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Outside correspondent Paul Keegan knew he'd turned a psychological corner after he'd visited Orlando's LGE Performance Systems training center and faced his fitness demons under the watchful guidance of motivational coach Jim Loehr for this month's cover story.
Returning to Manhattan facing a tight deadline, he found himself locked out of his office. "My instinct was to panic," Keegan recalls. Tapping into his new approach to stress, however, he kept his cool and began work on his story ("No More Mind Games," page 70) while a locksmith literally pulled the door apart. It was a small but significant benefit of
the "mental fitness" regimen he'd learned at LGE.
In search of fresh insight into the motivational side of fitness, we asked LGE to subject Keegan to its proven training program, which it customizes for every athlete, whether he's Andre Agassi or an ambitious amateur. The LGE brain trust obliged, putting our man through a wringer of body-fat tests, nutrition lectures, and brutally honest character
assessments. The goal: to root out and neutralize motivational flaws that keep both professional athletes and everyday adventurers like the rest of us from achieving high performance.
Loehr and his team of physiologists, nutritionists, and psychologists help their clients get into "ideal performance states"—Ph.D.-speak for those moments of absolute clarity in which you skate right through challenges at work, in life, on the playing field, or in the wilderness. In "No More Mind Games," Keegan gives you the essence of a program
that would otherwise cost $4,000—the tricks, tools, and practical wisdom that will help you conquer your own fitness demons.
Eventually, that is. Mental toughness, like the physical kind, requires a strategy for coping with setbacks, as Keegan discovered soon after LGE set him loose. "I rushed into the program way too fast," he admits. "I was trying to do too much, too soon." With overeagerness now in check, Keegan is back on the program. He'll review his long-term progress in
our September issue—and
invite you to compare your own results.
"It was worse than I ever imagined," declares Manhattan-based writer Andrew Essex of the things he witnessed over several weeks spent on patrol with the New York City Police Department's elite Scuba Unit ("Law and Water," page 96). "It's a grab bag of dread,"
Essex says of the divers' duties—tasks such as searching for contraband, weapons, decomposing bodies, or worse in opaque, biohazardous waters. "What they have to confront is truly horrific."
"It was peculiar seeing so many humans up in one tree," observes Fred Haefele, a writer who has long supplemented his income by toiling as a professional tree surgeon in Missoula, Montana. Haefele got a different view from on high when he roped up with Tree Climbers International, a tribe of Southern eco-outfitters who have traded crags for
conifers in pursuit of the newest old-growth extreme sport ("They're Not Just for Monkeys Anymore," page 106). Haefele wrote the 1998 motorcycling memoir Rebuilding the Indian.
Photographer Craig Cameron Olsen has goofed off in his share of trees, but not in anything like the towering giants he ascended with Fred Haefele. "I told myself, 'You have to take a deep breath,'" he recalls. "I'm sure that the more you practice, the less it becomes a big deal. Everyone else was flying around from branch to branch." A resident
of Los Angeles, Olsen's last Outside assignment took him to New Mexico to document the Philmont Scout Ranch.
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Pregnancy kept correspondent Sara Corbett from taking a spin on Cara-Beth Burnside's skateboard ("She Can Hit Frontside 50-50s...," page 62). "It wasn't prudent to try," she says. Instead she observed from the sidelines, starting with the All Girl Skate Jam in
San Diego. Corbett, whose 1998 book Venus to the Hoop chronicles the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team, gave birth to a boy, Leo, on January 6.
James Traub decided to write about the old-school scene at Vermont's unabashedly retro Mad River Glen ski resort ("The Resort that Time Forgot," page 53) after hearing a soliloquy from a chairlift partner at one of the state's more conventional resorts. "She
described this single chair that goes on for miles, and how it was incredibly cold—but that it's OK, because they give you a blanket," he says. Traub is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
When eight teens went on the lam from a wilderness-therapy program in Utah, contributing editor Mark Jenkins drove straight from his home in Laramie, Wyoming, to join the search (The Hard Way, "Truth or Consequences," page 45). As a member of one of the posses,
Jenkins had a midnight close encounter with two of the fugitives, but the kids eluded capture. "I'm sure they saw us," he says. Three hours later, the teens turned themselves in at a nearby railroad crossing.
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