SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST INSIDE THE HYROX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS
SKATE SISTERS SHREDDING STEREOTYPES IN INDIA
HOW TO BE SUPERHUMAN REAL ATHLETES, UNREAL ABILITIES
Power through anything with a fagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip. A batery that lasts over a day and charges in under 30 minutes. Add in a 50MP camera (front and back!) for shots like a pro.
This is everyday perormance, levelled up.
Chantal Pinzi
“In India, women face gender discrimination, with limited participation in social life,” says Pinzi, whose project on its female skaters won a Sony World Photography Award in April.
“By picking up their boards, they can imagine something different for themselves.”
Tessa Hulls
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, the US artist and adventurer creates original work for each issue of The Red Bulletin. “Everything I am as an artist and writer is a result of the time I’ve spent moving my body through wild spaces,” Hulls says.
Our cover star Laura Crane has a triedand-tested approach to surfing. “We train our minds to feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations,” she says. “It gives you trust that you can get through really tough things.”
The British big-wave pro is referencing her incredible journey, a ride on which she’s now tackling the world’s biggest waves – one of the few women to do so – and living to tell the tale. But it’s an ethos that could equally apply to this issue’s other featured stars: the athletes testing their strength and stamina at the HYROX World Championships; female Indian skateboarders shredding stereotypes to find freedom and follow their sporting dreams, and the four athletes whose epic adventures have seen them push beyond the limits of what was previously thought possible. We hope you enjoy the issue.
Neil Edwards
The Wrexham-based artist has drawn for the likes of Marvel and DC Comics, but, he says, “illustrating real-life superheroes [for our How to be Superhuman feature] was an amazing experience. They are truly amazing people.”
Skate control
Shraddha Gaikwad (pictured) and a new generation of women skateboarders are shattering stereotypes in their native India
Health scares, misogyny, the pitfalls of reality TV fame – none could stop the Devon surfer from realising her Nazaré dream
Inside the HYROX World Championships in Chicago, where the elite of this hybrid sport push (and pull and lift) endurance to the limits
A photographer’s-eye view of the boardriding movement empowering women and changing attitudes across India
athletes
Reckon only mutants can perform superhuman acts? Think again, Professor X –these exceptional athletes share their experiences of going beyond the ordinary
Charleston, SC, USA
Clone break
If FIFA can make up new competition formats in football, how long before the International Tennis Federation gets in on the act? Coming next summer: women’s dozens – 12 vs 12 on a standard court. Relax, this is all just crazy conjecture, though Robert Snow’s composite image of 24-year-old US tennis sensation
Emma Navarro shows what it might look like. “She’s everywhere,” quips the photographer in his accompanying Instagram post. But as opponents of the 2024 WTA Most Improved Player of the Year (previous winners include Steffi Graf, Monica Seles and Serena Williams) will attest, just the one Emma Navarro is formidable enough, thanks very much. Instagram: @robertsnowphoto; @emma_navarro48
Goodwood, West Sussex Jump start
Kids with skipping ropes. Cats spooked by cucumbers. Van Halen. The impulse to jump is universal. Kriss Kyle knows this better than any. In 2019, the BMX rider launched himself and his bike from a helicopter onto the roof of Dubai’s Burj Al Arab hotel. This summer, Kyle’s plans were more grounded – not that making the first-ever BMX jump over a speeding Formula 1 car carries any less jeopardy. “Facing a F1 car coming at you head-on goes against every natural instinct,” he says. “This has been by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” redbull.com
Paris, France
Fight club
What’s this? Huge LED screens, a fervent atmosphere, and two blokes with dodgy barnets trading punches as punters look on? No, it’s not Saturday night at your local sports pub. This is Red Bull Kumite, the fighting-game tournament that, at Paris’ Maison de la Mutualité this April, gathered the world’s elite Street Fighter players for a 10th time. Gamers did battle in an MMA-style cage inspired by the JeanClaude van Damme movie Bloodsport. See the anguish of the guy at the bottom of the frame? That’s because Kusanagi (France) and eventual winner Adel ‘Big Bird’ Anouche (UAE) have just poleaxed each other in a double KO. Oh, the humanity… Watch the action at redbull.com
Craig David
Staying power
After a quarter of a century in the game, the garage/R&B icon selects the soundtrack to his musical journey
It’s been 25 years since a 19-year-old Craig David released his number-one debut album, Born to Do It. And the Southampton-born purveyor of garagetinged R&B has navigated peaks and valleys in the past quarter of a century. As well as touring the world, being Grammynominated, and launching a thousand memes with tracks such as Seven Days, there was his decade-long hiatus from music and the UK, which he ended with a chart-topping comeback in 2016. Now 44, David says his new (ninth) album, Commitment, feels like a return to where he began. “I’ve arced back to how I created my first album: being playful, not worrying about chart positions. It took me back to moments like finishing Re-Rewind [his 1999 hit with Artful Dodger] and playing it on my Walkman on the way home from the studio. It’s good vibes only. Making music is a joy.” Here, David shares four tracks that helped shape his career… Commitment is out now; craigdavid.com
Boyz II Men End of the Road (1992)
“This transports me back to my early days of learning to sing. Kids in the playground would try to sing it, and I was pushed to do all the ad-libs and the higher notes that Wanya [Morris] would sing. I’d relish it. It became the litmus test – if I could get anywhere close to sounding like Boyz II Men in this song, I was on the right road.”
Usher
Nice & Slow (1997)
“Usher was always a big inspiration for me. I put on an under-18s gig in Southampton when I was 16 or 17, and I performed this. I had the ski cap, the glasses, the massive white puffer outfit. Lyrically, the way a story was being told really landed with me. I see its influence when I look at [my own tracks] Fill Me In and Seven Days.”
Craig David ft Sting Rise & Fall (2003)
“Singing this at Glastonbury and having 90,000 people singing the words back was a huge moment. It uses Sting’s Shape of my Heart guitar riff, which – graciously – he said I could use. He sang on it, too. Being in the studio with him was mind-blowing. He gave me such wisdom in a short period of time. And he showed me how to do crosswords.”
Robin S Show Me Love (1993)
“When I DJ [as TS5], this song connects every time, as soon as you hear that intro. It’s actually a sad love song, but empowered, too. At a festival, it takes on another meaning: it’s just about showing love. As a songwriter, I like that juxtaposition – to have a lyric that’s so deep, but everyone’s having the most positive, euphoric moment singing it.”
The Parkinsons Project
True grit
This inspiring new flm shines a light on a climber who, despite signifcant challenges, is pushing harder than ever
Filmmaker Jess James first heard of Chris Hamper when some climbing friends told him of a man who, despite displaying obvious symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, had approached a climbing wall and nailed it. “It took him about two minutes to get on his harness, which normally might take 10 or 20 seconds,” says James, taking up the story. “But then he went and climbed the hardest route on the wall. He’d gone from being the kind of person most people would write off to doing all these moves that young
upstart climbers wouldn’t be able to get near. That really sparked my interest: how can these two things co-exist in the same person?”
Hamper became the subject of James’ latest film, The Parkinsons Project, which tells of the 67-year-old’s determination to continue climbing following his diagnosis 10 years ago. “When I was little, I’d climb everything: boulders in the park, walls around the house, trees,” says the Coventry-born man, who recently retired from teaching to focus on his passion.
Sharing stories rarely told: filmmaker Jess James; (top) climber Chris Hamper in action
After becoming immersed in the Sheffield climbing scene in the 1980s, Hamper moved to Flekke, a village in Norway, where he taught physics and introduced his students to his sport. But when he developed Parkinson’s – the fastestgrowing neurological disease worldwide – both his teaching and his climbing suffered. Hamper found he was getting confused, losing strength on his left side and struggling to read climbing routes, while a drop in dopamine impacted his motivation levels.
But rather than give in to these challenges, Hamper continued to climb, something he believes has helped not only his physical symptoms but also his mental health.
“The movement of climbing is something special – it makes you feel something,” he says. “Yesterday I was feeling really bad. [But] I arranged to go on the kilter board [a type of climbing wall] and when I got there everything changed. I just felt much better and climbed quite well.”
James has made several films about climbing, but most have focused on elite athletes. The Parkinsons Project, he says, meant “telling a story that doesn’t solely focus on ability but actually dives into why people do sport… That’s a bit of an under-told story [in] a world that focuses so much on achievement”.
Indeed, the degenerative nature of Parkinson’s has forced Hamper to adjust his ambitions. “I always like to try to get better at climbing, but since the diagnosis I’ve realised I can’t really get that much better,” he says. “So my approach has changed a bit. I’m now much more satisfied with doing easier climbs but trying hard.
“I used to climb 7A or 7B and now I’m climbing 6A or 6B, but I’m trying just as hard as I was before. That seems to be more important. The main message I have is not to give up trying hard.” theparkinsonsprojectfilm.com
RACHAEL
The MiG-21 Project
High art
South African artist Ralph Ziman creates beautiful artworks from the tools of war – and he hopes that in their new form they’ll prove just as powerful
Ralph Ziman can’t tell us exactly how many glass beads he used in his MiG-21 Project, only a ballpark figure: “tens of millions”. It’s an astounding piece of work: a vast decommissioned Cold War fighter jet completely transformed inside and out by a painstakingly applied covering of tiny multicoloured beads arranged in vibrant, geometric patterns.
“Under apartheid, because beadwork was done by Black people it was looked on as a lowly craft – shit made for tourists,” says the 62-yearold South African artist and filmmaker. “I wanted to elevate it to high art, because that’s what I believe it is.”
The MiG-21 Project is the final instalment of his Weapons of Mass Production Trilogy, a body of work begun in 2013, which has seen him repurpose symbols of violence into beacons of
resistance and resilience. For the first, Ziman made replicas of AK-47 assault rifles from glass beads and wire; next, he clothed a Casspir armoured vehicle in elaborate beadwork. But the plane was his biggest challenge yet: “When I got the Casspir in the studio, I was like, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ But once we got the MiG in… this thing is just unbelievable.”
Measuring 51ft x 24ft (around 15m x 7m), the MiG-21 is the most prolifically produced supersonic jet fighter ever. “Somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 have been made,” says Ziman. “The idea was that you make these cheap, easyto-service aircraft and you fill the skies with them.”
Having obtained the jet from a US military contractor that was unable to use it due to incomplete service records, Ziman estimated a three-year
project, but it ended up taking double that time. Now based in LA, he worked with an international team that swelled to 100 people when they were working flat-out. Most important were the skilled artisans back in South Africa who produced the beadwork by hand. “The work they do is extraordinary,” says Ziman. “Every bead is hand-threaded on a needle, one at a time. There’s no shortcut, no loom, no way to mass-produce it. I marvel at the artistry [involved], the craftsmanship. It’s like
working with pixels, only these are pixels in real life.”
Ziman’s motivation for reimagining and reclaiming objects manufactured to oppress and aggress is rooted in his experiences of violence while growing up in apartheidera South Africa. “The first time I had a gun pointed at me in anger, I was 14 or 15,” he says. “What I want to do is change the meaning of these objects. I want people to see the beauty of it but also to think about weapons in a different way. We’re living in a time now when the world is
rearming… Guns don’t make you safer; they make things so much more dangerous.
“I love the idea that we’re taking something that was designed in the Soviet Union, designed for warfare, and it’s providing jobs for people in Africa. The profits we’ve made from this have all been ploughed back into charitable endeavours. We want to donate a portion to art therapy in the Ukraine, for both soldiers and civilians.”
The MiG-21 Project is on display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight until January 2026; ralphziman.com
Flying colours: (main and inset pics) the Mig-21 Project, Ralph Ziman’s bead-adorned fighter jet; (far left) the artist and his earlier Casspir Project
Every year, hundreds of thousands of spectators flock to Bristol – the ‘ballooning capital of the world’ – to watch hot-air balloons fill the skies. But not only do the colourful orbs float serenely in the air at the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta, they also inhabit the streets below, thanks to a sustainable fashion label that turns their hard-wearing fabric into messenger bags for the city’s cycling community.
Streetwear brand ReRun has been repurposing vintage denim, old blankets and tents as skateboarding clothing since 2018, but working with hot-air balloon fabric presented a new challenge. “We were always looking for things we could make stuff out of, and then we managed to grab a load of balloon offcuts,” explains ReRun co-founder Theo Thorpe, who set up the brand with his friend Wilf Hastings. “I think we initially tried to have a go at sewing them ourselves, but it was such a nightmare. They ended up [lying unused] in our fabric piles for probably two years. But we were just waiting for the right person to be able to help us with the project.”
That person was designer and fellow skater Theo Schaale, who set about working with scraps sourced from Cameron Balloons – the world’s largest hot-air balloon manufacturer – whose factory is just down the road from the ReRun warehouse in Bedminster.
Possessing no stretch, balloon fabric is “exceptionally slippy and really hard to sew”, Thorpe says, but it’s the ideal material for a hard-wearing cycling bag. “It’s ripstop nylon, but some of it has a special metal film to reflect heat,” says Schaale. “This was exciting for us and created a striking look. It’s great for bags because of its durability compared with its weight. I designed around the fabric’s constraints to make a very light but strong bag.”
Once ReRun had figured out how to work with the material,
What do hot-air balloons and cyclists have in common? More than just baskets, thanks to this forward-thinking fashion brand
the biggest challenge was the colour palette. “The main issue we had is that hot-air balloons are wild colours,” Thorpe says. “When you look up at the sky, it’s like a rainbow. Our aesthetic has always been a bit more toned down and fashionconscious, and we didn’t want the bags to look superrecycled and patchworky. It was about finding a way to make the colours complement each other.”
After seven years working in sustainable fashion and travelling the world to source materials, Thorpe is still aghast at how much is thrown away: “It’s astounding, especially in Asia. There are skyscraper-
sized stacks, which is so sad to see. But it feels like there’s a resurgence of people repairing their clothes – especially young people and skaters – which is encouraging.”
