Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i Outside

Hey there. I’m the new guy. And this is the almost-new Outside. We’re now a quarterly, publishing issues in spring, summer, fall, and winter. Like all great magazines, this one will evolve. You may notice some small changes in this issue, but our summer edition will be the all-new Outside, with a reimagined design, fresh sections, and other surprises. You know when the latest version of your favorite sneaker comes out and they nail the update and it just makes you want to get those miles in? I hope you’ll get a similar feeling from reading Outside going forward. When you join the staff here, it’s mandatory to tell people what your outside passions are. My outside thing is running. Like a lot of folks, I started during the pandemic,…

Following a massively successful inaugural run in 2024, the Outside Festival presented by Capital One and REI Co-op is returning to Denver’s City Center Park May 31 to June 1 for a rousing weekend of music, joy, and much more. Headlining bands include Khruangbin, Lord Huron, Sylvan Esso, Trampled by Turtles, Neal Francis, and Waxahatchee. The event will also feature conversations with iconic athletes and renowned storytellers, an adventure-film series co-curated with Mountainfilm, and immersive outdoor experiences. Outside+ members get special pricing on tickets while supplies last. To learn more, scan this QR code.…

1 MIDSOLE FOAM At the heart of every super shoe and super trainer is a thick slab of high-tech foam that’s lighter, softer, and bouncier than any other midsole material to date. It’s created by a process called supercritical foaming that combines heat, pressure, and liquid gas to infuse bubbles into elastic polymers like PEBA, TPEE, and ATPU. The resulting midsoles deliver plush cushioning and trampoline-like rebound, but are squishy and unstable, requiring a balanced, powerful stride to optimize performance. Super shoes have full stacks of these soft, bouncy foams. How-ever, many super trainers, like the Puma Deviate Nitro 3 shown here, use a combination of foams—softer on top of firmer—to provide an energetic feel while delivering the kind of stride-supporting ride more suitable for a training shoe. The step-in-feels…

COMPLETING AN UPHILL 26K in the thin air of the High Sierra is a hard feat for most runners. Doing it while wearing a prosthesis adds its own unique challenges. In September, seven adaptive athletes participated in the annual Mammoth Trailfest in California, which included a grueling 3,900-foot vertical climb to the top of 11,053-foot Mammoth Mountain and an equally demanding descent. Some of them had never run in a trail race before; to adjust to the course’s varied terrain, a few swapped between prostheses at checkpoints en route. Photographer Brian Kaiser went to capture their success. An estimated 5.2 million people in the U.S. need prostheses. However, prosthetic devices specific to physical activity aren’t covered by insurance in many states and can cost as much as $20,000 out of…

Best All-Around Trail Shoe Saucony Xodus Ultra 3 $160 Despite its name, the Xodus Ultra 3 excels at more than just all-day efforts. The blend of comfort, traction, and responsiveness impressed across a range of distances, terrains, and abilities. While the cushioning is plush, there isn’t so much squish that we felt disengaged from the trail; the springy foam let us react to rough footing and worked with the wide platform and reinforced sidewalls to keep our balance secure even throughoff-camber terrain. Four-millimeter lugs made of Saucony’s proprietary tacky rubber added to the shoe’s sure-footedness, whether on gravel roads or rocky, rooty, sloppy singletrack. We can’t think of a trail we wouldn’t want to run on in this shoe—or a runner we wouldn’t recommend it for. 10.1 oz (men’s), 8.7…

SEVEN MILES into the 2004 Cherry Blossom Ten Miler in Washington, D.C., a few months before that summer’s Olympic track trials, I felt a strange pop in my lower back. Hobbling gingerly to a halt, I realized that my race was over. As it turned out, so was my track career. I’d suffered a stress fracture in my sacrum, the bone that connects your lower back to your pelvis. It’s an unusual injury, and in the months that followed, I puzzled over my fate. Had I been wearing the wrong shoes, or logging too many miles, or not stretching enough? It wasn’t until a decade later that I began to consider another possibility: perhaps I hadn’t been eating enough. In 2014, the International Olympic Committee unveiled something it called “relative…

Lost and Found At the end of World War II, Benny Nasser picked up a sword relinquished by a Japanese soldier on a beach in Okinawa. Attached to the weapon was a handwritten tag, with a name, an address, and a request that whoever came to possess it restore it to its rightful owner. In “The Return” (page 86), Nasser’s grandson Kevin Chroust recounts the story of the search for that owner, which began in earnest with his Outside assignment; before that, Chroust said, he hadn’t done much more than google the name and the town. The mysterious mission spanned generations, languages, centuries, and continents. Ultimately, it led to the union of two families whose patriarchs—Tomesuke Umeki, now deceased, and Nasser, who is 101—fought on opposite sides in the Pacific…

BOULDER, COLORADO With more than 200 miles of trails around the Boulder area, it’s no wonder this high- altitude town is home to hundreds of professional runners. Head to Chautauqua Park to pick up the popular Mesa Trail, which rolls for seven miles through forested foothills in the shadow of the Flatirons. Or test your lungs and quads on one of four routes to the summit of Mount Sanitas—all accessible right from town. With a short drive up Flagstaff Mountain, you can tackle the eight-mile loop at Walker Ranch, which crosses South Boulder Creek above and below a breathtaking waterfall. ROANOKE, VIRGINIA Located on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and minutes from some of the most scenic sections of the Appalachian Trail, Roanoke is an idyllic outdoor-adventure and…

ON A SUNDAY afternoon in October, I snuck out for a run. It was tank-top weather when I left my house in downtown Durango, Colorado, and I expected it to hold. I drove north into the mountains, and as I crested a hill 15 minutes in, the sky turned gray and cracked with lightning. The temperature reading in my car dropped 20 degrees, and the rain hitting the windshield was so thick I could hardly see the road. My phone buzzed in the cup holder. It was a text from the friend I was meeting: “WTF, DWG.” DWG stands for Durango Weather Guy, the nom de plume of Jeff Givens, a local real estate agent turned amateur meteorologist who has much more power over my life than anyone running a…