and go permanently off-grid.

Talon’s paternal grandmother, Marilyn Burden, still seems shell-shocked by his sudden departure. Her extended family lives in a ranch-style house on a small cul-de-sac; when I stopped by for dinner last September, there were plenty of people on the street, and lights were on in every home. Eric Burden, Talon’s father, stood in his driveway speaking to a friend. He ushered me inside and introduced me to his mother, and we sat down at the dining room table.

Just over a year before, on August 1, Rebecca had dropped by out of the blue around lunchtime with Talon in tow. She handed Marilyn a photo album and other mementos of Talon, who Marilyn had helped raise and who shared a bedroom with her other grandson, Ashton, when Talon was there. Rebecca, she said, told her they were leaving town, that they “had to move to be safe.” Safe from what? Marilyn asked. Rebecca wouldn’t explain. And she was vague about their destination: she said that she, Talon, and her younger sister, Christine, would be driving to West Virginia, where her father lived. Marilyn didn’t think Talon had ever met that grandfather. Then, to forestall the possibility that Marilyn would ask Talon about the trip, Rebecca whispered to her not to bring it up, because he doesn’t know—he thinks we’re just going camping.

Another relative was told a different story. Christine said to their stepsister, Trevala Jara, that they would be heading into the wilderness to live off the grid. Trevala, who saw Christine every week, knew that Rebecca had spent much of the pandemic glued to her computer, growing increasingly obsessed with conspiracy theories and the end of the world. She feared vaccines, technology, and the power of global elites, and thought that the only escape was to get as far away from other people as she could.

“At first, Christine told me she wasn’t going with Becky,” Trevala recalled. “She thought it was crazy to do it, mainly because they didn’t have the experience.” But then one day, in late July 2022, Christine told Trevala that she had changed her mind, that she would accompany her sister and Talon to support them.

Trevala offered what she thought was a better solution. “I said, Don’t go to the woods—go to our place in South Park. It’s got an RV and a generator.” Trevala and her husband, Tommy, had an off-grid property in Park County, west of Colorado Springs. But Christine said that Rebecca wouldn’t budge—she wanted something more remote. Christine handed Trevala the urn containing their mother’s ashes, and also asked her to help find someone to take care of her cat, Oreo. Christine even urged Trevala to take her old car but couldn’t find the title for it.

Talon was by all accounts a happy boy, warm and easy to be around. “Every time he was over here, he’d pass me and say, ‘I love you, Grandma,’” Marilyn said. And he was eager to please. His father, Eric, told me that no sooner would Talon do something wrong than he’d turn himself in; his conscience was almost too strong. Talon got on well with Eric’s two eldest children, Emma and Ashton. But according to Marilyn, “He wasn’t well socialized. He had friends in elementary school. But when COVID hit he was just finishing fifth grade.” Rebecca pulled him out for reasons that were unclear to her family. She put him in the school district’s online program for the next two years. Rebecca decided he should stay in online school even after the pandemic died down, according to the Burdens. Her resolve to keep Talon home, Eric said, extended even to questioning why online students had to pick up their new laptops in person.

In place of friends, Talon had his iPad. Rebecca forbade him from using social media, so like many kids his age Talon played games. In addition to Super Mario Bros., his favorite, he enjoyed and was deeply immersed in , the online ecosystem that approximately half of American kids under 16 have visited. Going to school digitally had shrunk his flesh-and-blood social world, and his online connections became more important. As the date of his departure approached, he started telling his Roblox friends, without explanation, that he would soon be leaving. Apparently, despite what his mother would whisper to Marilyn, he did know about the plan to move permanently off-grid, and he knew that it was a secret.

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I was hiking along a dusty trail on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, surrounded by rocks and desert shrubs, when a lizard scurried along a rock and then froze, in classic lizard fashion. He was notably plump for a small reptile, and the end of his tail was missing, blackened. Now, I see my fair share of lizards— it’s one of the many great things about living in this part of the country—but this fellow was extra special because I had happened upon him the week before, blackened tail and all. I smiled at him, and wished him the best with regenerating his tail. I had moved to Reno almost nine months prior, during the height of the pandemic, and finally, I had made my first new friend.

I was one of at least who moved during the pandemic, and among that cohort, my choice to leave New York City . Our migration has changed some places so much that they are now called “Zoom towns,” and the consequences haven’t always been pretty. The Lake Tahoe area has seen an unprecedented housing boom, with newcomers mostly hailing from the Bay Area. Real estate prices have by upwards of 15 percent, and locals began to grow increasingly anxious about “Aspenification of Tahoe,” according to a recent șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű story detailing the changing demographics of the area.

I didn’t mean to be part of a trend, and my move wasn’t made to fulfill some long-held dream of leaving the city. I’ve been a freelancer for six years, and could have theoretically left New York long ago. But losing my most lucrative work during the pandemic made my city life more untenable than ever, and seeing the world change so quickly in lockdown also spurred a fundamental rethinking of my identity, helping me understand the connection between my happiness and where I lived.

Six years ago, if you were to tell me that I would be living in northern Nevada, hiking almost every day, spending my weekends kayaking on Lake Tahoe or swimming in the Truckee River, and making friends with lizards, I would have said, “No way. That’s not who I am.” I was born and raised in Manhattan, and being in New York forever felt like my destiny. As a certified city girl, my experiences with nature were alien and scary. Whenever my family would visit Sydney—my mother is Australian—I seldom went in the ocean. The waves and the tides freaked me out. I worried about getting salt water in my eyes and mouth or even drowning, and I hated getting my hair wet, since it would dry all wild and frizzy. As my mom and sister enjoyed splashing around in the Pacific Ocean, I would lie on a towel in the sand, reading a book, waiting to do the next thing.

After I graduated from college in Ohio, I didn’t seriously consider moving anywhere except back to New York. It was the only home I had ever known, and it was where I thought I needed to be if I wanted to become a professional writer. I immediately bought into the bourgeois idea that the more successful I became, the better I would feel. My life revolved around doing work, looking at the computer, and getting drunk. Things seemed objectively good, but the depression and anxiety I struggled with since childhood cast a shadow over everything. I lived in a city of many millions, I had access to a relentless stream of things to do and people to see, and still, my life felt narrow.

Two things happened in 2016 that helped me inch closer to happiness: I quit drinking and I fell in love. Getting sober gave me the opportunity to figure out what I actually liked to do. I took up baking and cooking, and I started going outside. My newfound affection for the outdoors was spurred by my boyfriend moving in with me. He grew up in the lush forests of Oregon, and though he was excited about all New York had to offer, he still ached for his old life, full of hiking and cycling and greenery. At his urging, we began exploring the city on our bikes. We started small: checking out the park by our local sewage treatment plant, a surprisingly charming nook of a place that actually smelled OK compared to the rest of the city. Sitting on a bench among the trees and looking out at the creek separating Brooklyn and Queens in silence was a new feeling for me, an exercise in calming my overactive, anxious mind.