Also heartening is how popular sustainable design has become: the first collection of ReRun’s hot-air balloon messenger bags, retailing at £90, sold out in just half an hour. And, luckily, there’s no sign of Thorpe’s team running out of fabric. “Another friend has just messaged to say he’s got a load of hot-air balloon scraps,” he says, “so all signs point to us making more.” rerunstreetwear.com
ReRun hot-air balloon bags
Blowing up
Hot property: ReRun’s first collection of messenger bags made from balloon fabric sold out in little more than 30 minutes
Soft Girls Who Hike
Go with the slow
By challenging preconceptions of what it means to be ‘outdoorsy’, these two friends opened up a new world of adventure
For many keen hikers, it’s a badge of honour to complete a difficult route in the fastest possible time. But when friends Emily Thornton and Lucy Hird joined a hiking group shortly after the COVID pandemic, they quickly realised that its competitive side wasn’t for them.
“It just felt that you were trying to get up the mountain as quickly as you could,” says Thornton, 36. “We felt
like we didn’t really fit into the box of what ‘outdoorsy’ is.”
Instead, the pair struck out on their own, coining a new term in the process: ‘soft hiking’. “It’s a more inclusive term for a variety of people who maybe felt like they couldn’t call themselves a ‘hiker’ as such,” Thornton says. “People thought we meant physically soft, but actually it’s a mindset,” adds Hird, 31. “There’s such a
stigma that hiking has to be hard. Actually, you can take your time with it. If we’re going up a really steep climb, we don’t feel the need to push through – we’ll stop, rest, and listen to our bodies. We’ll take in the view. It’s about slowing down and the art of noticing.”
It turned out that Thornton and Hird weren’t alone in their desire to enjoy walking in a gentler way. As Soft Girls Who Hike – founded in 2023 – they now have more than 50,000 followers on TikTok, where they post tips, routes and videos of the wildlife, scenery and historic sites they encounter.
The duo prioritise hikes that can be accessed via public transport from their homes in Manchester and the Peak District. But their ethos doesn’t preclude tackling tougher terrain: it’s all about your approach. For example, a route in Hebden known as ‘the Switzerland of Yorkshire Circular’ might take seven hours including stops for rest and exploration along the way. Another of their favourites is the Dragon’s Back route in the Peaks: “You can adapt it to your needs,” Thornton says. “I went on the path but Lucy scrambled up some of it [off-track]. It’s the perfect soft hike.”
Nowadays, the two friends consider their hikes to be sacred bonding time as well as essential for their mental health. “For me, it’s like finding a love for the outdoors again,” Thornton explains. “I come from quite an outdoorsy family, but [there was always] the mindset that you had to be trudging through the rain and mud, and that it was an achievement to get to the end. Whereas now I’ve found a different perspective.”
“We encourage others to create their own soft hike,” Hird adds. “We’re here to use as a kind of blueprint [for that]. What’s most important to us is people finding their own adventure.”
TikTok: @softgirlswhohike
Soft power: (from left) Lucy Hird and Emily Thornton, aka Soft Girls Who Hike
Mitch Hutchcraft
Swimming the English Channel, cycling across two continents and climbing Mount Everest was almost enough to break this adventure-hungry former Marine
Words Mark Lomas
Sporting a bushy beard reminiscent of Tom Hanks’ in the film Cast Away, his face lit only by the glow of his phone, Mitch Hutchcraft is trying to come to terms with the gravity of what he’s achieved. Just 48 hours have passed since he completed a journey of more than 13,000km from the shore of Dover to the summit of Mount Everest. The expedition’s suitably blockbuster name: Project Limitless.
Over eight gruelling months, 32-yearold Hutchcraft swam the English Channel, rode 11,900km through Europe and the Middle East to India, ran 900km to Nepal, then finally conquered the world’s highest mountain. Sitting in his Kathmandu hotel, on a patchy phone line not helped by a local blackout, the Englishman can finally pause to reflect on his remarkable feat of human endurance.
This was just the latest in a series of challenges Hutchcraft has taken on since leaving the Royal Marines in 2021. He’s also rowed the Atlantic, cycled across North America, and set a record for swimming the Lake District’s 11 swimmable bodies of water consecutively. Now he has completed what has been described as both the world’s longest triathlon and the longest climb of Everest.
Here, Hutchcraft talks us through the highs and lows of his adventure…
the red bulletin: How did it feel reaching the summit of Everest?
mitch hutchcraft: It was everything I’ve dreamed of for the last 27 years. I felt incredibly lucky as, walking up to the top, there was nobody else there and I could see the world below me. After 13,200km, it was finally the end. It was a sense of relief. We’d passed people who hadn’t
made it, who had died on the mountain. Obviously, given what I’d put my body through over the previous months, I’d wondered if it would be physically possible to climb Everest, so to reach the top was magical. I knew my dad [a big inspiration in Hutchcraft’s life, who died 12 years ago] would be proud.
Most people would be content with a regular triathlon…
Crazy ideas come from other crazy ideas. There aren’t as many ‘real’ adventures you can do now, but an unsupported Atlantic crossing – three hours on, three hours off – for two months is definitely still one of them. It was then, while rowing, the idea popped into my head.
How difficult was the Channel swim? Sitting here now, it’s amazing to think that day one was absolutely the hardest. It was more than 18 hours in the sea, in the worst conditions. Thirteen people left England for France that day, and only one other person made it across –and he finished before the bad weather hit. At one point there was a big tide, a big current, and for an hour I just wasn’t moving. I’d been swimming for 10 hours non-stop at this point, with more than eight hours to go.
How did you cope?
I remember a moment of feeling totally overwhelmed – I wasn’t moving, and I knew I still had 13,000km to go when I got to the other side. In moments like this, you need to dig in. It’s 99-per-cent mindset – I’ve always believed that if your mind is strong, your body will follow. I just remember thinking of my dad and all the people I was fundraising for. But for the final five hours of the swim it honestly felt like I was just trying not to drown.
Are adventurers born or made?
Definitely a bit of both. But I feel it’s a fundamental part of who I am. It’s in my DNA. I remember my mum saying that once, when I was three years old, we went to the forest and I didn’t want to leave. There’s no definition of adventurer –anyone can become one, at any age. It doesn’t have to be something big – every time you attempt something you’ve never done before, that’s adventurous. You don’t need an expedition to be an adventurer.
Were there opportunities to laugh and enjoy yourself on such an intense trip? There were many moments of genuine joy. The best ones were when we’d end up in some beautiful canyon or mountain or beach. We’d see a beautiful sunset in the desert and then get a little fire going and just appreciate the nature around us. Aside from that, the level of kindness we experienced from people was something we’d never expected. We had a driver in Iraq going out of their way to help us; a hotel owner in Pakistan who gave us a free room; a guy in India who invited us to stay with him. These little moments you don’t plan for are the best.
Has the experience changed you? It’s made me appreciate there’s something quite magical about humanity. I feel more open to other people after experiencing how open they have been to me. Of course, from a physical and mental perspective, it has pushed me and made me realise how much is possible. And I really hope it encourages others to open their eyes and challenge themselves in some way.
Project Limitless
December 2021 The idea is born during Hutchcraft’s Atlantic rowing challenge November 2022 – December 2023 He cycles coast-to-coast in the US as part of his preparation September 15, 2024 Project Limitless begins with a 35km swim across the English Channel September 2024 – January 2025 Hutchcraft cycles 11,900km from Calais to Digha, India January 29 – February 26, 2025 Runs 900km from India to Kathmandu, Nepal March 18 – April 1, 2025 Treks 360km to Everest Base Camp May 11, 2025 Finally reaches the summit of Everest
Instagram: @_mitchhutch
“Adventuring is a fundamental part of who I am. It’s in my DNA”
Paris Crossley
The popping pro has been dancing since she could walk. Now her skills are about to be uniquely tested in an international dance battle with a difference
Words Jessica Holland Photography Svenja Grüttner
When dancer Paris Crossley is popping, you can’t look away. Fast, jerky flicks of the hands give way to controlled, robotic movements, parts of her body static while others move with mechanical precision. Then everything changes again, her whole form appearing to turn to liquid as she melts to the floor…
Rooted in a freestyle dance movement popular on the West Coast of the US in the early ’70s, popping is enjoying a fresh surge in popularity, and Crossley is at the forefront. The 29-year-old, a founding member of London’s Fiya House popping crew, has risen to prominence via the UK street-dance battle circuit in recent years; she’s also danced for chart-topping pop acts including Rita Ora, Dua Lipa and Little Mix.
This October, Crossley is taking her talents to the Red Bull Dance Your Style World Final in Los Angeles, where she’ll compete as a wildcard entrant. The competition poses a unique challenge, bringing together the world’s best street dancers – of all styles – in a series of epic freestyle battles before a live audience, which ultimately decides the winner.
Crossley is nothing if not prepared. The Londoner first discovered her love of movement while still a child, dancing to reggae, electronic and funk played at home by her jazz-pianist dad. By the time she hit her teens, Crossley was attending the Swindon Dance Centre for Advanced Training, where she learned various forms of street dance and freestyled in her first cypher – a circle where performers take it in turns to show off their moves.
Since then, she’s toured the world, judging and guesting in battles, working with contemporary dance and theatre
companies, teaching, appearing in music videos and on festival stages, and devising her own movement art – something she plans to do more of later this year.
The Red Bulletin caught up with the popping pro to look forward to her international Dance Your Style debut and talk about her creative journey so far…
the red bulletin: What’s the popping scene like in the UK?
paris crossley: There’s a very specific energy. We come into the community with love and respect, but we also have a drive to push and hustle, and to expand the possibilities. I think it’s in a transition phase right now. There’s a resurgence, with a lot of new people coming into the scene, a lot of raw energy.
What role does Fiya House play in your dance career?
Fiya House is an all-popping-based crew, although a lot of [the members] are quite versatile. I’m an original member; I joined when I was about 16. It’s like a family. It’s so important to have a supportive network of people to push you, encourage you, inspire you, and to provide different perspectives.
Of all the dance styles, why did you connect so strongly with popping? I didn’t connect to it at first. I was used to doing choreography, not freestyling. Popping is quite otherworldly; you’re contracting and releasing your muscles. And you’re taking on different characters – there are styles called ‘Scarecrow’, ‘Puppet’ and ‘Toyman’. I found it very weird and alien at first. My teacher at the time made me freestyle in a cypher, and I felt so uncomfortable that I was in tears at the end. After that, I was like, “That can never happen again.” So I started practising and began to enjoy it.
So you turned your weakness into your biggest strength?
Yes! But I didn’t do it on purpose; it just naturally happened.
Do you see popping differently now? It’s very human at its core, because it’s a dance, but it’s about emulating things that aren’t human. Now I think that’s exactly what makes it magical.
What challenges have you faced to get to this point in your career?
When I was coming up in the popping community, it was very male-dominated. I mainly had men to look up to. I had to learn that as a woman in this dance style I have my own assets to contribute.
What is it you love about expressing yourself using your body?
It’s liberating. Especially if you’re going through something at the time; it can open up emotions, some good, some bad. It can be very healing. It can put you into a flow state and make you highly present as well, depending on the context and the degree of vulnerability you’re willing to give. Each dance is like a self-discovery.
How are you feeling about competing live at Red Bull Dance Your Style?
It’s a bit different to regular battles: it’s more about showcasing your skill set and the performative element of being an artist. It brings together a lot of international artists who don’t necessarily have the same style as me, who might have a completely different artistic and cultural background, so yeah, that’s super-exciting.
Popping parlance
Animation
Imitating a character that’s been animated by stop motion
Tutting
An angular style inspired by Egyptian art (as in King Tut)
The Robot
Embodying the mechanical movement of an automaton
Dime Stop
Coming to a clean stop after a more fluid motion
Isolation
Keeping the rest of the body still while one part moves
Waving
Creating the illusion of a wave travelling through the body
Strobing
A ‘glitching’ effect that mimics strobe lighting
“Popping is liberating. Each dance is like a self-discovery”
Will Westaway
A fear of monotony has set the Torquay-born filmmaker on a globe-trotting quest to solve ancient mysteries, uncover buried treasure and truly live in the moment
Words Jessica Holland Photography Kate Westaway
When Will Westaway was four, his builder dad told him that a co-worker had found a box of gold coins stashed in a retaining wall in a car park. It changed the way he saw the world: even in the most mundane places, you just might find something special if you keep your eyes peeled. Now 42, Torquay-born Westaway has devoted decades to treasure hunting. When not at his day job making video content for brands and charities, he travels to desert islands and remote mountaintops, scans the ocean floor from boats, and looks for Nazi gold in German slate mines. He tags along on trips as a filmmaker and selfdescribed ‘skivvy’, usually with ex-NASA scientist Shaun Whitehead, who was initially reluctant to accept his company. Trust was won after completion of a challenge: Whitehead buried a wax casket – housing the code to a bank vault containing a golden dragon – beneath a traffic island, and Westaway pinpointed its location along the shadow line cast by a nearby monument and dug it up. Now Westaway is examining the mysterious air shafts of the Great Pyramid of Giza and hunting for the literal Holy Grail. This may sound like an Indiana Jonesstyle fantasy, but in reality there’s much more failure than success, and it’s the journey rather than riches that he’s after. Westaway is quick to find the humour in the absurd, nerdy part of his adventures: following leads from French psychics and building metal-detecting shoes. And he says he wouldn’t have it any other way.
the red bulletin: What’s the personality type of a treasure hunter? will westaway: Put it this way, when I see a Tom and Jerry cartoon and Tom’s
going along the bottom of the ocean with a hosepipe in his mouth and weighted shoes, I’m like, “Why can’t I do that?” I did actually try that when I was 17; it was incredibly dangerous and didn’t work.
What was your first big project?
The first thing I did with Shaun was look for Forrest Fenn’s treasure in America. He was an old man who buried gold and precious items worth millions in a chest and created a poem that contained nine clues. I started searching in 2013, looking in bushes, climbing rocks and trees, going to vantage points, lining things up on a map, scurrying around in the middle of nowhere, looking in caves, old mines… I finally stopped looking in 2020, then someone else found it that same year.
