Eureka ! Arts improves literacy !

This was assumed by me long before THIS study. It's sorta like setting out to prove - through studies - that getting more sleep improves alertness. DUH !

Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills

Enid Alvarez

Students at Public School 8 participating in the Guggenheim Museum’s Learning Through Art program.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 27, 2006

In an era of widespread cuts in public-school art programs, the question has become increasingly relevant: does learning about paintings and sculpture help children become better students in other areas?

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A study to be released today by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum suggests that it does, citing improvements in a range of literacy skills among students who took part in a program in which the Guggenheim sends artists into schools. The study, now in its second year, interviewed hundreds of New York City third graders, some of whom had participated in the Guggenheim program, called Learning Through Art, and others who did not.

The study found that students in the program performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including thorough description, hypothesizing and reasoning — than did students who were not in the program. The children were assessed as they discussed a passage in a children’s book, Cynthia Kadohata’s “Kira-Kira,” and a painting by Arshile Gorky, “The Artist and His Mother.”

The results of the study, which are to be presented today and tomorrow at a conference at the Guggenheim, are likely to stimulate debate at a time when the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has led schools to increase class time spent on math and reading significantly, often at the expense of other subjects, including art.

Yet the study also found that the program did not help improve students’ scores on the city’s standardized English language arts test, a result that the study’s creators said they could not fully explain. They suggested that the disparity might be related to the fact that the standardized test is written while the study’s interviews were oral.

“We purposely chose to have students talk to us instead of writing because we thought they would show language skills, not purely reading and writing skills,” said Johanna Jones, a senior associate with Randi Korn and Associates, a museum research company conducting the study over three years with a $640,000 grant from the federal Department of Education.

Ms. Jones said that the study, which graded students’ responses as they talked about the painting and the passage from the book, found essentially the same results during the 2005-6 school year as it did during the 2004-5 school year. “We really held our breath waiting for this year’s results, and they turned out to almost exactly the same — which means that last year’s don’t seem to have been an anomaly,” she said. “That’s a big deal in this world.”

While it is unknown exactly how learning about art helps literacy skills, she said, “the hypothesis is that the use of both talking about art and using inquiry to help students tease apart the meaning of paintings helps them learn how to tease apart the meanings of texts, too. They apply those skills to reading.”

The categories of literacy and critical thinking skills were devised by the research company with the help of a group of advisers from Columbia University, New York University and the city’s Department of Education, among other institutions.

The Guggenheim program, originally called Learning to Read Through the Arts, was created by a museum trustee in 1970, when New York schools were cutting art and music programs. Since it began, it has involved more than 130,000 students in dozens of public schools. The museum dispatches artists who spend one day a week at schools over a 10- or 20-week period helping students and teachers learn about and make art. Groups of students are also taken to the Guggenheim to see exhibitions.

Officials at the Guggenheim said they hoped the study would give ammunition to educators in schools and museums around the country who are seeking more money and classroom time for arts education.

“Basically, this study is a major contribution to the field of art and museum education,” said Kim Kanatani, the Guggenheim’s director of education. “We think it confirms what we as museum education professionals have intuitively known but haven’t ever had the resources to prove.”

Roots of Intelligence

Nature or nurture? Blended. The most elegant solution to this ancient argument is to propose a theory of the blended life - where nearly equal measures of BOTH sides are taken into account. This article revisits the central argument and brings to bear the latest evidence. Enjoy.

Idea Lab

After the Bell Curve

By DAVID L. KIRP

Published: July 23, 2006

When it comes to explaining the roots of intelligence, the fight between partisans of the gene and partisans of the environment is ancient and fierce. Each side challenges the other’s intellectual bona fides and political agendas. What is at stake is not just the definition of good science but also the meaning of the just society. The nurture crowd is predisposed to revive the War on Poverty, while the hereditarians typically embrace a Social Darwinist perspective.

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Melissa Ann Pinney

A century’s worth of quantitative-genetics literature concludes that a person’s I.Q. is remarkably stable and that about three-quarters of I.Q. differences between individuals are attributable to heredity. This is how I.Q. is widely understood — as being mainly “in the genes” — and that understanding has been used as a rationale for doing nothing about seemingly intractable social problems like the black-white school-achievement gap and the widening income disparity.

If nature disposes, the argument goes, there is little to be gained by intervening. In their 1994 best seller, “The Bell Curve,” Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray relied on this research to argue that the United States is a genetic meritocracy and to urge an end to affirmative action. Since there is no way to significantly boost I.Q., prominent geneticists like Arthur Jensen of Berkeley have contended, compensatory education is a bad bet.

But what if the supposed opposition between heredity and environment is altogether misleading? A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience.

“It doesn’t really matter whether the heritability of I.Q. is this particular figure or that one,” says Sir Michael Rutter of the University of London. “Changing the environment can still make an enormous difference.” If heredity defines the limits of intelligence, the research shows, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached. And if this is so, the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.