On the weekends, we’d take the train into Long Island or up the Hudson River, searching for less urban outdoor activities. I started wondering if there could be a future for me in the wilderness, or at the very least, the suburbs. I often thought about a line in the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre,Ìęwhere the titular character New York as a prison “built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride about this thing they’ve built
” so everyone loses sight of the fact that they’re imprisoned in the first place.

Then the pandemic hit, and I couldn’t deny that I was quite literally imprisoned in my overpriced apartment. But I also smelled freedom. All the excuses I had made for needing to live in the city had disappeared overnight, and I began to seriously reconsider all these unspoken rules I had been adhering to my whole adult life: my worth is measured by money and professional success. I must live in a major metropolitan area to achieve it. Prioritize work above all. What if life is actually much more simple than that? I asked myself. What if the most important thing is going outside every day and cooking dinner for the person I love most in the world?

My grand exit from New York City fell into place pretty quickly. Our lease was up in June 2020, and our landlord wanted to raise our rent. We didn’t know where we wanted to go, but the West was calling. We considered Hawaii (too far) and Oregon (too dreary). “What about Reno?” I said one night in May. It was cheap, it was beautiful, and we had taken a relaxing vacation there and to Lake Tahoe in 2017.

It was a bit random and certainly impulsive. We risked a mid-pandemic trip, careful to remain perpetually masked and doused in hand sanitizer, to find an apartment and make sure we liked it. Reno felt as right as a place could feel in the midst of a global health crisis. It helped that the flashing lights of the slot machines in the casino hotel we stayed in upon our arrival reminded me just enough of . I felt more excitement than fear, and had a hunch that living here would help me know myself in a new way. My boyfriend and I understood that we were lucky to have jobs that we could do anywhere in the world, and we were grateful to take advantage of the new precedent of office-free working.

Our first months in Reno weren’t exactly smooth sailing. We didn’t know a soul and . At the beginning, my outdoor life consisted of biking to the nearest grocery store every other day, and hitting up the one trailhead within walking distance of our apartment, which snaked around a dusty, rocky hill. I began to get in touch with this beautiful desert that is now my home through the window of a beat-up Toyota during my weekly driving lessons. Then the pandemic got worse, and we again found ourselves trapped inside our apartment. This time, though, our apartment was bigger, our rent was affordable, and if we walked down the street, we could see the most magnificent view of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There were some kinks to work out, but for the first time in my life, I was out of New York for good and I had no regrets. I was saving over a thousand dollars a month on rent and other living expenses. I was no longer pressured to hustle for freelance assignments. I was confident in my ability to carve out my own path.

After I finally got my driver’s license in December, the life I’d imagined for us in Reno—with weekend drives to the lake and daily hikes in the desert—became a reality. We have three good trailheads ten minutes away from our apartment, and even better ones 15 to 30 minutes away. We can get to Lake Tahoe in about 45 minutes, but part of the fun is the drive itself, a twisty part of I-80 that goes up the mountains and through gorgeous pine trees. Sure, I miss the great bagels, sushi, and pizza that New York has to offer, and I miss my family and friends, but I like it here. Reno, which was named one of °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s Best Places to Live in 2019, provides me with seemingly infinite ways to be in nature—something I didn’t know I needed until quite recently.

There’s tons of scientific research about the psychological benefits of being outdoors. Multiple have compared the dispositions of people who had just taken a walk in the forest with those who walked in a city center and found that the forest walkers had lower heart rates, better moods, and less anxiety than those who walked in the city. But I didn’t actually understand what this meant for me personally until I started experiencing it on a regular basis. Being outside lessens my anxiety because it allows me to let go of myself. When I’m on a hike, I’m not looking at my phone—half the time I don’t have service anyways—and I’m not thinking about the news and what is or isn’t going on with my career. Instead, I’m keeping an eye out for any new animals (recent sightings include a rattlesnake, a few marmots, some adorable little chipmunks, and a horny toad). Maybe I’m listening to the rush of the Truckee River. There’s a good chance I’m chatting with my boyfriend about what Ronald Reagan’s favorite reality show would be if he were still alive. Whatever profound or deeply silly thing I’m thinking or talking about when I’m outdoors is beside the point. The important thing is that every day I have reprieve from my internal monologue, that grating negative self-talk, and the millions of small anxieties I’m plagued by. The regularity of these moments is what makes life here so satisfying. It goes beyond the fleeting tranquility achieved by taking a vacation to a beautiful place.

It’s not that moving out of the big city made my life totally idyllic or my depression suddenly go away. I’ve gone from having a community of loved ones to just one person I can rely on, and besides the fat lizard, I haven’t made any friends—though I hope to soon. Living in Reno has, however, taught me a lot of wonderful things about myself: that I have the freedom to go wherever I want to, and I never have to feel stuck in a single place; that nature needs to be a part of my everyday, not just something I can only access on vacations; that work is not life, and career success has little to do with fulfillment. I now know that I love to swim, that I can overcome my longtime fear of cold water, and that I actually do not care about getting my hair wet, no matter how frizzy it gets when it dries.

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Kieron Wilde told his story to producer Ann Marie Awad for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I got into tourism almost 20 years ago, and left my career of ecology behind. But I’ve always felt like I had abandoned my real purpose and my real calling.

And I had that moment where I was like, Maybe they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I own a company called First Nature. We are a destination management and private tour company. We specialize in creating custom experiences around the Pacific Northwest.

Travel’s definitely a passion of mine. It’s all the things that go along with travel: the learning, the experiencing of other cultures, the meeting of new people, and just the experience of opening yourself up to the world.

The beginning of the pandemic aligned perfectly with the birth of my first child. And for my industry, the tourism industry, we were one of the first and hardest hit. Everything just came to a screeching halt in March of 2020.

My “oh shit” moment was probably not long after the official call came down from the US government, banning travel. Just the aftermath of that, cascading down through every hotel here, and every small little outfitter and guide, is massive.

My husband was still working full-time. He was still going to the office quite a bit, even though they were social distancing. And I was basically a night nurse, and if anybody’s had a kid, they can understand what that means. Every few hours you’re awake, if you even get to go to sleep in between, and then there’s the daytime. You’re doing the same thing, but also trying to run a business. Every day felt a little bit overwhelming.

What kept me going was the excitement, for one, of being a new parent. I was very lucky in some sense that I had the opportunity to be at home and not be out guiding. It’s a very magical thing to become a parent, and I had been wanting it for my entire adult life, actually a lot of childhood as well. It’s just been a huge goal of mine forever, and it’s hard for two men to have kids. It’s a little bit more complicated than most other partnerships, for the obvious reasons. So it had taken us many years to get to the point where we had been able to realize our dream of having a family, and the fact that we had finally reached this goal was amazing. Even though everything else seemed to be falling apart and it kind of felt like the end of days. We’re like, Is this the apocalypse? And what are we gonna do with our brand new newborn in this new world?

I just remember just sitting there on very few hours of sleep on my computer trying to figure out how to refund these people all their money. They had paid for tours that they weren’t gonna be taking. And I had that moment of, Hey, maybe this is an opportunity to invest in doing things differently, in a way that is more fulfilling for myself and makes a better impact on the planet and the people that we interact with. Maybe this is a way to rewrite the script on travel in general.

