Three, two, one, dropping鈥攂ut wait, there鈥檚 something he鈥檚 got to do first.

Before extreme skier Julian Carr launches off any of the monster cliffs that have made him famous, he does three things. Always three. Never four. Two is out of the question. He exhales deeply, looks up at the sky, and clicks his poles together, just once.

Professional skier and wingsuit BASE jumper JT Holmes聽also clicks his poles together before launching off cliffs, but not once. 鈥淭wice,鈥� he says.

What Holmes does not do is look toward the sky. Instead, a little while before pole-clicking, he eats a green apple. 鈥淚n the beginning,鈥� he says, 鈥渋t was for energy and hydration. The tartness was like a shot of caffeine. But this has changed over time. The apple is one piece of the equation as I build my courage to do something gnarly.鈥�

Former professional kayaker Jamie Simon has a different approach. 鈥淏efore I run any big waterfall,鈥� she explains, 鈥淚 take a few deep breaths and visualize all the bones in my body. It gets me out of my soft tissue and into my core, and it grounds me.鈥�

Sports rituals鈥攖hose quirky behaviors carried out by athletes in the hope of influencing performance鈥攁re a mainstay of our A-game. Most athletes have a few, but not many will talk about them. This raises a variety of questions. Where do our preperformance routines come from? Are they superstitious nonsense, or do they help our cause? More specifically: If Carr pole-clicks twice instead of once, or if Holmes substitutes a red apple for a green one, will the gods of cliff-hucking take notice?

Scientists have been trying to answer these questions for over half a century, and they haven鈥檛 had an easy time of it. Part of the problem lies in defining what they鈥檙e studying. Consider the multiple game-day habits of tennis player Rafael Nadal. These include: always taking a pre-court cold shower, toweling down after every point, picking at his underwear and shirt and slicking the sweat from his nose before every serve, crossing the lines on the court with his right foot first, and, in front of his chair between games, meticulously arranging his two beverages of choice鈥攐ne a sports drink, the other plain water鈥攊n a line so straight that global positioning systems might be involved. Which of these are rituals and which routines? And what鈥檚 the difference, anyway?

Hard to say, isn鈥檛 it?

Researchers have firmer definitions. Preperformance routines, to use the preferred term, should have performance benefits. They calm anxiety聽and tighten focus. Traditionally, superstitious rituals are repetitive symbolic actions that lack a direct instrumental purpose鈥攍ike how skier Matt Reardon used to always wear the same merino long johns before trying anything of consequence. (If things were going well, he eschewed washing them, which he admits led to an abundance of funky smells by season鈥檚 end.) But if wearing those long johns actually lowered Reardon鈥檚 anxiety (because he hadn鈥檛 violated his superstition), or if the pole-clicking displays of Carr and Holmes tighten their focus, then isn鈥檛 that a direct instrumental purpose?

Consider former Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs鈥檚 famed fetishes: waking up at the same time every day, eating chicken and fielding 117 ground balls (no more, no less) before every game, always taking batting practice at 5:17 p.m., always running sprints at 7:17 p.m., then鈥攁nd it鈥檚 worth pointing out that Boggs isn鈥檛 Jewish鈥攕cratching the Hebrew word chai (meaning 鈥渓ife鈥�) into the dirt before each at bat. On the surface, much of Boggs鈥檚 behavior appears, to use the technical term, batshit crazy. But a regular sleep schedule is fantastic high-performance kung fu, and eating the same meal every day standardized Boggs鈥檚 energy levels and guaranteed he wouldn鈥檛 bonk in the eighth. And while the number 117 seems arbitrary, doing anything that many times will definitely warm up both the body and the mind.

To understand ritualized behavior, start with the fact that the brain is a meaning-making machine continually trying to link cause and effect. This is evolution at work. On a hunt, it helps to remember that the last time you went out, when the bushes started shaking, there was a rabbit inside. And if you happened to pound your spear on the ground twice, perhaps to improve your grip, before you discovered that rabbit, your brain may try to connect those dots.

That鈥檚 how superstitions are born.

And it may not just be humans who are wired this way. Famed psychologist B. F. Skinner discovered that pigeons also have this tendency. When Skinner placed extremely hungry birds in a cage with an automated feeding arm set to arrive at regular intervals, whatever a bird happened to be doing right before the food came鈥攕pinning in circles, pecking the air in the upper right corner of the cage鈥攚ould later be repeated in an attempt to produce the same result. Skinner called this 鈥渟uperstitious behavior,鈥� writing: 鈥淭he bird behaves as if there was a causal relationship between its behavior and the presentation of food.鈥�

It鈥檚 also worth noting that the birds鈥� state of hunger and stress may have created a feeling of uncertainty in them. This matters. Back in the early 1900s, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was living among South Sea islanders and noticed that when they fished the dangerous waters beyond the reef, the men performed a series of rituals to ensure a safe and productive voyage. By contrast, when they fished the predictable waters of the local lagoon, they treated it like any other part of their day鈥攏o rituals required. From this, Malinowski concluded that when outcomes are important and situations uncertain, ritual behavior increases. It鈥檚 how we try to gain a little control over the uncontrollable.

The same is true in sports. In the 1970s, University of San Francisco anthropologist decided to investigate Malinowski鈥檚 theory in baseball. A former minor leaguer, he reasoned that while hitting and pitching are subject to random influences, fielding is a much steadier craft. Great players get a hit 30 percent of the time. Fielders snag balls at a much higher rate and with far less fanfare. Gmelch figured that if Malinowski was right, he鈥檇 find a greater number of idiosyncratic behaviors among pitchers and batters than among fielders. And that鈥檚 exactly what happened.

The majority of batters and pitchers had a ritual of some sort, maybe not as extreme as Boggs鈥檚 winner-winner-chicken-dinner, but definitely distinctive. Among fielders only one did, and he was in the middle of a fielding slump and couldn鈥檛 catch the flu. 鈥淩ituals are about confidence,鈥� Gmelch explains. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about gaining a feeling of control in the face of uncertainty. And the greater our sense of uncertainty鈥攖he more we want to feel in control鈥攖he more likely superstitious rituals are to develop.鈥�

The most important discovery researchers have made about rituals聽is that they tend to work. Part of this, as Gmelch pointed out, is that we perform better when we feel a sense of control. But we also increase our focus and optimism about our chances for success. And don鈥檛 sleep on the placebo effect: superstitious rituals win games just as sure as sugar pills cure disease.