When quantitative geneticists estimate the heritability of I.Q., they are generally relying on studies of twins. Identical twins are in effect clones who share all their genes; fraternal twins are siblings born together — just half of their genes are identical. If heredity explains most of the difference in intelligence, the logic goes, the I.Q. scores of identical twins will be far more similar than the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins.

And this is what the research has typically shown. Only when children have spent their earliest years in the most wretched of circumstances, as in the infamous case of the Romanian orphans, treated like animals during the misrule of Nicolae Ceausescu, has it been thought that the environment makes a notable difference. Otherwise, genes rule.

Then along came Eric Turkheimer to shake things up. Turkheimer, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is the kind of irreverent academic who gives his papers user-friendly titles like “Spinach and Ice Cream” and “Mobiles.” He also has a reputation as a methodologist’s methodologist.

In combing through the research, he noticed that the twins being studied had middle-class backgrounds. The explanation was simple — poor people don’t volunteer for research projects — but he wondered whether this omission mattered.

Together with several colleagues, Turkheimer searched for data on twins from a wider range of families. He found what he needed in a sample from the 1970’s of more than 50,000 American infants, many from poor families, who had taken I.Q. tests at age 7. In a widely-discussed 2003 article, he found that, as anticipated, virtually all the variation in I.Q. scores for twins in the sample with wealthy parents can be attributed to genetics.

The big surprise is among the poorest families. Contrary to what you might expect, for those children, the I.Q.’s of identical twins vary just as much as the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. The impact of growing up impoverished overwhelms these children’s genetic capacities. In other words, home life is the critical factor for youngsters at the bottom of the economic barrel.

“If you have a chaotic environment, kids’ genetic potential doesn’t have a chance to be expressed,” Turkheimer explains. “Well-off families can provide the mental stimulation needed for genes to build the brain circuitry for intelligence.”

This provocative finding was confirmed in a study published last year. An analysis of the reading ability of middle-aged twins showed that even half a century after childhood, family background still has a big effect — but only for children who grew up poor.

Meanwhile, Turkheimer is studying a sample of twins who took the National Merit Scholarship exam, and the results are the same. Although these are the academic elite, who mostly come from well-off homes, variations in family circumstances still matter: children in the wealthiest households have the greatest opportunity to develop all their genetic capacities. The better-off the family, the more a child’s genetic potential is likely to be, as Turkheimer puts it, “maxed out.”

n seeking to understand the impact of nature and nurture on I.Q., researchers have also looked at adopted children. Consistent with the proposition that intelligence is mainly inherited, these studies have almost always found that adopted youngsters more closely resemble their biological than their adoptive parents. Such findings have supported the assumption that changing a child’s life circumstances won’t alter the hard facts of nature.

But researchers in France noted a shortcoming in these adoption studies and set out to correct it. Since poor families rarely adopt, those investigations have had to focus only on youngsters placed in well-to-do homes. What’s more, because most adopted children come from poor homes, almost nothing is known about adopted youngsters whose biological parents are well-off.

What happens in these rare instances of riches-to-rags adoption? To answer that question, two psychologists, Christiane Capron and Michel Duyme, combed through thousands of records from French public and private adoption agencies. “It was slow, dusty work,” Duyme recalls.

Their natural experiment mimics animal studies in which, for instance, a newborn rhesus monkey is taken from its nurturing biological mother and handed over to an uncaring foster mother. The findings are also consistent: how genes are expressed depends on the social context.

Regardless of whether the adopting families were rich or poor, Capron and Duyme learned, children whose biological parents were well-off had I.Q. scores averaging 16 points higher than those from working-class parents. Yet what is really remarkable is how big a difference the adopting families’ backgrounds made all the same.

The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 — 12 points lower. The same holds true for children born into impoverished families: youngsters adopted by parents of similarly modest means had average I.Q.’s of 92.4, while the I.Q.’s of those placed with well-off parents averaged 103.6. These studies confirm that environment matters — the only, and crucial, difference between these children is the lives they have led.

A later study of French youngsters adopted between the ages of 4 and 6 shows the continuing interplay of nature and nurture. Those children had little going for them. Their I.Q.’s averaged 77, putting them near retardation. Most were abused or neglected as infants, then shunted from one foster home or institution to the next.

Nine years later, they retook the I.Q. tests, and contrary to the conventional belief that I.Q. is essentially stable, all of them did better. The amount they improved was directly related to the adopting family’s status. Children adopted by farmers and laborers had average I.Q. scores of 85.5; those placed with middle-class families had average scores of 92.

The average I.Q. scores of youngsters placed in well-to-do homes climbed more than 20 points, to 98 — a jump from borderline retardation to a whisker below average. That is a huge difference — a person with an I.Q. of 77 couldn’t explain the rules of baseball, while an individual with a 98 I.Q. could actually manage a baseball team — and it can only be explained by pointing to variations in family circumstances.

Taken together, these studies show that the issue has changed: it is no longer a matter of whether the environment matters but when and how it matters. And poverty, quite clearly, is an important part of the answer.

That is not to say that an affluent home is necessarily a good home. A family’s social standing is only a proxy for the time and energy needed to keep a youngster mentally engaged, as well as the social capital that helps steer a child to success.