I just started working on a plan B and a pivot for my company. We started to think about ways to create regenerative travel moments for people when they’re traveling to the destinations we work in.

Regenerative travel is a trend in the industry right now that allows visitors to engage in stewardship that leaves a place better than they found it. It can look a lot of different ways. Regenerative travel can be anything from volunteering to do trail restoration work, to spending some time cleaning up a beach in the destination you’re visiting, to planting trees in riparian zones to help salmon habitat restoration.

I had a couple moments in 2021 when we launched the first of these regenerative travel projects, where it was still pretty new that people could travel together, and there was a lot of hesitancy around travel still, and it was hard to fill them. I definitely had a few moments where I was like, Is this even a viable product?

But it’s gaining momentum, we’re working with destinations to consult on how they can be more regenerative as a destination. And there’s a lot of interest.

It takes time when you make a big pivot, you make a big move, and you kind of have to trust the process and stick with it if you want to be successful. I really believe in purpose finding and doing that internal work, and I’ve done a lot of those exercises over the years, just finding my intention, following your passion, and seeing where all those things align.

It took a while to apply that to my own business, because once you’re making money and you’re doing your thing, it’s hard to really shift. It’s hard to change tracks once you’ve built this thing and it’s really going along. The pandemic really provided that opportunity to say, Woah, is there a way we could be doing this better? Is there something entirely different we could be doing? It provided that opportunity to take a break and pause and shift focus.

You just get on autopilot sometimes when you have so many things, but find those moments where you can breathe and just be in the moment. Be still for a minute. And that’s when a lot of those epiphanies come, I think, when people take that time to be still.

Kieron Wilde is the founder of First Nature Tours in Portland, Oregon, and is an experienced tour guide in the Pacific Northwest as well as in Central and South America. You can find his company at .

You can followÌęThe Daily RallyÌęŽÇČÔÌę,Ìę,Ìę, or wherever you like to listen.ÌęÌęČčČÔ»ćÌęÌęto be featured on the show.

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The fall of 2022 was supposed to be a chance for bike retailers to catch their breath after two crazy years.

A month after lockdowns had them wondering about their future in the spring of 2020, they suddenly couldn’t keep up with demand. For a year and a half, staff worked overtime as Americans rolled out their dusty steads or bought new ones. A 50 percent increase in riding, plus supply chain snafus and factory lockdowns dwindled inventories. Then, just as supply and demand evened out last fall, a new challenge walked into stores dressed like a delivery person: a glut of bikes and parts arrived during the darkest days of the year.

“We’ve been waiting for this inventory for a year or more,” says Nick, the owner of two Utah bike shops, who asked that we not use his real name because he didn’t want to alienate his sales reps and dealers. “And we’re getting it all at once and at the worst possible time. No one is buying bikes or getting their bike serviced in the fall and winter.”

His shops received so much inventory that Nick ran out of space and had to rent 10 storage units.

“Worse than excess inventory is that it’s not the right mix of inventory,” he says. “We have too much of this, too little of some things, and did we even order that?”

When his main supplier launched a new gravel bike with a major marketing campaign, Nick didn’t have a single model in stock.

“We’re supposed to be a launch partner, but they had no bikes for stores at the same time they had every color and size available on their website,” he says.

But he can’t complain. “During the inventory shortage all the manufacturers gained a lot of power,” he says. “They decided who got inventory.” Now, he worries if he rocks the boat he’ll lose even more access to the bikes or get dropped as a dealer. That’s why we agreed not to use his real name.

It’s all costing Nick money—in storage fees, staff time and debt financing. And things may only get worse. All of the dozen people we talked to for this article say Nick’s situation is the norm. With bills piling up, bike retailers will start discounting what they can. Nick will have to match prices. With demand slowing—he says it’s already 10 percent lower than last year—he expects spring 2023 inventory to arrive long before he has sold most of the just-arrived 2022 models, which will lead to more storage issues, more discounts, slimmer margins. The vicious cycle could spin out of control. “It’s going to get more difficult before it gets better to the point some dealers are not going to make it,” he predicts.

But smart and creative independent bike shop owners are finding ways to work with the inventory challenges by doubling down on service, embracing the new pandemic cyclist, and finding ways to reach novel customers near and far. Despite a busting bike market, inflationary woes, and increased competition from their suppliers and the used market, these shops are optimistic about the future.

Bull whips and snake bellies

The pandemic-fueled inventory roller coaster is not news to any outdoor related retailer. Even other specialty niches like paddling shops are facing challenges with out-of-season inventory piling up, too much of this, and not enough of that. But in many ways the bike industry suffered more during the last three years than other verticals and thus its woes are more extreme, says John Williams, the former president of Live to Play Sports, the owner of Norco Bikes and the distributor of .

First, manufacturing is more concentrated. For instance, just a handful of factories in Taiwan and China produce most of the premium bike frames worldwide. The bike supply chain is also more complex. Even budget friendly bikes include dozens of parts. One unavailable component stalls delivery of the whole bike. And during the pandemic, bike riding boomed more than most outdoor activities. The U.S. Census department says participation increased by 50 percent in New York City. Nationwide bike industry sales jumped nearly 50 percent in 2020 and 2021, , according to NPD Group, a business research company.

The result is what’s known as a bull whip effect. As retailers saw demand for bikes surge, they ordered, say, 25 percent more inventory than normal. When the inventory didn’t arrive in time, they ordered the same amount from someone else and started hoarding what parts they did have. Distributors took that 50 percent order and added their own 10 percent bump. Brands did the same, asking factories to make 70 percent above what they would normally need. Two years later the whip is finally snapping. Missing parts arrived, factories caught up with back orders, cargo ships sailed, port strikes ended. Now all the inventory is arriving in warehouses and shops, at the same time that consumer demand is falling, recession and inflation talk is locking up wallets, and the used bike market, particularly online, is overflowing.

“It’s like the belly of a snake after a big meal,” Williams says. “It’s going to take time for the inventory bulge to move its way through the system.”

Some brands are helping retailers digest. , a Canadian company, has extended its payment terms to give shops more time to sell the bikes it just delivered. Some brands are allowing dealers to rewrite orders, says Williams, something they normally wouldn’t do. And SRAM, a components maker that rarely allows deviation from its minimum advertised price guidelines, gave shops permission to put 200 SKUs on sale.

“Our goal is to create demand so that our retailers, partners, and we at SRAM are in the best position regarding inventory going into next spring season,” said

To Williams, that shows retailers are in a power position. “All the product has to make its way through the supply chain and the majority of it will still sell at retail,” he says. But that doesn’t mean the next year or so won’t be tough for bike shops. Williams says it’s time to be creative, reimagine the in-store experience and offer something not available online.

It’s not all about sales

is a good example of what that could look like. There is almost no inventory at all in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania store. And that’s exactly how Isaac Denham wants it.

“I managed a traditional bike store and watched $250,000 worth of inventory collect dust,” says Denham, who opened Befitting in 2018 with store manager Victoria Edwards. “I wanted to do everything in my power to keep our inventory dollars low.”

