Into the Great Wide Open Download PDF

For a first taste of Alaska, it’s hard to beat a week of exploring in Wrangell-St. Elias. Bigger then Switzerland, it’s America’s largest and emptiest national park.

There are only three rules you have to remember when whitewater rafting in Alaska,” says my 26-year-old river guide Gaia Marrs. “First rule: Don’t fall out of the boat. Second rule: Don’t fall out of the boat. Third rule: Don’t fall out of the boat.” It’s July, and I’m lying supine in the sand on a riverbank in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. My head is wedged between granite boulders, my legs are pinned together like disposable chopsticks, and my arms are splayed perpendicular to my torso. Marrs is standing over me, and I can see myself in her sunglasses. I look like a fallen scarecrow. In the event you end up in the water, the position you’re in now is how you’d want to go downriver,” she continues. “Feet first, on your back, so your butt hits the rocks before your head. Oh, and if you try to swim, use the backstroke. Anything else and you’ll probably drown.” Continue reading →

Six-Pack Abs, Made to Order Download PDF

Men tired of working their asses off in the gym and not seeing results are now turning to a radical new surgery to get the perfect stomach.

It’s 12 o’clock on Friday in Denver, Colorado, and Stephen Riebold, a 38-year-old engineer, has just stood up from his chair at Panera Bread Café and lifted his shirt to reveal to me (and the other 80 people eating here) the most ripped six-pack abs I’ve ever seen on a human being, Batman included. His obliques appear ready to burst through his skin. His serratus are those of Adonis. His abdominis are rippling quicksilver.

It’s all the more astounding considering Riebold is not racing in the Tour de France or competing in the Ironman this fall. In fact, he’s not a pro athlete at all; he’s barely a jock, and other than his stomach, he isn’t even that slim (his face and arms are a little pudgy). His miraculous midsection is the result of a novel procedure called high-definition liposculpture. It’s a more advanced cousin to conventional lipo, which uses a metal tube to suck up fat like a Shop-Vac. For Riebold’s procedure, however, which he had done five months ago, Denver plastic surgeon John Millard had stuck a VASER (Vibration Amplification of Sound Energy at Resonance)—a sleek stainless-steel probe the length of a chopstick—into his gut and did what lipo cannot: He sculpted Riebold’s existing body fat so that it molded to his abdominal muscles like shrink-wrap. Continue reading →

Sudden Death Download PDF

When active and healthy Michael Behar is awakened one night with palpitations, he learns of a potentially fatal condition that causes athletes’ hearts to fail without warning.

I’m still loopy from the anesthesia when a blurry silhouette stoops over my hospital bed and announces, “You’re gonna live.” It’s my cardiologist, Nelson Trujillo. Thirty minutes earlier, while I snoozed blithely, Trujillo shoved a hollow plastic catheter through the skin above my right groin and into my femoral artery. He snaked the flexible tube north about two feet, through my aorta, until he entered my right coronary artery. Into the catheter he squirted a “radiocontrast agent” that tinted my blood with a reflective dye. As a technician steadied a hefty rectangular imaging device called a fluoroscope over my torso, Trujillo watched an adjacent monitor that displayed the dyed blood circulating through my beating heart.

The procedure, an angiogram, is typically a last step for cardiologists trying to figure out if your heart is in serious trouble. For the most part it’s administered to old guys with beer guts who complain of chest pains, or used on post–heart attack victims to survey the carnage. “The angio lets us see what happened and what’s left,” Trujillo said. I’m neither old nor obese, and I can definitively confirm that at 39, my heart, thus far, has not attacked me. Still, my doctor had urged me to “get poked,” as he put it, because of what brought me to his office in the first place. Continue reading →

Trekking Virgin Cloud Forest in Costa Rica Download PDF

If you think all the authentic adventures in Costa Rica have been packaged and polished to death, think again. Welcome to the jungle.   

“He’s not far ahead,” declares my trekking guide, a lanky, wiry haired 26-year-old Costa Rican named Andre’s Vargas, as he plods up a switchback in the jungle.

Who, exactly, is he?” I ask.

“Look down,” says Vargas, pointing to a foot-wide hoofprint in the muddy trail.

“What the hell is that?”

“Fresh tracks, from a tapir,” he says.

“A what?” Judging from the colossal print I imagine a wild boar on steroids and wonder if the machete we’ve packed is within easy reach.

A tapir, Vargas explains, is, in fact, a piglike mamal indigenous to Southeast Asia and Central and South America. It looks almost prehistoric: part anteater, part hippo. A full-grown adult stands three feet tall at its shoulders, measures six feet long, and can weigh almost Loco pounds. They are shy, nocturnal creatures that normally steer clear of humans and other predators, which in Costa Rica include pumas, jaguars, and am. But if you startle a tapir—particularly a female with calves—expect a fight, Vargas says. With its powerful snout the beast will slam you onto the ground, then administer a vicious stomping with its massive hooves. Continue reading →