There are, of course, many affluent parents who do a bad job of raising their children, and many poor families who nurture their kids with care and intelligence. On average, though, well-off households have the resources needed to provide better settings for the fullest development of a child’s natural abilities.

In “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” the University of Kansas psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley find that by the time they are 4 years old, children growing up in poor families have typically heard a total of 32 million fewer spoken words than those whose parents are professionals. That language gap translates directly into stunted academic trajectories.

Is there a way to reduce such gaps? In recent years, the case for investing in early-childhood education has become stronger and stronger. The federal Early Head Start program for infants and toddlers is effective when it is well implemented — in part because it succeeds in getting parents more involved with their children.

Recent research also shows that one year of high-quality state prekindergarten can give children as much as a seven-month advantage in vocabulary; this, in turn, is a good predictor of how well they will read when they are in primary school. As you would expect, poor children benefit the most, especially when they are in classes with middle-class youngsters.

The push for universal preschool is not a red-state-blue-state issue; the pioneers in the area are Oklahoma and Georgia, not generally known for social progressivism. And with the support of business groups and prominent philanthropists like Susan Buffett, the daughter of Warren Buffett, it may enter the national agenda. If it does, it will be a small step toward a society in which not only the most fortunate children will be able to “max out” their potential.

David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is writing a book about the universal preschool movement.

TACO Trail

My idea of the enriched life (Vita Excolatur) : chasing these kinds of adventures ! Let's go !

By CINDY PRICE

Published: July 21, 2006

I’VE never met a taco I didn’t like. Weaned on Taco Bell and my Lebanese mother’s Old El Paso tacos, I’m not terrifically choosy. High-end, low-end, commercial, authentic — even a bad taco is better than no taco.

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A shrimp taco at Chapala in the fishing village of Morro Bay.

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The New York Times

Customers line up at La Super Rica.

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Customers line up at Lilly’s Taqueria in Santa Barbara.

But things change. Deep, obsessive love begets connoisseurship, and a more refined understanding is sought. The plan? A trip along Highway 1, between Los Angeles and San Francisco — among the most beautiful stretches of road in the country, and possibly the hottest taco crawl outside of Mexico. My boyfriend, Taylor Umlauf, will take the wheel and help sample the goods — generous spirit that he is — with hours between to soak in the scenery. The hum and buzz of 380 miles of winding open road await — heady visions of rustic farm towns unfolding into sun-bleached fishing villages, the sun, the salt, the fresh California air. This will be our storied and scenic backdrop. But our raison d’être? Five days, 28 taquerias, 49 tacos.

Eager to hit the road, we decide on a whirlwind tour of sprawling Los Angeles.

In the city’s central section, Pico-Union is a largely Hispanic neighborhood that tourists rarely brake for, but it is home to the taco trifecta — King Taco, El Taurino and El Parián.

King Taco owns El Taurino, and both have a terrific atmosphere — bustling assembly-line kitchens, lively patrons, Latin-themed jukeboxes. Each produces tasty blueprints for the authentic Mexican taco: saucer-size soft corn tortillas about four inches wide, topped with steaming meats that hum with cilantro, onion and a shot of hot sauce.

But it is the loner, El Parián, that sways the heart. It is a favorite of the taco-blogging sensation, the great Bandini (www.tacohunt.blogspot.com), who has warned me that it always looks closed.

Parking in back, we slip into a surprisingly roomy restaurant with sit-down service. In the open kitchen, enormous pots bubble with birria (stewed goat), while customers toil quietly over chips and salsa. My carne asada taco arrives, the thick, juicy strips of steak bursting with flavor and laced with ripe tomato. Flanking the plate are the requisite slices of radish and wedge of lemon.

Across town, we cruise into a busy commercial strip of East Los Angeles. Those who have never sampled a fish taco would be wise to cut their teeth at the tropical urban oasis Tacos Baja Ensenada. Filled with plump pieces of fried halibut and stacked high with cabbage and an otherworldly cream sauce, it is the kind of taco you don’t look up from.

Day fades to night through Venice and Santa Monica, and in the morning, we burst onto the open road. This stretch of Highway 1, just before Santa Barbara, where the road hugs the Pacific so tightly you can see the spray coming off the rocks, makes you want to laugh and crank up the music. In the summer, the wildflowers spring up, paving the way to San Francisco. You know it’s been said a million times, but this really is the great American road trip.

Do rich people eat tacos? I had heard that wealthy Santa Barbara was a hotbed of authentic taco activity, but I was hard-pressed to believe it. A cruise down quaint, tree-peppered North Milpas Street, however, confirms it. The street is lined with taquerias, including the one that started the craze — La Super Rica Taqueria.

Known to many as “the Julia Child joint” — she was a loyal customer until she died two years ago — La Super Rica is bright and airy, and the tortillas are handmade on the spot. On the cashier’s recommendation, I pair a taco de bistec (charbroiled steak) with a queso de cazuela (a heavenly cheese baked in tomato sauce).