How did you feel about that?
Gutted, obviously. But I was actually more gutted the year before, when Shaun came up with a solution to the puzzle that was so good he wanted me to go and check it. I felt sick, because I thought, “It’s going to be there, and I’ll be lost when this amazing search comes to an end.” I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day.
What have been your toughest moments in pursuit of treasure?
Someone had hidden a golden acorn in Cornwall years ago, and we suspected it was in a certain spot, but there was a 10mthick, thorny hedgerow there. I crawled my way through a fox hole, getting torn to shreds by the thorns. It was pouring with rain, and my mum was there wearing a Tesco carrier bag with a hole in the top. But I ended up digging up a silver case containing this solid gold acorn.
What was the feeling like?
You’re kind of trembling. You’re like, “Wow, this is the thing I’ve wasted – sorry, not
wasted, spent – about 500 hours thinking about.” It’s a mega sense of achievement.
Did you get to keep the acorn?
Oh no… I drove about 400 miles to give it to Shaun.
You didn’t feel like you’d earned it?
It’s not the keeping that’s important. It’s like the feeling when you’ve solved a sudoku. You don’t frame the sudoku; you’re like, “That’s done, on to the next one…”
Where do you think the Holy Grail is?
There’s a lot of interesting information that implies Joseph of Arimathea, who was in charge of Christ’s burial, visited the UK multiple times. I’m investigating a particular site that’s linked with incredibly ancient history and has been totally forgotten about.
What advice would you give to an aspiring treasure hunter?
Do it on your own terms and live in the now. That sounds so cringe, but enjoying the moment is a muscle and you need to practise it before it comes naturally.
Why is treasure hunting so important to you?
In my opinion, human beings are knitted together by stories, and stories are what give meaning. The idea of going on a treasure hunt makes what you’re doing more interesting. There’s also a human need to want some element of the unexpected, and a treasure expedition gives you a huge sense of that. What’s more scary than monotony? You want to believe that the world is massive. It’s a celebration of the unknown.
Treasured tools: Westaway’s essential kit
The treasure hunter never travels without his camera, and clothing with extra pockets sewn on. These are some of the gadgets that Westaway also likes to take along: Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) ‘snakes’ with a depth range of more than 40m. Small enough to traverse through jungle, slide down tunnels and lower down cliffs. Crawler robots that explore and map environments too small for human access. Perfect for finding out where mysterious holes in walls, tunnels and cracks lead to. Metal-detecting inner soles (with GPS tracking) that can be inserted into shoes to build a data set of what’s underfoot.
“Humans need an element of the unexpected. Treasure hunting gives you that”
WAVES MAKING
LAURA CRANE’S JOURNEY FROM CROYDE TO NAZARÉ HAS BEEN ANYTHING BUT STRAIGHTFORWARD. BUT IT'S GIVEN HER THE STRENGTH TO TAKE ON GIANTS
Words Jessica Holland
Portraits Amelia Pemberton
BIG-WAVE SURFING
Riding high: Laura Crane in action in Nicaragua in June this year
It’s a grey, choppy February day in Nazaré, Portugal, home to the world’s biggest waves, and 30-yearold surfer Laura Crane hasn’t competed in more than a decade. She’s being towed by jet ski into a wall of water, the first British woman to qualify for a top-level World Surf League (WSL) event and the first to have ever ridden walls of water the size of tower blocks here at North Beach. She holds the rope and readies herself to drop in, feeling fear but trusting in the programme of gruelling resilience training she’s put herself through to get here.
“In the face of that fear,” she says afterwards, “all I can do is trust I’ve done the training, trust I have a good breath hold, trust I know what to do.” Crane also knows what comes next, when she’s flying across the water at speeds comparable to a car on a motorway, propelled by hundreds of tonnes of volatile ocean power. “It’s past excitement; it’s euphoria. You’re not even in this world. Or you’re in it more than ever, so connected to everything, purely in the moment.”
The waves aren’t huge by Nazaré standards – today, they’re the size of a house rather than a skyscraper – but the water is bumpy and wild enough to challenge the world’s best. The first time she catches a wave, Crane has already made history, but she doesn’t hold on for
long. Then, about 15 minutes in, she gets a chance to show what she’s made of, charging fast and surfing a daring line, turning into the most critical part of the wave as the crest foams over her head.
Her strength and power are clearly visible, but when a chop of backwash hits her on her second turn it sends her flying. She’s unable to get her front foot out of the strap it’s wedged into, and she feels her ankle break before she even hits the water. Distracted, Crane doesn’t take a breath or pull the cord on her impact vest before the colossal wave breaks on top of her. But her training kicks in and she makes it to the surface in one piece, managing to haul herself onto the sled attached to the jet ski driven by her competition partner, Tony Laureano.
At this point, most people would focus on getting back to dry land, but Crane insists on switching roles with Laureano and towing him onto a couple of waves. Driving a jet ski in these conditions is a skill that’s arguably as hard as surfing itself, and it’s a requirement for competitors in the Big Wave Challenge. “I’ve got five minutes in me,” she remembers saying. “I need to show that I can put you on a good wave and pick you up on the inside. Until then, I’m not fucking going anywhere.” Bouncing around on the ocean with a smashed-up foot was “hell”, Crane says, but she still counts the day as one of the best of her life.
As she tells the story a few days later, the surfer exudes positivity and
“THERE’S DEFINITELY A FEW OF US WHO SEE THE ATLANTIC AS OUR POWER. IT MADE ME REALLY TOUGH”
Chill factor: Crane began surfing in the cold Atlantic waters of Croyde, north Devon, at the age of six
determination; it’s clear that psychological resilience is one of her defining qualities. It’s something that she works on daily, Crane explains, which means 5am ice baths as well as punishing workouts. “Big-wave training is about putting yourself through as much hell as possible,” she says. “We train our minds to feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations. It sounds horrible, but it gives you a sense of inner trust that you can get yourself through really tough things.”
Growing up in the UK helped develop this muscle. Crane started surfing at the age of six in the cold Atlantic waters of Croyde, north Devon, where, she says, “we’d probably get one or two decent days a month”. The location isn’t as famous as some of the hotspots in nearby Cornwall, but it can serve fast, barrelling beach-break waves at low tide. Most globally prominent surfers are from tropical spots with daily access to perfect turquoise tubes, rather than chilly English fishing villages. But, Crane says, “if there was one thing I was never scared of, it’s hard work. There’s definitely
a few of us who see the Atlantic as our power. It made me really tough”.
At 30, Crane also has a deeper, hardwon strength that comes from not only the ordeals she’s chosen but also those she didn’t. She gained her first highprofile sponsorship at the age of 12, after becoming British champion, but her surfing career “didn’t take the route that I dreamed it would”, she says. “The value they saw in female surfers back then was: if you look good, you’re going to sell something, and if we can put you in less clothes, you’re going to sell even more. For a 12-year-old girl, that was pretty hard to swallow. I turned from being this go-getting athlete to an Instagram bikini model within about three years.
“They were dangling this carrot: you can have your dreams, but to get them you have to completely lose yourself. So your dreams change. They make you feel like you should be grateful to have that space in the industry. It really, really broke me. I developed an eating disorder that ran my life for 15 years.” When she retired from surfing at 21, she explains, “it got to a point where I was being
Spray time: Crane rides one of Nazaré’s world-famous waves at a free surf session in November 2023; (right) pre-competition practice this January
HELIO ANTONIO, ANDREA ASTARITA
CRANE’S PRE-GAME
BIG-WAVE SURFING REQUIRES INTENSE STRENGTH AND CARDIO FITNESS. THIS IS HOW THE DEVON PRO PREPS DAILY FOR A SEASON OF BATTLING GIANTS
Twenty minutes of meditation in front of an infrared light at 5am.
A three-to-five-minute ice-bath plunge at 5.30am “to set the tone for the rest of the day”.
The bulk of the day will be spent on cardio and breath holds. This might be a six-hour, 100-mile bike ride one day, holding her breath during the uphill sprints, with
a heavy weight-lifting session later in the day, focusing on end-range movements so that the body is strong when held in difficult positions while surfing. Another day may involve running hill sprints, followed by underwater training in a pool, carrying a kettlebell underwater and spiking her heart rate with jumps outside the pool at the end of each lap. This replicates what the body must deal with when held down beneath multiple waves.
Eating whole foods as much as possible, including protein smoothies with nuts and fruits, chicken and rice, eggs and protein bars.
Yin yoga – a slow form of the discipline, where passive poses are held for long periods – every evening.
Thinking big: after finishing third at
this February,
is
hungry” to aim even higher next year
Nazaré
Crane
“super-
“BIG-WAVE SURFING IS PAST EXCITEMENT; IT’S EUPHORIA. YOU’RE NOT EVEN IN THIS WORLD”
GOING LARGE KEY MOMENTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF WOMEN’S BIGWAVE SURFING
1959
Californian Linda Benson, aged just 15 at the time, catches a 20ft (6m) wave in Oahu, Hawaii, making her one of the first recorded female big-wave surfers.
2016
Paige Alms is crowned the first-ever women’s big-wave champion at the Pe‘ahi (Jaws) Challenge on her home island of Maui.
2019
The WSL rolls out equal prize money for men and women in all divisions.
2021
The first in-person Red Bull Magnitude – an all-women big-wave competition, judged on videos only on its launch in 2020 – takes place in Hawaii. Keala Kennelly from Kauai wins the Biggest Wave and Overall Winner awards.
2020
Brazilian Maya Gabeira achieves a world record by surfing a 73.5ft (22.4m) wave at Nazaré.
2023
Aussie surfer Laura Enever breaks the paddle-in record by catching a 43.6ft (13.3m) wave at the outer reefs of Oahu’s North Shore.
2025
Laura Crane becomes the first British woman to compete in a WSL big-wave contest.
sick eight times a day and I couldn’t physically keep food down. I was completely broken. Every single part of me had been taken away”.
Struggling to find a new identity, Crane moved to London, appeared on the reality dating show Love Island and tried her hand as a sports TV host. Then, in 2018, she suffered a major health crisis when she contracted lifethreatening sepsis following surgery to remove a cyst on her fallopian tube. “I almost died,” she says. “Like, really fucking close. That was the moment I realised that no one except me knows what’s good for me. I quit all the TV shit and moved back to Devon. I got therapy for my eating disorder for the first time, and that was when everything really changed. I learned that I’d been through some intense trauma, and I slowly started to regain my power.”
At home, Crane saw her younger brother getting stoked to surf on “shitty two-foot waves” and, inspired by his excitement, she tentatively returned to the water. A trip together to a rare, chunky big wave in Cornwall known as
the Cribbar ignited a new passion for the big-wave scene with its emphasis on guts, grit and muscle. Former World Championship Tour surfer Éric Rebière got in touch and offered to teach her how to tow-surf, saying that she was built for the discipline. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a man in the industry value my body for its strength,” Crane says. “I realised that maybe I did actually have a space in this world.”
Buoyed by an excitement that she hadn’t felt since she was a kid, Crane decided to take the £40,000 she had saved from her TV work, drive her entire life from Devon over to Nazaré, buy a jet ski and start pursuing a new dream, this time on her own terms. “No one could take it from me this time,” she says. “No one could tell me how to fucking do it. I was going to pay for it; it was my journey. For the first time in my surf career, I was really proud of myself. I was following the path that I was meant to be on.”
That’s not to say the path is easy. The number of women in big-wave surfing at a high level remains tiny, and there are
All’s swell: Crane at a big-wave surf training session in Nazaré this January, assisted on the day by experienced jet-ski driver and surfer Eric Rebiere
“I WANT THE GIRLS WHO COME AFTER ME TO BE EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE”
still plenty of battles to fight. During the contest, you can hear a commentator on the WSL’s livestream, unaware of Crane’s ankle break, saying that “it must be a huge challenge” for her to drive a jet ski for her partner, and expressing surprise when she does so smoothly. “We’re in a male-dominated world,” Crane says. “Naturally, they believe women shouldn’t drive. I’m still met with, ‘You shouldn’t do this, you’re a girl.’ But now I just have this little smirk on my face, like, ‘You’ll see.’”
She acknowledges that those who came before her had to fight even harder to be taken seriously. The current world record for the biggest wave surfed by a woman is held by Brazilian Maya Gabeira, who rode a 73.5-footer (22.4m) in Nazaré in February 2020. This
achievement came seven years after Gabeira lost consciousness and almost drowned in the same spot – an accident that prompted Kelly Slater to DM her shortly afterwards, suggesting she should quit before she died.
“[Gabeira] pioneered the big-wave scene for women,” Crane says. “She was here in Nazaré 10 years ago, when men were telling her that big waves were not a place for women. She fought for that record. Us three girls who are at the top now want to keep pushing that limit, and we’re getting incredibly close, but I don’t think any of us want to take that record off her until it’s really ready to be broken.”
It was Gabeira who won the women’s contest at Nazaré in 2024, but in January this year she announced her retirement at 37. The following month, France’s Justine Dupont took the 2025 title, with Brazilian Michelle des Bouillons in second and Crane, the big-wave newcomer, third.
“I’m super-hungry for next year,” Crane says now as she focuses on rehabbing her ankle, maintaining her strength, and planning trips to Brazil and the Maldives before returning to Portugal in autumn. “My biggest goal going into this season was to learn how to drive [a jet ski] and then maybe do the contest the following year. I’ve had an incredible season, and I just can’t wait to give it another shot.”
While her goals for the future definitely include winning the contest, Crane says, she also places great importance on helping the women’s big-wave scene continue to grow. Already, a few days after this year’s competition, 18-year-old Scot Robyn Larg – sister of pro surfer Ben – became the second British woman, and the youngest ever, to ride Nazaré’s ultra-gnarly waves. Rather than feeling threatened, Crane is excited by this sign of progress. It’s part of the reason she wants to get her own story out there, with all the lows as well as the highs: “I want the girls who come after me to be exactly who they are, from start to finish. No confusion. Just go and get your dream.”