In fact, the duo prefers to call the store a fitting studio, not a bike shop. Instead of rows of bikes and walls of helmets, there’s a fit bike, which they can adjust to mimic everything from an extra small mountain bike to an extra large triathlon bike. Before the pandemic customers would come in for a fit appointment and then Denham or Edwards would order the bike and parts. With multiple distributors within a few hours of their shop, they would have everything the next day to build the custom bike and deliver it to the client within a week.

In the summer of 2020, once they could restart fit appointments, the landscape shifted during the 2020 lockdown and bike boom. Delivery was no longer an option and they couldn’t beat direct-to-consumer online prices. Rather than fight it, they went with the flow. Now after the fit appointment, they tell the clients what to order online. When the parts arrive, Edwards and Denham build the bike.

What seemed like a loss was actually good business. For a 90-minute bike fit appointment Befitting charges $300. An average $1,000 bike might put $250 in a store’s register, but that’s before subtracting the cost of shipping, storage, credit card fees and shop time to build and sell the bike.

“A bike sale looks good on paper, but bike fit is more profitable,” says Denham.

And it creates more loyalty, adds Edwards. “My fit clients are telling me stuff about their body they have never told anyone else,” she says. “That intimacy builds trust and creates clients, not customers. The difference in relationship is big.” Edwards says he has many “clients” who drive an hour to have their bikes serviced at Befitting.

Embrace the new riders

Obviously not every bike shop can focus on a luxury service like fit. But everyone can focus on building a community and Patrick Hogan, the senior research manager for the , thinks there is an untapped market of consumers looking for a welcome sign.

In late 2020, PeopleForBikes, which represents 320 bike-related suppliers, commissioned . Of the 2,803 respondents, a quarter got back on a bike for the first time in a year or more during the pandemic. The eight percent who were brand new riders were more likely to be women and minorities.

“The lesson, I think, is there is a lot of opportunity to grow the sport with audiences not typically targeted with marketing and communications,” Hogan says.

When the study asked what it would take to keep them riding, Hogan says the top two responses were infrastructure and community. Advocating for bike lanes is a logical move for some bike shops, he thinks, but it’s a long play. Finding ways to welcome new riders into the sport is a shorter term lever that any retailer can pull.

“If you engage them in the sport, they’re probably going to purchase more product,” says Hogan.

Befitting used to have beer and pizza night every Friday. But like group riders, movie nights, event sponsorship and other classic forms of community engagement, the party nights died during the pandemic and are slow to reemerge.

There are simpler options. Right from the beginning of the pandemic, bike shop in Cleveland, Ohio, concentrated on one thing: getting people on bikes, quickly. Instead of the five week service waits at most shops, staff worked overtime to keep turn-around time to three weeks or less, says manager Antoine Powell.

“Putting your nose to the grindstone makes a good lasting impression,” he says. “I think we got a lot of new faces in here with word of mouth about our service time.”

When they noticed new riders balking at the price of a bike, particularly e-bikes, they introduced financing. Offered through a third party, the retailer eats the interest on the payment plan. But it helps close sales, ensures customers don’t buy an inferior product, which might turn them off cycling, and gets them riding right away, rather than later with a layaway plan, says Powell. Customers are pleasantly surprised by the option.

“More people riding good bikes, means more people enjoying riding, which expands the bike culture,” he says. “We’ll benefit later.”

Every shop is national

Both service and engagement rely on the inherent challenge of selling bikes online: They are too complicated for most people to build and tune out of the box. It’s why traditionally bike shops have had very local markets. But locked stores and contactless services changed the behavior of cyclists just as much as any shopper. Tapping into this shift presents opportunities for retailers, says Cameron Simpson, the head of North America for BikeExchange, an online marketplace where hundreds of bike shops sell their inventory.

“Our retail spaces are becoming antiquated. But the people that are riding bikes stay youthful,” she says. “We need to keep up with the demographic.”

Part of Simpson’s role is engaging with the individual shops that partner with BikeExchange. To manage their inventory challenges some are tapping into niche markets, like working with hotels or cruise ships to supply rental fleets for their guests. Others, like Dallas, Texas-based Playtri, are buying shops and franchising to use economies of scale, like for balancing inventory between stores. But the most productive strategy is to expand online to find new customers beyond the neighborhood, says Simpson.

About 20 percent of all retail sales happens online, according to the U.S. Census department. The number for the bike industry is much lower, says Simpson, but it’s growing. Sales on Bike Exchange’s marketplace increased by 120 percent between 2019 and 2020 and another 60 percent in 2021. 2022 was flat, but conversion rates increased, says Simpson. More telling, the number of BikeExchange retail partners has increased from 130 nationwide in 2020 to more than 200 today, as more and more shops look for ways to move overstocked inventory, Simpson says.

Even on a more local level online is powerful, says Tuvi Mrakpor, a sales associate at Sweet Pete’s Bike Shop, a business with two locations in Toronto, Ontario.

For most of 2020 customers weren’t allowed in stores in Ontario. Sweet Pete’s had to pivot to digital and virtual. Now, even though there are no restrictions, they continue to conduct significant business online, he says. It’s not just customers in Toronto either. They’re selling bikes into other markets where customers can’t find the specific model they want locally.

“The store is functionally a warehouse,” says Mrakpor.

The challenge is delivering the bikes. For out of town customers, Sweet Pete’s builds the bikes up like they would with an in person sale, carefully rebox it, and pay to ship the bike with Canada Post or a courier company. That still requires the customer to put the bike back together. Simpson says other stores bought vans and bike trailers so they could deliver ready-to-ride bikes. And BikeExchange saw this as an opportunity and started an offshoot business, Kitzuma Cycling Logistics, that specializes in delivering fully assembled bikes from shops to customers across the country.

“The industry has flat out tried to avoid online,” says Simpson. “They can no longer put off that this is where consumers want to shop.”

Bike service online?

The advice seems to pull retailers in two directions. Service and engagement is all about offering something that’s unavailable online. But it also points to a potential future where the bike shop is more of a showroom. With bikes still dominating most retailers’ sales and revenue stats, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association, that’s a hard move to make.

John Williams has some simpler advice for retailers: Look for ways to embrace new customers and don’t panic. There will be chaos. There will be disruption. But when the snake stops looking like a beach ball there will still be bicycle retailers.

“People have been calling for the death of the independent bike dealer for 30 years,” Williams says. “But they are the fabric and soul of the industry. Brands need them. Consumers need them.”

And that won’t change until someone figures out how to tune gears or change a tire online.

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Editor’s note: șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű will be hosting a live Q&A with David Quammen on Thursday, October 13, at 6 P.M. Mountain Time. Join us on Zoom .

In March 2020, I was busy devouring , a novel by Lawrence Wright about a deadly new virus that shuts down the globe as epidemiologists engage in a frantic race to isolate the pathogen. That plot, of course, was also playing out in real life at that very moment. Nearly three years later, we haveÌęa compelling new nonfiction scientific thriller about SARS-CoV-2: by science writer David Quammen.

