MEN'SJOURNAL August 2017 VOL . 29, No. 7
TRAIN LIKE A LION AND BE ONE ON THE PITCH
Alex Honnold Climbs new Heights
GEAR LAB SPECIAL
HIGH-TECH SHADES SOLO CAMPING GRAVEL BIKES
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Contents 24
The SUV gets a luxury makeover
NOTEBOOK
18 Seal of Approvol Rocker Steve Earle’s favorite things; plus,
expert advice on surviving Burning Man.
28 Drinks Mixing with mazcal
30 Food How to make summer veggies taste
even better.
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34 Feature Inspired to get fit by the Lions this summer?
Elite Rugby Player
Here’s how to shape up
36 Feature Reach new heights with Alex Honnold
HEALTH & FITNESS
43 Training How to be the smartest guy at the gym. 48 What Works for Me Acclaimed Chef Rene Redsepi shares
his fitness epiphany
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50 Nutrition How to eat your way out of diabetes.
Life after the sport he loved
GEAR LAB
78 Eyewear Performace rays that do more than
block rays.
80 Backpacking What you need - and don’t - to take an epic solo adventure.
75 Bikes that devour gravel
82 Fitness Apparel Gear that keeps you cool and stink - free.
84 Grills Four portable models that will make you
king of the tailgate
THE LAST WORD
86 Ken Burns The prolific documentarian on staying
ON THE COVER: ALEX HONNOLD photgraphed for The North Face by Jimmy Chin Bugaboos, British Columbia, Canada
authentic and making sense of Vietnam
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MENSJOURNAL.COM
MEN'SJOURNAL EDITOR IN CHEIF JANN S. WENNER
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR JASON FINE
TRAVEL
Last-Minute Summer Vacations
Wheather it's renting a housebout on Lake Powell (pictured) or bumming around the Bahamas, you still have time to catch the summer fun.
Editor MARK HEALY
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rugby
player
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elite Inspired to get fit by the Lions this summer? Here’s how to shape up
BY SAM RIDER Photo by Sean M. Haffe
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S Strength, power, agility, stamina, muscle. The professional rugby player has it in spades. The physical specimens on the British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand this summer have honed their bodies to the pinnacle of peak performance.
“Muscle is a rugby player’s body armour. Its primary purpose on the pitch is for protection"
If you can look past the keg-shaped wwwwtorsos and cauliflower ears of front row forwards, the typical testmatch rugby fitness and physique is one of the most aspirational in world sport. If you need further convincing, put “Sonny Bill Williams” into your search engine. The 6ft 3in and 108kg All Black is a freak of nature.
Yet it’s possible for mere mortals to build a physique worthy of the Lions tour. To discover how you’d need to train to resemble these rugby gods, we spoke to former pros turned personal trainers Ben Gotting and Ali McKenzie of London’s leading gym The Foundry. Brace yourself for some heavy metal.
Build muscle that’s fit for function As former teammates at English club London Wasps when Lions coach Warren Gatland was at the helm between 2002 and 2005, Gotting and McKenzie know first hand what it takes to cut it at the sharp end of the sport. Principally: muscle. Muscle is a rugby player’s body armour. Its primary purpose on the pitch is for protection. In a typical test match players will cover on average 9km while absorbing monstrous collisions comparable with those seen in car crashes. According to the game’s performance scientists, a player might expect more than 400 impacts greater than 9G per match and around 30 greater than 13G. To put that in context, a shuttle launch generates 3G and a car crash at 40mph equates to 35G. 8
New England defensive bak / special-teamer Nate Ebner took part in a High Performance Camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., in March, shortly after signing a two-year contract to stay with the patriots. Photographed By Galil Fisher
Jeremy Jones performs Squat Warm Up Series for Men’s Journal
and med ball slams. Thrash yourself on each station for 30 seconds then rest for 30 seconds and go again for five agonising rounds. A more globo gym-friendly version would involve farmer’s walks, clean and presses and all-out sprints at a high resistance on the rowing machine or assault bike. “MST is about as rugby-specific as you’re going to get and it’s really functional,” says McKenzie. “You get through a huge amount of work in a short space of time. You’re working between 90-100% of your maximum heart rate in controlled periods but also using your full body so you stay flexible and mobile.” Combine these drills once or twice a week with two to three of Gotting’s hypertrophy workouts and plenty of rest between sessions to recharge and your rugby physique will quickly take shape. To look the part of a rugby player you need to be smart in the gym. “You need to train in what’s called a functional hypertrophy rep range,” says Gotting. “You want to build useable muscle.” Hypertrophy – the process of increasing muscle size – breaks down into two types: the one that gnarled powerlifters do where you get a thickening of the muscle fibres; and the other is the typical post workout muscle pump you get when you feel like you can’t move your arms. “For the rugby look you want a blend of both,” Gotting explains. “Build your workouts around the three big compound lifts of squats, deadlifts and chin-ups. For each aim to do six to ten reps, going slow on the way down and powerful on the way up so your muscles are under tension for 20-40 seconds per set. Then add in assistance exercises like lunges, shoulder presses, kettlebell swings and abs moves.”