When she arrived in Nazaré, Crane benefitted from the support of the women already surfing there, and she’s ready to pay this forward. “I’m so proud that in our little crew of big-wave girls we understand we have to be in this together. Yes, we’re athletes and we’re competitive, but when push comes to shove we’ve got each other’s backs. We have our own voices, and no one can stop us now.”
This interview is taken from Raised on Waves, a 148-page Red Bulletin special featuring surf stories from the UK and Ireland, on sale now at UK newsstands and on Amazon
FIRST WATER
JORDY SMITH – TEAM O’NEILL ATHLETE – PHOTO: NATHAN LAWRENCE
Putting in a shift: Lucy Procter sledpushes 102kg at the 2025 HYROX World Championships;
WITNESS THE
FITN
(opposite) Jake Dearden in action
GLOBAL SPORTING
PHENOMENON HYROX HAS ALREADY ATTRACTED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF ATHLETES TO ITS SWEATY, HIGH-OCTANE RACES. BUT ONLY THE BEST OF THE BEST MADE IT TO THIS YEAR’S WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS FOR THE ULTIMATE GYM-BASED BATTLE
Words Tom Ward
Photography Christian Pondella
I’m a rollin’ thunder, pourin’ rain/I’m comin’ on like a hurricane… AC/DC’s hard-rock anthem Hells Bells reverberates around the Grand Ballroom of Chicago’s historic Navy Pier on a Thursday evening in early June. A real-life storm has just split the sky above the city, banishing the oppressive 30°C heat and welcoming in cool air over Lake Michigan. But here, inside a venue transformed into a circuit of running track and fitness machines, the drama is just getting started…
Pulling rank: at the Rowing station, the competitors sweat it out over a distance of 1,000m
This is the setting for the 2025 HYROX World Championships, a highly anticipated fitness contest that has attracted more than 10,000 competitors and spectators from around the globe. Huge banners advertising the sport – a combination of running, weightlifting and cardio stations – are draped from every surface, and thousands of fans, who have been excitedly checking out the latest gym shoes and workout gear while quaffing protein shakes from the free bar, are now eagerly taking their seats for the main event.
The air crackles with electricity as 15 men walk into the start pen, all but one shirtless, revealing a sea of shimmering abs. Four-and-a-half thousand athletes will compete here over three days, but these are the Elite 15, the most talented HYROX athletes the world has to offer, united by a passion for this fitness phenomenon and the true grit it has taken to get here.
Hailing from the US, Czechia, Australia and beyond, some of these, such as 2024 world champion Alexander Rončević, are already household names. Others, including British athletes Jake Dearden, 25, and Lucy Procter, 21 – who’ll compete in the women’s race – are among the newest members of HYROX’s elite. Born in 2017, the sport has enjoyed a whirlwind rise to the top of the fitness scene, and these Brits have been part of the wild ride – just a few years after discovering the existence of HYROX, they’re full-time pro athletes with world titles to their names.
All know a win here in Chicago would place them on the tip of the spear in the world’s biggest fitness race – a race that comes with all the noise and atmosphere
of a WWE match. The music blares and the cheers reach deafening levels as the men position themselves on the start line, ready to bring the thunder. The MC counts down to zero. Finally, the storm is unleashed.
Inever thought HYROX would bring me here when I only began training a few years ago,” Dearden says. We’re speaking at a gym in Chicago’s River North neighbourhood, three days before the Elite 15 Singles. The city is still baking hot, its parks swarming with muscled athletes running decked out in high-end fitness gear, almost all of them proudly touting HYROX insignia.
HYROX – a melding of the words ‘hybrid’ and ‘rockstar’ – may have only been born last decade, but its relative youth belies its influence. This year’s World Championships are the sixth to date and, for the first time, events are being staged on five continents, with 500,000-plus participants competing in 40 races, everywhere from London to Cape Town. There are HYROX stations popping up in high-street gyms across the UK; there’s also a TV show, and countless podcasts dedicated to improving your time.
For the benefit of anyone unversed in the phenomenon, HYROX was dreamed up by endurance athlete Christian Toetzke and three-time hockey Olympic medallist Moritz Fürste as a new way to work out. Combining running, weightlifting and cardio stations, their creation took the best elements of ‘hybrid’ sports and formed them into a single programme.
As every sweaty, high-octane race consists of the same eight stations – SkiErg, Sled Push, Sled Pull, Burpee Broad Jump, Rowing, Kettlebell Farmer’s Carry, Sandbag Lunge and Wall Balls, each bookended by a 1km run – HYROX has a uniformity and accessibility that’s attractive to many fitness fans. No matter where you’re racing, the exercises will be exactly the same as in your last race, and the next. Your race times may be slower than the pros, but you’re on the same track, using the same kit.
Athletes at the World Championships can compete alone in the Open, Pro or Elite categories – ranking permitting – as well as in the Doubles and Relay divisions. Procter has chosen Singles and Doubles; Dearden is competing in those two plus Relay. “You don’t have to be naturally talented to be good at HYROX,” Dearden says. “Anyone can learn to run, anyone can learn to push a sled. It just takes grit and hard work.”
Just three years ago, the Manchester native had never heard of HYROX. It was a colleague at his local gym who invited him down to the Birmingham race in 2022. Dearden threw himself into it, dominating his age group (U24). He went all in,
JAKE DEARDEN
Age: 25
Sporting background: Football, ultrarunning
HYROX highlight: Men’s Pro Doubles world champion, Nice, June 2024
Solo PB: 55:44, Glasgow, March 2025
Favourite
HYROX station:
SkiErg: “A strong performance early on sets the tone for the race”
Favourite training hack:
Sleep: “The most beneficial things are free”
Pre-HYROX meal: Bagels with honey and bananas
winning the Men’s Pro Doubles title at the 2024 World Championships in Nice with partner Marc Dean. Then, earlier this year, he teamed up with Australian James Kelly to break the Pro Doubles world record with a time of 50:04 minutes. And in Glasgow this March he rocked HYROX with 55:44 in the Pro Singles division, earning himself a shot at the big time in Chicago.
“It’s weird to be paving the way in a relatively new sport,” admits Dearden, fresh from competitions in New York and Austin. The hardest thing, he says, is that because HYROX is so new, people often don’t understand what it is. “They think it’s a made-up sport. They don’t understand the work it takes to get to the top.”
The day before the Elite 15 compete, a press conference is held at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Three-time world champion Hunter McIntyre, dressed in a pink tracksuit top with popped collar and wearing both a gold watch and a fitness tracker on his wrists, is making some bold statements, announcing to Rončević, Dearden and Kelly that he wants their “ass” in competition.
By contrast, Dearden reiterates how grateful he is to be here, and how much
he respects his competitors. Having shaved for the occasion, the literally fresh-faced athlete is clearly the youngest here by far. “I look up to these guys,” he says in soft Northern tones. “There’s not one person who couldn’t win.”
Neither of the relatively new UK competitors seem to have let their swift rise to pro-athlete status go to their head – despite the training schedules, sponsors, global travel, fans and press conferences that come with it. Each still lives a quiet life in their hometown, preferring to let their explosive performances during competitions do the talking.
“You just try and rise to the challenge,” Dearden says later. Thanks to his side hobby creating HYROX training videos on YouTube, he’s one of few Elite 15 faces the casual fan might recognise, which increases the pressure. “I do think I have a target on my back. I’m aiming for top five. If I came 15th, I’d be mortified.”
FOR THE FIRST TIME, EVENTS ARE BEING STAGED ON FIVE CONTINENTS, WITH 500,000-PLUS PARTICIPANTS
Procter has been in Chicago since Saturday, occupying herself with runs along the shore of Lake Michigan. Like Dearden, the Londoner has blazed a serious trail since first setting foot in HYROX competition, in Glasgow in 2023 at the age of only 19. Then employed in events marketing, Procter had no idea that just two years later she’d return to race in the city a pro athlete, part of the world’s Elite 15, and qualify for the world championships here in Chicago.
“When I left secondary school I got into classes like Barry’s Bootcamp in London,” she says. “Someone there recommended HYROX because I was a good runner and I was strong. I found it’s such a great way to train, really good for general fitness. I love how it gives people from all different backgrounds the chance to have a go.”
When back home, Dearden works through up to 10 gym sessions per week,
Squat goals: the Pro Men at the Wall Balls station. The 9kg ball must hit the strike zone 100 times, each rep started in a squat
Worth the weight: Dearden lines up at the SkiErg, a 1,000m ski challenge; (opposite, top) Procter tackles the Farmer’s Carry – lugging two 24kg kettlebells for 200m – and (bottom) Burpee Broad Jumps over a distance of 80m
“SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT HYROX IS A MADE-UP SPORT. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE WORK IT TAKES TO GET TO THE TOP”
occasionally hitting the gym as many as three times a day, with sessions focused on running drills or practising specific HYROX stations – “I’m obsessed,” he admits. Procter, meanwhile, practises daily in a local gym well-equipped for weightlifting, occasionally decamping to her local high-street gym to use its superior cardio equipment on running or sled-training days. For both competitors, training for HYROX has become their life.
Neither of the two was a stand-out athlete prior to discovering HYROX, however: Dearden played football and competed for a local run club as a kid; Procter ran, and played hockey and cricket, inspired to move by her mother (a dancer) and her father (also a runner). “I was always the best on the B team,” she laughs. “I was never above average.”
Procter has a theory about why she and Dearden have excelled in their new sport: “HYROX is about doing this specific group of things really, really well. Many HYROX athletes didn’t find their sport until their late teens [and so have a varied skill set]. I think myself and Jake doing a bit of everything and then specialising later really helped us, because it gave us a base in so many different sports.”
HYROX IN NUMBERS
Year created: 2017
Participants in the 2024–25 World Championships season: 500,000 upwards
Races in the 2024–25 season: 40
Prize money: $302,000 in total; $30,000 for the Elite 15 winner
Percentage of athletes who complete their race: 98
Affiliated high-street gyms in the UK: 5,000
Annual growth in number of HYROX classes at UK gyms: 270 per cent
Growth in number of UK athletes, season on season: 21/22: 7,400
22/23: 23,200
23/24: 52,200
24/25: 97,000
UK gender split by percentage: Women: 56.8; men: 43.2
Procter was certainly quick to get up to speed in competition. By her third-ever race, she had advanced to the Pro category and finished 80th out of a field of almost 800. At the 2024 World Championships in Nice, she was the fastest woman in her age group, taking the U24 world title. That December, Procter levelled up yet again, advancing from Pro to Elite 15 with a time of 1:01:39 in Marseille. This March, a 1:00:58 finish in Glasgow meant she’d be competing in the Elite 15 ranking at the World Championships for the first time.
“When I learned I’d got in[to the World Championships] it was amazing, the first glimpse [that I’d found] something I was actually really good at,” she says modestly.
In fact, it’s a jaw-dropping ascent. Especially as, for Procter, doing well in Chicago represents a significant personal achievement as well as a professional milestone. She’s comfortable admitting that a fear of failure has always been her source of motivation, which has led to “crippling anxiety” during training sessions. “I would beat myself up if I didn’t execute a session perfectly,” she says. “I was stuck in that mindset of, ‘If the conditions aren’t perfect, I’m not doing it.’ Which is so unhelpful.”
Hard ROX life: 2024 world champion Alexander Rončević (centre, wearing cap) was unable to retain his title, coming eighth
At the start of this season, Procter began working with a sports psychologist who has helped her adopt a more flexible approach, to understand that not every training session will go well, and that’s fine. Now, prepping in Chicago, her outlook has done a 180. “Going into the World Champs, I feel like I can’t really fail,” Procter says. “I keep reminding myself that just by starting I’m already in the top 15 in the world. I know I’ve done all I can in training, all that’s left is to send it as hard as possible. For me, [the definition of] failing is not trying.”
The Elite 15 men tear out of the start pen as the crowd roars. After months of dreaming, of training, Dearden is now in the race that could shape his future.
But something’s wrong. He falls back in the first run and is 10th going into the SkiErg. The next run is worse. The Sled Pull and Sled Push don’t go any better, and then the official word comes through: Dearden has dropped out of his debut Elite 15 World Championships.
At the end of the final, there’s a new champion – Germany’s Tim Wenisch – and Dearden is devastated. “I shed a few tears,” he admits. A nerve injury left his left leg feeling “wooden”. He thought he could battle through, but he soon realised that wasn’t feasible. “I knew it was going to be tough, but it was like a nightmare coming true,” he says.
The race MC encouraged Dearden to take the DNF to save his leg. “He was right,” Dearden admits. “It might take me three weeks to get better; if I’d carried on, it could have been six.”
By choosing not to limp over the finish line, Dearden called his own race, even if it wasn’t the one he’d planned. “You learn more from the hard times than the good times,” he says. “It’s made me focus even more. My next-season prep starts now.”
LUCY PROCTER
Age: 21
Sporting background: Hockey, cricket, running
HYROX highlight: Second place, Women’s Elite 15 Doubles, Chicago, June 2025
Solo PB: 57:35
Favourite
HYROX station: SkiErg: “A chance to regather myself and prepare for the rest of the race”
Favourite training hack: “Threshold running sessions make a huge difference to my fitness”
Pre-HYROX meal: Bagels and strawberry jam
For Procter, Chicago exceeds all expectations. Ranked 11th before the women’s Elite 15, she paces around backstage, warming up as MIA’s Bad Girls shakes the ballroom.
Then, after high-fiving each other in the start pen, the women are off. Procter quickly establishes herself, gaining ground until she literally jumps ahead into fourth in the Burpees. From the Farmer’s Carry to the finish, it’s a battle between Procter and fellow Brit Sinéad Bent. The last run is a mad dash, with Procter in fifth going into the Wall Balls. She maintains her place, finishing fifth. It’s more than she ever dared expect. “Couldn’t be happier or prouder of tonight’s result,” she later writes on Instagram.