Also, context matters. Perform a random series of behaviors before a hard task under serious pressure and, likely as not, nothing happens. But give those behaviors a name, call them a ritual, and performance improves. The same works in the other direction, which helps explain taboos. No baseball player with any common sense dares mention a no-hitter before the final pitch is thrown, just as no action-sports athlete in his right mind says, 鈥淭his is my last run.鈥�

鈥淵ou can鈥檛 even think it,鈥� explains skate legend Danny Way. 鈥淭he last time I made that mistake, I launched 20 feet out of the quarterpipe, drifted backward midair, smashed into the ramp, and shattered my ankle into pieces.鈥�

Not everyone thinks preperformance rituals are the way to go. 鈥淚鈥檓 not bullish on them,鈥� says sport psychologist Michael Gervais, who coached Red Bull athlete Felix Baumgartner through his jump from a helium balloon 128,100 feet above the earth and now works with the Seattle Seahawks. 鈥淩outines, be they preperformance or superstition, put form and structure around what鈥檚 formless and structureless. True masters of craft don鈥檛 need them. They know that sport is about adjusting to a spontaneous unfolding鈥攖heir mastery comes from embracing uncertainty.鈥�

But if you include flow states聽in this discussion, ritual and routine start to make even more sense. Defined as an optimal state of consciousness during which we feel and perform our best, flow refers to those in-the-zone moments of rapt attention when we get so focused on the task at hand that everything else melts away. Scientists have known about flow鈥檚 relationship to peak performance for a century, but recent research into the phenomenon can help us decode rituals, too.

Flow states have triggers, preconditions that drive us into the experience. While there are more than 20 known triggers, they all share one commonality鈥攖hey significantly amp up attention. That is, flow shows up only when our focus is all in, right here, right now. That鈥檚 what these triggers do: they drive attention into the present moment.

One good example is 鈥渃lear goals,鈥� a trigger identified by the godfather of flow psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Clear goals keep us in the now, focused on what we鈥檙e doing and what we鈥檙e about to do. When goals are clear, attention can stay locked and loaded. This explains Boggs and his 117 grounders. Keeping the number in mind lowers cognitive load and keeps attention on the task at hand. Both drive flow鈥攚hich helps win ballgames.

Another trigger is 鈥渄eep embodiment,鈥� first identified by the Flow Genome Project, a peak-performance research and training organization I cofounded in 2011. In our work with action-sport and adventure athletes, we鈥檝e found that attention is heightened when multiple sensory streams are engaged鈥攚hen we鈥檙e paying attention not just to sight and sound, but also to touch. The skin is the body鈥檚 largest organ, with the greatest number of sensory inputs. That鈥檚 why so many rituals have a tactile component鈥擝oggs scratching chai into the dirt, Nadal plucking at his clothes鈥攁nd it also explains the ski-pole click. The number of clicks doesn鈥檛 matter, but the engagement of multiple sensory streams sure does. In other words, thanks to our biology, the voodoo works.

Steven Kotler () is the author of .

The post Why So Many 国产吃瓜黑料 Athletes Are Superstitious appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In their new book聽 ($28; Harper Collins)聽Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal investigate the many ways people are now seeking out the heightened awareness of flow states鈥攖hose ecstatic zones of pure focus where humans achieve ultimate performance. Some use psychedelics, others meditate or dance, and daring athletes practice extremely dangerous adventure sports. In this exclusive excerpt, the authors recount the tragic death of BASE-jumper Dean Potter, question why he and others are willing to risk everything in the pursuit of elevated consciousness, and explain how innovative technologies enable us to reach the same state without the without the life-and-death stakes.

The why was never in question. What happened? How it happened? Those answers remain unclear. But the why? For Dean Potter鈥攊t was never in doubt.

It was May 16, 2015, in Yosemite Valley, California, a nice spring evening, right on the edge of dusk. Potter, a record-breaking rock climber, slackline walker, and wingsuit flier, got ready for the evening鈥檚 adventure. He was 3,500 feet above the valley floor, standing on the summit of Taft Point. Alongside his friend and fellow flier Graham Hunt鈥攃onsidered one of the best young pilots around鈥攖heir goal was to leap off the edge, zip across the canyon below, and sail through a V-shaped notch in a neighboring ridge, above an ominously named cliff, Lost Brother.聽

Dean Potter played an important role in the writing of . He was a good friend of the, a member of our advisory board, and as big-hearted and thoughtful as any professional athlete we鈥檝e met. In 2013, when we were filming the Rise of Superman video series, Dean told the story of how he nearly died while BASE-jumping into a deep cave in Mexico. He finished tellingly: “This year, twenty-something wingsuiters have lost their lives. Dying鈥檚 not worth it. I鈥檝e been struggling with that a lot. I don鈥檛 want to be that guy who got lucky. And I鈥檝e been that guy who got lucky for a lot of years. I want to be that guy that鈥檚 such a wizard of strategy and knows myself and am comfortable enough to say, 'Na-ah, I鈥檓 not going. I want to live.'”

But, that early evening in Yosemite, he went anyway.

Graham and Dean launched off Taft Point. Forty seconds later, their flights were over. Both men came into the notch low, possibly because the colder, denser winds that arrived with the setting sun had cost them altitude. Potter never wavered, but Hunt鈥攁s far as anyone can tell鈥攋erked left, then swerved right, putting him on a diagonal path and directly into the canyon鈥檚 far wall. Potter made it through the notch, but didn鈥檛 have the height he needed and crashed into the rocks on the other side. Both men died on impact.

And to this day, the details of the accident remain mysteries. No one knows what caused Hunt to swerve; no one knows exactly how Potter lost so much altitude. But the why was never in question.

“Look,”聽Potter once explained, “I know the dark secret. I know my options. I can sit on a cushion and meditate for two聽hours and maybe I get a glimpse of something interesting鈥攁nd maybe it lasts two seconds鈥攂ut I put on a wingsuit and leap off a cliff and it鈥檚 instantaneous: Whammo, there I am, in an alternate universe that lasts for hours.”

And for flow junkies who get their fix through action sports, this has always been the dark secret. Ecstasis聽only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment. In meditation, for example, the reason you follow your breath is to ride its rhythm right into the now. Psychedelics overwhelm the senses with data, throwing so much information at us per second that paying attention to anything else becomes impossible. And for action and adventure athletes seeking flow, risk serves this same function. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in the morning,”聽Samuel Johnson once remarked, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

By 2015, wingsuiting was providing exactly that kind of dangerous focus. “I start to shiver and wonder if what we鈥檙e doing is right,”聽Dean wrote in an essay just a month before his death. “Wingsuit BASE-jumping feels safe to me, but [so many] fliers have lost their lives this year alone. There must be some flaw in our system, a lethal secret beyond my comprehension.”

The lethal flaw is that, for many, using high-risk sport to explore ecstasis is so compelling and rewarding that it becomes an experience worth dying for. Steph Davis, Potter鈥檚 ex-wife and a professional climber and wingsuiter herself, has lost two husbands to the sport, yet she keeps flying. The siren song of “hours in an alternate universe”聽that Dean sought has continued to beckon to pilots convinced they can dodge the rocks.

