The Race Across America [RAAM] is the antithesis to the Grand Tours featured in glossy magazines. Instead of the surging peloton and the high-intensity stages, RAAM is a meditative contest that delves deep into human psyche to push the very limits of the body and mind.

If we dissect the history of sporting it’s evident that behind strategy is an inherent honesty in the physical. Whereas modern sports are consumed by arbitrary limitations ranging from the rather onerous round-by-round judging system of martial arts to the four swim styles competing in the Olympics, there still exists an event that embodies this honesty.

The RAAM’s reason for being is to deliver one answer: how quickly can a person traverse the United States? Participants in the event cannot be described with superficial words like: fast, or good,  or even strong. Their vocabulary is of a heavier – more brutal – stock: endurance, fortitude, willpower. These are the words that describe a persons character, because that is the requirement to even compete in the Race Across America. Racers are expected to race around the clock for 3000 miles, winners have slept as little as 1 hour a night and completed the course in as few as 8 days. Compare this to the 2500 mile – 3 week Tour de France and you can see why Christoph Strasser may be the greatest endurance cyclist in the world.

WPU is excited to share our interview with 2011 RAAM winner Christoph Strasser. Out of a million possible questions, here are the ones that made it through:

wpu: Is it a fight to keep going, or a fight to keep going hard?

cs: In bad times it is a fight to keep going, it is a fight to stay awake and even survive, do not even think of going fast! But in good times, which happen again and again (also on the last day of RAAM), to keep going is easy and also going fast is possible then. I think the racer, who is in the positive flow the most of the time, wins this race!

wpu: What’s harder: racing for 8 days straight, or training for it?

cs: Definitely training for it! You have to train 6 times a week, sometimes for 7 hours straight. And doing this on an indoor bike, for three days in a row – this is what I call motivation. The race hurts more, you have to suffer sometimes, but you even have a lot of fun, you conquer a whole continent and you have a support-crew and opponents, who push you.

wpu: How do you recover from the race. Are you in a stupor for the next week trying to catch up on sleep?

cs: Recovery after the race just happens, you do not have much influence on that in the first few days. Sleeping and eating is the main requirement, you feel like a baby: Get up, eat, go to the toilet, eat and sleep again. You repeat this up to four times a day! After a week you already feel like an ordinary human being again, but the shape is gone. Cycling feels like you never did that before, you are slow, weak and you simply don’t like it. Until you are strong in the saddle again, it takes at least two months of easy, short recovery training rides.

wpu: Do you get bored while you’re out there or is it more like torture mixed with enjoyment?

cs: It is a mixture of torture and enjoyment, no way to describe it better. Our genes are still the same like in the Stone Age, so if we get stressed, our brain tells us we must keep pushing in order to survive. There is unknown power in your body, which only gets activated when you struggle to survive – and this is not boring! If you also have a crew, who entertain and support you, you have a really good time while pushing yourself.

wpu: When you drive across the states, do you stop to sleep? If so, do you find it embarrassing?

cs: Sleeping is extremely important for your brain. You need at least one slow-wave-sleep-phase per night to stay a little bit concentrated. About 75 minutes of sleep do not allow your body to recover, but your body can keep going for 3000 miles if trained well. But your mind needs some sleep, so stopping for a sleep break is not embarassing. And believe me, when you are so tired like after sleeping 7 hours in a whole week, you fall into bed like a stone. This moment is what you are looking forward to the whole day… Closing your eyes for some time!

wpu: What type of training prepares you for the race? Surely sleep deprivation can’t be training… can it?

cs: Sleep deprivation can not be trained, but you can gain experience. I did a lot of races before RAAM, nearly 30 races over 24 hours up to four days. And in every competition you learn something new, how your body reacts to extreme situations, how your brain deals with sleep deprivation and so on. Experience is the only way to deal with that, everybody can do it, it is nothing special. I sleep 8 hours per night, I fall asleep in the cinema or when I try to watch a movie at home. But if I have a big goal in my mind, when I am in a race, I can go without sleep. It is a matter of motivation! The other way is doing mental training, I do this 2 times a week. A simple instruction is to close your eyes and think of the situation. How do you deal with it? Imagine yourself overcoming trouble in a very realistic way. This will help you in the race!