Just as I’m sitting down with the owner, Isidoro González, a white-bearded passer-by leans in. “It’s not just a taqueria, it’s the best restaurant in town,” he says. Heart be still, it’s David Crosby. A fellow taco-hound! “You don’t have to continue any further,” he says, eyes twinkling. “This is it — this is the place.”

Starry-eyed, we proceed. Nearby, just off charming State Street, where white stucco boutiques sit neatly under manicured palm trees, is a no-frills storefront called Lilly’s Taqueria. The menu, scrolled hurriedly across a white eraser board, reads like Hannibal Lecter’s grocery list — cheek, lip, tongue, eye. I opt for the lengua (tongue), and dig into the tiny pocket.

EMBOLDENED, I ask the owner, José Sepulveda, about the ojo taco (cow eye). “It sounds kind of unusual,” he says with a laugh. “They think they’re going to serve the eye right there. We chop everything, and it’s cooked and steamed.”

Right. It does kind of look like browned Steak-Ums. But I also spy some gelatinous, clear bits. “Oh, that,” he says, catching my hesitancy. “That’s nothing. Just different parts of the, uh, muscle.”

Oh, boy. Like the cornea? I think, plunging in. The flavor is rich, straightforward — a bit greasy, but doable. “Tacos de ojo” is also slang in Mexico for “eye candy,” as in “that Salma Hayek is un taco de ojo.” Possibly excited by the connotation, my vegetarian boyfriend leans in swiftly for a bite, then stares sheepishly at the plate before dipping in for round two.

Back on the road — the whistle of the wind, the rush of passing trucks, the smell of salt air. Passing a herd of grazing cows, Taylor grips the wheel, muttering: “I can’t even look them in the eye.”

San Luis Obispo is a lot like Santa Barbara, without the fancy. It’s just as cute, but the streets, lined with Mission-style buildings, are less crowded, and the shopping is feasible. On a sidewalk, four Mexican construction workers sit eating lunch. On a whim, I run through my list. They nod approvingly, but when Chapala, a little-known restaurant in nearby Morro Bay, is mentioned, the big guy on the end lights up like a firecracker: “Yes, yes! That’s the one!”

Morro Bay is a fishing village about 10 miles north, with a service street that runs along roaring Highway 1. Tucked discreetly into a gas-station minimart, Chapala is easy to miss. Last November, after seeing long lines form for his homemade tacos, its owner, Antonio Dominguez, turned Chapala into a full-service restaurant, with a mariachi band that plays Friday nights. To mark the changeover, a temporary plastic sign flags in the wind.

Inside, the restaurant is awash in color — a vibrant, charismatic place with big wooden chairs brought in from Mexico. Festive music competes with the clank of the kitchen as the host grabs a couple of menus. The tacos are the best yet. The al pastor (marinated pork) is kicked up with a zigzag of cream; the shrimp taco is sautéed in a homemade achiote sauce.

Our next stop also turns out superb tacos, but with a beachside surfer appeal. At Ruddell’s Smokehouse, a bubble-gum-colored outpost on Cayucos Beach, the owner, Jim Ruddell, owns up to his “gringo tacos” with a laugh, but his house-smoked meats and seafood are no joke. We feast on cumin-dotted pork loin and sweet, smoky oyster tacos, to the thrum of the crashing waves.

Fat and happy, we set our sights on the rocky landscape of Big Sur. The commercial world slips away as we climb the coastline, the gray-brown Santa Lucia Mountains rising suddenly over the swirling blue Pacific. Before us lies a stretch renowned for its vast, awesome splendor, a 90-mile picture postcard in the making — but alas, a taco wasteland.

As the dark cliffs of Big Sur give way to the bright green heartland, Mexican farmers toil in broad hats, backs bent in the hot sun. This is Watsonville, an agricultural town, filled with taquerias catering to the ever-increasing Hispanic population.

Fiesta Tepa-Sahuayo looks like a classic California hole-in-the-mall, but the festive interior brims with homeland trinkets. The tacos hardly disappoint, but my guess is that the real gems are the hard-to-find specialties, like shrimps in rose petal sauce.

Santa Cruz, to the north, is a flip-flop, sand-in-the-shorts kind of place — a laid-back beach town where the college kids reign supreme along thumping Pacific Avenue. Its Taqueria Vallarta turns out to be a major operation catering to daytime shoppers and late-night partiers, and my defenses kick up. Teenagers don’t have the most discriminating tastes for food.

Young America, I stand corrected. The carnitas (shredded pork) tacos are delicious, and grabbing them to go, we pick up a six-pack and head up to the Skyview drive-in movie theater. It’s a classic drive-in, screening Hollywood blockbusters and entertaining a laissez-faire policy of B.Y.O.T.

Halfway between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, we turn off into the rolling green hills of Pescadero, a tiny little blip of a town with a handful of general stores, a single bar and one gas station. I have been tipped off that there is a taqueria holed up somewhere in town, and that the ingredients are straight off the farm. I ask around. “There is no sign in the window,” a local offers, “but there is a taqueria in the gas station.”

