Between The Lines

New and Old Pursuits
By Larry Burke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

Those of us who've been ducking hasty new year's resolutions can take heart: It's not too late to start nudging our bodies into shape for the warm months ahead. A loud and clear incentive has just arrived, in the form of this month's cover story, "The Guru Speaks. You Should Listen." Mark Allen, six-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman triathlon, is arguably the fittest human being on the planet. For the past decade and a half, he's turned his body into a biomechanical R&D laboratory, challenging commonly accepted wisdom, looking for ways to tease out every last cache of stamina and strength. Only a few months ago the 39-year-old paragon of fitness decided to retire from competition and is now concentrating on starting up a business and raising a family. In other words, you could say he's becoming one of us. As a result, his once impossibly rigorous regimen has been scaled back into an effective but infinitely more reasonable one that, surprisingly enough, is well within reach of the rest of us.

Recently we asked contributing editor Todd Balf to encourage Allen to crack open his trove of secrets and devise a total fitness plan--one that includes specific endurance workouts, weight-training routines, nutritional advice, and tips on mental conditioning. The 16-week approach that Allen came up with is demanding, to be sure, but far more commonsensical than you might expect. "Mark is incredibly balanced," notes Balf. "He's always had an uncanny ability to sense when his body is telling him to exit one stage of his career and move on to the next. It's the same theme that runs through his fitness advice: Set goals, but don't hesitate to depart from them whenever your body is telling you to take a different path."

For an altogether different path to athletic glory, we steer you to the frozen tundra of...New Jersey. Every winter, when the marshes behind his house begin to rime over, Charles McGrath grows restless with thoughts of good "shinny" with old friends. In his enchanting reverie of winter sport, McGrath, who grew up slapping pucks on the black ice of his native New England and is now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, considers the fast-breaking joys and easy camaraderie of pond hockey, a more intuitive form of the sport that existed long before the age of Zambonis and acridly lit rinks. "Pond hockey is to the indoor version what that sheep-pasture game played by ancient Scottish shepherds is to golf," McGrath observes. "It's the real thing."

In upstate New York, growing pumpkins is both a sport and a very serious hobby. At harvest contests, farmers commonly haul in specimens in the 900-pound range-warped beasts that look as though they were raised on water from the cooling reservoirs of Chernobyl. When we heard rumors last October that the 1,000-pound barrier was about to be broken, we dispatched correspondent Elizabeth Royte to the annual weigh-off of the World Pumpkin Confederation in Clarence, New York. Royte stumbled into a world of cutthroat competition, Machiavellian intrigue, and parliamentarian nitpicking gone mad. "I felt I'd entered a parallel universe, a universe where only size matters," says Royte, whose wry take on the whole affair. "After seeing these brutes, I doubt I'll ever be satisfied with an average-size pumpkin again."

Finally, writer Doug Stanton road-trips down La Ruta Maya and ends up in the misty high country of Chiapas, Mexico, to find himself in a parallel universe of his own--in this case, one that is decidedly topsy-turvy. The Mayan Ch'ay K'in festival in February is an annual carnival of "five lost days" in which men dress as women, women dress as men, and none of the rules or etiquettes of normal society obtain. This Mad Hatter's bacchanal is, for Stanton, both a roistering good time and a kind of ritualized rebuke of responsibility. "I was 34, married, a father," writes Stanton. "I needed a quick escape...a disappearing act. I wondered, what would it be like to turn my own world upside-down, if only for a little while?" A pursuit worthy of exploration, and one that stands Stanton in good company this month.