wpu: Time for a multiple choice – choose one:

Midnight day-7 is it more like:

1. Meditating
2. Taking mind-altering drugs
3. Watching the grass grow on a 120˚ day (48C)
4. Going 12 rounds with Muhammad Ali

cs: Mind-altering drugs

Some might say the ‘ball’ sports are under-represented on this blog, but who can blame us? Let’s say it together: there’s no gear.

Granted, Poo-holes (is that how you spell it?) probably has a favorite bat, and apparently Delilah is coming after Jason Terry’s knee-highs, but generally non-standardized gear is sacrificed at the alters of those unholy gods, competitive balance and fair play[1].

But let’s not forget the cleats.

Let’s give props to the folks at Nike, they managed to make two of the least likeable people on the planet seem plausibly humanoid. We see you Nike.

We know how Rafa feels. Some jerk with spikey hair clowns you for the game winning goal and you’re looking at him, hands on your knees thinking:

I work out, I go to practice, what gives? …Man those cleats are fresh.

Inevitably, the jerk with the spikey hair is wearing fancier, flashier, definitely more expensive cleats. And so begins the feets-race[2].

Okay so they’ve convinced you to replace your standard issue black cleats. Now which do you choose?! Cleats have 4 vectors, listed here in ascending order of importance:

1. Cleat pattern: Metal studs are only good for ending friendships. Buy some rainy day cleats with big studs. Besides that, if the cleat pattern actually mattered, it wouldn’t change every year when they release a new model.
2. Weight: Wearing heavier cleats than you’re used to is like doing laps at pool when the water just feels heavy.  It’s impossible to tell if you’re actually going slower, but it sure doesn’t feel right.
3. Durability: Remember your friend[3] bragging about the cleats he got for 8 bucks in the bargain bin at Ross that blew out the first day of the tournament? And then he had to borrow your old Speed TDs but they were half a size too small and he got a blood blister the size of a quarter? Which then got infected because, those cleats have been in your bag stewing with your dirty socks since 2007? Us too. A rule of thumb, $100/year of functional cleat is only 27 cents a day!
4. Sizzle: We have friends who swear by New Balance cleats because they come in the wide sizes. Comfortable, economical, practical. Please. They’re not paying us for this. Might as well look good. And who cares if sizzle cleats aren’t ‘comfortable’? Next time you score the winning goal, you don’t want the chump to think to himself “Man, those cleats sure look cozy. I wonder if his grandma knit him those socks.” Embrace the sizzle. Let them you know can’t feel your feet.

"I can't feel my face." (This is how your feet could feel in solid gold cleats)

1. Nerds
2. Get it? Feets-race? Like arms-race? Because you wear them on your feet? Nevermind.
3. Of course it was your friend, we believe you.

There are innumerable superlatives orbiting the world of sport. It seems players are endlessly crowned with hardest, best, fastest, strongest, etc… in no particular order and sometimes without reason. I’d be a liar to say that WPU is the exception, we beat the drum as loud as our nemesis and unlike them - we mean everything we say. Sport is an appreciation of drama, a respect for the pregnant silence prior to an attack, and a worship of perfect execution.

If there has ever been a sporting event that mirrored the sentiment of perfection it is the cycling time trial:

1. Put a human on a bike
2. Draw the finish line
3. Give the rider a pat
4. Watch the suffering drama

The time trial is simply a race against yourself and the clock. There are no other competitors to draft behind, no smug satisfaction of dropping your competitors, and no one to inspire you to be a better cyclist than the you that showed up. Today we feature a time trial specialist who is so good that they invented a way of cheating just to explain his performances: Fabian Cancellara.