Anxiety tamed, Procter has left it all on the track. “Top five was an absolutely aspirational place,” she says the next day, “and I saw it come to fruition so quickly.”
Procter returns for the Elite 15 Doubles race on Saturday, this time teaming up with Bent. The pair are unstoppable, comfortably leading the pack with practised efficiency in the Sled Pull and Sled Push, digging deep to cross the line first.
The jubilation is tempered by 25 seconds of penalty points, accrued in the Rowing and Sandbag Lunge, pushing Procter and Bent down to 55:07 – just nine seconds slower than the team who now take first. Despite the drama, in one weekend Lucy Procter has gone from an outside punt to the world’s fifth-ranked HYROX Singles athlete and half of a silver-medal-winning Doubles team. “Chicago has been an awesome experience for me,” she says with a huge grin.
Chicago has also seen major upsets, but, as HYROX strengthens its grip on the fitness world, Procter and a soon-to-be-rehabbed Dearden are on the cusp of even bigger things. As co-founder Toetzke explains, 2026 will be the sport’s biggest year yet, with its first-ever stadium events in Arizona and Poland. The dream is for HYROX to become an Olympic sport. To help seed interest, two HYROX events will be held in Australia next year, prior to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. Procter hopes to be there. “It’s crazy how I’ve gone from my first race to fifth in the World Champs in just over two years,” she says. “I’m really proud of myself, it’s super-exciting.”
“It’s every athlete’s dream to be in the Olympics,” Dearden adds. “I have plenty of time to get ready for 2032, and many more competitions before that. This year wasn’t my year. Hopefully the coming years are.”
For now, the two Brits head off to enjoy the post-competition calm. They’re both aware that, in this fast-paced world they’re now a part of, it won’t last for long.
Instagram: @_lucyprocter; @jakedearden_
Roll of honour: Mumbai’s Shruti Bhosle, 20, overcame family opposition to became national champion in 2019 – a title she believes saved her from an arranged marriage. A knee injury and the prohibitive cost of surgery may have scuppered her Olympic dream, but she doesn’t plan to stop.
“Skating’s my passion. I’ll always teach other girls. I want them to feel the same freedom it gave me.”
Wheels of progress
IN INDIA, SKATEBOARDING IS STILL WIDELY SEEN AS A SPORT FOR MEN. BUT, AS BERLIN-BASED SKATER AND PHOTOGRAPHER CHANTAL PINZI WITNESSED, DETERMINED WOMEN FROM ACROSS THE GREAT EXPANSE OF THE COUNTRY ARE BREAKING THAT STEREOTYPE – AND DISCOVERING THE POWER THAT COMES WITH GETTING ON A BOARD
Words Rachael Sigee
Photography Chantal Pinzi
In Janwaar, a rural village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, sits a community-built skatepark – and at Janwaar Castle, as it’s known, there’s a golden rule: girls first. This ethos goes against the grain in a country where women are still expected to conform to traditional ideas of gender and are often excluded from public spaces. “It’s insane to see a skatepark in the middle of nowhere like that, with buffaloes crossing it – it’s like another dimension,” says photographer Chantal Pinzi. In 2024, the Berlin-based Italian travelled for 20 hours across India by train and bus to meet Asha Gond, then aged 23, whose passion for skateboarding was shattering stereotypes.
As a female member of the Adivasi tribe – a marginalised group in India’s hierarchical caste system – Gond’s opportunities in life were limited until she discovered the sport. “Skateboarding
Equal footing: 25-year-old Yaki Nabam has been skating for two years, but where she lives in New Delhi there are no public skateparks and no other female skaters. “Sometimes I feel like an outsider within the community, especially because there are no other women skating around me,” she says. “Some of the guys treat me like I can’t land certain tricks just because I’m a woman. I don’t think they always mean it in a bad way; it’s just that they’ve grown up in a society where people assume women can’t do certain things. It’s frustrating, but it also makes me want to prove them wrong.”
Breaking new ground: opened in 2015, Janwaar Castle was the brainchild of German activist Ulrike Reinhard, with the help of Berlin-based NGO Skate-Aid.
“At first, we didn’t understand what was being built,” says Asha Gond (pictured).
“There were rumours: some said it would be an English school, others thought it might be a hostel or even a new hospital. But it was something completely different. When I saw the kids dropping in and carving on the ramp, I wanted to try it, too. It felt amazing right away. At the skatepark, we’re free to express ourselves, no matter our background. It’s a space where everyone is equal.”
empowers me as a woman because it gives me confidence and freedom to be a voice and no longer an echo,” she says. “Every time I land a trick, I feel stronger; I prove to myself that I can do things people say I can’t. In my community, girls are often told to stay quiet or stay home, but when I skate I feel free. At the skatepark, I’m not just a girl – I’m a skater, just like anyone else.”
This April, Pinzi’s images of Gond and other members of India’s emerging women’s skateboarding scene – part of the photographer’s ongoing Shred the Patriarchy project, which has also taken her to Morocco and Ethiopia –won the Sport category at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards. A skater herself, Pinzi understands how empowering the sport can be: “You don’t get a trick immediately; you need to be persistent. You try and try, you fall, maybe you hurt yourself, but you keep
going until you get it. It gives you this sense of freedom. Once you’re skating, everything around you disappears completely. You don’t think about the problems in your life any more; you just focus on the trick and the specific moment. It’s really precious.”
Although conservatism in India tends to sideline female ambition – especially in sports – Pinzi believes attitudes are changing, due in no small part to skateboarding being granted Olympic status. “That changed a lot of opinion,” she says. “India is a really complex society and bringing honour to your own community through a victory, through a medal, means a lot. This recognition gives the freedom to practise it, especially for women. It’s sad you need that, but I think it was a turning point.”
Sister style: “In India, it’s not that easy to create a community because it’s so huge,” explains Pinzi. “There’s not that sisterhood in one specific place. They’re spread all around and try to get together during competitions to create this bond. Goa – where these women are posing [at the Youth Hostel skatepark in Panjim] – is the only place with a big community of female skaters. Because it’s an iconic place for surfing, the skate scene developed from there. The girls wear what they want – sometimes that’s traditional saris and kurtis, other times they wear jeans.”
Skate of mind: when Mumbai’s Urmila Pabale started skateboarding, people thought she was “crazy”, she says. “I used to come home with dirty clothes, all sweaty, and they didn’t understand why I was doing it.” Even now she’s had success, she faces discrimination: “I constantly face comments and judgment. I wear baggy clothes, sometimes short dresses, and I carry a skateboard. Strangers shout things like, ‘Don’t waste your time, get married.’ I hear that all the time. People say I look or act like a boy, but honestly that doesn’t affect me any more; I know who I am. I’m doing what I love. Being myself seems to be a problem here [in India], but I won’t stop. I’ve often felt lonely, but skateboarding has given me strength. It’s taught me to be independent, to live on my own terms.”
SKATEBOARDING
Full board: “This was shot in a parking lot where Urmila [Pabale] goes by herself and practises until she can’t feel her legs any more,” says Pinzi. The 19-year-old trains every single day and has already won a silver medal at India’s National Games but dreams of being an Olympic champion. “Society thinks that we don’t belong in certain spaces,” she says. “They expect us to follow cultural norms, dress traditionally, go to the temple, pray, get married. That’s the path they’ve laid out for us. But skateboarding showed me something different. It helped me see another version of myself, one that is free, powerful and full of potential. I don’t want to follow someone else’s path. I want to be a pro skater.”
Ready to fly: for Shraddha Gaikwad, skateboarding has provided opportunities she could never have dreamed of, including travelling to competitions in France and Dubai where she met one of her biggest inspirations, the Brazilian Olympic silver medallist Rayssa Leal.
“Boarding an aeroplane for the first time was overwhelming,” Gaikwad says. “I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness. When I arrived at the skatepark in Dubai, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and such a grand set-up, I was really nervous. But I was determined to become a pro skater, so I focused on learning as much as possible. No one in my family had ever flown on an aeroplane.”
Flipping the script: as a result of her skating, Asha Gond became the first person from her village to own a passport, and she was India’s only female representative at the 2018 World Skateboarding Championship in China. Her journey has been a difficult one, however: “The villagers talked a lot and told my father many lies, especially about me spending time with boys at the skatepark. He wanted me to get married, but I didn’t want to. There was a time when I went to the skatepark and found a threat written on the wall. I felt deeply hurt, but I tried to stay strong because challenges will always appear for people who are trying to do something good, especially when pushing against the system. You should never give up because of such hateful things.”
Live fast, dye young: Pinzi immersed herself in the project during her month-and-a-half stay in India, spending as much time with her subjects as possible.
“Because I’m an athlete myself and a woman, it was easy to communicate and connect with them,” she says.
“It became a friendship; I became part of their life. Sometimes I would even live with them and get to know their families, as with Asha [Gond, pictured with her hands decorated with mehndi, or henna]. It was a full immersion. I love her sensibility, her curiosity. She’s already done so much for a woman her age. She’s faced a lot of difficulties and just pushed forward.”
LIVING AMONG US ARE EXTRAORDINARY ATHLETES WITH EXCEPTIONAL PHYSICAL AND MENTAL GIFTS. HERE, WE UNMASK THE REAL HUMAN STORIES BEHIND THEIR UNREAL POWERS
MARTIN STREL
EXTREME SWIMMER
“People told me that to swim the Amazon you must be completely crazy,” admits Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel. “There are piranhas, crocodiles, bull sharks, anacondas and candiru, [which are] the scariest fish on the planet – if you pee in the water, these small spined fish swim up your urethra. [There are also] diseases, parasites, heat, torrential rain. Local people said, ‘You will die in two days.’”
But Strel possesses a very special power: superhuman vision. No, he can’t see through walls or into the future. But, as proven by his previous world-first swims – including the length of the Danube (3,004km in 58 days) in 2000, and the Yangtze (4,003km in 51 days) in 2004 – Strel has the ability to visualise a seemingly impossible goal, and the resolve to make it a reality. That’s how, in 2007, aged 52, Strel shocked the world by becoming the first man to swim the 5,268km length of the Amazon – from Atalaya, Peru, to Belem, Brazil – in 67 days.
“Achieving the impossible: this is my goal,” explains Strel, now 70. “People say, ‘What does it mean?’ It means I can ‘see’ this goal in my mind, and I’m going to do this. This is like a war. Everything is against me. But I’m gonna say every day, ‘This is possible.’”
In a post-swim documentary for National Geographic, Strel underwent a clinical analysis by psychologist Dr Dan Shapiro of Pennsylvania State University. Based on personality tests, but with the swimmer’s identity kept secret from him, Dr Shapiro concluded Strel was “absurdly confident”, capable of “magical thinking” and “visionary or… delusional”.
It’s a fine line. But in psychological terms a visionary is someone who can envision radical new possibilities – and make them happen. Strel’s Amazon success proved he’s a visionary. “If you believe in yourself, in God, in something, what is impossible?” he says. “I keep this vision in my mind always. You have to stay successful, even though you have a thousand problems.”
Strel’s powerful visions begin with a meaningful goal. Having grown up swimming in pristine rivers and lakes, he says water is his lifeblood. Although in his earlier life he was a soldier, a poker player and a guitarist, the Slovenian’s love for water inspired him to take up marathon swims and extreme challenges. His Amazon swim was crafted to raise awareness
“WHEN I HAD CRAMPS OR RASHES, I JUST THOUGHT OF DIFFERENT FILMS, OR PLAYED GUITAR IN MY HEAD”
of the need to protect our waters and rainforests. “When I was in pain, I said 1,000 times, ‘That’s why I am here,’” he says. But any grand vision must be grounded in reality. So, before his Amazon swim, Strel used visualisation techniques to imagine problems before they happened. “I ‘see’, at the beginning till the end, everything,” he says. This manifested itself into intense preparation. Imagining the pain and problems to come, Strel trained hard, with 400 sessions in the pool, ocean and rivers over a year; he selected a skilled team, from doctors to danger ‘lookouts’, for his support boat; he identified the most digestible foods, including soup, pasta and fish; and he chose to wear a ‘superhero’ mask made from a pillowcase to avoid sunburn: “I was like a demon,” he laughs.
Strel even had a specific plan for a lethal piranha attack. “Piranhas don’t like fast water, so I swam many times with piranhas in the faster-flowing middle of the river,” he says. “I could touch them. Then one day they started eating my back. But we had arranged for the team to drop buckets of blood in the water to get them away from me.”
Perhaps his greatest mental challenge was how to maintain his positive ‘vision’ under extreme fatigue. “At the beginning, you have a clear vision,” he says. “Then you’re losing power, you’re skinnier, it’s soon impossible to walk, eat, sleep…” In the harshest moments of nausea, exhaustion and sunstroke, Strel fixated on controlling the vision in his mind. Sometimes he used ‘association’ techniques, tuning into his surroundings to maintain his focus: “Swimming by the riverbank offered more for my eyes.” He also used ‘dissociation’ techniques, redirecting his thoughts towards other things. “When I had back cramps and rashes, I just thought of different films, or ‘played’ guitar in my head, or ‘talked’ to God or my wife,” he says.
But one huge question remains: how did Strel convince himself to slide into the murky Amazonian water each day, knowing its dangers? “You know every minute could be your last,” he admits. “So I would ‘talk’ to the animals. I would say, ‘I’m your friend! Don’t bite me!’ That was non-stop in my head.”
This is what psychologists mean by ‘magical thinking’: the belief that one’s thoughts can influence real-world events. Used unwisely, it’s delusional. But harnessed strategically, it offers a potent coping mechanism. Strel couldn’t control the sharks or the piranha. What he could control, however, was the vision in his own mind, in which he saw himself as a friend of the wildlife around him. Like a BASE jumper about to leap into the void, he had to convince himself everything would be fine – even though he could never know for sure. “Even when swimming the Amazon, you have to feel like you are in a swimming pool, nice and relaxed,” he says. “I’m not crazy. But in the Amazon you have to be a small genius to survive.”