Lift like a strongman Those workouts will give you the foundations for the rugby player look. To get the rugby player strength, power and mobility, McKenzie recommends adding in modified strongman training (MST) – something they specialise in at The Foundry.
Dan Carter [New Zealand & Racing Metro 92 : Fly-Half ] has been cleared
MST involves the kind of moves you might see on The World’s Strongest Man: log presses, yoke carries, Atlas stone lifts. “It’s an all-action blend of full-body functional strength and power moves,” says McKenzie. “You’ll get through a big volume of work to build muscle, experience short rest periods to improve cardiovascular efficiency and a skyhigh intensity to burn through fat reserves.”
And the happy side-effect of looking like you could handle high-speed collisions and dish them out yourself is that you’ll look great in a well-fitted T-shirt. “We don’t train to look a certain way,” says McKenzie. “We train for the sport and as a byproduct we end up looking the way we do. Function comes first, the look comes second.”
McKenzie suggests an effective MST circuit of tyre flips, prowler pushes, sled pulls 9
Most Dangerous Rope-Free
Ascent
Ever
Alex Honnold has become the first climber to free solo Yosemite’s 3,000-foot El Capitan wall WORDS BY Mark Synnott - PHOTOGRAPH BY Jimmy Chin
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OSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA— Renowned rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety gear, completing what may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport. He ascended the peak in 3 hours, 56 minutes, taking the final moderate pitch at a near run. At 9:28 a.m. PDT, under a blue sky and few wisps of cloud, he pulled his body over the rocky lip of summit and stood on a sandy ledge the size of a child’s bedroom. Honnold began his historic rope-less climb—a style known as “free soloing”—in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m. He had spent the night in the customized van that serves as his mobile base camp, risen in the dark, dressed in his favorite red t-shirt and cutoff nylon pants, and eaten his standard breakfast of oats, flax, chia seeds, and blueberries, before driving to El Capitan Meadow.
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He parked the van and hiked up the boulder-strewn path to the base of the cliff. There, he pulled on a pair of sticky soled climbing shoes, fastened a small bag of chalk around his waist to keep his hands dry, found his first toehold, and began inching his way up toward climbing history. For more than a year, Honnold has been training for the climb at locations in the United States, China, Europe, and Morocco. A small circle of friends and fellow climbers who knew about the project had been sworn to secrecy. A team of filmmakers, led by Jimmy Chin, one of Honnold’s
longtime climbing partners, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, captured the ascent for an upcoming National Geographic Documentary Films feature. This past November, Honnold made his first attempt at the free solo, but backed off after less than an hour of climbing because conditions did not feel right.
THE MOON LANDING OF FREE-SOLOING Trained in a climbing gym in Sacramento, Honnold, 31, burst onto the international scene in 2008 with two high-risk, rope-free ascents—the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome and the Moonlight Buttress in Utah’s Zion National Park. Those free solos astonished the climbing world and set new benchmarks in much the same way that Roger Bannister redefined distance running when he broke the four-minute mile in 1954.
TRAINING FOR THE CLIMB OF HIS LIFE “What Alex did on Moonlight Buttress defied everything that we are trained, and brought up and genetically engineered to think,” said Peter Mortimer, a climber who has made numerous films with Honnold. “It’s the most unnatural place for a human to be.” But those pioneering climbs pale in comparison to El Capitan. It’s hard to overstate the physical and mental difficulties of a free solo ascent of the peak, which is considered by many to be the epicenter of the rock climbing world. It is a vertical expanse stretching more than a half mile up—higher than the world’s tallest
"With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping" me in any way.”
1. Alex Honnold freesolos the Phoenix in Yosemite National Park, Calif. (Peter Mortimer) 2. Alex Hommold free climbs El Capitan. Photo by: Brad Rassler
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building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. From the meadow at the foot of El Capitan, climbers on the peak’s upper reaches are practically invisible to the naked eye. “This is the ‘moon landing’ of free soloing,” said Tommy Caldwell, who made his own history in 2015 with his ascent of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan’s most difficult climb, on which he and his partner Kevin Jorgeson used ropes and other equipment only for safety, not to aid their progress. (What Caldwell and Jorgeson did is called free climbing, which means climbers use no gear to help them move up the mountain and are attached to ropes only to catch them if they fall. Free soloing is when a climber is alone and uses no ropes or any other equipment that aids or protects him as he climbs, leaving no margin of error.) Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015. John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew somebody would eventually do it. “It was always the obvious next step,” says Croft. “But after this, I really don’t see what’s next. This is the big classic jump.” By the end of 2014, Honnold had achieved international fame for his exploits. He had been featured on the covers of National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Outside, and 60 Minutes had profiled him. He had a slew of corporate sponsors, had co-written a best-selling memoir, and started a nonprofit foundation to improve the lives of
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needy communities around the world. But he felt like he had not yet made the mark he hoped to on climbing history. In January 2015, when Caldwell and Jorgeson summited the Dawn Wall, a project they had spent years studying and training for, Honnold was there to meet them. Jorgeson told a reporter, “I think everyone has their own secret Dawn Wall to complete one day.” What’s my Dawn Wall? Honnold asked himself. But he already knew the answer. For years he’d been thinking about what it would take to free solo El Capitan.
