Tips to make your winter escape a success
Study finds upper body coordination keeps us upright
Even during a normal year, Jacqueline Kim, a stay-at-home mother of two in Encinitas, California, is pretty bullish about making travel plans to national parks. She researches trails and sites, and logs on to the websites right when reservations open up. “Six months ahead, I book it, because I know exactly where I want to be,” Kim, 48, said. “If you don’t know exactly which trailhead, somebody else is going to get it while you’re thinking about it.”
This winter, because of the limited capacities imposed on venues by the coronavirus pandemic and increased demand for domestic recreation of all kinds, there has been even more incentive to be on top of it. At some mountain ski resorts and other outdoor venues, interstate travel restrictions and quarantine requirements are complicating the usual day trips and weekend getaways. Meanwhile, social distancing measures have reduced availability at skating rinks, recreational areas, adventure parks and other places, leaving many would-be attendees with no place to go.
If you’re preparing for a simple trip down the sledding hill or even a weeklong road trip, the pandemic has added a host of extra considerations. Here’s how to plan this winter for every contingency.
Leave yourself time to work out the details
The constantly shifting landscape of the pandemic, and the public health regulations that can vary down to the county level, may make it tough to plan for the future with confidence. While that uncertainty has spurred many venues to offer flexible cancellation policies, it’s all the more reason to start investigating your options early, ensuring you have accounted for potential complications. (Think: A month or more out, and as many as four for
longer excursions.)
“Plan it early and plan well and plan robustly,” said Mirna Mohanraj, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Mount Sinai Morningside in New York who has written about vacationing safely.
First, if you are crossing state lines, find out if your preferred destination requires you to quarantine or provide a negative coronavirus test result. If you’re eligible for a vaccine in-state, Mohanraj said, allow two weeks between your second shot and your departure; that’s how long it takes for your immune system to respond.
At ski resorts or other outdoor recreation venues, remember you’ll need to avoid indoor dining and shared equipment, if possible, so inquire about food options and other amenities to figure out what you’ll need to bring with you. (If you don’t own equipment, Mohanraj said, look into the venue’s procedures for sanitizing its rentals.) At some mountain resorts, on-site child care and ski school are limited, so consider creating
a schedule to coordinate who will take their ski or ride days when.
Stay current
Whether your destination or planned activity is far or nearby, keep checking back for updates as your departure date approaches. After reserving accommodations in August and purchasing a season pass in October, Mike French, 34, spent significant time preparing for a weeklong snowboarding trip with his wife and two children, ages 2 and 4. They planned to drive the 10 hours to Breckenridge, Colorado, from Westwood, Kansas, so he looked into how the pandemic would affect child care, food and grocery options, transportation and “what it looks like to be on the mountain,” he said. He also kept tabs on the public health regulations in Summit County, where the resort is. “Do your research,” he recommended, “and get on the social media platforms and ask questions.”
Affiliate groups on Facebook and Twitter feeds for
various resort passes and geographic areas are full of helpful tips about crowds and availability. Local news media and other crowdsourced guides can also point you in the right direction.
Make reservations now
By the middle of February, entry tickets to the Ice Castles, a series of large sculptures and structures made out of icicles in Colorado, Utah, Wisconsin and New Hampshire, had already sold out for the month. You may be familiar with the feeling: Seized by inspiration, you log on to get tickets for an attraction only to find that there are none left.
Many venues are operating at 25% or 50% capacity to allow for social distancing, so there are fewer spots available. Often, venues also require advance reservations, some of them with specific timed entries. This helps control the flow of visitors and reduce lines at the ticket booth; it also means they fill up, especially on weekends and holidays. But don’t give up: Find out when registration opens up and make sure you’re online then — and don’t forget to sign any waivers online ahead of time.
Treat your vehicle as your home base
Warming tents, welcome centers and base lodges are operating with more limited capacities and hours — if they’re open at all. As a result, there’s been “this kind of revival of the parking lot scene,” said Kristin Rust, a spokeswoman for the Alterra Mountain Co., which manages the popular Ikon Pass.
Preparing your vehicle to take the place of any usual on-site facilities can make more spontaneous departures that much easier. RV travel can also be a fun, safe, selfcontained option. Catherine Caruso, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest, recommends you pack it with food, water, blankets and extra warm clothing. Backup masks can’t hurt, either — especially for children. Research your route to find out if your drive will require snow chains on your tires or other preparations.
Woody Bousquet, 67, an avid skier and a retired professor at Shenandoah University in Virginia, has taken to bringing a folding chair and welcome mat on his mountain excursions to use to change into his boots. “Your car is your base lodge,” Bousquet said.
Be flexible, and always have a backup plan
Have a backup plan, or three. And if you’re traveling with children, prepare them for a little letdown while getting them hyped up about your alternate plans. “This is a time to have a Plan B, C — maybe D,” said Anna Roth, the hiking content manager of Washington Trails Association.
