Table of contents for March/April 2019 in Outside

Like it or not, we live in the era of government shutdown as a blunt-force political tool. Since 1990, there have been six shutdowns resulting from budget disagreements between Congress and the executive branch. Typically, these battles end when one party or the other takes the blame in public-opinion polling and folds under the political pressure. As I write this, however, we’re halfway through the record 24th day of a shutdown that began December 22, and no negotiations are scheduled to try to solve the impasse. Despite more than 50 percent of Americans blaming President Trump for the stalemate, he’s vowed to fight on unless he gets his demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall. One factor making this current shutdown so destructive, beyond its duration, is that…

By the time professional runner Kate Grace decided to move from Bend, Oregon, to Sacramento, California, in the summer of 2015, she’d become a reluctant expert in the anatomy of the foot and lower leg. She’d endured a metatarsal stress fracture in her foot, a nasty case of plantar fasciitis, tendinitis in her flexor hallucis longus, and a tear in her plantar plate, a ligament-like structure under the ball of the foot. Her new coach at the NorCal Distance Project, Drew Wartenburg, sent her an e-mail before she arrived. To be successful, she would need to stay healthy, he explained, and to stay healthy, she should start making Jell-O. Wartenburg, a former director of track and cross country at the University of California at Davis, was following the advice of…

One afternoon in mid-October, I lugged two boxes, weighing a total of 65 pounds, up three flights of stairs. This was the first sign that my new Naked Labs 3-D full-body scanner was anything but an ordinary scale. I unboxed the hardware—a mirror and a flat plastic disc about the size of a turntable—and then downloaded an iPhone app, which instructed me to undress. And so there I was, in a pair of tight-fitting boxer briefs, waiting for a firmware update from Naked Labs. On a regular bathroom scale, my five-foot-ten frame tips in at a little over 200 pounds. Calculate my body-mass index, and I’m a 29.8—which is considered overweight, almost obese. But the BMI is a bit of statistical snake oil. The formula was designed in the 1800s…

On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, you hear it again and again: “There will never be another Hermis Tall.” Hermis was the greatest Indian relay rider of his generation, a natural horseman who led a team of Oglala Lakota to three consecutive championships at the sport’s marquee event, held every summer in Sheridan, Wyoming. The sight of him thundering bareback across the finish line—astride a 1,200-pound thoroughbred, shirtless, his chiseled physique glistening with sweat—will forever be ingrained in the minds of his teammates, friends, and rivals. His team, known as the Brew Crew (a nod to the last name of their captain, Stan Brewer), racked up a remarkable 19 wins during the summer of 2015 alone, making them Indian relay’s dominant force, the subject of envy and…

I've dealt with plenty of injuries in my career, including six broken ankles and a torn ACL. Three years ago, I had a hip replacement on my dominant leg. When you spend decades in the ocean, you’re bound to hit a few rough patches, and the same is true for any serious athlete. So I started investing in resilience. Now everything I do—what I eat, how much I sleep, the way I train—is designed to protect me from being hurt. Here are my top tips for building a body and mind that can handle the load. Train Smart The potential for injury from outside forces is everywhere—so don’t contribute to it with bad training. When I’m doing highly repetitive motions, I get creative and compensate with oppositional movements to avoid…

She Said… I Dream About Blue Seas In 1983, my parents decided to go into the boat business. They bought a small boatyard near our home in Stamford, Connecticut, and imported Westerly sailboats from Hampshire, England. The first to arrive was a Westerly Fulmar, a 32-foot sloop we named Lower Goose, after an island in Maine we often visited. She was quickly sold. Twenty-eight years later, my father bought Lower Goose back. As she was being refitted, a space heater started a fire down below that smoldered for half a day. Lower Goose became an insurance write-off, but my dad couldn’t bring himself to scrap her. For the next few years, she hung neglected on a mooring in Connecticut’s Five Mile River. I have spent some time on boats. There were…

I was on Skype with Barry Lopez, legendary scribe of the natural world, when the ravens interrupted. As cawing sang through my computer, I pictured dark wings skimming Lopez’s home in the Oregon rainforest, where he has lived for almost half a century. Earlier that morning, a raven had cruised past my cabin near the British Columbia–Alaska border, and the two felt somehow connected. I heard fumbling in the background. The cawing stopped. “It’s my cell phone,” Lopez confessed. One of the perks of a raven ringtone, he told me, is that when it goes off in a crowded room, instead of glaring at him, people look to the nearest window to locate the birds. Lopez, at 74, is a master of making us look outside—at hypothetical corvids through glass,…

Skechers GoRun Razor 3 Hyper $135 Best For: Setting PRs. When going fast is your priority, step into this fun speedster. At 6.4 ounces and with a 27-millimeter stacked heel, the Razor 3 Hyper boasts the best weight-to-cushion ratio of all the shoes we tested. The tight upper boosts control, while the EVA midsole delivers one of the most launch-you-forward rides of any shoe on the market. 6.4 oz; 4 mm drop Saucony Triumph ISO 5 $160 Best For: Unmatched comfort. Roomy and smooth riding, the Triumph ISO 5 is the Cadillac of daily trainers, a stable cruiser best suited to slow and moderate days. With 28 millimeters of resilient TPU, this shoe is a cushion lover’s dream. Saucony’s new footbed contours around your foot like a bucket seat, providing a…

Deanna glover’s voice hits a high note along with her eyebrows, tone and expression conveying the same grandmotherly concern. She’s not my grandmother—we met for the first time an hour ago—but that hardly seems to matter to the sweet, white-haired 80-year-old. “Tell me you’ll have a friend hiking with you, because it’s a lot of country,” she says. “And, you know, I start to worry.” The Kanab Heritage Museum, in Kane County, Utah, is cluttered with arrowheads, wedding gowns, antique farm implements, and sepia photographs of the families that founded the town of Kanab in 1870. I phoned Deanna, a descendent of these Mormon pioneers, earlier this April morning, and though the museum, her baby and brainchild, was closed, she insisted on opening it so that the displays could inform…

There’s one question that people always ask me about running alone in the backcountry. It’s the same question they ask me about taking young children down whitewater rivers. I know because it’s also the one I ask myself. Aren’t you scared? The answer is: absolutely. In the seven years I’ve been an ultrarunner, I’ve taught myself to tolerate uncertainty, to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve run and won races ranging from 50 kilometers to 100 miles, but I still rarely leave the house without weighing my worries against my desire to run, assessing the risks of being on my own in the wilderness, thinking hard about what’s at stake. Everything. I’m scared of getting lost and of getting hurt and of being attacked by animals wild and domesticated—even livestock. Dogs…