Inside the gas station, it’s lunchtime and bustling at Taqueria y Mercado de Amigos. Mexican workers squeeze into booths, sipping hibiscus sodas and chatting over the sizzle of the grill and the rhythmic cha-ching of the register. Two cooks work quickly — grilling the shrimp just till the edges blacken, searing the al pastor and drizzling it with hot sauce.

Outside, the quiet of Pescadero is breathtaking. We head up Stage Road to the old cemetery and take the dirt road to the top of the hill. Sitting on the trunk of the car, tacos warming our laps, we find the most beautiful spot yet — the Kelly green pastures rolling and folding straight into the Western sky, the sun beaming down on all that open land. And just when it couldn’t get any better, we realize something else — we’re holding two of the best tacos this side of Mexico.

On the last day, we reach San Francisco and its Mission District. For sheer taco volume, it is equal to any neighborhood in the States. The streets are lined with murals and filled with the sounds of friends heading for happy hour, cars honking as they pass. The taco to beat here is at La Taqueria, where awards line the walls. But I’ve heard word that two other restaurants, Taqueria San José and El Taco Loco, were gaining. Clearly, I will need to sample one from each.

Having barebacked it sans gringo toppings all the way from Los Angeles, I decide to indulge my American peccadilloes and load them up with guacamole, sour cream and cheese. In the Mission, this is called the “super taco.”

Three carnitas are placed neatly shell to shell. At first blush, San José’s, filled to the breaking point with rice and beans, looks doomed. La Taqueria’s is clearly the looker — fresh ingredients folded gingerly into a wax paper pocket. But scraping aside the mound of rice on the San José taco, I am blown away. The pork is charred perfectly — crispy on the edges, with a center so sweet it brings a tear to the ojo.

Nearby, the legendary El Tonayense taco trucks (named for the owners’ hometown, Tonaya, in the Mexican state of Jalisco) are hopping. Hitting the truck at Harrison and 22nd Streets, I sample an ace tripitas (pig intestines).

It’s fitting that our last stop finds us at La Palma Mexicatessen, a tiny grocery store lined with the Mexican spices we’ve sampled along the way. In the back, kitchen workers shout orders and hand-roll tortillas to order. The crowd is lively — and why not? It’s a beautiful afternoon, and the streets of this gorgeous city are lined with tacos. Determined to cap the crawl on the perfect note, I ask another customer what he likes on the menu. He smiles broadly.

“Everything.”

The Taco Trail

Here are some of the taco places Cindy Price liked best on her trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

EL PARIáN 1528 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles; (213) 386-7361.

TACOS BAJA ENSENADA 5385 Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles; (323) 887-1980.

LA SUPER RICA TAQUERIA 622 North Milpas Street, Santa Barbara; (805) 963-4940.

LILLY’S TAQUERIA 310 Chapala Street, Santa Barbara; (805) 966-9180.

CHAPALA RESTAURANT 2816 Main Street, Morro Bay; (805) 772-4492.

RUDDELL’S SMOKEHOUSE 101 D Street, Cayucos; (805) 995-5028.

TAQUERIA VALLARTA 1101 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz; (831) 471-2655.

TAQUERIA Y MERCADO DE AMIGOS 1999 Pescadero Creek Road, Pescadero; (650) 879-0232.

LA TAQUERIA 2889 Mission Street, San Francisco; (415) 285-7117.

TAQUERIA SAN JOSé 2830 Mission Street, San Francisco; (415) 282-0203.

EL TONAYENSE TACO TRUCK Harrison Street & 22nd Street, San Francisco.

LA PALMA MEXICATESSEN 2884 24th Street, San Francisco; (415) 647-1500.

Science of Training

The science of training for a marathon: interesting stuff that can can be applied over a broad spectrum of endeavors. Enjoy.

Race to the Swift? Not Necessarily

By GINA KOLATA

Published: July 18, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS — Steve Spence arrived in Tokyo on an August day in 1991 to run a world championship marathon. He knew right away that it would be bad.

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Vasileios Zambelis, a Greek marathon runner, practicing for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Competitors and trainers looking toward Beijing in 2008 are anticipating and planning for grueling heat, humidity and air pollution.

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Gina Kolata will answer select reader questions about this article. E-mail your questions to kolata@nytimes.com. Answers will be posted at nytimes.com/science on Friday.

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When it is humid, sweat does not easily evaporate.

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Air pollution, like that in Beijing, top, can bring on exercise-induced asthma. Runners took breathing tests before the 2004 Olympics in Athens to identify any adverse reactions to the air there.

The city was hot and humid and the air so polluted, Mr. Spence said, that he felt as though he could not take a full breath. His adviser, David Martin, an exercise physiologist, agreed. They were, Dr. Martin said, “the most challenging conditions that have ever been reported for world championships.”

But Mr. Spence, who is now the head cross-country coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, had trained long and hard for the race, the International Association of Athletics Federations’ World Championships. He had run so much that a five-minute-per-mile pace “felt like a jog,” he said. But his training had been so exhausting that he had to sleep 10 hours a night and nap 2 hours every afternoon. And his schedule, running 140 miles a week, was so onerous that he needed 5,000 calories a day to sustain himself.