Mechanical Doping

Fabian Cancellara has been accused of mechanical doping. Rest assured that this is not the same accusation lobbed at Alberto Contador, Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong.  They’re accused of regular doping.

Doping: the use of a substance (as an anabolic steroid or erythropoietin) or technique (as blood doping) to illegally improve athletic performance[1]

"Does this helmet make me look faster?"

The folly that Cancellara has been accused of is attaching a motor to his bicycle[2]. Of course these accusations are silly, when we all know that mechanical doping is actually just another way to say perfection. Put this unholy being in a time trial and a spandex-clad behemoth will emerge.

Fabian has more metal than Fort Knox. He’s has won countless trophies in time trials, classics, stages of the Grand Tours, gold in the Olympics and the WC stripes. Let’s translate this for regular folk: he rides his bike faster than I drive a car. This is Cancellara’s 2012 bike with Team Nissan, Leopard, Trek, Radioshack[3].

1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doping
2. a.k.a., riding an e-bike – not sure whether it’s as grave as arriving at the TdF on a recumbent
3. Can we all agree on the absurdity of this team?

For the better part of my sporting life I considered cycling to be a selfish sport. A sport of solo racers attempting to claw their way to the finish at all costs. How is it possible to be selfless? There are only three spots on the podium – two of them are there for funsies – while a lycra laden field of hundreds awaits to eat the lunch right out of your musette.

There are moments when your entire viewpoint of sporting shifts. As if a trigger has been flipped and you’ve suddenly entered the zone of interested person. Memorable moments include:

• The value of great defense in Puyol’s stellar 2010 World Cup performance for the Spanish national team
• Strategy in mixed martial arts and the rise of Lyoto Machida
• #Linsanity on the importance of an intelligent point guard and dare I say selfless play (lookout Kobe)

I’ve felt this sensation about all the sports covered here and I’ve felt this once upon a time about cycling as well.

I’m not ashamed to say cycling entered my awareness during the era of Lance Armstrong. An intriguing story and the fact that he is the winningest American in pro-cycling would definitely pique the interest of anyone. However, it wasn’t until I was introduced to George Hincapies role in Lance’s success that the switch was flipped.

A domestique is a road bicycle racer who works for the benefit of his team and leader. The French domestique translates as “servant”.

Hincapie was a domestique. Without him, the legend of Lance would be a mere bedtime tale. If this were basketball, people would praise Hincapie for his hustle. The cognitive dissonance of someone so selfless paired with someone so selfish shattered my conception of the sport. It became clear that cycling is in fact a team effort albeit only one man can stand on the podium.

Of late, that man is usually Mark Cavendish: also known as the fastest man on two wheels. The caveats are that he must be in a contestable position 200 meters from the finish line in order to rise to the occasion. So to frame it a bit differently, he is the fastest sprinter on Earth when in the presence of great domestiques.

Look ma' no hands!

He’s won stages in the grand tours and currently wears the World Champion Stripes. This is Cavendish’s 2012 bicycle riding for Team Sky.

Winter in Southern California is like a leprechaun, folks know what it is, but no one ever sees it[1].  Thus, my first introduction to winter sports was ‘Cool Runnings’ aptly titled ‘Rasta Rockett’ in France. The movie recounts the tale of the Jamaican bobsled team and introduced us ordinaries to the world of ice tracks & luging where racers are propelled 85mph down a narrow ice slick in multi-colored onesies.

Skeleton Racing

Now imagine instead of four people per luge, you have just one – head-first on a sled the size of your torso. Welcome to Skeleton – the most hardcore of the sliding sports –  the whisper of its name strikes fear into the hearts of bobsledders. We mentioned extreme sports previously on this blog:

Extreme sports is a term cultivated in the 90′s by marketing henchmen because they didn’t know what to call emerging activities like skateboarding, snowboarding, waterboarding (too soon?). They could have just defined them under sport but that’s not edgy enough.

Extreme sports eat your heart out. Skeleton predates you by a hundred years. That’s street credibility.