But for the rest us? Those with lives and wives and things that matter? Are we shut out of these “alternate universes?”聽Do we have to make an impossible choice between dedicating decades to practice or accepting intolerable risks to get there faster?

Thanks to inventors like skydiver Alan Metni, the answer, increasingly, looks like “no.”聽Metni began his professional life as a lawyer at Vinson and聽Elkins, a global firm that counts senators, U.S. attorneys general, and Fortune 100 CEOs as alumni. But the legal life didn鈥檛 do it for him, so he chucked it for his true passion: jumping out of airplanes. He pitched a tent at a local airport and began training relentlessly, logging more than ten thousand jumps and earning three U.S. national championships and a world championship in formation flying along the way.

But Metni wasn鈥檛 satisfied. He wanted to find a way to train even harder, so he started tinkering with giant fans and wind tunnels. By the early 2000鈥檚, he鈥檇 perfected an indoor skydiving experience indistinguishable from true free fall. Suddenly, competitive teams could log hundreds of hours training together in absolute safety. With this one innovation, the standard of excellence at the elite level changed nearly overnight. Even SEAL Team Six came to work with Metni. Not to learn how to jump out of airplanes鈥攖hey had that part down cold鈥攂ut to train teamwork, group flow, and the secret to “flipping the switch” while falling through space together.

“Around the world,”聽Metni said, “it doesn鈥檛 matter what culture, language, or faith, everyone has the same dream: to fly.” So he built a company, , and set out to fulfill that dream, one wind tunnel at a time.

Today, iFly is in fourteen countries with over fifty-four tunnels and revenue nudging ten figures. Thousands and thousands of people who would never have considered jumping out of a perfectly good airplane or leaping off a cliff in a wingsuit have realized that dream, and done so safely. By taking out the risk, iFly has taken a sport once reserved for daredevils and made it accessible to everyone鈥攁ges three and up.

And skydiving isn鈥檛 the only high-risk pursuit that has undergone a revolution in accessibility. Across the action sports industry, advancements in technology are providing safer and easier entry into the zone than ever before. Powder skiing, with its utterly magical sensation of floating down a mountain, used to be the rarefied domain of top athletes. Today, extra-fat skis make that float available to anyone who can link two turns together. Mountain bikes, which once offered bone-rattling descents to all but the best riders, now have supple front and rear suspensions, oversize balloon tires, and an ability to roll over the most daunting terrain. Even kitesurfing鈥攂est known on the Internet for its “kitemare”聽footage of people getting dragged by giant sails across highways鈥攈as mellowed. Better safety gear lets newcomers find聽the balance between wind and waves with a fraction of the exposure and learning time.

This trend, of technological innovation providing wider and safer access to altered states, isn鈥檛 limited to adventure sports. It鈥檚 showing up across many disciplines, allowing more people than ever before to sample what these experiences have to offer. We鈥檙e shedding some light on Dean鈥檚 dark secret, sparing many of us the stark trade-offs that he and so many other pioneers were forced to make. Technology is聽bringing ecstasis to the masses, allowing us to taste it all, without having to risk it all.

The post The High-Tech Race to Make Deadly 国产吃瓜黑料 Sports Safe for Anyone appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In May 2007, Steven Kotler and his wife, Joy Nicholson, moved from Los Angeles to Chimayo, New Mexico, to open a dog-rescue operation that they named Rancho de Chihuahua.

Animal Rescue

Annie Marie Musselman

Animal Rescue

Dogs at Rancho de Chihuahua

Animal Rescue

Joy With (from left) Bella, Sprocket, Airtel, Teddy Bear, and Misha

Animal Rescue

The author with Bella

Chimayo is a tiny, rough-and-tumble town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It's famous for red chile, a mystical healing church, and one of the highest per-capita rates of heroin addiction in the United States. Rancho de Chihuahua is a special-needs sanctuary for dogs whose physical problems and emotional scars make them extreme long shots for adoption. Their first pack of patients was a motley assortment, consisting of a few big dogs (pit bulls, Rottweiler-husky crosses), a few medium-sizers (dachshund hybrids), and a dozen or so Chihuahuas and Chihuahua mixes. Over the months, the original collection of eight canines ballooned to north of 20.

Nicholson (a novelist who'd had years of experience in dog rescue) and Kotler (a longtime outdoor writer who didn't but was gung-ho) worked with dogs both seriously old and seriously ill, animals who needed a lot of delicate care. Delicate isn't a word often associated with Chimayo and its surrounding badlands, where their animals were attacked by bobcats, wild dogs, and, once, a murderous donkey. Still, none of them died during the first ten months, a fact that struck the couple as mildly miraculous. But in February 2008, the universe decided to make up for lost time, with a skein of dog deaths that made Kotler start to wonder if he could handle what he'd signed up for.

AT MOST COMMERCIAL breeding facilities in the U.S.鈥攌nown as “puppy mills” in rescue slang鈥攄ogs are packed into wire cages, usually for the entirety of their time there, often in pitch-black conditions. There are waste-collection trays beneath the cages, but they're rarely emptied. Flies are a constant. With no air conditioning in summer, no heat in winter, dogs regularly freeze to death or die from heatstroke. The food is bad and vet care infrequent. Open sores, tissue damage, blindness, deafness, and ulcers are more the rule than the exception.

Maus was a Chihuahua, a breeder dog, rescued from a puppy mill. For two years, dating back to our time in Los Angeles, Joy worked with her on a daily basis. It was an uphill battle. By the time we got her, Maus was mostly deaf, completely blind, and seriously damaged. Open spaces were too much for her to bear, as was the company of people (especially men), other dogs, sunshine, loud noises, and any sort of affection. Maus lived at the back of a closet and never came out. Her entire world consisted of a bed, a water dish, and a couple of pee pads.

Holding her was impossible, so Joy would scrunch under a shelf that ran along one side of the closet and stay still for an hour at a time. After six months, she got Maus to accept a scratch on the neck. After nine months, Maus allowed a head rub. But that was as far as things went. Anything else and Maus would start wailing and shaking. We tried every drug on the market and a dozen other therapies, but nothing did the trick. In the end, we realized that prolonging her suffering was the worst available option. We decided to put her down.

Maus was my first experience with an incurable case, and the timing of our decision couldn't have felt worse. Two weeks after the death of Ahab, our Rottweiler-husky mix鈥攁nd a few days after an unknown someone sighted a high-power rifle over a fence and shot and killed a friend's golden retriever鈥擬aus was euthanized, with Vinnie alongside her.