TARA DOWER ULTRARUNNER
On the rocky slopes of Blood Mountain in Georgia, Tara Dower looked up and saw the devil. Stumbling and sleepstarved after running an average of 54 miles (87km) per day for more than a month, the ultrarunner was battling towards the end of her historic Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the fabled 2,197-mile (3,535km) Appalachian Trail, a route that crosses 14 American states, from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia. “I started getting microhallucinations,” Dower recalls. “I saw this little devil sitting on a log. I saw a lion. I saw a person hanging from a tree. They were split-second hallucinations but terrifying.”
These dark images symbolise Dower’s tortured mind. Her feet were wrecked by blisters and holes the size of “large caverns”, and her little toes were as black as her thoughts. Most humans would quit. But Dower has a special gift. Her secret is tattooed on her right thigh, where the words ‘Suffer Well’ sit above a heart-shaped wreath of barbed wire – a vivid pain-busting image inspired by a sign she saw at the Hardrock 100 endurance run in Colorado. “Honestly, that’s why we do this stuff: to get to that point where you’re hurting and it feels impossible,” says Dower. “How will I move past that? I thought, ‘This is so intense and epic. I’m going to finish this, no matter what.’ My mantra was just, ‘I’m doing it. I am doing this momentous FKT. And I’m proving it to myself and others.’”
Dower’s ability to ‘suffer well’ gives her an endurance edge. The more she cries in anguish, the more she knows she’s achieving something extraordinary. As Heather Quiñones, a member of Dower’s support crew, put it, “That is the wail of a woman making history.”
Each year, around 3,000 people attempt to hike, not run, the full Appalachian Trail, which involves 141,579m of ascent and descent – the equivalent distance of climbing Mount Everest 16 times. Roughly 75 per cent will fail. Those who succeed typically take five-to-seven months. But at 11.53pm on September 21, 2024, Dower, aged 31, finished it in 40 days, 18 hours and six minutes. In slashing by 13 hours the time set by male Belgian runner Karel Sabbe in 2018, she took the overall trail record. “I felt complete,” she says.
Dower comes across as a cloak-wearing heroine of superhuman stamina, capable of feats mere mortals cannot
” THINKING ONLY OF THE FINISH WAS EXHAUSTING… MAKING LITTLE CARROTS [TO CHASE] HELPED ME”
dream of. But it wasn’t always this way. On her first attempt at the Appalachian Trail in 2017 – a humble hike, not a run – she suffered an anxiety attack. Sudden chest pain. A migraine. A shortage of breath. “I got this incessant merrygo-round of thoughts like, ‘My gosh, I miss my family, the trail is so long, I shouldn’t be here,’” she recalls. “I felt this impending doom.” After eight days, she quit.
This failure devastated her. Having grown up hiking as a child, running at school and playing rugby at college –“The guys were like, ‘You can’t play rugby, that’s crazy,’ but if somebody says I can’t do something, I’m gonna do it” –the North Carolina native was a gritty, stubborn “outdoorsy” person who “lives for big challenges”. She’d been mesmerised by the culture and beauty of the Appalachian Trail since watching a documentary about it at college. “It was all I wanted to do. And I failed.”
To fight back, Dower spent years learning about her anxiety, her body, her mind, her strengths and her flaws, slowly reassembling the pieces of her broken self. “I realised that my anxiety is really a fear of the future, a fear of the unknown,” she explains. “And what helps me is staying in the moment.”
In 2019, she returned to hike the Appalachian Trail with her husband Jonathan; they finished it in five months and 10 days. “Last time, I was always focused on the finish, so this time I made smaller goals,” Dower says. “I focused on celebrating milestones and really entrenching myself in the culture of the Appalachian Mountains.”
Battle-hardened and now powerfully self-aware, she soon picked up the pace with her running goals, too, setting FKTs on the 1,175-mile (1,890km) Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina (29d, 8h, 48m in 2020) and the 567-mile (912km) Colorado Trail (8d, 21h, 59m in 2023), and impressing with a fourth-place female ranking at Hardrock 100 in 2024. Chasing a FKT on her beloved Appalachian Trail now became Dower’s grandest ambition.
“There is a big gap between my experiences of the trail in 2017 and 2024, and that gap is chock-full of failures and successes that have taught me so much,” she says. Her race successes taught her about body management – such as eating on the slower uphill segments to aid digestion – and solidified her confidence. And Dower’s failures taught her how to survive hard times. “That failure made me who I am,” she insists. “In life, we try to avoid failures, that feeling of not measuring up, but they’re valuable experiences. I’m so happy I experienced failure, because it made me a more multidimensional person.”
Without her failure, Dower would have lacked the self-knowledge necessary to endure her Appalachian
”YOUR BRAIN AND BODY SEND YOU SIGNALS LIKE, ‘PLEASE STOP!’ BUT YOUR BODY CAN GO FURTHER THAN YOU THINK”
Trail FKT. Over the 40 days, she slipped on wet rocks in Maine, slashing her legs, and faced 32C heat in Pennsylvania that left her in tears. One night, she trod on a venomous copperhead snake but had sped past before it could react. Waking in her tent at 3am, she ran for 17 hours and ate 9,000 calories per day – quadruple the recommended intake for a woman – hoovering up everything from burritos to chewy Airheads.
But in the most torturous moments Dower drew on her newly galvanised mental powers. “I worked on mindset tricks to stay in the moment,” she explains. “So the first 11 days it was like, ‘Just make it to Hanover.’ Then it was looking forward to my friend coming out. The next part was just getting to Virginia. In 2017, thinking only of the finish was exhausting, so making these little carrots [to chase] helped me.”
To calm her anxious thoughts, she listened to music –including the La La Land soundtrack – and used powerful imagery. “I had a lot of Lord of the Rings-esque feelings going on – I viewed myself as Frodo,” Dower says. “This was not a race – nobody was going to come up behind me, motivating me to go faster. I had to find that from within.”
But like all superheroes, she needed sidekicks. Her support team, including her friend Megan ‘Rascal’ Wilmarth, mum Debbie Komlo and various pacers, were her back-up batteries in hard times. “Their help meant all I had to do was move forward,” Dower says. “They were making me food, determining when I would go to bed. I wasn’t in the right mindset to make these decisions.” Dower developed a confidence-boosting alter
ego, visualising herself as a ‘race car’, with her team as her pit crew. “I became a machine,” she says.
Despite her machine-like drive, Dower deliberately treasured glimmers of beauty on the trail. She recalls a rare glimpse of a bobcat at night, and a “poetic” sunrise in Vermont. “People wonder, did I just grit it out the entire time? But if I had to grit it out the entire time, I wouldn’t have finished. I was there because I absolutely love the trail.”
The hardest moment psychologically came in Connecticut, when, after the pouring rain and slippery rocks of Maine and New Hampshire, she fell 100 miles (160km) behind schedule. This forced her to crank up her daily target to 58-60 miles (95km) from New Jersey onwards. “It was an overwhelming amount,” Dower says. “When Rascal told me, I was like, ‘This is impossible.’ I had a lot of turmoil. Mentally, I was fighting myself.” The difference this time was that she had the psychological weapons to fight back. “I just learned to stay in that individual mile and make it the best mile I can.”
In the final days, she launched into a sleep-deprived 129-mile (208km) push to the finish. Dower’s pacer, Hunter Leininger, had to hand-feed her snacks. Tears streamed down her face. But it was her strength of mind, not her strength of body, that enabled her to kapow the demons telling her to stop. “Your brain and body send you signals like, ‘Please stop! We’re trying to preserve you!’ And often it’s not real. Your body can go further than you think. I told myself, ‘Until I physically can’t move, I’ll keep going.’”
Dower was not born with superhuman stamina, but through hard work, humility, success and failure, she became the athlete she needed to be. Her vulnerabilities have made her indestructible. “When I used to see great athletes, I always thought they had a straight line to success,” she says, “but success is a very bumpy ride. And I’m not at the top yet. I’m still learning. These FKTs are like experiencing life. The trail has taught me a lot about who I am. Now I just reiterate to myself, ‘I belong here.’”
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ANDREW COTTON
BIG-WAVE SURFER
Off the coast of Nazaré, a monstrous wave, unleashed by the swell of Hurricane Epsilon, rears up like an angry cobra. It’s October 2020, and Andrew Cotton is on his surfboard, watching this colossal sea-sculpted serpent writhe malevolently towards him. A wave like this could break your back. But Cotton knows this. He can still remember the horrific crack of his L2 vertebra when he was hospitalised by a similar wave here in Portugal in 2017. But today there’s no room for fear, only steelplated courage. A jet ski tows him into position. Then, for a glorious fragment of time, he surfs the wild ocean rodeo.
“The second you let go of the rope, there’s no comeback,” says Cotton, 45, who believes the wave was around 27m high – the biggest he’s surfed. “You let go of the fear and the doubt with the rope and soon you’re hitting 75kph. It may look smooth, but up close you get chops and bumps, like ski moguls. And you have the fear of that white water chasing you. Is that lip going to come underneath the board or pitch behind you? The power and energy in the ocean is just insane. It’s like moving mountains. To surf that, very briefly, is like a dream.”
Slaying waves the size of apartment blocks, he may seem fearless, but courage, he says, is a learnable superpower. Before becoming a big-wave gladiator, Cotton was a plumber.
As a kid in Devon, he’d surfed for fun. When he discovered bigwave surfing in his twenties, via YouTube, the footage amazed and terrified him. But by hunting bigger waves in Ireland, Madeira and Nazaré, in between plumbing jobs, his courage grew incrementally. He recalls a life-changing 50ft (15m) wave in Mullaghmore in 2012.
“One second, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this!’
Then, before I knew it, I was going down one of the biggest lefts I’ve ever had.” Only in 2014, when, aged 34, Cotton surfed an 80ft (24m) wave in Nazaré that attracted global media attention, did he bank the sponsorship to become pro.
“WITH THE OCEANS, THERE IS NO REFEREE, NO PAUSE BUTTON… ONCE YOU’RE GOING, YOU MUST COMMIT”
According to his trainer, Andrew Blake, by exposing himself to fear over many years Cotton has desensitised his body to stress, meaning his heart rate, breathing patterns and brain waves stay calmer in moments of fear. The anxiety remains, but he has learned to master it. “Fear and self-doubt 100-percent go through my head,” Cotton admits. “But the second I get in the water, I go into a different mode where I feel like, ‘I can do this. I’m invincible.’ It hasn’t always been like that.”
Cotton’s ability to enter this ‘courage bubble’ takes effort. Through concentration (letting go of the tow is his cue for focus) and self-talk (he repeats mantras such as ‘I’m gonna make it’), he enters ‘game mode’. “That feeling can last 10 minutes or an hour, but at some point I say, ‘I’m done! Let’s get back to land.’ It takes every ounce of physical and mental energy.” And this is a skill set he’s had to learn twice. Cotton’s horrific 2017 accident, when the wave suddenly changed shape and crushed him, left him barely able to walk for months. “Physically, you get over it quicker than you do mentally. There was a lot of trauma. I could have said, ‘It’s a sign – get out now!’ But do I give up, or do I still chase the dream of surfing the biggest waves on the planet? For me, it was a no-brainer.”
To reboot his broken courage, Cotton took a granular approach, setting small daily targets in the rehab gym and on the surfboard. But when he tried surfing big waves after a year out, something was missing. “I watched videos, and I could see the fear in my body – I was rigid,” he says. “I wasn’t surfing; I was surviving. Within a week, I changed my mindset, having fun, moving with the ocean, not trying to run away from it. I said to myself, ‘I know my body. I know what I’m capable of.’ You acknowledge your fears, you put them in their place, and then you’re in the zone. With the oceans, there’s no referee, no pause button. You’re on the edge of that extreme. So once you’re going you must commit.”
Conquering that hurricane-powered wave in 2020 in Nazaré – the scene of his accident – felt symbolic and unleashed “an amazing feeling of fear and relief”, he says. In such lethal moments, Cotton can replace red-hot fear with ice-cool concentration. “It’s so calm and silent,” he says. “Time slows down. You can see individual droplets of water in the wave.”
Cotton has learned that life in the comfort zone is kryptonite for human courage. Only by pushing our limits will we develop the courage to dream bigger. “I love being out of my comfort zone,” he says. “Whether you’re a runner, a gymgoer or a surfer, find your weaknesses, scare yourself and push yourself. It’s not about being the best; it’s about feeling good. And we’re all capable of feeling good about ourselves just by getting out of our comfort zone more often.”
CATHY O’DOWD
On the frozen slopes of Mount Everest, the living soon become acquainted with the dead. In the oxygen-starved ‘Death Zone’, above 8,000m in altitude – where climbers can take 10 breaths for a single, laboured step, and the air is too thin for a helicopter’s rotors to safely generate lift – rescue of the living and recovery of the dead is all but impossible, meaning climbers must shuffle past the preserved corpses of long-deceased climbers.
“Because the place is so cold, it’s like a deep freeze or a morgue,” says South African climber Cathy O’Dowd, 57, the first woman to climb Everest from both its north and south sides. “They [the bodies] look like they’re sleeping. I think of them as empty suitcases. What made them a person has gone. What you’re looking at is the suitcase.”
Such intimacy with death delivers a warning to climbers. Here, at the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner, winds can reach 280kph, and temperatures can plummet to -60°C. Confronting 1,000m drops, crevasses and snowstorms, climbers require superhuman resilience – both physical and emotional – to survive. It’s easy to think they must be steely action figures who heroically bulldoze through every challenge, but O’Dowd’s own resilience is built on not only rigid, unbending resolve; she can also rely on flexible, agile decision-making under pressure.
“I think about risk as like being in a tunnel,” explains O’Dowd. “In a non-risk situation, you can turn in any direction. But as these situations get more serious, the tunnel is closing in on you. The darkness is all the places where you have no options. But the tunnel, the light, is where your options still lie. As things get worse, your tunnel gets tighter and you have fewer options. But you focus on the light, on what you’re still able to do, rather than looking into the darkness.”
