Outside Podcast

Last summer, 34-year-old Andrew Bernstein, known to his friends as Bernie, was riding his bike alone on a road outside Boulder, Colorado, when he was struck by a vehicle. The driver fled the scene and left him laying in a ditch, where he would have soon died if a passerby hadn’t noticed him and called 911. Bernie was a passionate amateur cyclist who competed regularly in elite track races, but in an instant his body was shattered and his life was forever changed. Unfortunately, his experience is all too common: 857 cyclists were killed by drivers on American roads in 2018, making it the deadliest year in almost three decades. In this episode, we detail what happened to Bernie, how he’s fared since, and where he goes from here. It’s a deeply personal account—but also a story that has the power to change all of our behavior in ways that will save lives and reduce the number of people who will go through what Bernie has endured. This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Visit Florida, one of the country’s great adventure destinations. Have you met a manatee? Airboated in the Everglades? Snorkeled the coral reef? Plan your next Florida adventure at visitflorida.com/outside

As every seasoned traveler knows, the most meaningful trips are the ones where everything goes wrong. Take, for example, climber and longtime Outside contributor Mark Jenkins’s recent quest to witness a total solar eclipse from the top of a 20,000-foot peak. A veteran of historic expeditions including an attempt on the North Face of Mount Everest, a first descent of the Niger River, and a bicycling odyssey across Siberia, Jenkins was in the mood for something different. So he recruited his old pal Large, and the two of them set off for a little-know summit in the Andes that was in the zone of totality. From the moment they landed in South America, their plans went comically sideways—again and again and again. Were they cursed, or was this the adventure they both really needed?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a technique that would allow us to vanquish fear and beat back stress? There just might be. In his latest book, The Wedge, bestselling author Scott Carney explains that when humans face challenging situations, our automatic responses tend to make us feel terrible. But the good news is that there are a number of simple methods we can learn to take control of our reactions to stimulus—whether it’s a circling shark or a scary news headline. Over the past few years, Carney traveled all over the planet, seeking out people who understand what he calls the wedge—a technique that enables us to adapt our bodies and our minds to be more resilient in the face of just about anything. In this episode, Outside editor Chrisopher Keyes asks Carney: What exactly is the wedge? And how can we learn it right now? This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Visit Florida, one of the country’s great adventure destinations. Have you met a manatee? Airboated in the Everglades? Snorkeled the coral reef? Plan your next Florida adventure at visitflorida.com/outside

The longer we’re stuck at home, sheltering in place, the greater our hunger for tales of far-flung journeys. For this week’s episode, we’re offering one of our favorite adventure stories from our archives, about a daring crew of twentysomethings who, back in 1970, had a crazy idea to canoe remote rivers though the Amazon Basin. Their half-baked plan was to hunt, fish, and forage for food until it wasn’t fun anymore. They had no jungle experience and few supplies beyond a machete and a small rifle. Not surprisingly, they ran into all sorts of trouble—including a hungry jaguar who chased them up a tree.

Unlike most other animals, humans have to be taught to swim, and yet many of us feel an irresistible pull to the water. There’s something about submerging ourselves that makes us feel very much alive—even as we enter an environment where the risk of death is suddenly all around us. (That’s why the lifeguard is watching.) In her new book, Why We Swim, journalist Bonnie Tsui explores how this unique sport rekindles the survival instincts we inherited from our ancestors, heals some of our deepest wounds, and connects us with a wider community even as we stroke silently alongside each other. In this episode, Tsui guides us through the remarkable tales of an Icelandic fisherman forced to swim for his life, an athlete who found new life by diving into the ocean, and a swim club that sprung up in the middle of a war zone.

Over the past few years, the sport of running has been upended by a debate over shoe technology. It all began in early 2017, when Nike announced a prototype called the Vaporfly that was billed as improving a runner’s efficiency by 4 percent—a claim that was hard to believe until that spring, when Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge came seconds away completing a marathon in under two hours. The running community’s reaction was swift, with many claiming that the shoe wasn’t a breakthrough, it was a cheat. A lot has changed since then, with records at numerous distances being obliterated while other shoe brands look to duplicate the Vaporfly’s success, even as they call for new Nike prototypes to be banned. Today, even with the Olympics and other major athletic events postponed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the sport of running remains upside down, with the focus still on shoes instead of on who’s wearing them.Outside editor Chris Keyes speaks with our Sweat Science columnist, Alex Hutchinson, about how we got here and what it all means for the future of the sport.

In the isolated Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, some 800 miles from the North Pole, the tiny town of Longyearben is the kind of place where people go to start their lives over. With brightly colored homes laid out neatly against a mountainous backdrop, it seems out of a fairytale. There’s almost no crime, so residents leave their front doors unlocked and their keys in the car. In the surrounding Arctic wilderness are abundant polar bears, arctic foxes, and reindeer. But when an eerie crime happened in the frozen winter darkness, it brought home a harsh reality: in the modern world, trouble always finds you.

Now here’s a mind-boggling fact: there are more tigers in captivity in the United States right now than all of the wild tigers in the world combined. This is due to loopholes in the laws governing big-cat ownership in this country—and it’s a dangerous problem. Besides tigers, people keep lions, cougars, leopards, and other big cats as pets. It’s not great for the cats that are locked in cages and basements, but it’s really not great for the people nearby when, inevitably, those cats get out. Because then what do you do? Today, we have the story of what police officers were forced to do when a man named Terry Thompson let loose 18 tigers, 17 lions, 8 bears, and a handful of other animals, and then shot himself. Nine years later, not much has changed in the way of regulation. It’s the first episode of a powerful four-part series from Longreads called Cat People that is coproduced by former Outside Podcast host Peter Frick-Wright.

When experienced wilderness guide Blair Braverman was invited to audition for the Discovery Channel reality show ‘Naked and Afraid,’ she saw it as a chance to live out a childhood fantasy. Here was an opportunity to have a totally wild—if somewhat absurd—adventure that would allow her to prove her mettle or fail trying. Having crossed the Arctic twice by dogsled, she felt she could handle all kinds of discomfort and physical challenges. Pus, it’s just a TV show, right? Then she found herself without clothes in the searing African heat, enduring one of the most intense experiences of her life.

Recent years have seen all kinds of major progress in outdoor sports equipment, from maximalist running shoes to electric bikes to crazy-lightweight camping gear. But the most important breakthroughs of all have been in the design and manufacturing of sports bras. New research and technologies have paved the way for an advanced class of support systems that are comfortable, look good, and fit a wider variety of bodies. In this episode, we talk to Outside associate editor Ariella Gintzler about her feature report on the state of the sports bra, then take a look back at the game-changing invention that started it all.