“I got sick of eating,” he said.

Even so, he and Dr. Martin, who is a professor at Georgia State University, planned his training by trial and error, Mr. Spence recalled. “We just kind of muddled our way through,” he said.

Times have changed. Armed with new knowledge of how to survive a grueling race in heat, humidity and pollution, trainers and coaches say they are already starting to plan for two races that may be as bad as Mr. Spence’s — the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, in 2007, and the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

It is so early that the athletes for the races have not even been selected. But exercise physiologists and trainers are planning every detail, from a mile-by-mile examination of the routes to the use of a chemical that can prevent dehydration to methods for coping with the extreme air pollution in China.

Each tip, each special preparation, might take only 1 percent or so off a runner’s time, but that can mean the difference between fame and defeat.

And that includes psychological preparation, says Gloria Balague, who directs sports psychology services at the Sports Medicine Center and Human Performance Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“You can’t just hope to have a good day,” Dr. Balague said.

Mr. Spence’s experience shows how preparation and planning — even without the advances of the last decade — can determine who wins a race. At 6 a.m. on race day in Tokyo, the temperature was already in the 70’s and humidity was high. Mr. Spence knew he could not keep up his usual pace in those conditions, so his strategy was to run slower than usual and hope his training would pull him through, allowing him to speed up at the end while the faster runners faded.

The gun went off, and the other runners quickly pulled ahead.

“You begin to wonder, ‘Where am I?’ ” Mr. Spence recalled. “The leaders are so far ahead of me that I’ll never catch up.” Would they really wilt and fall behind on the 26-mile course?

They did, and so did many others: 40 percent of the runners never finished. Mr. Spence came in third, 40 seconds behind the winner, with an average pace of 5 minutes 11 seconds per mile. He went down in sports history as one of the few American marathoners to win a medal in a world championship.

“Was I the third most fit person in that race? Absolutely not,” Mr. Spence said. “Was I the third most talented? Absolutely not.” What made the difference, he said, was his training and strategy.

Now, with plenty of time to prepare for the races in Osaka and Beijing, USA Track & Field sponsored a small meeting for coaches, distance runners and trainers on getting to the medals podium. Mr. Spence told how he prevailed in Tokyo; exercise physiologists shared research results; and coaches of the champion American Olympic marathoners Meb Keflezighi and Deena Kastor revealed their athletes’ preparations.

It was not the typical scientific meeting. At least half the people in the room wore runners’ watches on their wrists and running shoes on their feet. The meeting adjourned for 2½ hours in the late afternoon so the participants could go for a run and eat dinner. And it seemed that no training tip was too minor to be of interest.

The overwhelming challenge, the group agreed, was to run well in high heat and humidity. Dr. Martin, analyzing performance records for men, calculated that the optimum temperature for a fast marathon was about 54 degrees. Running times, he said, slow by one minute or more with every seven degrees above that, because it becomes more difficult for the body to cool itself.

When it is humid, sweat does not easily evaporate, so the body sweats even more. Blood volume drops, and the body has to make a choice: divert blood to the skin for cooling or divert it to the muscles for performance. It sends blood to the skin.

The result is predictable, Dr. Martin said. With less blood going to the muscles, the runner slows down or stops. The challenge, then, is to find the fastest pace that can be maintained for 26 miles. Go too fast and you may collapse before the race is over. Go a little slower than you have to and you may lose the race.

“You’re on the horns of a dilemma,” Dr. Martin said.

Of course, he added, runners should not use lotions, including sunblock, because they add a barrier to the evaporation of sweat. He said that while it seemed logical to drink as much water as possible before the race — and runners try it — “it doesn’t work.” The reason, he explained, is that drinking a lot of water increases blood volume and the body responds by getting rid of it, in urine.

“What you need to do is to increase your total body fluids another way,” Dr. Martin said.

He added that the legal, safe way to do it is through glycerin loading. The technique exploits the unusual properties of glycerin, a thick, gooey sugar alcohol that is sold in drugstores as a lubricant. Each molecule of glycerin absorbs three molecules of water. During a race, the body uses the glycerin for energy. And every time the body metabolizes a molecule of glycerin, “it unleashes three molecules of water,” Dr. Martin said.

The result, he said, is that “you have a water bank account.”

Glycerin loading, he added, should be reserved for races of a half marathon or longer, when runners are competing in intense heat for at least an hour and a half. Ten days before the Tokyo world championships, Dr. Martin told Steve Spence to try glycerin loading.

“He told me it would help with hydration,” Mr. Spence said. “I asked a lot of questions. I was very skeptical because I didn’t want to mess with anything. But they assured me it wouldn’t cause any problems.”

He tried it in training, and used it in the race. “I definitely think it helped me,” Mr. Spence said.

Two American men, Steve Taylor and Brad Hudson, chose not to use glycerin in the Tokyo marathon, Dr. Martin said. Mr. Hudson did not finish the race, and Mr. Taylor “finished miserably,” coming in 26th, Dr. Martin said.