AN ABILITY TO CONTROL FEAR The route Honnold chose to reach the top of El Capitan, known as Freerider, is one of the most prized big wall climbs in Yosemite. The route has 30 sections—or pitches—and is so difficult that even in the last few years, it was newsworthy when a climber was able to summit using ropes my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.” for safety. On Freerider, one of the most daunting physical and mental It is a zigzagging odyssey that traces several spidery networks challenges Honnold faced was two pitches of steep, undulating of cracks and fissures, some gaping, others barely a knuckle wide. expanse of rock about 600 feet up. Polished smooth by glaciers Along the way, Honnold squeezed his body into narrow chimneys, over the millennia, the granite here offers no holds, forcing a tiptoed across ledges the width of matchboxes, and in some places, climber to basically walk up it with his feet only. Honnold used a dangled in the open air by his fingertips. delicate technique called “smearing,” which involves pressing his Freerider tests nearly every aspect of a rubber shoes against the rock to create just enough climber’s physical abilities—strength of fin- “Years ago, when I first mentally grip to support his weight on the incline. He had gers, forearms, toes, and abdomen, as well mapped out what it would mean to to keep his weight perfectly balanced and maintain as flexibility and endurance. Environmental free solo Freerider, there were half enough forward momentum to avoid sliding off. “It’s factors, like sun, wind, and the potential a dozen of pitches where I was like, like walking up glass,” Honnold said. for sudden rainstorms, are also factors that ‘Oh that’s a scary move and that’s a Over Memorial Day weekend, Honnold made really scary sequence, and that little Honnold had to carefully calculate. a practice run up Freerider with Caldwell. The pair But the true test for Honnold was whether slab, and that traverse,’” reached the top in a little over five and half hours, he could maintain his composure alone on a breaking their own speed record in the process. “Alex was on fire,” cliff face hundreds or thousands of feet up while executing intrisaid Caldwell. “I’ve never seen him climbing so well.” cate climbing sequences where positioning a foot slightly too low A few days before this week’s climb, Honnold hiked to the top or high could mean the difference between life and death. Elite of El Capitan and rappelled Freerider to make sure that a recent climbers have pointed to Honnold’s unique ability to remain calm rainstorm had not washed off the marks he had made with dabs and analytical in such dangerous situations, a skill that Honnold of chalk to highlight the route’s key holds. He found it dry and in has slowly developed over the 20 years he has been climbing. perfect condition. Now all that was left was to rest and prepare Some of his poise can be attributed to his detailed preparamentally for the climb of his life. tion. He is obsessive about his training, which includes hour-long Honnold said. “There were so many little sections where I sessions every other day hanging by his fingertips and doing thought ‘Ughh—cringe.’ But in the years since, I’ve pushed my one- and two-armed pullups on a specially-made apparatus that comfort zone and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives he bolted into the doorway of his van. He also spends hours perthat seemed totally crazy eventually fell within the realm of the fecting, rehearsing, and memorizing exact sequences of hand and possible.” foot placements for every key pitch. He is an inveterate note-taker, On Saturday, the possible finally became reality. After trusting logging his workouts and evaluating his performance on every his skill and endurance over hundreds of handholds and footholds climb in a detailed journal. and controlling his fear for just under four hours, Honnold pulled There are other climbers in Honnold’s league physically, but his body over the last ledges. Chin along with his assistant Sam no one else has matched his mental ability to control fear. His Crossley and cameraman Cheyne Lempe had rappelled down with tolerance for scary situations is so remarkable that neuroscientists their cameras from the top to follow Honnold as he climbed the have studied the parts of his brain related to fear to see how they upper half of the wall, even using jumars—a type of mechanical might differ from the norm. winch—to hoist themselves up, the two had struggled to keep up Honnold sees it in more pragmatic terms. “With free-soloing, with him. obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m Chin, panting and covered in sweat, raced ahead to film Alex up there is not helping me in any way,” he said. “It’s only hindering Honnold on top of the world. 14
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1. Alex on-sight soloing a new route in Angola, Africa. The rock was a bit brittle at times, which made for an interesting solo‌ the route was 5’11+. Photo: Ted Hesser 2. Alex down-soloing crimson Chryssalis in Red Rocks Nevada. He soloed Clout tower that morning, in an hour or two. Photo: Ted Hesser 3. In this photo, Alex is teaching Kenyan wildlife rangers how to use a GoalZero yeti, so that they can power radios, lights and phones on the go from their trucks. Photo: Ted Hesser
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