Vinnie was an old schnauzer from L.A. whose owner had died of AIDS, so he ended up on the rescue circuit. At the time, we were babysitting a couple of young Chihuahuas for a local humane society. Since finding homes for Chihuahuas in L.A. is significantly easier than finding an old schnauzer a home just about anywhere, a trade was arranged: The Chihuahuas went to Beverly Hills; Vinnie came to New Mexico.

Vinnie seemed to love life in Chimayo. He had a stump for a tail, but that didn't stop his self-expression. Every morning he would dash outside, glance up to see the wide sky and open fields, and run big laps around our one-acre property before flying back to the porch to wag his stump. I had come to love that wag. It started at his head and ended at his butt and made him look like a freight train trying to breakdance.

About the time we decided to euthanize Maus, Vinnie's heart and liver started to fail. We made another tough choice. Forty-eight hours later, both Vinnie and Maus were put to sleep on our back porch. Maus died in Joy's arms, Vinnie in mine. He was the first living thing to die under my care, but not the last. A few days later, Chow, an adorably feisty terrier, started coughing at around six in the morning. By seven, her lungs had filled with fluid, and by eight she was gone. The following week, for reasons still unclear, we lost a dachshund named Jerry. Then Otis, our beloved bull terrier, died of a stroke three days after that. The count was seven dead in two months.

Moving to New Mexico to save dogs had been the plan. The problem now was: Who was going to save me?

AT FIRST GLANCE, a bull terrier puppy is an unlikely source of salvation. Mostly, they're an exercise in collateral damage. With their jaws and teeth and disposition, they can destroy a pair of jeans in 20 seconds. Making matters more complicated, our new bull terrier, Igor鈥攚hom we got in June 2008 from a group called Southern California Bull Terrier Rescue鈥攄idn't like small dogs. It wasn't a prey issue. He knew they were members of his species and weren't supposed to serve as dinner. But our unruly pack of Chihuahuas鈥攖hen numbering around a dozen鈥攋ust plain bugged him.

The only way to ensure peace was to exhaust Igor. In the beginning, because he wasn't used to Chimayo's altitude, a good walk did the trick. Pretty soon runs were required, and not just for Igor. On the Fourth of July that year, some local shithead wrapped his puppy in firecrackers and lit the fuse. The dog was found tearing down a highway with a skunk-stripe of singed fur and melted flesh. We got the call because the burns were going to take a while to heal, and in the animal-rescue world, time means space. We didn't really have any, but our friends at the humane society knew what kind of sucker my wife was for injured Chihuahuas鈥攕o that's how they described him to her.

This dog was no Chihuahua. He was part pit bull and part hellhound鈥攚ith a face that was unmistakably Calvin Coolidge. He had to wear a cone until the burns healed, and, being a puppy, he quickly destroyed six of those. To create something he couldn't destroy, we cut a hole in the bottom of an old plastic bucket, so Bucket was the name that stuck. If Igor was an eight on the Richter scale, Bucket was a ten. By the middle of summer, exhausting these two went from crisis management to the only prayer we had left.

Thus began the Five-Dog Workout, though this label isn't entirely accurate. Sometimes there were five dogs, sometimes ten. At the start, the workout entailed a trail run up a fire road. But the dogs kept getting lost, so I had to switch from fire roads to arroyo bottoms, where the sides were steep enough to keep the dogs penned in.

Since snowmelt and heavy rains tended to pile up debris at various points, running the arroyos required occasionally stopping to climb over tree limbs and rusted car parts and everything else that washes downstream. Or it did until about a month into this experiment, when Igor spotted a jackrabbit and bolted. Rather than climb over a junk pile, he shot partway up the canyon wall and came down on the other side of the blockage. He looked like a snowboarder on a halfpipe.

Of course, I went right up after him. I tore up the wall, banked a turn, came back down, and then ran up the other side. It was so ridiculously fun that I forgot what I was doing and just kept going. There were seven other dogs with me that day, and they kept pace right behind us, resembling a bobsled team moving through a chute, except this team seemed to be laughing.

In the beginning, those arroyo runs were mostly about stamina; later, they required some skills. Igor soon mastered the gradual curve and moved on to the dead vertical, trying to run straight up the sides. If the sides got too steep, he'd attempt to cat-leap to the top. Like most bull terriers, he cat-leaped about as well as he performed long division. But Bella, a pit bull芒鈧�渉eeler mix, could do almost anything she tried, including midair 180's. This drove Igor crazy.

Often, when Bella pulled some stunt Igor couldn't duplicate, he'd just vanish. There were days when I would call and call and he wouldn't come. One morning, I hunted around until I found him, hard at work, on a different cliff, practicing Bella's moves. He went up the wall and flew sideways, missing and smashing鈥攈ard and repeatedly鈥攂efore he got it right just once.

There's some elementary behavioral science that explains why Igor would want to “hide” his practice sessions鈥攂asically, showing signs of weakness is a great way to lose standing in the pack. But in his case, I think it was pure embarrassment. Igor was a klutz. He took some bad falls. The fact that he wanted to rehearse privately seemed perfectly reasonable.

His embarrassment faded when Bucket got hip to the cause and also started trying to run up walls. Bucket is small and squat and about as aerodynamic as a wheelbarrow. For a while, the Five-Dog Workout became the Cirque du Soleil Reject Hour. And when Igor realized he wasn't the only klutz out there, he stopped trying to hide his failures. Bella would pull some acrobatic feat and Igor and Bucket would spend the rest of the run falling all over the place, trying to learn it.

Afterwards, our runs became a giant game of follow the leader, only considerably more chaotic. When Bucket had point, he preferred the low curves of gentle arroyos; Igor, the skate park of the canyon walls. Bella went straight no matter what was in her path. I fell down a lot. The soft dirt was carvable, which meant that sharp turns were theoretically possible. Those turns were needed because the dogs ran like wolves, as a tight pack, and I wanted to keep up.

“Part of the pleasure of being around dogs is a sense that we are participating in rituals that go back to atavistic pack behavior,” Jeffrey Moussaieff wrote in his book Dogs Never Lie About Love. I agree. One day, as we were coming down a steep cliff, Igor cut me off. I tripped, he crashed, and Bella came down with us. Together we cartwheeled over a boulder and into a cactus. Pleasure was had by all.

STILTS ARRIVED IN NEW MEXICO one day in January 2009, a mixed-breed California transplant, short-haired, coat mostly black, a pinched face, long nose, wide eyes, a few teeth left, half an ear missing, all his tail, standing about two feet high, with the torso of an armadillo and the legs of a giraffe. He looked like a stilt-walking Hobbit with an eating disorder.

For any dog, meeting a new pack is the equivalent of switching high schools, so we take it slow. Big dogs meet big dogs first, small dogs meet small dogs. This was a problem for Stilts: He was significantly bigger than the small dogs, significantly smaller than the bigs.