The book is already , and for longtime șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű readers, it’s something of a dream come true (even though it’s about a nightmare). With more than four decades of reporting on the natural world under his belt—starting as șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s Natural Acts columnist in 1981—Quammen was perfectly placed to listen in on the conversation as scientists and virologists began rapid-fire pinging each other in December 2019—at first with rumors of an unidentified pathogen, and then with snippets of genetic code—trying to get a bead on something that, said one, looked “very, very similar to a SARS coronavirus.”

The emergence of a “novel” virus was, of course, a surprise to none of them. As Quammen wrote in 2012 in his similarly terrifying book , infectious disease scientists have been warning for years about the very real possibility of a pandemic caused by a virus “spilling over” from the nonhuman world. That’s what caused AIDs, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, Nipah, West Nile, and othersÌęserious maladies that Quammen chronicled in in the book. (The main lesson I took from Spillover: never, ever go anywhere near a bat cave.)

In Breathless, Quammen writes that virologists “had for decades seen such an event coming, like a small, dark dot on the horizon of western Nebraska, rumbling toward us at indeterminable speed and with indeterminable force, like a runaway chicken truck or an eighteen-wheeler loaded with rolled steel.”

That’s the third line of the book. It only gets crazier from there.

Quammen would probably disagree with describing Breathless as a thriller. “This is a book about the science of SARS-CoV-2,” he writes. “The medical crisis of COVID-19, the heroism of health care workers and other people performing essential services, the unjustly distributed human suffering, and the egregious political malfeasance that made it all worse—those are topics for other books.” (For those stories, try , by Michael Lewis, or , by Lawrence Wright.)

Quammen writes clearly, accurately, and even conversationally about the science, from the nomenclature conventions of virus variants to a virus’s “receptor binding domains.” One of the COVID-19 virus’s most nefarious adaptations is something called a furin cleavage site, which signals the infamous spike protein to change shape, as Quammen puts it, “like a Transformer robot metamorphosing suddenly into a truck.”

As Quammen warns us at times, the scientific going can get tough—some of the explanations are very technical. But just when your eyes glaze over, he is there to gently shake you awake. At one point, after I’d zoned out reading a calculation for herd immunity (“threshold = 1 – 1/R0,”), he began the next paragraph with the words: “He prints equation. Eyes roll back in heads. But no, wait, look how easy this is.”

One of the best things about Breathless is Quammen’s familiarity with the remote areas where viruses tend to emerge. His beat, after all, has always been the wild. He has traveled with disease cowboys, as they’re sometimes called, into caves and around remote villages, looking for viral hosts. He has seen the crowded markets full of palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs, with “multiple animals packed into small cages, stacked atop one another, sharing their fears and their bodily fluids, while hundreds of people worked and lived and ate amid the jumble, toddlers ran back and forth amid offal from butchered animals, [and] families slept in cramped lofts above their shops.”

That global experience gives him compassion for countries where virus spillovers tend to happen, and sympathy for world leaders angry that Americans are getting fourth and fifth shots while many low-income countries have had none. He demonizes no animal, not even the horseshoe bat from which SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged, nor the critically endangered pangolin, a group of whom died in a wildlife rescue center of an unknown respiratory disease, “inactive and sobbing.” Even viruses themselves get their due. They are like fire, he writes, “the dark angels of evolution, terrific and terrible,” without which “the immense biological diversity gracing our planet would collapse like a beautiful wooden house with every nail abruptly removed.”

The heart of the book is a meticulous investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and Quammen turns over every stone. In what will likely be the most provocative part of the book, he spends serious time examining and debunking the theory, ultimately rejected by scientists, that SARS-CoV-2, escaped from a lab.

Likewise, he doesn’t merely roll his eyes at the early claims surrounding cures like the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Ivermectin, he writes, is a trusted tool among veterinarians and a medicine that won its inventors a Nobel Prize. Very few authors could write the following sentence: “I’ve taken the stuff myself, in small dosage, when I was walking across swamps and forest in the Republic of the Congo and Gabon, being bitten continually by blackflies, and hoping to avoid river blindness.”

It just doesn’t work on COVID-19.

Luckily for the easily scared, some of the most unsettling revelations about SARS-CoV-2,Ìę are already behind us: the realizations that the virus was airborne and that asymptomatic people could silently spread it; those early CDC tests that didn’t work; the long months without effective treatment or vaccine.

And yet, there is still terror to be found in these pages. Breathless introduced me to perhaps the two scariest words in virology: “sylvatic cycle.” After the first spillover of a pathogen from the animal kingdom to humans, humans can then infect pets or farm animals, which can then infect wild animals, providing a hiding place for the virus to mutate again. As Quammen writes: “A virus with a sylvatic cycle is two-faced, like a traveling salesman with another wife and more kids in another town.”

That is already happening, right here in the United States. During the 2020-2021 hunting season, Iowa wildlife researchers studying chronic wasting disease found SARS-CoV-2 in 82.5 percent of the 97 deer carcasses they tested. The United States, Quammen reminds us, is home to an estimated 25 million white-tailed deer.

This is the world we live in now. “One thing is nearly certain, I believe, amid the swirl of uncertainties,” Quammen writes. “COVID-19 won’t be our last pandemic of the twenty-first century. It probably won’t be our worst.”

And it isn’t over yet. On October 4, when Breathless was published, the author was at home with COVID-19.

The post David Quammen’s ‘Breathless’ Is a Riveting Account of the Race to Understand SARS-CoV-2 appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 1981, writer David Quammen took over a monthly column for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű called “” which investigated all sorts of wildlife- and nature-related questions. It ran for 15 years, becoming a beloved regular offering in the print magazine and helping launch Quammen’s career as a preeminent science writer. He’s now , won multiple magazine and book awards, and was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2012, he wrote , a nonfiction look at how zoonotic diseases pass from animals into humans. That reporting positioned him perfectly to understand what was going on when a novel coronavirus started infecting people in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

, on shelves October 4, is the result of two years of research and interviews with scientists on the frontlines of understanding SARS-CoV-2 and the pandemic it caused. The day it was released, it for the National Book Awards. For this book, Quammen talked to 95 people working on the virus, from unknown graduate students to Anthony Fauci. Add to that the dozens he met in person while reporting Spillover, and multiply it by his many years traveling in the kind of remote environments where new zoonotic diseases tend to emerge, and you have the most authorative account yet of SARS-CoV-2 and its spread. To boot, Breathless is full of the lyrical prose and the kind of compelling narrative drama that has become Quammen’s signature.

We are hosting a live Zoom Q and A with David Quammen on Thursday, October 13, at 6 p.m. Mountain Time—and we want you to join us. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Book Club host Elizabeth Hightower Allen will moderate, and you’ll have opportunities to ask Quammen your own questions.

This conversation is open to anyone, whether or not you’re an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű+ member. But you do need to register for the Zoom event by clicking the button below. In the meantime, you canÌę. (Note that if you purchase through this link, you’ll be generating a small commission for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in addition to supporting independent bookstores—you can read more about our affiliate policy here.)

The post An șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Conversation with ‘Breathless’ Author David Quammen appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This feature by award-winning author Jeff Jackson first appeared in Rock and Ice, July 2020.

