As Dave Vanderveen recovered from a car accident that could have killed him, he decided to return to mountain biking. The only problem was that the bones in his foot were shattered, and at least one of those bones looked like a bag of marbles. He needed something special for motivation, and his wife put up with an unusual bedroom request to make sure he had a muse. That last sentence sounds dirty, but the video is nothing of the sort. It's clean, short, beautifully edited, and you should watch it to get an idea of what an injured athlete has to go through to get back to singletrack.
When journalist David Walsh, the chief sports writer for the
Sunday Times and the author of From Lance to Landis and LA Confidential, needed
a title for his new book about the 13 years he’s spent trying to expose
Lance Armstrong’s doping, he took to Twitter. “Thinking about title
for this last book on LA, have not come up with anything. So okay it's over to
you - 1 or 2-word title, 3 or 4 max,” he said.
Responses came streaming in. Some were
good. Some made little sense at all. Walsh kept a running tab of his
favorites and responded to them. Here’s a short list, including the tweet announcing the winner, Seven Deadly Sins.
Lance Armstrong grabbed headlines for two reasons this past weekend. News broke that he resigned from the board of the Livestrong Foundation. Armstrong made the decision on November 4, “to
spare the organization any negative effects as a result of
controversy surrounding his cycling career,” Jeff Garvey,
the group’s new chairman, said in an email to Bloomberg. “We are
deeply grateful to Lance for creating a cause that has served
millions of cancer survivors and their families.”
Armstrong had already stepped down as the organization's chairman in mid-October. Livestrong Foundation spokesperson Katherine McLane wouldn't say what Armstrong's exact role would be going forward. “Lance remains the creator and inspiration of the
Livestrong foundation and for its mission—providing free
financial, practical, and emotional support services for cancer
survivors and their families,” McLane said in an email to Bloomberg.
In the spring of 2002, when Eric Larsen was living in Grand Marais, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior and near the Boundary Waters Canoe area, he started watching the lake ice very carefully. He was waiting for some incredibly specific conditions. Just after the snow melted and seeped through the ice, he knew it would leave a soft, rough surface for a period of one to two days. When that happened, he and some friends grabbed their mountain bikes and headed out. "Being on a bike on the lake ice felt really weird, but it was also really fun, too," he says.
Six years later, he started seeing fat bikes. While skiing a hard and relatively flat route to the South Pole that winter, he had an idea. He should ride a fat bike to the South Pole.
"Of course, there is a bit more to the story," he says. "You see, I love bikes. I
have all my life. Raced for a bit, worked in bike shops for forever. The
whole eat, sleep, and breathe two wheels thing. But the catch was, I
love wilderness and winter more, so there was always this choice—expeditions or bicycling. So perhaps maybe my brain had been trying
to subconsciously connect the two for quite some time."
He plans to start pedaling toward the South Pole this December, on an expedition he's titled Cycle South. It will be the fourth Christmas in the past five years that he's spent in Antarctica. This time, he's given himself a pretty small window—about a month and a half—to get things done. "One of the reasons that I'm on a pretty tight timeline is that I've got a five-week-old baby boy that needs my love and
attention," he says. "Being gone for six weeks is no cake walk on my partner Maria,
either."
Kate Rawles on her Mexico-to-Canada tour. Photo: Chris Loynes
Kate Rawles is an outdoor philosopher. That is a title she
coined herself, and it is accurate in more than one way. She spends her
professional life thinking about, talking about, and being in the outdoors,
activities that culminated in the publication of The Carbon Cycle,
her account of the three-month, 4,553-mile bike ride she undertook to better
understand concepts and perception about climate change in the American West.
The Banff Center named The
Carbon Cycle a finalist in the 2012 Banff Mountain Book Competition. Philip
Connors' Fire Season took the prize,
but the nomination helped bring Rawles' book to an audience outside her base in
the United Kingdom. Adventure Ethics talked to Rawles, a lecturer in Outdoor
Studies at the University of Cumbria, about outdoor philosophy, her ride, and
the resulting book.
What is outdoor
philosophy? I spend a lot of time talking about human-nature relationships,
but I was doing this inside lecture halls, and there were no other species in
the room. The whole thing felt very abstract, so over time I started to take
those classes outside more and more.
Outdoor philosophy means getting outside the classroom. I
often take my classes sea kayaking and they have a very powerful engagement with
a very different landscape. There is a motivation aspect, too. It's not just
exploring the topic academically but encouraging students to act on behalf of
the environment.
The Carbon Cycle is based on the conversations about climate change
that you had with hundreds of people during the course of your
Mexico-to-Canada bike ride. How did the book come into being? I always loved cycling and mountains and I've done a number
of trips over the years, but wanted to do a bigger trip. I wanted to use it as
a way of communicating about climate change. I wanted to raise awareness rather
than money. And I wanted to connect what is known, academically, about climate
change with what is happening on the ground.
I wanted it to be adventurous enough to get people's
attention. I used the bike ride almost like a Trojan horse, to get to people
who would not necessarily pick up a book about climate change, and get them to
talk about it with me.
The trip was 4,553 miles and I tried to follow the spine of
the Rockies as much as possible, I crossed the Continental Divide about 20
times.