For O’Dowd, this pliable, problem-solving mindset –which she now shares with businesses in talks titled ‘Think Like an Explorer’ – has always been part of climbing’s appeal. Growing up in Johannesburg, her first taste of rock climbing came on a teenage summer camp in the Drakensburg mountains on the Lesotho-South Africa border. She loved the cerebral thrill of “problem-solving, physically and mentally, in wonderful, wild places”. During her twenties, in between university study and lecturing, she progressed to mountaineering in western Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, the Bolivian Andes and the Alps. She never dreamed of climbing Everest, but simply enjoyed taking “small steps” forward, learning, probing, testing, thinking.
“I’m essentially driven by curiosity,” O’Dowd says. “What it would be like to try something, to go somewhere…
And that curiosity extends to the process.” She likens the strategising of climbing to a video game. “Essentially, you go into an environment you don’t fully understand or control, but with a set of tools and skills – previous experience, training, innate abilities, research – in your metaphorical backpack. And your challenge is to move through this environment, survive, extract yourself successfully and problem-solve as you go. In that sense, it’s very much real-world game-playing.”
It’s 1996, and having been selected for the first South African team to climb Everest – via its southern slopes –a 27-year-old O’Dowd begins the multi-week ascent, armed with her ‘backpack’ of skills and experience. She crosses the Khumbu ice fall, edging past blocks of ice “the size of apartment blocks”, and inches across ladders teetering over crevasses. She passes 2,000m-high walls of ice and rock, clambers up the steep Lhotse Face where you’re “on the edge of your crampons all the time”, starts breathing supplemental oxygen at 7,800m, and makes it to Camp IV, at 7,925m, ready for the summit push.
But at Camp IV snow begins to fall. Climbers need a good weather window to summit. Go too early and the jetstream winds can “literally pick human beings up off the mountain”, O’Dowd says. But hesitate too long and you’ll miss your chance: “It gets too warm, the ice fall becomes dangerous, and those ladders fall into the crevasses.”
The pressure can be intense. Other teams push on. But O’Dowd’s team waits. Their decision is based on a blend of rigid caution – they’d agreed not to go into unknown ground in unstable conditions – and open-minded flexibility: “You’re waiting to see if circumstances change,” she says.
When they later hear on the radio that other teams have summited, doubt kicks in: “We got it wrong, we weren’t hard enough…” But then a blizzard rolls in, described by some as “the worst storm in Everest history”. The ensuing carnage, which led to eight deaths, has subsequently entered popular folklore courtesy of books such as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997) and the 2015 movie Everest.
Death stalks the mountain. Climbers fall, freeze or disappear. Sheltering in their tents, O’Dowd’s team hear
“I THINK ABOUT RISK AS LIKE BEING IN A TUNNEL… FOCUS ON THE LIGHT RATHER THAN LOOK INTO THE DARKNESS”
“YOU HAVE TO BOX ANY TRAUMA, OTHERWISE YOU’RE A LIABILITY. YOU CAN CLIMB AND CRY, BUT YOUR VISION GETS BLURRY”
only snippets over the radio. She remembers “the storm, the noise, the confusion, the darkness, the exhaustion, the lack of oxygen; the scratchy, noisy, impossible-to-hear radio calls”.
Unable to help, unable to move, her light-in-the-tunnel strategy proved decisive. “It’s not ‘all in or give up’,” she says. “You’re sitting out the storm, trying to survive, while trying to keep open a set of options.” Sometimes resilience involves waiting to fight another day.
When the storm subsides, the extent of the tragedy becomes clear. Having returned to Base Camp with her team, O’Dowd is horrified by the news but refuses to be traumatised. “Mountaineering is a risk sport,” she explains. “You’ve got to have thought through why you’re there.”
Behind her resilience lies intense passion: “I often say, ‘You chose to do this…’ There’s something you love about climbing, skiing, canyoning, sea kayaking, whatever ridiculous sport you’ve got yourself into. You remind yourself what that [love] is, then go back to dealing with the problem, one step at a time.”
Weeks later, in more stable weather, the team decide to try again. Their flexibility – not their rigidity – has given them another shot. Climbing through the night, they witness the glorious orange and purple glow of sunrise, then, on May 25, O’Dowd speaks to her mother via satellite phone.
“Hi Mom, I’m on the summit of Everest…” she tells her.
“It’s pretty cool.”
In 1998, O’Dowd was back on Everest, this time to climb the feared North Face. It would prove to be another brutal test of her emotional resilience. Having battled to 8,600m – just 250m below the summit – she glimpsed a corpse. “But this body moves,” she recalls. “You’re like, ‘No, no, that’s
not what normally happens.’” It was the American climber Francys Arsentiev, who’d been climbing oxygen-free –a bold, high-risk style – with her Russian husband, Sergei.
Frostbite had left her looking “like a porcelain doll”. Her head and legs were flopped down, forming a ghastly inverted V-shape. She muttered a few words, including the gut-wrenching plea, “Don’t leave me,” then slipped into a trance. For an hour, in -30°C, O’Dowd and her colleagues tried to rouse her, but it was hopeless. Up here, there are no stretchers, no spare oxygen masks, no helicopters. “For people for whom rescue means calling 911, it’s hard to get your head around that,” admits O’Dowd. She herself was now turning hypothermic. She had an ominous vision of the organs inside her chest cavity turning “grey with cold”.
Following her light-in-the-tunnel strategy, O’Dowd had kept all options open, but now she had to make a choice. Despite being so close to the summit, she headed down while two sherpas continued to the top. She couldn’t pass a dying woman. Her heart and her head told her, “Get me out of here.”
On the perilous descent, O’Dowd had to compartmentalise the trauma. This was something she’d learned in 1996, after her teammate Bruce Herrod perished on his descent. “You’ve got to box it, otherwise you’re a liability,” she says. “You can climb and cry – I did – but it’s not great, because your vision gets blurry. You can’t see where you’re putting your feet… This is something that’ll need to be thought about, but it doesn’t need to be thought about right now.”
While male athletes are praised for demonstrating cool emotional resilience in such tragic situations, their female counterparts are often reviled for it. “I’ve been accused of being an ‘ice queen’ for that,” she says. “How dare a woman not be hysterical and in tears because something went wrong? Well, that’s just going to get you killed.”
A year later, O’Dowd, battle-hardened but not bowed, returned to Everest. On May 29, 1999, at the age of 30, she became the first woman to summit Everest from both sides. “It wasn’t something I was chasing,” she says, “but it was this wonderful bonus.”
After the trauma of 1996 and 1998, how had she galvanised the resolve to return to Everest? O’Dowd believes this steel-plated resilience stems from the hours she has spent contemplating her deepest motivations. At the age of eight, she lost her 21-year-old brother in a car crash. Her climbing friends Stephen Kelsey and Graham Whittaker perished in Peru in 1993. She considered quitting her mountain adventures. But having confronted death, her response was to relish the infinite possibilities of life.
“I never thought that you couldn’t die, but I thought you could die having not had a chance to live your life or fulfil your potential, try crazy things or chase your dreams,” she says. “I was always up for living life to the fullest.”
Your Ultimate Wingman
Enhance, equip, and experience your best life POWER PLAY Mountain ebiking in the Balkans
VENTURE
TRAVEL/ BALKANS
“The path continues upwards in a punishing mix of loose rocks and dusty switchbacks. Each step is a battle. The bike’s motor is no help; the weight of the batteries and our kit makes every inch feel like a deadlift”
Tyres hum against the dusty, narrow, zigzagging tracks through the prairie grass as we push deeper into the mountainous wilderness of Durmitor National Park. The sun has begun its slow descent, casting long fingers across the rolling hills and igniting the Montenegrin mountains in candlelit shades of yellow and gold.
With a huge chunk of our second day’s riding still to cover, it’s hard not to think we spent too long sessioning the trails of Štuoc Bike Park. Daylight and our ebike batteries are against us. The next sign of civilisation is 60km away and, with fully loaded bikes, this is not somewhere we want to be stuck.
I find myself in the depths of the Balkan Peninsula, chasing untamed horizons to see whether burly electric mountain bikes can carry me, self-supported, across an ambitious 600km off-road route linking five countries. I’d managed to persuade two British, Chamonix-based friends, Nathan Hughes and Luke Jarmey, to join me under the perhaps misleading premise that, because we have powerassisted pedalling, it would be easy.
Our route saw us start within the high walls of the historic Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik before turning our backs on the Adriatic and cutting north through the rolling hills of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A southeasterly traverse across the entirety
of Montenegro would lead us to the dramatic ranges of Kosovo and Albania, where we planned to end our expedition on some of Europe’s best trails. But with big mountains, remote regions and only two batteries each, simply reaching today’s finishing line would be a test of the bike’s abilities as a bikepacking tool as much as our cycling skills.
The following four hours of rough night-riding are a careful balancing act between moving fast and preserving every last drop of battery. Our bikes slip into another world of shadow and silence. With only the narrow beam of a head torch cutting through the darkness, every twist of the trail is amplified, every rustle in the undergrowth more mysterious. The mountains loom as vast silhouettes, their contours barely visible beneath a velvet sky scattered with stars. This spell is only broken by a mandatory check of the map to see how far we’ve travelled – and how far we still have to go.
After a close encounter with a hungry fox, the gleaming lights of a small hamlet appear like a mirage. Stopping at the first house, we ask if they know of any guest houses that can get us out of the crisp autumnal grip of nightfall. Taken aback by our remote journey across the mountains, we’re met with the warm Balkan hospitality I’d heard so much about, the residents offering to put us up, light the fire and cook us kuvana krtola, a tasty traditional potato dish. I’m sure they can see the immeasurable relief on our faces as they provide much-needed warmth and sustenance while we share stories of our adventure to get here.
With big days still in store, we’re soon throwing heavy legs back over muddy bikes the following morning – we must make it to Kosovo if we’re to remain on schedule, and some of the biggest peaks of the trip stand between us and
BALKAN DREAMS (left) Rolph and Jarmey enjoy the uplift opportunities in the hills above Peshkopi, Albania; (clockwise from top) looking out to rugged mountains in Montenegro’s Prokletije National Park; riding over one of the many historic stone bridges in Kosovo; the long climb through the Montenegrin forest to Lake Biograd; (opening page) Rolph puts in sunset turns above the Kosovan city of Prizren
the border. Many of the Balkan states are divided naturally by high mountain passes and summits, meaning there’s usually no easy way to connect these beautiful countries. Although our ebikes are doing a fantastic job at propelling us to altitudes exceeding 2,000m, even they have a limit.
Approaching the jagged ridgelines of the Albanian Alps – also known as the Accursed Mountains – we find ourselves heaving the fully-laden, 35kg rigs up impossibly steep trails. The sun bears down relentlessly, turning the air into a slow-roasting oven; sweat slicks my back, soaking my shirt in minutes. Ahead, the path continues its pitch upwards in a punishing mix of loose rocks and dusty
Wandering the Western Balkans
Rolph, Hughes and Jarmey spent seven days traversing Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania, averaging around 100km of off-road riding per day and squeezing in bike parks and downhill trails wherever they could.
switchbacks. Each step is a battle. The bike’s motor is no help here, and the weight of the batteries and all our kit make every inch feel like a deadlift. We dig our shoes into the dirt, trying to avoid slipping; it takes all our focus to stay balanced while hauling our reluctant mules up the never-ending face. Hours pass in slow motion, but as the final climb levels out we can see Kosovo on the horizon and we’re rewarded with a fast-flowing singletrack descent to reach its border.
In Kosovo, I connect with a local mountain bike crew in the beautiful historic city of Prizren, where Toni – a tall, bearded man carved from the same stone as the peaks he calls home –offers to show us his favourite trails. His eyes exude a kindness we’ve learned to expect in this part of the world, and he has no problems taking the afternoon off work to shred right above the city. He explains how the war affected his home all those years ago, and which areas are not yet reclaimed from the danger of old land mines – a stark reminder of the political complexities of Kosovo’s past but also of its bright future. We share lap after lap until sunset, amazed by the unique bond that mountain biking can forge – one that transcends culture, language and nationality.
As our journey continues south, the landscapes are ever-changing. The rolling hills that separate Kosovo and Albania are broken only by eerie, derelict bunkers dating back to the Yugoslavian era – an estimated 750,000 are dotted across Albania. Hostilities have thankfully now cooled, and in the last two decades Albania has experienced an exponential growth of prosperity, welcoming a growing number of international tourists. When we arrive at our final destination – a remote guesthouse on the outskirts of a small mountain town named Peshkopi – it’s easy to see why. Another big day finishes in the dark, my ebike battery dying just metres from the door – a fitting end to our adventure, which we accomplished by the skin of our teeth.
The name Balkan comes from the Turkish for ‘chain of wooded mountains’, a description that encapsulates this wild and fascinating peninsula. The diversity and warmth of its people will undoubtedly stay with us for ever.
Aaron Rolph is an adventurer and photographer based in the Alps, as well as the founder of the British Adventure Collective; britishadventurecollective.com
TAKING IT TO THE LIMIT Going off-trail gives the group some extra-spicy exposed descents to tackle
Urban beat. Alpine retreat.
OFF DOWN THE SLOPES! WINTER SKI HOLIDAYS IN THE
INNSBRUCK REGION
Whether you’re a mileage fiend or a leisure skier, a freeride fan or more of a family guy, a beginner or an expert – the Innsbruck region has the ideal ski run for everyone
If you’ve fired up a fitness-focused app or wearable in the last 12 months, you’ll most likely have been met with a notification about a new AI feature. Machine-learning algorithms have infiltrated every aspect of health and wellness, and each AI addition promises to revolutionise the way you exercise – from individualised workout plans to tailored nutrition and recovery strategies.
Coaches aren’t redundant yet, though. “Most apps miss what truly drives results, which is a blend of intelligent programming, accountability and human coaching,” says personal trainer Michael Baah. “These tools are powerful, but they work best when paired with real coaching – that’s why I’m still in a job.”