I one-fell my Ultimate Project on a Saturday. A few days later, Michael Victorino, the mayor of Maui, issued the stay-at-home order about to take effect. I had cruised the first nine bolts and gotten to the rest fresh enough to trade out in the horizontal and think, This could be it. I might finally send.

I released the foot jam and swung like a tamarin, stabbed my toe at the shoulder-level horn out right and stuck it, locked down and grabbed a little sloping edge no bigger than a pencil and greasy as a SchĂŒblig sausage. Boned up, flagged hard and started to cross when my fingers snapped off the edge and I plunged through the gulf, arms whirling, machine-gunning expletives, ungainly as a dodo bird.

After boinking, I pulled on without resting and sent the route to the top. Uncle Chris Janiszewski lowered me, and we bumped fists (remember bumping fists?).

“Next go,” he said.

And then: Pandemonium.

***

I’ve had projects pretty much nonstop for 40 years. I’ve gone on road trips and picked a line and given it all my gorm for days. I’ve worked projects at local crags weekend after weekend. I’ve had projects in hard-to-reach places, and spent years striving and training and visualizing, whispering positive aspirations and ruining relationships, gearing up, hiking in and trying hard, and then after almost losing my grip on reality, I’ve sent my lifetime projects and experienced that feeling of ecstatic release like the guy with a pimple on his leg who squeezed out a Tumbu fly maggot the size of his thumb. And then, 20 years later, I’ve watched Alex Honnold walk out with a friend one morning and onsight my nine-pitch megaproject.

The project before my Ultimate Proj—let’s call this one my Penultimate Project—was supposed to be my last project, but I never sent it. Didn’t spend weeks refining my beta or tweaking my diet. Didn’t feel the urge to cry or call my parents. Didn’t progress the sport or even improve myself, not even a little bit. I just gave up. Threw in the towel. Quit.

I’d projected the Penultimate Project, a steep, slopey line at Plenty Kiawe for a couple of weeks and watched GuiJ Marun—big-wave surfer and one of the most prolific new routers in Maui—do it, and then a visiting Austrian named Stefan fired it, and then Babsi, his girlfriend, did a lap.

After I left it for the summer and got back on it this fall, the Penultimate Project felt painful and committing and scary, just the way I remembered.

“I’m done with this piece of shit!” I shouted down to Coco Dave after hanging at every bolt.

We both knew what I meant. It was too hard. I’d have to suffer hard and fail over and over, and let it get into my head. And then it would mess with my mind. And I’d start to care. And then I’d fall in love with it. I’d go to sleep thinking about it and wake up thinking about it and daydream about it. I’d fantasize about putting my hands on it and when it finally came time to get my hands on it, it would reject me. And I’d fret and worry and go back to it again and again, for months or years. We’d develop a dysfunctional relationship, a one-sided thing where I took care of it—groomed it, blew on it, looked lovingly at its shapes, hung colorful baubles on it—and it would remain obdurate.

Then one day I’d do it. Maybe it would feel easy. The relief would be immense, like barfing up a hot iron ball or having a 10-minute orgasm. I’d feel free for a moment. But then I’d fall in love again.

Coco Dave shouted up some encouragement. “You got it, dude,” he said. “We’ll do some hangboarding.”

Training? That seemed a little extreme.

I hesitated. Didn’t I want to climb hard anymore? What was happening to me? Was I finally getting too old for this sport? Somehow, I couldn’t muster the energy to care. I pulled the draws on the way down and basked in the happiness of giving up. Maybe I was done projecting forever.

***

Consider what the Buddhist master and philandering alcoholic Chogyam Trungpa had to say about the human condition: “Really, we operate on a very small basis. We think we are great, broadly significant, and that we cover a whole large area. We see ourselves as having a history and a future, and here we are in our big-deal present. But if we look at ourselves clearly in this very moment, we see we are just grains of sand—just little people 
 ”

In other words, you are just a speck of insignificant, unimportant, inconsequential and trivial nothingness stuck to the shoe of the universe. Littler than the swage sleeve on a #1 micro Stopper. Smaller than Ramon Julian Puigblanque’s pinky toe. On a cosmic scale, even Adam Ondra is nothing special, which makes you and me 
 well, let’s not get too incisive here. Suffice it to say that we’re completely irrelevant. And so are our projects.

***

I suppose it’s time to talk about Adam Ondra and the Hard, Hard, Hard.

For a long time, all we knew was that Project Hard, Adam Ondra’s Norwegian super proj, was the next level up. Harder than The Hard Hard (La Dura Dura), the nails-hard previous world’s hardest climb. Four years went by, and Ondra still hadn’t done Project Hard, but he continued to rage—accomplishing hard things like onsighting 9a, winning World Championships, bouldering V16s, crimping tiny granite chips across the Dawn Wall, finishing university and learning languages and being this nearly-too-good-to-be-true, smart, funny, humble-but-real, all-around best rock climber in the world.

And then, finally, he did it. The Hard Hard Hard. La Dura Dura Dura. Ondra later changed the name of Project Hard to Silence, because, as he put it: “I could not even scream. All I could do was just hang on the rope, feeling tears in my eyes. It was too much joy, relief and excitement all mixed together.”

What does it take to send the world’s hardest project? Find your way to the humungous Hanshelleren Cave in Norway. Use Sherlock Holmesian deduction to locate the start of Nordic Flower (5.14b) among a bewildering grouping of quickdraws dangling like villi in the duodenum of Scandinavian jotun. Climb halfway up that line, link into another one and finish via a V15 crack, into a V13 to another number I can’t climb, blah, blah. (Honestly, the blow-by-blow is less interesting than my neighbor Larry, 91, standing in his garage talking about his tools while his Datsun’s motor is running.)

Things to remember: Ondra hung upside-down for long intervals to train his circulatory system so he could milk an inverted kneebar and not have to worry about the blood filling his head until his eyeballs exploded. He also let a man named Klaus hold him in compromising positions for long periods of time. He also asked a ballet instructor to watch a monkey and report his findings. These are techniques you and I would not avail ourselves of.

Also, Ondra climbs full-time, has a coach, a PT, a PR agent and a videographer, rocks a wispy Czech afro, and has a neck like a Tula fighting goose. He speaks Czech, English, Spanish, Italian, French and Cherokee. This guy might be the first World President. He also might be an elf or a wizard.

***

Ondra once told my buddy Andrew Bisharat that projecting was his least-favorite kind of climbing. He said that he could easily just climb 5.15b and keep his sponsors happy and not have to try so damn hard on the Hard, Hard, Hard.

But he also told AB that he just has to try as hard as he can. Like John Lee Hooker and the boogie woogie, it’s in him and it’s got to get out. And just like John Lee’s papa, I say, “Let that boy boogie woogie.”

But there’s something equally liberating about not working so damn hard.

We’ve been told our entire life that quitting is bad, that quitters never win and that quitters develop the habit of quitting. If you give up a few times, pretty soon you’ll become one of those people who say things like, “This is my summit.”

Look at any study on satisfaction and you’ll see that happiness is concomitant with completing tasks that have an appropriate level of difficulty. The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who coined the term “flow,” pointed out that this energized and intrinsically rewarding state only arises when the task at hand requires intense focus. Too easy and you get bored. Too hard, you get bored. Turns out life is just very boring and the only way to stay stoked is by projecting 5.15 or doing brain surgery.