You might even try a new type of recreation: If your home ski mountain is booked up or you can’t make it, go snowshoeing or try another outdoor activity instead. “It’s a great time to try new stuff,” Mohanraj said. “Be adventurous.”
We can thank early human evolution that many of us can enjoy running as much as we do.
Watch anyone with a ponytail run, and you can see their hair repeatedly describe a figure-eight in the air, responding to the forces generated by the running. But their heads stay still, their eyes and gaze level.
If it weren’t for some unique evolutionary advances, our heads would do the same as that ponytail, flopping like a swim noodle when we run, according to a clever new study of how — and why — our upper bodies seem to work the way they do when we run, but not when we walk. The study, which involved treadmills, motion capture, hand weights and an eon’s worth of back story, finds that an unusual coordination between certain muscles in runners’ shoulders and arms helps to keep heads stable and runners upright.
The new findings may answer lingering questions about the role of our upper bodies in running and why we, unthinkingly, bend and swing our arms with each stride. They also add to the mounting evidence that, long ago, distance running began shaping human bodies and lives in ways that still reverberate today.
The possibility that we humans are born to run has inspired many studies, books, lectures and debates in recent years, including journalist Christopher McDougall’s 2009 bestseller, “Born to Run.” The idea is based on fossil research indicating that early humans evolved to have distinctive leg bones and other characteristics that would have aided distance running. The findings suggest that those of our ancestors who could run well dominated in the procuring-food and procreating sweepstakes, so that natural selection started favoring physical characteristics associated with running.
Much of this research came from the mind and laboratory of Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary anatomy at Harvard University and
author of the new book “Exercised,” which delves into exercise and evolution. At first, most of his and other scientists’ work related to evolution and running centered on lower bodies, since legs play such an obvious part in how we get from one place to another.
But Lieberman also was interested in runners’ upper bodies and, especially, their heads. As a longtime
marathon runner himself, he knew that a stable head is critical for successful running, but not necessarily a simple thing to achieve. Running is propulsive.
You push off, rise and then brake forcefully against the ground with every stride, placing forces on your head that could make it flop uncontrollably, like that bobbing ponytail.
How we manage to keep our heads stable, however, has not been altogether clear. Like most cursorial species, or animals that run, including dogs and horses, we have a well-developed nuchal ligament, a tissue that connects the skull and neck. That is not the case in species that aren’t natural runners, like apes or swine.
When he was a young scientist, Lieberman recalled, he enticed pigs — who are inelegant runners — onto treadmills to study their biomechanics. Their heads jiggled like bobbleheads when they were forced to run, prompting Lieberman and his colleagues to conclude they lacked a nuchal ligament, a finding borne out by anatomical studies.
But we humans also have the challenge of being upright, on two legs. Presumably to balance ourselves while running, we began, at some point, to swing our arms. Lieberman guessed that the arm swing helped to stabilize our heads. But, if so, there would have to be coordination between the muscles in our forearms and shoulders, he thought, even though these muscles do not physically connect. They would need to fire together and with comparable force during running, if they were to be successful in stabilizing our heads.
He was uncertain about how to test that theory, though, until his colleague Andrew Yegian, a college fellow in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, suggested weighting runners’ arms and heads. Add mass there, he said, watch how the muscles respond, and you would be able to tell if the arms and shoulders were working together to steady the head or not.
So, for the new study, which was recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Lieberman, Yegian and their colleagues fitted 13 men and women with sensors on their upper bodies that track muscle activity and asked them to first walk and then run on a treadmill while the researchers filmed them with motion-capture technology. Then the scientists handed the volunteers light hand weights and asked them to run again. Finally, they strapped weighted masks to the volunteers’ faces and had them run once more, before comparing how everyone’s muscles had responded to each of these interventions.
It turned out that not much of interest happened while the study volunteers walked; the muscles in their forearms and shoulders showed no evidence of coordinated activity.
But those same muscles snapped into synchronized action when the volunteers started to run; the muscles began firing at the same time and with about the same amount of force.
That synchrony grew during the weighted runs. When the volunteers carried weights and their forearm muscles fired with extra force to compensate, the muscles in their shoulders did the same. Similarly, when their weighted faces prompted the runners’ shoulder muscles to fire more forcefully, their arm muscles did likewise.
The study does not explain how these widely separate muscles communicate with one another, though. Nor can the findings pinpoint when, in our existence as a species, they may have started to work together in this way. It also does not prove that all of us are natural born runners; plenty of people do not enjoy the sport.
Still, the results do tell us more than we knew before about our bodies, Lieberman says, and underscore that running molded us as a species.
“If we didn’t have to run” in our early days as humans, he says, “we wouldn’t have this system” of muscular interplay today.