Winningest

Kyle Tress – World Cup Skeleton Racer

An unconventional activity attracts unconventional competitors[2], Skeleton is no exception. What Pros Use had the opportunity to interview Kyle Tress, a hardman competing at the top of the sport. Kyle masquerades as a software developer while training as a World Cup-level athlete. Where does the time to compete & make apps come from? He most likely does not sleep.

w: How did you go from techie to World Cup athlete?

k: I’ve always been interested in the Winter Olympics. I remember watching the Lillehammer games in 1994 and telling myself I was going to be an Olympic speed skater. What’s crazy is that I was never really into sports as a kid, although I did play on a few teams. When I learned about skeleton for the first time in 2002, it was from an article on Yahoo.com. Third generation Olympian Jim Shea had just won gold, and the sport was getting a lot of attention. I was working as a freelance web developer at the time, so I had the flexibility to travel to Lake Placid, NY and see if I enjoyed skeleton. I never left.

w: It’s a huge hurdle to go from being interested to actually getting out there and participating. What motivated you to seek out the track, gear, and training for the sport?

k: Skeleton just felt so natural to me. When I saw it for the first time, something clicked. I knew it was the right sport for me. Looking back, I think it was combination of things. Skeleton is under the radar, it’s so unique, and it requires both mental and physical toughness. It’s also a sport that demands a lot of experience and skill. I knew that it would take a commitment of 8-12 years to reach my goal, and that was part of the appeal.

w: Your face is close enough to the ice that you can lick the track, what’s your greatest fear as you are propelled head-first brakeless down the track?

k: I trust myself and my abilities completely, regardless of how difficult or fast the track. What scares me are things outside my control. Are there two sleds in the track at the same time? Did a track worker leave a tool or shovel in the track? These things have actually happened, and I have to remind myself every day that the people who are responsible for my safety are professionals.

w: Aside from the physical gear, are you able to combine digital tools/software to train smarter? If so, what metrics do you track on and off the sled? How have you integrated technology into your training?

k: I use a lot of digital tools to help me succeed. I created a ruby on rails app to track and analyze my runs, and I’m currently building an iPhone app for the same purpose. I use my iPad at the track everyday for video review, taking notes, and killing time during long training sessions. Finally, I’ve experimented with devices that capture speed and acceleration, such as the Ripxx, but I haven’t had a lot of success with them. I’m always looking for new ways to blend my love for skeleton and technology.

w: Is the body suit front zip or back zip?

k: Front zip. Better aerodynamics.

w: Thanks for the insights Kyle.

Checkout all the gear and a piece-by-piece breakdown on Bindle.

1. unless they go to the mountains, where it’s all fake snow anyways
2. See: Professional gaming, ultimate frisbee, curling

Christian Maurer is the X-alps paragliding champ — in ordinary-joe-speak it translates to: birdman. For many of us, flying means confining ourselves in an alloy fuselage 5 miles up with air hostesses asking whether we’d like chicken or beef with our MRE’s meals. These birdmen must brave the elements while suspended thousands of feet above ground hunting thermals.

Paragliding is similar to parachuting; the major differences are the control and ability to traverse distance by riding natural lifts called thermals.

That's a mannequin in the window right?

The X-Alps is a 2 week adventure race where top pilots navigate the European alps. Whoever arrives first wins. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy right? Well not really, our participants are expected to camp in harsh conditions, hike up mountains to launch points, fly through high elevation passes, and NOT DIE. They can only fly and hike their way to the finish line 800km away.

Christian has arrived first in the X-alps twice and holds the Swiss and World cup titles. This winged man is probably more comfortable in the air than on land.

This is a bit off beat for @WhatProsUse[1]. Today we’ll be examining Ari Marcopoulos, a man who helped define a generation of extreme sports through photography.