I googled “satisfaction” and a 2017 study popped up first. A Harvard Business School professor, Teresa Amabile, and psychologist Steven Kramer found that 1,200 workers reported their happiest days as those marked by a sense of progress.

“Ultimately, work is really about accomplishment,” the researchers noted. “Did I get something done, and does it matter?”

The question, of course, is whether you want climbing to be like a job. We do call it “working a route,” after all.

After indulging in a similar train of thought for a couple of days, I decided that I was officially done with projecting forever, and the next weekend, instead of warming up on The Vegetarian Paniolo and Jahawaiian, and trying hard on the Penultimate Proj, I found myself hiking with Arnie Dungo, a loquacious and hardworking Maui carpenter about my age, into a canyon with sweeping 100-foot walls and seven new 5.10s.

We got to the base of a steep red-and-gold wall liberally etched with tacky edges and pockets. Arnie belayed me on an amazing 14-bolt route, Amazeballs (5.10c). I didn’t try hard and I totally sent that shit. We did all seven lines, 700 feet of 5.10, and I couldn’t believe how much fun rock climbing was.

The next weekend we were back. We did the seven 5.10s and it was totally amazeballs.

By the next weekend, however, Amazeballs wasn’t quite as amazing and I was starting to feel a familiar pull. I kept stealing glances up the canyon toward The Syllable, a 90-degree slab with holds the size, shape and texture of crumbs at the bottom of a popcorn bag — an old project that had taken weeks to send.

By the end of the day, I knew that my self-imposed lockdown was over. It was time to get back to work.

***

And so the real work began. Needing yet another new project, I picked out an appropriately impossible-looking line and spent a few days gluing 15 titanium bolts into its belly. Then I brushed every hold I could reach with an electric, rotary wire brush, a full-sized wire brush, a smaller wire brush, and a toothbrush. Then I took a nut tool and scraped any gunk out of the pockets. I pried off loose flakes and glued the loose flakes I couldn’t pry off. Used a one-inch blow tube to blow dust out of pockets and cracks. Went back over it with a Âœ-inch blow tube and then borrowed GuiJ’s electric leaf blower and blasted it until it was cleaner than a vegan’s colon. Then I felt the holds and chalked ’em up. Brushed it some more. Moved a bolt or two. Pried off another hold. Added some glue. Brushed it again and blew off the holds. After only five days of prep, it was ready to try.

I gave it one burn and realized it was way too hard for me. So, I started training and I trained too hard and hurt my shoulder. After rehabbing my shoulder, I got on the Ultimate Project and tried too hard and tweaked my knee. I had to project another project that wasn’t the Ultimate Project for a few weeks while my knee healed. Miraculously, I sent the project to the left of the Ultimate Project.

The work was paying off, so I kept training and doing my rehab, and every night before bed I’d sit cross-legged and visualize the Ultimate Project while sipping magnesium tea to ease my old, aching over-trained muscles. And every Sunday I’d crawl a little farther out my own Project Hard, until one day I arrived at the rest below the crux and thought that maybe, just maybe, I would send.

***

On March 25,Ìę Mayor Victorino ordered that nobody is supposed to leave home. The majority of the Maui community works in the tourism industry and most people lost their jobs. Cops are handing out $5,000 fines, and the National Guard has set up a roadblock on the Pi’ilani Highway and cut me off from the Ultimate Project.

As I write this, exactly 30 days after the mayor’s stay-home rule, it looks like it might be another month before they let us out. I haven’t been climbing in weeks and I know now what Ondra meant when he said he just has to try hard. In fact, after 30 days of not working, I would like nothing more than to try hard on the Hard, Hard.

I like to think of it—shady and cool, my draws swaying in the gusty northeast breeze. It’s not waiting for me. No, the Ultimate Project just is. It’s out there, it exists. One day I’ll get to try it again, and for now, that’s enough.

Jeff Jackson is the At-Large Editor for Climbing.

The post Lessons Learned from a Setback at the Crag appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This article was first published byÌę.

One of those riders was Danish rider Magnus Cort of American team EF Education-EasyPost, one of the key animators of the early stages of the race. Cort was clearly on good form coming into the Tour de France. He attacked into breakaways for more than 300 miles in the early stages, wore the KOM jersey for most of the first week, and then won stage ten.

Then, Cort started deteriorating.

A surprisingly complete picture of Cort’s changing condition exists, both from his reported impressions in a he wrote for Danish news site BT.DK, and in the form of data released from his Whoop fitness tracker.

CortÌę that “since Wednesday, I have had discomfort in my body,” but at that point had recorded negative results on multiple COVID tests. He wrote that he felt “lethargic,” with several other symptoms. “It has not been a fever, but it is as if many of the symptoms have overlapped the fatigue, so I cannot completely separate things,” he explained. Cort had also been struggling to get to sleep, despite his fatigue. We already know that , Cort was up late, but celebration one night turned to sleeplessness thereafter. “Fatigue has set in in my head,” Cort wrote.Ìę“I feel used.ÌęIt is hard mentally to ride such a long bike race.ÌęEspecially in this insane heat.”

On Sunday morning, Cort had the answer as to why he had been feeling so unwell,ÌęÌęafter five days of symptoms. “Magnus Cort woke up this morning with a headache and fever and has since tested positive for COVID-19. He will not start stage 15 of the Tour de France. His medical evaluation is ongoing,” his team said on its social media.

On Monday, the exercise tracking company Whoop—a sponsor of EF Education-EasyPost—shared physiological data that supported Cort’s observed impressions.

The surprising metric is Cort’s recovery score, and how quickly he bounced back from one day to the next prior to contracting the virus. For the first 16 days of the race, Cort’s recovery averaged 57 percent from one day to the next. On the day of his COVID-19 positive, that dropped dramatically, to 19 percent.

His respiratory rate jumped up significantly, too, from 14.5 average breaths per minute, to 16.5.

Cort’s resting heart rate showed an even more dramatic spike. Over the five days leading up to the COVID positive, his resting heart rate slowly increased from 37 bpm, before spiking up to 47 bpm on the morning of his withdrawal from the race.

His also plummeted. This measure of the interaction between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, measured in milliseconds, is, Whoop says, an important indicator of a body’s health. A low measure indicates that “your body is working hard for some other reason (maybe you’re fatigued, dehydrated, stressed, or sick and need to recover), which leaves fewer resources available to dedicate towards exercising [or] competing.” On stage 11, Cort’s range was 99 ms. By stage 14, as his body fought the burgeoning infection, it dropped to 87 ms. On stage 15, when he tested positive, it plunged to 61 ms.

The final metric shared by Whoop was related to his fever symptoms. Cort’s skin temperature was, Whoop notes, “! very elevated”, increasing by 2.0° C.

The Tour de France had its final rest day on Monday, in the baking heat of Carcassonne, where the remaining riders of the race will be resting in preparation for three days in the Pyrenees, a sprint stage, a time trial, and finally a celebratory spin down the Champs-ÉlysĂ©es.