In his recent life, Stilts had gone from person to person, shelter to shelter, state to state, and who knows what else. He needed to sleep off the shock. Two days is the norm for this process, but a month later Stilts hadn't moved much from a pillow under a table. Attention, affection, good food, great pack, general silliness, long hikes, lots of freedom and love鈥攖hese were our standard tools, and none was working. When I took Stilts on walks, he would wander off and hide.

Ever since I'd started the Five-Dog Workout, one untried backcountry route鈥攁 crazy-looking ridge run that dumped over a series of small drops and then a large cornice and down to a gorgeous sandstone cliff鈥攈ad grabbed my attention. Every time I walked that way, I stared at it. Was it even doable? The cliff looked too steep, the cornice drop too big. Something about it made me want to try, and something about it kept scaring me away. I suppose I was waiting for a sign.

I got one a few days before Stilts arrived. Igor, Bella, Bucket, and I were climbing a tall ridgeline just before sunrise. The route was directly across from us, still mostly in shadow. A few minutes later, we topped the ridge as dawn swept in and the whole valley lit up. And there, suddenly visible, sitting 50 feet below the cornice, was the biggest coyote I've ever seen.

He was the size of a wolf, with thick, silvery fur and paws like salad plates. He saw us immediately, but instead of running away he just stared. We stared back. Five minutes, ten minutes. Then Igor barked once. The coyote blinked and then bounded up the route in six strides, maybe seven, went over the cornice, and was gone. It was like a three-hour ballet condensed into a moment.

We ran “Coyote's Line” that day. Igor and Bella jumped the cornice without hesitation, but Bucket took one look and found another way down. I thought about going with him but knew I'd regret it later, so I jumped, too. There was some hang time in the air and a bit of a hip-check on the landing, but the soft dirt bounced me back to my feet and momentum did the rest. A few steps later, the dogs were at my side and we were bounding down the slope together, falling five feet with every step, falling deeper into each other along the way.

A few months later, I returned to Coyote's Line with the same crew, minus Igor, plus Stilts. Stilts didn't have much trouble with the ridge, but he wasn't so sure about the cornice. Once again, Bucket backed off and found another way down. Stilts tried to follow Bucket, but I put my hand on his back and spun him toward the drop. Then I stopped myself: What was I thinking? There was no way I could shove him off a cliff.

I apologized to Stilts and released him, figuring he'd follow Bucket down. To show him what he was missing, though, I let out a whoop and jumped. Bella jumped with me. Once I slid to a stop, I looked back up to check on Stilts. He was still there, still staring off the edge. At first, I thought he was frozen in terror. Then he did something I've never seen a dog do: reared up on his hind legs and kicked his front feet in the air like a stallion. He did it twice, started barking, and jumped straight off the cornice. He kept barking all the way down, into the arroyo, where, without breaking stride, he smashed into Bella and bounced into Bucket and they all rolled into a game of bitey-face鈥攖he first playful contact Stilts had ever had with any of our dogs.

THE LAST TIME I RAN Coyote's Line was April 2009, just shy of our three-year anniversary in Chimayo. I had decided to take the dogs to “the Thumb.” This was another destination I'd been staring at for a while, always wanting to get closer, always afraid of what I might find. Deep in the backcountry, wind and weather had shaped sandstone into a massive fist with an extended thumb鈥攚hat's technically called a “tent rock” or “hoodoo,” but neither of those terms quite capture its size. The Thumb was colossal: 300 feet of red rock sitting atop another 200 feet of rubble.

We set out to explore it on a cold and clear Sunday morning. With me were Bella, Bucket, Igor, and Poppycock, a shepherd stray who'd showed up around Christmas and never left. We spent the first hour crossing wide plains on wide trails. By the second hour, we'd moved into a slender arroyo that narrowed into a slot canyon that soon became a maze. The exit was at the top of a steep hill, where we got our first good look at the Thumb. But no sooner did we see it than it vanished in a whiteout.

Flurries had been drifting down for a while, but suddenly it was dumping. I rounded a corner and found myself standing at the mouth of a wide arroyo just as the entire riverbed sprang to life in a whirlwind of snow. Just as quickly, the wind calmed and a great silence returned. Here was the real voice of the desert, the whisper that's always there.

We didn't listen that day鈥攂ut we should have. Instead, we kept clomping forward, postholing through deepening drifts. It took another hour to get to the bottom of the rubble pile, and the moment we arrived, the storm abated. I stood beneath the Thumb with my neck craned back, looking at all that rock, all that deep time, a bad feeling starting to rise in my stomach. I felt like I was trespassing, violating some covenant written eons ago.

I ignored the feeling, so we kept going. The escarpment was steep and crumbly and it took five minutes to scramble to the top. As we reached the Thumb, the storm returned. Biting cold, howling wind, visibility gone. I could barely see the dogs beside me. We hunkered down to wait it out.

Usually when I rest in the backcountry, the dogs run over, give my hand a lick, and then head off exploring. That day, they didn't just lick me, they crashed into me. Poppycock clipped my back with her hips as she ran past in a tizzy. Bella did the same thing, only harder. Bucket whimpered and dove under my legs. Igor came in two minutes later, looking seriously demented鈥攁nd moving at a full gallop.

His 70 pounds鈥攎oving at 20 miles per hour鈥攌nocked me off my perch and into Bucket, and all of us tumbled down the slope. I popped upright and saw Bella and Poppy running beside me, and we all went boing-boing and pell-mell and straight down. We bottomed out and kept going and ran across an arroyo … and that's when I noticed that Igor was missing. He'd been beside me only a moment ago, but how long ago was that moment? Two seconds? Ten? A minute? I stopped and called and waited and called and ran up and down the canyon. No Igor. I tried to backtrack using paw prints, but the snow was coming down too hard and there was no trail left. Igor had gotten lost once before and headed home. Maybe, I hoped, it had happened again.

But he wasn't at home, so Joy and I hiked back to the Thumb. The storm got worse. We hunted all day, into the evening, the temperatures dropping below freezing, but we never found him.

It was a terrible night. The uncertainty, the helplessness, the sense that I'd been given fair warning but had chosen to ignore it. We'd promised the dogs that their last memories would be of love. I had visions of Igor dying alone, scared and cold and missing his family鈥攖he exact opposite of my vow.

WE FOUND IGOR ALIVE the next day, with serious help from our neighbors. People had poured in鈥攑et owners, dirt farmers, gangbangers鈥攖o join our search. Pretty soon, there was a message on our machine from a guy who lived about five miles down the road. Igor, he said, was standing on a cliff across from his front door. We hopped in the truck and roared over there. Almost immediately, we spotted him. I pulled over and jumped out. Igor saw me but didn't move. Instead, he shook his head, lowered his gaze, and started trembling. I wasn't sure what to do, so I dropped to my knees. He stared at me for a long time, then finally came over, his head low, his tail tucked. He looked like he'd done something very wrong.