Extreme sports is a term cultivated in the 90′s by marketing henchmen because they didn’t know what to call emerging activities like skateboarding, snowboarding, waterboarding (too soon?). They could have just defined them under sport but that’s not edgy enough. So over a decade later we have extreme in all of it’s variations[2] attached to rather pedestrian words like:

• Extreme Pizza – welcome to the house of rad, eat your fill
• Extreme Networks – as if computing couldn’t get more extreme [3]
• Extreme Music – really just loud noises
• Extreme Games - chess boxing should be included

Ari Marcopoulos’ camera trigger finger rivals that of a professional eSportsman. He gave the rest of us neophytes a glimpse at Californian subcultures responsible for changing what young kids in everywhere thought was extreme/awesome/rad/gnarly. Here is Ari Marcopoulos’ camera gear.

1. Frequent topics include: sports
2. Extreme, xtreme, x-treme, extra-cream
3.  Source

My lofty aspirations as a child amounted to getting paid to play video games. I didn’t want to be a policeman or firefighter, 12-year-old me wanted to be: Jung Jong Hyun. This ungodly being has returned to us from the future to foreshadow what is to become of sporting. Jung dominates one of the only sports where you make up your own nickname: Starcraft II. Jung will henceforth be referred to as his handle MVP.

"This is my index finger"

Let me tell you a bit about Starcraft. It is the most popular competitive videogame on Earth. At the center of this popularity is the nation of South Korea, where matches are broadcast on live TV, streamed over the internet, casted by nerds professionals and viewed through the spectacles of millions. The life of a young Korean prospect is lived entirely in training. Promising young gamers under the age of twenty (reaction times deteriorate as you age) are sequestered in a team house where they spend over twelve hours a day bathed in the cold glow of their computer screens.

Do not let your luddite bias skew the fact that these advanced beings are the real deal. Starcraft pro-gaming in South Korea[1] is backed by mega-corporations like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Blizzard, Intel, and any other technology company you can think of. At the top of the heap is MVP, whose tournament earnings alone net upwards of $250k, not to mention sponsorships. This puts him a few bags of money above most UFC fighters, and he doesn’t have to get punched in the face for a living. His only worries are aging and carpal tunnel syndrome.

MVP is a fitting name for the winningest eSportsmen of 2011. Short of mass human extinction, this is the future of sporting.

1. the US and Europe aren’t far behind

Although fancy sports like competition yachting, golf, and tennis are bastions for latte sipping 1%ers, it does not lessen the worth of their champions. We’ll be focussing on tennis today. There are very few things required for tennis greatness, among them are superhuman endurance, cat-like flexibility and flawless technique. At the upper echelon, tennis is as much a battle for court position as a contest of baseline-forearms[1].

Every few years a new king is inaugurated to reign over us plebes. My introduction to tennis was watching  Federer mercilessly crush competition, I then spectated as Nadal wrestled the crown from Roger’s iron eastern grip, and most recently: the Djokovic coup.

Year-over-year the top dogg’s seem more dominant than their predecessors. So with 2012 likely being the year of Djokovic, it’s safe to assume that he’s the best tennis player on earth, and perhaps ever? This is Djokovic’s tennis gear; and yes, it’s all gluten free.

1. oh how exciting…

• Swimming 2.4 miles
• Running a marathon ~26miles
• Bicycling a +century (over 100 miles)

In 2011, there were 1773 finishers. The worlds population is 6.8 billion. That means only 2.59191314 × 10^-7 % of humans had the fortitude to even complete the task. They say people have a hard time processing extremely large numbers, which is probably why the 99% of us still don’t understand the causes of the Global Financial Crisis 2008[1]. To give you an idea of the awe inspiring magnitude of just how infinitesimal the probability really is: you have a better chance of winning the lottery.

The challenge is insurmountable for mere mortals like us. Those that have made it are miracles of nature, even when they have to crawl to the finish line after soiling themselves. 2011 was the year of three time winner of the Ironman: Craig Alexander. This is Craig Alexanders bike & triathlon gear.

1. see what I did there; fix your pitiful lack of knowledge with This American Life