That said, there are a handful of tools that are pushing the boundaries of AIbacked insight, providing a personalised approach to all pillars of performance.
Tone up
Strength training requires a wealth of knowledge to get started safely – from learning the correct form for each exercise to knowing when it’s time to switch up to the next level. Baah says that the all-in-one home gym Tonal uses AI to solve these issues, giving direction and sensor-based analysis for more than 280 different movements via its built-in camera; it can also automatically modify the load midsession based on your performance. “It’s brilliant for home users who want studioquality feedback,” he says. “It tracks time under tension, range of motion and power output, and gives automated weight adjustments and personalised suggestions.” And unless you’re aiming for Arnold Schwarzenegger levels of strength, you’ll struggle to exceed its limits – the digital weight resistance increases in one-pound increments up to a maximum of 250lb (113kg). tonal.com
Tailor training
If your fitness pursuit is more parkrun or pedalling than pumping iron, you’ll be familiar with goal-specific training plans. Historically, this has meant following a one-size-fits-all option or employing a coach to create something bespoke. HumanGO does the latter using an AI coach, Hugo, drilling into performance data from activities such as runs, rides or swims to build an individualised, sciencebacked schedule that fits your lifestyle. And if plans change, simply tell Hugo, who’ll instantly update your programme. “It’s a game-changer,” says Sascha Bartesch, an age-group triathlete who has been using the app for a year.
FITNESS/ COACH IN THE MACHINE
As AI promises to revolutionise fitness, these devices and apps have begun to harness the tech’s potential
“It’s user-friendly and flexible, and I don’t have to think about my training plan –I look at the week and just plan the time out of my day to do it. I’m getting faster in every discipline, so it works.” humango.ai
Rethink refuelling
Nailing nutrition isn’t just for race day; it can transform your training and recovery between sessions. Sports dietician Nessa Raeijmaekers recommends The Athlete’s FoodCoach, which creates individualised meal plans that sync with other tools like Strava and adapt to your physical needs. “It’s one of the only apps that gives you a good view of your macronutrients when training,” she says.
“AI tools work best when paired with real coaching”
Michael Baah, fitness trainer
Using the FoodCoach AI chatbot is like having your own sports nutritionist at hand – “It’s a nice tool that locates information from high-quality sources,” Raeijmaekers says – but for certain detailed or health-related questions you’ll be directed to a flesh-and-blood dietician: “The human touch is still important. The AI is good for guidelines, but it doesn’t know the whole story behind the person.” theathletesfoodcoach.com
Perform at your peak
Sleep and recovery are the latest areas being tapped for performance gains. The Whoop wristband uses AI to advise when you’re ready for a hard workout or would benefit from rest, ensuring every workout is optimised to your current condition. “[It] focuses on training and recovery metrics and calculates a recovery score based on sleep data, HRV [heart rate variability] and resting heart rate,” says elite coach David Osgathorp, performance consultant for the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team. “The AI can translate complex biometric data into understandable, actionable feedback. It learns and predicts needs based on aggregate data and can provide deeper insights and coaching tips to enhance physical and mental performance.” whoop.com
SET FOR ADVENTURE
Planning your next foray into the great outdoors? Make sure this genius gear is ticked off on your packing list before you get going
Photography Daniel Cheetham
(From top) SOUNDCORE Motion
Boom Plus Portable Speaker, soundcore.com; FLEXTAIL
Tiny Repeller S Portable Mosquito Repellent and Max Pump 3 Air Pump, flextail. com; DOMETIC CFX3 45 Coolbox, dometic.com; NEBO Galileo 1600 Flex Rechargeable Lantern, nebotools.co.uk; VANGO Sizzle Double Induction Hob, vango.co.uk; (opposite) SEA TO SUMMIT Frontier Ultralight Knife, Fork and Spoon Set; seatosummit.co.uk
MERRELL Speed Strike 2 Mid Gore-Tex Hiking Boot, merrell.com; (opposite, clockwise from top left) SEA TO SUMMIT Detour Stainless Steel Frying Pan, seatosummit.co.uk; EXOTAC Matchcap XL Waterproof Match Case, exotac.com; SEA TO SUMMIT Frontier Ultralight Two Pot Set, seatosummit. co.uk; HYDROFLASK Micro Hydro Mini Bottle, hydroflask.com; COBB Pro Black BBQ, cobb-bbq.co.uk; LIFESTRAW Go Series 22oz Water Filter Bottle, lifestraw.com
HOW TO/ LAUGH
head, making eye contact and encouraging each other to laugh. “This is not about having, say, the kookiest laugh; it’s all about contagiousness,” says Nerenberg. “The victor is judged on the extent to which their opponent laughed back.”
This global community, he says, is bound by a simple credo: life’s just too serious to be taken too seriously. So, if laughter is medicine, how can we harness its power? Nerenberg recommends the gradient laugh technique, gently building up to contagious laughter. Here’s how…
Make eye contact
The idea for the WLC was born ringside when Nerenberg noticed something odd at a UFC pre-fight weigh-in. Fighters were brought face-to-face, forced into intense eye contact to psych each other out – but instead of rage, what often broke through was laughter. “They’re trying to intimidate each other, but they start cracking up,” he says. “Eye contact is so powerful, it can flip from confrontation to connection.”
LOLing isn’t just for fun, says laughologist Albert Nerenberg – it could help your health and even win you a world title
The greatest revolution in human evolution wasn’t the wheel, or the written word, or the printing press, or the internet. It was laughter. So says Albert Nerenberg, filmmaker, “laughologist” and founder of the World Laughing Championship (WLC).
“Laughter may be the very source of human communication,” says the Canadian, who’s spent years studying the science. “Humans laughed together long before they spoke. It’s the ultimate peace signal, helping us stop fighting and cooperate.”
It all began, he says, with panting. Laughing, after all, is not unique to humans – we know dogs laugh, as do primates, even rats. And so, over time, “pant, pant, pant” morphed into “ha, ha, ha”. And laughing isn’t only a mood booster. “It increases the presence of T cells in saliva, which helps the immune system,” Nerenberg says.
“Scientists have also found it suppresses stress hormones, reduces anxiety and activates the body’s relaxation system. It’s even good for the heart.”
Scientists at the University of Maryland, Baltimore found that laughter dilates blood vessels, increasing blood flow and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. “Overseriousness has become a scientifically recognised state,” Nerenberg says. “So wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all took laughter more seriously?”
The idea for the WLC – an annual competition to find the world’s most
infectious laugh – came to Nerenberg while he was touring his 2009 documentary Laughology. “I began holding laughter contests to warm up the audience before screenings, and people loved it,” he says. What began as the American Laughing Championship proved so popular that in 2020 he made it global.
The event attracts competitors – or ‘laughletes’ – from across the globe. And like in many sports, some nations appear better than others: “Surprisingly, Russia and Iran are two of the most dominant countries. Russians take it so seriously that this year they held nine regional events just to choose who’d compete nationally.”
The WLC sees laughletes face off in a last-man-standing format. A key challenge is the Duel, where competitors go head-to-
“Humans laughed together long before they spoke”
Albert Nerenberg, laughologist
Get close (or fake it)
Proximity matters. “There’s a reason people laugh in elevators,” Nerenberg says. “Cram strangers into a small space, add eye contact, and if someone breaks wind or something… boom, everyone’s laughing.” It’s primal. Physical closeness triggers play signals in the brain. “And you don’t need to be in the same room – just create the illusion you are.”
Master the gradient
Don’t force it. The build-up is the whole point. “You start with a gentle ha-ha-ha and gradually get louder,” Nerenberg says. The slow rise makes the laughter feel natural – and surprisingly contagious. “I would say that unless you’re a soulless zombie you’ll almost always laugh. This isn’t about faking it; it’s about letting laughter sneak up on you. And once it does, it tends to bring others with it.”
Breathe from the belly
“In the WLC, most people lose because they’re breathing badly,” Nerenberg explains. “They try to control their laugh from the throat or chest, which sounds like a cough, but real laughter comes from the diaphragm. If you take a deep breath and laugh from low down, you trigger a true, contagious laugh. The best laughers even get caught in a feedback loop, laughing at their own laugh. That’s when it really takes off.”
The 2025 World Laughing Championship takes place online on September 20. For tickets, visit worldlaughingchampionship.com
Pioneer. Game-changer. Disruptor. In the world of tech, these terms are thrown around so often that they start to lose meaning. When it comes to OnePlus, however, it’s difficult to think of better descriptors – the brand is arguably the biggest challenger to the status quo in the smart device industry in the last decade.
It all began in 2014 with its first smartphone, the OnePlus One. Combining premium tech at pocketfriendly prices, the phone gave those in the know access to the pinnacle of innovation without having to pay over the odds for a label or logo.
The company, which is now globally recognised, was just getting started, though. In the intervening years, OnePlus has muscled its way into a competitive market, and its latest suite of releases across smartphones, tablets, audio and wearables takes things up a notch once more. This is an embodiment of the brand’s ‘Never Settle’ ethos and constant pursuit of improvement.
The stars of the show of the July 8 launch are two new smartphones – the OnePlus Nord 5 and OnePlus Nord CE5. The OnePlus Nord Series has become a much-loved collection for its fun and colourful tone, and its fifth-generation releases continue the disruptive legacy of the OnePlus One by offering flagship features at a mid-tier price.
The OnePlus Nord 5 is the ultimate playmate, power tool and performance enhancer, staying fast and smooth during a full day of streaming, multitasking and gaming thanks to its 80W Supervooc fastcharging, high-capacity 5200mAh battery; flagship Snapdragon 8s Gen3 chipset and ultra-smooth 144Hz display. It also features a 50MP camera on the front and back, offering razor-sharp selfies and 4K filming for vibrant, smooth videos. Its companion, the OnePlus Nord CE5, meanwhile, boasts the same high-capacity 5200mAh battery, plus a powerful MTK8350 Ultra processor.
Packed with cutting-edge, industry-leading tech and AI integration including Open Canvas+ multitasking, the two handsets are
NEVER SETTLE
Tech disruptor OnePlus launches five products to shake up the status quo once more
your ultimate entertainment, creative and connected companions, helping you up your game at all times.
The launch also includes the OnePlus Watch 3 43mm, a compact 37.8g (excluding strap) version of the brand’s flagship wearable that can track and analyse fitness activities, health data and sleep; the OnePlus Pad Lite, an entry-level tablet with an 11-inch screen that’s perfect for unwinding at home and can connect with a OnePlus phone to seamlessly share files, videos and images; and OnePlus’ flagship real-time noise-cancelling
earbuds, the OnePlus Buds 4. Individually beautiful in design and intuitive to use, their full potential is realised when combined, each syncing together to create an ecosystem that will revolutionise any experience.
OnePlus has never settled for second best, so why should you? For more information about OnePlus, visit oneplus.com
27 CALENDAR/ THINGS TO DO AND SEE
September to 26 October Hot Wheels Stunt Show
Launched in 1968 as a competitor to Matchbox’s toy cars, Hot Wheels were Mattel cofounder Elliot Handler’s playtime offering to boys after the success of his wife Ruth’s Barbie dolls. And, following the box-office triumph of the Barbie movie, a film about the replica vehicles is in the works. But unless she’s also organising an arena spectacular filled with real-life souped-up hot rods, ATVs and superbikes pulling off ramp jumps, backflips and a 360 loop off a 10m-high wall, we’d say Hot Wheels has the edge over Margot Robbie here. Touring Aberdeen, Newcastle and London; ticketmaster.co.uk
15
August to 23 November
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
It was a time of baggy trousers and bucket hats. No, not the Oasis reunion tour, but the Acid House era of the late ’80s, when party-seekers would follow cryptic directions to illegal raves in disused warehouses and fields, hoping to get in before the cops cordoned off the area. You had to be there. Or you could slip on a VR headset and relive a night of hedonistic adventure as you ride the outskirts of Coventry circa 1989. In this startling one-hour immersive documentary, posters and flyers come to life as promoters, ravers and even police officers from the time recall this cat-and-mouse game. Spoiler: you make it to the rave and it’s wicked. Touring Leeds, Warwick and Cardiff; eastcityfilms.com
12
August to 7 September
Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical
Secret Cinema is back, and while the Travolta/Newton-John classic is the one that you want during those summer nights, this immersive Grease experience comes close. It’s hardly a (greased) lightning return for Secret Cinema but, after a twoyear break, the concept has been reimagined. The location is no longer a secret – it’s at Evolution London in Battersea – and the classic format (wandering around a film’s fully realised sandbox, followed by a screening) has changed. For two-and-a-half hours, audiences can interact with the characters at Rydell High as live performances occur in sync with the action on huge screens. Battersea Park, London; greasetheimmersivemoviemusical.com
1
September to 31 October Red Bull Tetris
Reckon you’re good at Tetris? Here’s your chance to prove it. In December, Red Bull will host the first official live playable game of Tetris in the sky – more than 2,000 drones bringing it to life beneath Dubai’s 150m-tall Frame. The best players from more than 55 global qualifiers will take part; for the chance to be among them, you need to test your skill on a custom, timelimited mobile version of the game. Play it at redbulltetris.com
5 to 6 September
Max Richter’s Sleep Live
On September 5, 2015, German composer Max Richter released Sleep, a 8.5-hour experimental album based on the neuroscience of our restive state. He has since performed all-nighters to audiences not in seats but in beds at the Sydney Opera House, Philharmonie de Paris and the Great Wall of China. For its 10th anniversary,
he’s releasing a new album – Sleep Circles, which taps into the liminal space before waking – and performing this full live set of Sleep, his first in London since 2017. Bring your pyjamas. Alexandra Palace, London; livenation.co.uk
Publisher Andreas Kornhofer
Editor-in-Chief
Andreas Rottenschlager
Global Content
Tom Guise (Manager), Lou Boyd
Creative Directors
Erik Turek (Manager), Kasimir Reimann
Designers
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LESSONS FROM THE WILDERNESS
From
intrepid artist and
adventurer
Tessa Hulls
The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on October 14