Igor had frostbite on his paws, slashes across his belly and back鈥攆rom what, we didn't know鈥攁nd he needed about three days to sleep it off. Unfortunately, when he woke up he was a different dog. At first, whenever we walked into the backcountry, he'd wander off and find a high perch and gaze at the Thumb. Pretty soon, he just wandered off.

Then the change crept into his home life. Bucket was still his best friend, and they still liked to wrestle, but now Igor had misplaced his self-control. He was hurting Bucket, throwing him around too much, biting him too hard. Then he bit me. I was walking down to the back field one day and Igor ran up behind me and took a chunk out of my thigh.

It happened again later that week鈥攁 surprise bite on my fingers鈥攁nd I didn't know what to do. I told people the story and they all said the same thing: It's a different world in the badlands. Maybe he met something weird out by the Thumb.

The morning after the last of those conversations, Igor nearly killed a small dog of ours named Buddy. By then, after consultation with several vets and rescuers, we believed we knew what was wrong. Because of the inbreeding required to produce all-white bull terriers, they're often prone to epilepsy, and because of the epilepsy they're prone to Rage Syndrome, which is like an epileptic fit featuring rage instead of the shakes. There's no treatment for it and it's progressive. Fits last longer, violence escalates.

There was only one thing to do. We called our vet, scheduled euthanasia for the next morning, and had another very bad night. I got up early to take Igor for one last Five-Dog Workout鈥攖he very game I'd invented for him in the first place. I brought Poppycock and Bella and Bucket. We ran Coyote's Line again that day. Igor and I leapt the cornice and landed and bounded down together, and for those few seconds of primordial reenactment鈥攋ust a man and a dog at play鈥攅verything did change, the way it always has. But then the moment was gone. There would be no magic out there this time, only disappointment.

THAT DISAPPOINTMENT turned to despair when we reached the bottom of the cliff and I noticed Poppycock was missing. I called and searched, but she wasn't to be found. It was getting late; the vet would be at our house any minute. Having to hike out of the backcountry to go euthanize a dog and then having to turn around and come back to hunt another is the kind of heartbreak only animals can provide. But there were no other options. Animal rescue might be a game of death, but isn't everything? Tomorrow I would wake up and try to save some more dogs regardless, and the day after that as well. Joy put it best: This is what we do.

Right about the time I realized that, I spotted Poppycock. She was hovering at the edge of the badlands, standing beside a juniper bush, acting like dogs act when they've just buried a bone鈥攁s if she had something to hide. The other dogs weren't paying much attention, but there was a tingle down my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I took about ten steps forward and glanced behind a juniper bush. Sitting there, less than ten feet from me, was the coyote鈥�that coyote, the coyote of Coyote's Line.

He was enormous, almost a hundred pounds. His face wide, his shoulders broad, his coat two-toned. He looked like a hybrid, like a dog, wolf, and coyote all rolled into one. He looked like the standard-bearer for the entire canid line. We got a good, long look, because he wasn't running away; in fact, he didn't even appear to be afraid of us. Instead, he sat straight up, positioning his torso directly over his hind legs, and then鈥擨 kid you not鈥攈e started hopping on those hind legs, hopping like a kangaroo.

It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen an animal do. I didn't know how to react, so I stood there gaping. The coyote hopped in a semicircle, his great jaws hanging open, his tongue flopping. When he stopped, we were all standing in a long line: The coyote at one end, Igor at the other. He'd stopped a few feet from Poppycock but ignored her and started walking toward me. He passed me and then Bella and Bucket and stopped in front of Igor. They stood a few inches apart for what seemed like an eternity. Then the coyote leaned in close and rubbed his head against Igor's neck鈥攖he same gesture wolves sometimes use when adopting a newcomer into their pack. They stood together for about 20 seconds and then, with some silent signal I never detected, the ceremony ended. In three quick lopes, the coyote was gone, vanishing in the distance, becoming another backcountry apparition, another story no one quite believes yet no one entirely doubts.

Trickster, shape-shifter, transformer鈥攖hat's how most cultures view the coyote. He is the keeper of magic, the bringer of death, the gateway to renewal. His presence, according to many, carries with it specific lessons. Ted Andrews, an expert on the subject, put it this way in his book Animal-Speak: “The coyote teaches the balance of wisdom and folly and how both go hand in hand. … Are you not seeing the wisdom in your life and events? The coyote will help you.”

I certainly needed the help. Igor was dead within the hour. Joy made it through all right, but I took a couple of extra days to get going again. Bucket hasn't been the same since. All things, as they say, are connected, but that doesn't make them any easier. Or any more comprehensible.

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EVEN NOW, SIX YEARS after his death, at 67, from pancreatic cancer, you can head to the beach in Malibu and find DA CAT LIVES spray-painted on a wall. Da Cat is surfer Miki Dora, a.k.a. Mickey Chapin, a.k.a. the Black Knight. The enigmatic wave man who invented renegade surf culture as we know it had so many aliases that it’s always been hard to get his story straight. Yet Los Angeles聳 based journalist David Rensin comes as close as anyone has so far in his new oral-history-based biography, All for a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora (HarperEntertainment, $26).

All For a Few Perfect Waves by David Rensin

Get a copy of Rensin’s biography from .

In the 1950s and ’60s, when Malibu was the center of the surf universe, Dora was its master. He was part of the scene that inspired the Gidget movies聴and, despite his anticommercial bent, worked on them as a stunt double聴but Dora’s hatred of the resultant crowds inspired Surfer editor Sam George to label him “the guy who invented localism.” Called Da Cat for both his feline grace on the waves and his sneaky ways off them, Dora was a true outlaw. Refusing to take a job聴to him, “nothing in life was more valuable than total personal freedom,” Rensin writes聴Dora lived off scams, cons, and the largesse of beautiful women. He forged passports and faked credit cards; in 1981, after a global FBI chase, he spent nearly a year in prison.

Since Dora spent much of his life lying about his legacy, Rensin set out to unearth the truth by interviewing just about anyone who knew him: 300 relatives, ex-girlfriends, slighted bank executives, and, of course, surf notables, from big-wave pioneer Greg “Da Bull” Noll to Riding Giants director Stacy Peralta. The result is a treasure trove of anecdotes, pieced together to create a portrait of the man whose life was every bit as intriguing as his myth.

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1. They’ve Had a Long Day

For the Malloy brothers Chris, 35, Keith, 33, and Dan, 29 going to work means,as Keith describes it, pursuing “the lost art of beinga waterman.”

“A waterman,” explains Chris, “knows how to swim, surf, bodysurf, paddleboard, spearfish, and freedive but really it’s about having a rhythm of life dictated by the ocean’s moods.”