By that point, hopefully, Magnus Cort and the other unlucky COVID-positive members of the peloton are feeling much better.

The post How Does COVID Impact a Tour de France Cyclist? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A pandemic was not going to deter Lou E. Reyes from composting. Even at the height of New York City’s early wave of COVID infections, Reyes masked up and dutifully lugged his bag of food scraps to his neighborhood’s collection site in Astoria, Queens. In late March 2020, however, Reyes arrived to find a sign stating that the sanitation department all composting services. Organic scraps would now be sent to landfills rather than converted into compost. “I had a moment of panic,” Reyes says. “I saw a garbage can there, full of food scraps, and I was like, I cannot.”

He biked his scraps back to his apartment.

Reyes had always taken composting for granted. It was something he did as a kid with his eco-conscious mother in California, and he stuck with it after moving to New York City to work in casting and production in the fashion industry. His girlfriend, Caren Tedesco, grew up in a composting household in Brazil. The couple sees composting as one of the few tangible things they can do to help curtail climate change, because keeping organic scraps out of landfills cuts down on the emission of methane, a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. “Composting is not a lifestyle choice or some cool or strange thing that a few people do—it’s crucial,” Tedesco says. “It’s key to solving a lot of our community issues.”

For Tedesco and Reyes, New York City’s abrupt shuttering of its organics collection program was a shortsighted step backwards. They weren’t alone: the city’s suspension of compost services “unleashed the wrath of New Yorkers,” says Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn’s borough president. “What this did is create a ton of new advocates.”

In spring 2020, the collective frustration of over 20,000 compost-loving New Yorkers culminated in the creation of , one of the most energetic and diverse garbage-driven campaigns the city has seen in years. The group is seeking nothing short of a complete revamp of New York City’s approach to compost. Its ideal program is one both universal and mandatory, with accompanying educational outreach and a strong emphasis on local processing. “This is literally the bare minimum any government at a local level has to do today,” Tedesco says. “New York City must have a universal composting program, and this has to be implemented as fast as possible.”

The post Inside the Battle to Save Compost in New York City appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Modern life often means a lot of sitting. It’s easy to become transfixed by work, social media, and streaming services. You look up and it’s been several hours of sitting, staring at a screen. Sitting still too long robs your hips, spine, and shoulders of mobility thus making you a less effective athlete. But you can stay mobile even if you’re confined at home. You have multiple opportunities to maintain or increase your movement skills with minimal time, space, and no special equipment.

Mobility Plan

The most important thing to remember is this: You need to move more. No one posture or position is best. Ideally, you should assume different positions frequently throughout the day. The best way to maintain mobility while fulfilling work and parenting requirements is to get up frequently and move around for a few minutes.

One strategy is to set a timer to go off every hour or so. Get up when it sounds and spend 5-10 minutes doing a few of the following drills, then return to work. Repeat throughout the day. You’ll gain mobility and by giving yourself a break from work you’ll come back refreshed and more productive. Another strategy involves working from different positions, not just sitting at your desk.

Mobility Drills

3D Hip Flexor Stretch

Kneel on one knee and tuck the rear foot under with your foot pulled toward the shin. Tilt your hips backward by thinking of pulling your belt buckle up to your chin. This should initiate a stretch in the thigh of the kneeling leg. Glide forward and back into and out of the stretch. You can vary the stretch in two ways: Rotate the kneeling foot outward (hip internal rotation) or rotate the foot inward (hip external rotation) and perform the stretch the same way. Do 10-20 reps.

Doorway Mobility

You can use a doorway for several whole-body mobility drills.

1. Chest: Put your right foot forward and your left foot back with both feet pointing straight. Place your hands at about head height with elbows bent about 90 degrees. Drive your chest forward/backward. Next, drive the hips side to side. Finally, turn the head and body left/right. Perform about 10–15 reps in each position. Switch the feet and repeat the series. You’ll stretch the chest, arms, hips, and rear-leg calf.
2. Overhead: This series is similar to the first but you’ll work with your hands overhead. Assume the same split stance as above. Put both hands overhead against the doorframe. Drive forward/backward. Tweak the stretch by putting your hands overhead at an angle and perform the same stretch. This creates a side bend in your trunk. Do the same to the other side. Switch legs and repeat. Perform about 10–15 reps in each position. You’ll feel the stretch in your lats, triceps, and trunk.
3. Crossover: Keeping your arms at chest height, grab the front of the door frame with your left hand and grab the back of the door frame with your right. Cross your right leg over your left. Drive your hips left/right for 10–15 reps. Repeat with your hands to your left and your left leg crossed over your right. You’ll feel the stretch through your lateral shoulders, trunk, and hips.
4. Type 2 Crossover: Put your right foot forward and your left foot back with both feet pointing straight. Turn your left hand over, thumb down, reach across your chest, and grab the back of the doorframe. Reach your right hand overhead to your left, palm forward, and grab the top back of the doorframe. Drive your trunk forward/backward for 10–15 reps. Then drive your hips left/right for 10–15 reps. Finally, rotate your trunk right/left for 10–15 reps. Reverse your foot and hand position and repeat the process. You’ll feel a stretch throughout your shoulders, trunk, and hips.
5. Spine/Posterior Chain: Stand just outside the doorway with your feet close together. Reach down low and grab the doorframe with your thumbs turned down. Glide forward and backward in and out of the stretch. You’ll feel this in your lats, low-back, and hamstrings.

Different Work Positions

Hip Extension at Your Desk

Sitting in a chair isn’t your only option when typing on your computer. You can do the above hip flexor stretch at your desk. Or you can simply kneel on either both knees (tall kneeling) or on one knee (half-kneeling) while at your desk.

This helps open up the hips and improve hip extension. Hip extension is essential for pushing off the ground while running. Kneeling while typing at your desk also requires you to extend your spine. A tall, neutral spine is an efficient running posture. Hunching over isn’t necessarily bad, but doing it for hours on end isn’t conducive to efficient running posture.

Floor Sitting Positions

If you work on a laptop then you can leave the desk altogether and get on the floor. The floor offers a galaxy of novel sitting positions: cross-legged, side-lying, on your stomach—the list is endless. You can work, watch videos, and communicate with others all while engaging in variable movement and postures. Simply getting up and down off the ground is a practical exercise and it’s something most adults rarely do.

Standing desks

Using a standing desk is fine but standing in one position for a prolonged time isn’t better than sitting. Remember, you need to move more often. Further, you don’t need to be on your feet a lot more if you’re still running regularly. You should rest and recover appropriately between runs.

Keep Moving, Keep Changing

Sitting still all day is no way for an athlete to live. Frequent movement is essential to maintaining joint health and movement skills. You can maintain your movement skills by assuming different postures and sitting positions, and by performing a few mobility drills throughout the day. Use this mobility routine in combination with an to be a faster, more durable runner. Your running options may be limited but your movement options aren’t.

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Kyle Norman, MS, is a Denver, Colorado-based personal trainer, strength coach and running coach with 20 years of experience. He specializes in helping people move well, get strong and get out of pain. You can follow his blog atÌę.Ìę

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