To keep fit, the Omaha Daily Bee advised back in 1911, women should try “the imaginary motion of lifting a piano” and the real-life challenge of pulling a cork from a bottle. “Hold the bottle between your knees and pull and pull at the tightly driven cork,” the writer advised. Sadly, she didn’t specify how many sets and reps of...

　　Pizza. At an Italian restaurant in a strip mall just outside an idyllic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, seven teenage mountain-bike racers and two coaches crowd around a table. It was a busy Saturday in May 2022 at Virginia’s interscholastic mountain-biking series, known as VAHS. 　　The team, the Richmond Cycling Corps (RCC), consists of sixth-to-twelfth-graders who attend a variety...

　　Welcome to Tough Love. We’re answering your questions about dating, breakups, and everything in between. Our advice giver is Blair Braverman, dogsled racer and author of Small Game and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. Have a question of your own? Write to us at [email protected]. 　　I recently got my first dog. I’ll admit that I was kind of impulsive in...

　　More than 250 million years ago, in the Triassic period, what is now western Utah was a broad coastal flat of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Moenkopi Formation, as it is known, saw five million years’ worth of sedimentary layers—gypsum, siltstone, mudstone—dumped onto the flats by oceans and rivers. 　　Nearly 200 million years later, the gradual seismic uplift of the Colorado...

　　It wasn’t crossing over into my forties that felt so unsettling, it was the physical signs—subtle as they were—that made aging bloom into something real and looming. 　　After my fortieth birthday, over the course of two years, my periods became heavier and more painful. Now, at 42, I sometimes spot between cycles. Sometimes my period comes early. Every month, days before...

　　Earlier today, a federal jury found Charles Barrett, an accomplished Northern California climber and a guidebook author, guilty of three charges of sexual assault. 　　The verdict follows a weeklong trial held at the U.S. District Court in Sacramento. A 12-member jury composed of eight men and four women found Barrett, 39, guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and...

　　Welcome to Tough Love. We’re answering your questions about dating, breakups, and everything in between. Our advice giver is Blair Braverman, dogsled racer and author of Small Game and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. Have a question of your own? Write to us at [email protected]. 　　I know you normally answer questions about relationships, but I have a question about my...

　　The best way to prevent running injuries isn’t to waste your time stretching or searching for the perfect shoe; it’s to get strong. That’s where the zeitgeist has been headed over the past decade or so, as old ideas about injury prevention have produced disappointing results in studies. The rationale for strength training, by contrast, is seemingly unassailable: injuries occur...

　　At midnight Mountain Time on January 30, the public comment period closed for two proposals from the National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) that would ban fixed anchors (bolts, pitons, snow pickets, slings) in America’s Designated Wilderness areas. 　　I’ve written a lot about and around this subject; so if you want a full treatment, read “New Wilderness...

　　We are excited to announce the upcoming Erlanger Chattanooga Marathon Weekend, set to take place on March 1-3, 2024. This is your invitation to join us for this thrilling event and actively participate in the festivities. 　　The Erlanger Chattanooga Marathon is not just a race; its a celebration of our vibrant community and a testament to the indomitable human spirit....

　　The best detail in Christian Cheung’s new study in the Journal of Applied Physiology is the rigorous, Caddyshack-esque screening the subjects had to undergo: a urine test to prove that they did, in fact, use drugs at least once a week. Such is the world of cannabis research, which still tends to make funding agencies and ethics committees a little...

　　I am not that curious about how to get faster as a trail runner, but I am curious about how fast people’s brains work. My friend Mike Foote and I have a lot in common (we’re dads of toddlers, we both like early Metallica albums, we both live in Missoula, we both grew up in small towns in the Midwest,...