Which is to say being a waterman is a bit complicated. It can mean inventing new kinds of surf quests, like Keith and Dan’s 2004 paddleboard mission along 50 miles of the central California coast. Or making movies with their surfer-artist crew, the Moonshine Conspiracy. Or lending a hand on a commercial fishing boat. Or designing products for their employer, Patagonia.

Take last year. In February, Keith packed up his biodiesel Dodge truck and surfed, climbed, and hiked from Bend, Oregon, to Cabo San Lucas and back again, meeting his brothers along the way for forays into everything from forest onservation to sustainable agriculture, which were documented in a book, Bend to Baja. Then Dan left for a monthlong bullet-dodging, wave-hunting sojourn through Liberia, while Chris went off to scout locations for a surf movie in Chile. In May, all three put together, literally, Patagonia’s flagship surf store, in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, painting the walls and installing the gear racks.

Next, they headed to Indonesia, partly to test Patagonia surfboards but also because the 2004 tsunami had crushed the northern end of Sumatra and the brothers had decided, as Dan puts it, that “the whole damn archipelago had given us so much that it was time to give something back.” So they did: $162,000 via SurfAid International, comprising a $150,000 Moonshine Conspiracy donation (equaling the profits from their 2003 Indo-based film, The September Sessions), plus $12,000 from a benefit they hosted with Patagonia. They followed that with two days of labor in a community garden.

By the end of the year, the Malloys had surfed more than 330 days each in a combined 11 countries, including Panama, Fiji, and Micronesia. “Our lives are about perpetual motion,” says Chris. “We don’t ever sit on our asses.”

2. You Owe Them One

Last October, I paddled out into the lineup at Huntington Beach, California, with Dan Malloy. It was a perfect dayof shining sun and overhead dream waves except that we were at ground zero for surfing’s hotdogging rude boys. Worse, the 2006 ISA World Surfing Games were just up the way, so the water was ego-to-ego with pro riders.

Which meant the only waves I caught were when Dan blocked for me. Dan was once a competitive pro himself: He won the 1996 OP Pro Junior and placed second in the 2000 U.S. Open of Surfing. The same is true of Keith, who in 2000 was one of just 44 surfers to qualify for the world championship tour. Even Chris, who’s always eschewed contests to chase monster waves, once accepted an invitation to the Big Wave Invitational in Memory of Eddie Aikau, on Oahu’s North Shore. And yet, one by one, they all dropped out. Dan explained why best in 2002, when his confession that competition was making him “lose my love for surfing” made surf-press headlines.

Unfortunately for me, Dan also grew tired of Huntington; after he went ashore, I couldn’t even get scraps. Finally, I shoulder-bashed four takers out of the way and sailed down the line. To say I rode that wave with any noteworthy ability would be to ignore the guy to my left pulling a 360 aerial and the guy to my right ass-deep in a tube, but then the cheering started.

“Wow,” said the guy closest to me, “that must have been some wave.”

“It wasn’t that great.”

“Well,” he said, pointing over my shoulder, “that’s Dan Malloy making all the fuss.”

“We always need to surf vicariously through everyone else, too,” explains Chris. “That’s why we quit contests. We’d get so excited for other people, we’d forget to compete against them.”

3. They Can Handle It

To understand the Malloy brothers, start with their dad. In the sixties, Mike Malloy held his own at Topanga, the SoCal break famous for fast waves and ferocious localism. He made ends meet laying industrial pipeline. In 1975, he moved his family to a small farm in Ojai.

Mike Malloy is now 59 and runs a cow-calf operation north of Santa Barbara. His toughness is the stuff of family legend. One evening, at Keith and Dan’s two-story beachside bachelor pad in Ventura five miles from where Chris lives with his wife, Carla, and two-month-old son, Lucas I was standing next to the outdoor grill with their friend Chris Del Moro when Chris Malloy began arranging the hot coals with his bare hands. When I suggested tongs, Del Moro laughed. “Mike never uses tongs either,” he said. “He just reaches in and goes for it. Whenever Dan and his friends do anything hard and painful, they chant, ‘Mike Malloy, Mike Malloy, Mike Malloy.’ “

As teenagers, the boys hitchhiked 15 miles to Ventura to surf and spent summer stints in a tepee they built on the beach. When Chris turned 18, in 1990, he moved to Hawaii. “He was unbelievably fearless when he got here,” says big-wave rider Shane Dorian. “He went from six-foot California slop to 25-foot Waimea without blinking.”

Two years later, Keith followed. In his first week, he surfed a dangerous outer break called Himalayas. In 1993, at 18, Dan went to Polynesia to ride Teahupoo, one of the world’s heaviest waves.

Yet as all three boys will tell you, the toughest Malloys are their mother, Denise, and their 25-year-old sister, Mary. Mary was born blind and deaf and with severe cerebral palsy. She requires constant care. “We can go catch 30-foot waves,” says Chris, “but then we come home to a sister who can’t walk or talk or move her hands without shaking, and a mother who was up all night long with her for the first seven years of her life. You very quickly realize that every day is a gift and that you need to treat it with respect.”

4. Because It’s a Working Lunch

Early on, the Malloys were a lot like, well, other extremely talented professional surfers. They picked up their first sponsor in 1987, when Channel Islands Surfboards founder Al Merrick gave them a contract for boards and spaghetti dinners. They’ve come as a package ever since. Their first big endorsement deal was with Billabong, in 1991. When Billabong president Bob Hurley launched Hurley International in 1998, they went with him.

In April 2004, the Malloys jumped to Ventura-based Patagonia. The surf industry was dumbfounded: Why work for a company best known for mountain apparel? “Bob Hurley treated us like family,” says Chris, “but we were really tired of the entire Orange County surf paradigm. It’s become Hollywood. It’s no longer a sport; it’s a look.”

The Malloys had befriended Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard in 2000, when Keith bought the Ventura home where he lives with Dan across the street from Chouinard and his wife, Malinda. When he began talking to them about the viability of building out Patagonia’s surf line with sustainable, function-first products, Chris recalls, “we told him it would work and that we wanted in.”

They’ve since had a hand in every aspect of Patagonia’s surf line, from advertising to the design of the Cardiff store. Inside, you’ll find the Malloy-designed 80-percent-non-petroleum-based wetsuit (most are 100 percent petroleum), along with non-Patagonia waterman essentials like spear guns and paddleboards. The apparel includes organic-cotton versions of layers from their own closets, like an overcoat modeled after Chris’s old army jacket, and following a typical Malloy notion of what’s practical a side-vented shirt that allows you to comfortably hold a surfboard while riding a horse. “Surfing takes work,” says Keith. “We’re making durable work clothes.”

