Outside May/June 2022

In With the New The issue you’re holding is a special one, part of Outside’s ongoing commitment to excellence at a time when many media companies are moving away from print. We’re all in when it comes to using the web, podcasts, and video to expand what we bring readers, but remain dedicated to our original motive: producing a magazine that brings outdoor adventure alive through compelling writing, reporting, photography, and design. Starting with our redesign, we hope you’ll enjoy the changes that mark the new Outside as much as we do. Design and photography director Hannah McCaughey has been given greater freedom for the beautiful covers and layouts she produces month after month. The revamped Outside is airier, with more space devoted to imagery and less emphasis on quick-hit service. Our…

THE RESCUE, an extraordinary 2021 film from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi—the power couple behind Free Solo—tells the story of 14 teenagers who got stranded deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand and their improbable, high-risk extraction. One of the film’s most compelling scenes occurs early, when the girlfriend of a rescue diver is describing their courtship—the attraction, the dates, the sweet notes. The interviewer asks: “Did you fall in love?” After a pause and a sheepish grin, she nods vigorously and says, “Yes!” It’s a small moment of warmth and vulnerability in a thriller that otherwise unfolds at breakneck pace, and it connects us to the characters in a way that even their heroic actions do not. The Rescue is just one of many impressive adventure documentaries that have…

EVERY MATCH THE Wigudun Galu volleyball team competes in is like a party. Beneath the hot Panamanian sun, players laugh and gossip, some wearing vibrant jewelry or sporting iridescent manicures. Their partners root for them from the sidelines, drinking beer and listening to music. “When people see us play, they are happy,” Joamir Mojic, 29, says from his home in Panama City. “It makes me feel like we’re part of society, because people accept who we are.” The volleyball team was founded in 2018 by the Wigudun Galu Association, a nongovernmental organization comprising people from Guna Yala, an Indigenous territory in northeast Panama where gender diversity is venerated. The Guna nation’s origin story recounts the arrival of three brothers; one of them, named Wigudun, was said to possess both masculine and…

OVER THE PAST four years, a new breed of heavily cushioned running shoes modeled on Nike’s Vaporfly line have rewritten the road-running record books. Soft-bottomed shoes, it turns out, can be exceptionally fast. But the hot new debate about the Vaporfly’s performance advantages has managed to push aside an older conundrum that should be of greater interest to 99.9 percent of runners: Does the cushioning in your trainers protect you from shin splints, stress fractures, and other impact-linked running injuries? Or, as barefoot runners insisted during their brief ascendency a decade ago, is it the cause of such injuries? In the period following the 2009 publication of Christopher McDougall’s bestseller Born to Run, one of the key claims made by the barefoot and minimalist running movement was that the design of…

ON A RAINY FALL morning in 2005, Donald Lawson got a phone call from his sailing hero, Bruce Schwab, asking if he would be willing to drop everything and join him on a trip down the East Coast. Lawson, then 23, had been honing his sailing skills for more than a decade, first at Baltimore’s Police Athletic League and Downtown Sailing Center, then on the Chesapeake Bay in prestigious regattas like the Governor’s Cup. In these races, up to 20 boats are pitted against one another on courses that can reach 100 nautical miles in length. Lawson and his teammates had broken several speed records—and each time, Lawson was one of the only Black sailors. In those days, there was no bigger figure in American sailing than Schwab, who in the previous…

IN THE 15 YEARS I’ve been publishing The Radavist, a website about cycling, I’ve written in-depth reviews of more than 30 mountain bikes, including some of the best money can buy. So it may come as a surprise that my preferred style is the modest hardtail. I fell in love with the balance of simplicity and capability built into these bikes. Riding one gives me a sense of pride I haven’t experienced on any other bike. That said, there are challenges to riding a hardtail. You can’t just point the bike and let it do its thing like you can with a full-suspension bike. You have to guide it through even the smoothest lines while enjoying a playful jib here and there. Speed is your friend in the rough stuff, but…