Mr. Spence used glycerin again in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, where he finished 12th. So did the other two American men in the marathon, Ed Eyestone, who finished 13th, and Bob Kempainen who finished 17th. One American woman, Cathy O’Brien, used it and finished 10th, Dr. Martin said.

But the glycerin trick is not widely known, and that is just what Dr. Martin wants. He and his colleagues studied it in the early 1990’s, testing it on athletes and asking, he said, “if it did any harm and whether they could finish a 20-mile run in hot weather and feel great.”

Wanting credit, the researchers published their work. But not wanting to advertise it to the world’s marathon runners, they published it in a Swiss triathlon journal, Der Laufer, written in German.

Food is another issue. A change in eating patterns can markedly improve performance, said Dan Benardot, a sports nutritionist at Georgia State. But getting athletes to change their eating habits is another story.

In analyzing athletes’ diets, Dr. Benardot and Dr. Martin found that the diets of some, like Ms. Kastor and Mr. Keflezighi, were nearly perfect, “astounding,” Dr. Benardot said.

But, he said, “most of the athletes have really severe energy deficits at different times of the day.”

They “don’t eat enough, and they don’t drink enough,” Dr. Benardot said. “Their backup plan is to take supplements,” which, he added, are not particularly useful.

The typical pattern for athletes, Dr. Benardot found, is to eat a tiny breakfast, snack throughout the day and then, “at the end of the day, oh, my God, they make up for it with a big meal.”

What would happen, he and Dr. Martin asked, if athletes parceled out their calories more evenly?

In a recent study, they recruited 60 college athletes. Thirty were told to eat three high-carbohydrate energy bars a day, in midmorning, midafternoon and after dinner. The others got packets of a sweet powder to mix with water and drink three times a day. The athletes thought the study was comparing liquid to solid snacks. In fact, the powder contained no calories, and each energy bar had 250 calories.

No one gained or lost weight; those eating the energy bars unconsciously adapted to the extra calories by eating less at other times. But the athletes who ate the energy bars lost nearly 2 percent of their body fat, a statistically significant change, and greatly improved their performance on a 30-second test of anaerobic power and endurance.

“It’s a test from hell,” Dr. Benardot said.

He said the athletes were so competitive that they pushed themselves to exhaustion. “We had the world cross-country cycling champion on his knees,” Dr. Benardot said.

The test puts athletes on a bicycle connected to a computer. The computer adds 7 percent of the athlete’s body weight as resistance, and then the athlete sprints as hard as he or she can for 30 seconds. Five minutes later, the athlete does it again.

Not only did those eating the energy bars do better on the test, they also said they did not feel hungry and that they felt more vigorous, Dr. Benardot said. And, to his astonishment, the changes occurred in just two weeks.

“After the study was over, those who had the bars kept coming to us saying: ‘Do you have any more of those bars? What was in them, really?’ ” Dr. Benardot said. “Some of them thought it was illegal.”

A month after the study ended, those athletes were back to their old eating habits, and their body composition and performance on the anaerobic test were back where they had been before the study. “It was incredible,” Dr. Benardot said. “They went right back to their baseline levels.”

Even if the distance runners in the Beijing Olympics eat perfectly, though, they are going to face the problem of air pollution.

In March, Randy Wilber, an exercise physiologist with the United States Olympic Committee, went to Beijing to measure the air quality at training and competition sites.

“I walked around the city for over a week,” he said.

The air was not good. It had high levels of carbon monoxide, which significantly decreases the amount of oxygen that blood can carry. Added to that were high levels of ground-level ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, all of which can inflame and constrict the air passages in the lungs and set off asthma attacks even in people who have never had them.

“When you add in heat and humidity, with the heat index you can expect a sensation, a feeling of 90 to 95 degrees when you are outside,” Dr. Wilber said. “With prolonged exposure and moderate physical activity, you will be on the borderline between caution and extreme caution.”

The physical activity the athletes will be doing could hardly be described as moderate, however.

Parts of the 26-mile course are particularly dirty. “If any of you have driven through the steel mill district of Gary, Ind., that’s what it reminded me of,” Dr. Wilber told the meeting participants.

Air pollution can bring on exercise-induced asthma, even in athletes who never knew they were susceptible, Dr. Wilber said. But the runners cannot simply show up at the race and whip out an inhaler.

The drug they inhale, a beta-2 agonist, is considered a banned performance enhancer. If it shows up in a urine test, the athlete is disqualified unless he or she has medically documented asthma.

Since 2002, the World Anti-Doping Agency has said athletes must submit their medical tests well in advance of Olympic competitions. No longer will a doctor’s note be enough; an independent panel of medical experts will determine whether the athletes have asthma severe enough to warrant medication.

Dr. Wilber wants to pretest Olympic athletes in Beijing, something he did for several athletes competing in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. One or two years before the Olympics, the athletes will be going to Beijing for other competitions, Dr. Wilber said, and those events would be a perfect time to test them.

To show how important it is to find out about asthma ahead of time, Dr. Wilber described an athlete who was competing in track and field and had no idea he had asthma until he tried exercising at the Athens Olympics.