5. It Won’t Go To Their Heads

“Look,” says Chris, “don’t write that we’re these do-good humanitarians. Don’t write that we’re rabid environmentalists. We’re just fun-hogging tube junkies. But we’ve realized we can have all the fun we want and still leave something good behind.”

6. They Could Make You a Star

The Malloys started shooting movies in 1999, when Chris and then-unknown musician Jack Johnson borrowed $100,000 from Bob Hurley and along with Keith, Dan, and others started surfing and filming around the planet. They named themselves the Moonshine Conspiracy.

Chris calls their projects “home movies.” And they are, featuring scenes from a trip to their ancestral Ireland or shots of friends hand-making guitars. Their first film, 1999’s Thicker Than Water, shot on 16mm, felt like a return to an earlier era of subtle, wide-angle surfer storytelling albeit injected with doses of some of the best wave riding ever captured on celluloid. It also sparked Jack Johnson’s career the soundtrack was an underground hit. They’ve released four more films, involving such co-conspirators as Kelly Slater, Eddie Vedder, and Ben Harper.

“Thicker Than Water swung the pendulum back to the right brain,” says Surfer magazine editor Chris Mauro. “It was a monumental shift.”

7. They Might Tell the Supermodels Story

Usually, they hate to talk about it. In 2001, the brothers appeared in a Vogue shoot on the North Shore. “We didn’t try to be in that,” insists Chris. “We met the photographer at a benefit for an elementary school. He asked if we wanted to spend the next day rolling around in the sand with supermodels. Dan was single. Keith was single. The surf was flat. Who doesn’t want to wrestle with supermodels?”

For the Malloys, the answer really does depend on the surf. In 1996, Dan modeled for Ralph Lauren for a few days in New York. But when they asked him to continue on to Florida, a swell was hitting the California coast. He went home.

All three brothers are over six feet and chiseled and surf like demigods. Are they just interchangeable?

Complementary is more like it. Chris, who does most of the talking, tells me about a time all three showed up at a local break and saw a guy they’d had a fight with out in the lineup. “So,” he says, “I was thinking about how to logically explain my actions, Dan was worried about how the guy felt, and Keith just said, ‘Fuck him, get in the water.’ “

8. They’ll Talk to You

Not too long ago, Dan smashed his cell phone with a rock. He wasn’t angry, just making a decision. His laptop is next. Nine times out of ten, Chris’s voice mail is full. If you get through, he might call you back. Keith won’t. In 2003, Surfer‘s Chris Mauro had to convey to ABC that, no, Keith didn’t want to be The Bachelor.

9. They’ll Drink It

One night before I was to go surfing with the Malloys, Chris called me. “Hey,” he said, “if I don’t make sense it’s because we’ve been drinking. But I helped my dad move cows today, Dan’s been doing a monster surf session, and Keith’s gone boar hunting. So I guess dawn patrol is out of the question.”

I arrived at Chris’s place the next afternoon to find him skinning a leg of the boar Keith shot. He lectured as he worked: how to tease the skin away from the meat; which of his herbs would make the best marinade. For a waterman, Chris spends a great deal of time pondering his backyard. The acre is already home to chickens, ducks, two large German shepherds, and a steer. He recently added a pair of baby boars.

Keith, meanwhile, is launching expeditions to icy, virgin breaks. “British Columbia, Alaska, the east coast of Canada most of these spots are completely unexplored,” he says. And Dan’s working with surf-film director Taylor Steele on a new movie.

But at the moment, Chris just wants to drive over to his brothers’ place to surf and eat. “I don’t know if there will be waves,” he says, “but we’ll get wet, watch the sun set, and cook some food. That’ll be good enough for today actually, that’s good enough for most days.”

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“As a boy, I was beaten a lot by my parents and schoolmasters,” says Martin Strel. “This greatly contributed to my ability to ignore pain and endure.” While this partially explains how the 52-year-old Slovenian lived through world-record swims down the Danube, Mississippi, and Yangtze rivers, he’ll need more than a high pain threshold to, um, brook his toughest trip yet: 3,375 miles of the Amazon, beginning in February. Here’s a look at what Strel and his approximately 20-member support crew will face.

Martin Strel

Disease Already vaccinated against hepatitis, diphtheria, rabies, various fevers, and parasites, Strel will also take malaria pills. His defense against raw sewage from riverside villages? Luck and his team doctor.

Whirlpools At the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Negro, Strel will have to swim around football-field-size whirlpools that could hold a person underwater.

Candiru This parasitic fish, generally one to three inches long, works its way up the urethra, where barbed spines lock it in place and make removal without surgery impossible. “It’s the thing I am most afraid of,” says Strel, who hopes his wetsuit will offer enough protection. “God needs to help us.”

Bull Sharks Responsible for a disproportionate share of fatal shark attacks worldwide, bulls can survive in freshwater and have been sighted some 800 miles up the Amazon.

Piranhas Strel’s team will carry a bucket of blood that can be dumped into the water to distract the fish in case of attack.

Pirates Strel hopes to bribe his way out of any confrontations in these sometimes lawless waters. “We have T-shirts, caps, food, and drinks,” he says. “I think pirates will like that stuff.” But the crew will also be armed.

Tidal Bore Tidal surges at the mouth of the Amazon can send ten-foot waves roaring upriver then rushing back out in irregular cycles. Strel will rely on coast guard forecasts to avoid them, sometimes swimming at night to stay on schedule.

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FORGET “WHERE’S THE BEEF?”聴it’s what’s behind the beef that matters to Richard Linklater. The Austin, Texas聳based director, who’s spent his career alternating between edgy cult favorites (Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly) and big-budget popcorn flicks (School of Rock, Bad News Bears), takes a bold leap into nutrition politics this month with Fast Food Nation, a fictional interpretation of Eric Schlosser’s 2001 muckraking assault on pit-stop dining franchises. Linklater and Schlosser’s collaborative screenplay used the research-rich book to conjure multiple narratives聴a burger-chain executive (Greg Kinnear) sent to investigate rumors of feces in the meat supply, a Mexican illegal immigrant who’s braved a border crossing for sweatshop shifts at a meat-processing plant, a fast-food clerk desperate to escape her greasy gig聴interwoven to create an almost hopelessly grim and gruesome fable. The film boasts star power, with cameos by the likes of Ethan Hawke, Bruce Willis, and Patricia Arquette, and promises a shocking yuck quotient, thanks to a scene shot on the killing floor of a real slaughterhouse in northern Mexico. Steven Kotler grills the auteur about his last meal and America’s coming diet war.

Richard Linklater

Linklater in Austin, August 2006

Fast Food Nation

Scenes from FAST FOOD NATION: Mexican immigrants loading up for an illegal border crossing.

Fast Food Nation

Scenes from FAST FOOD NATION: Inside a meat-processing plant