“He tested positive for exercise-induced asthma, and we gave him the meds right there,” Dr. Wilber said. “A few days later, he won a silver medal.”

Dr. Wilber also has another plan up his sleeve to help athletes — including those without asthma — compete while breathing Beijing’s polluted air. But he prefers not to reveal it to the outside world.

“There’s a fine line amongst all of us internationally,” he said. “They’re not going to tell us everything they’re doing. and I’m not going to tell them everything we’re doing.”

“That’s medals for us,” he said. “not them.”

FUN & Bernie DeKoven

FUN & Bernie DeKoven

Bernie DeKoven and his "Deep Fun"

This website is the best I have found on the subject of fun.

Fun drives the universe.

God herself was having FUN when she created the universe.

No doubt about it. Want proof?

Look around.

There are more FUN things about our world than anything else.

And why not ?

Oscar Wilde penned as elegant a defense for fun as I have ever read:

"Seriousnesss is the refuge of the dim witted."

Can't top that.

Enjoy by clicking on Bernie's name above or this.

Share.

Camp life

Going to a summer camp is a sign of living well. But so is living as if you were always at summer camp between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Checklist for Camp: Bug Spray. Sunscreen. Pills.

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times

In what has become a common summer camp drill, nurses dispense medication at Camp Echo in New York.

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By JANE GROSS

Published: July 16, 2006

BURLINGHAM, N.Y., July 15 — The breakfast buffet at Camp Echo starts at a picnic table covered in gingham-patterned oil cloth. Here, children jostle for their morning medications: Zoloft for depression, Abilify for bipolar disorder, Guanfacine for twitchy eyes and a host of medications for attention deficit disorder.

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Graphic: Medicated Campers

A quick gulp of water, a greeting from the nurse, and the youngsters move on to the next table for orange juice, Special K and chocolate chip pancakes. The dispensing of pills and pancakes is over in minutes, all part of a typical day at a typical sleep-away camp in the Catskills.

The medication lines like the one at Camp Echo were unheard of a generation ago but have become fixtures at residential camps across the country. Between a quarter and half of the youngsters at any given summer camp take daily prescription medications, experts say. Allergy and asthma drugs top the list, but behavior management and psychiatric medications are now so common that nurses who dispense them no longer try to avoid stigma by pretending they are vitamins.

“All my best friends take something,” said David Ehrenreich, 12, who has Tourette’s syndrome yet feels at home here because boys with hyperactivity, mood disorders and facial tics line up just as he does for their daily “meds.”

With campers far from home, family and pediatricians, the job of safely and efficiently dispensing medications falls to infirmaries and nurses whose stock in trade used to be calamine lotion and cough syrup. Three times a day, at mealtimes, is the norm, with some campers also requiring a sleep aid at bedtime to counteract the effect of their daytime medications.

“This is the American standard now,” said Rodger Popkin, an owner of Blue Stars Camps in Hendersonville, N.C. “It’s not limited by education level, race, socioeconomics, geography, gender or any of those filters.”

Peg L. Smith, the chief executive officer of the American Camp Association, a trade group with 2,600 member camps and three million campers, says about a quarter of the children at its camps are medicated for attention deficit disorder, psychiatric problems or mood disorders.

Many parents welcome the anonymity that comes when a lot of children take this, that or the other drug, so none stand out from the crowd.

“It’s nobody’s business who’s taking what,” said one parent of an Echo camper whose child is medicated for A.D.D. and who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. “It could be an allergy pill. The way they do it now, he feels comfortable. He just goes up with everybody else, gets it and then carries on with his day.”

Increasingly popular is a service offered by a private company called CampMeds, which provides a summer’s worth of prepackaged pills to 6,000 children at 100 camps. Its founder, Dana Godel, said 40 percent of the children regularly took one or more prescription medications, compared with 30 percent four years ago. Eight percent used attention deficit medications last year; 5 percent took psychiatric drugs.

Borrowing technology developed for nursing homes, CampMeds distributes pills in shrink-wrapped packets marked with a name, date and time. Camp nurses simply tear each packet along the dotted line, sparing them the labor-intensive task of counting pills and reducing the risk of error and thus liability.

The proliferation of children on stimulants for attention deficit disorder, antidepressants or antipsychotic drugs — or on cocktails of all three — is not peculiar to the camp setting. Rather it is the extension of an increasingly common year-round regimen that has also had an impact on schools, although a lesser one, as most medicine is taken at home.

Exacting diagnoses and proper treatments enable some children to go to camp who otherwise could not function in that environment, said Dr. David Fassler, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Dr. Fassler said that children with one behavioral or mood disorder often “have a second or even a third diagnosis.” A child with A.D.D. may also be depressed and anxious, he said, a combination of symptoms that can make such children pariahs in the close quarters of a summer camp cabin without the proper combination of remedies.

Some camp owners question the trend, however. Mr. Popkin, the camp owner in North Carolina, is among them. “It’s universal, and nobody really knows if it’s appropriate or safe,” he said.

And many experts say family doctors who do not have expertise in psychopharmacology sometimes prescribe drugs for anxiety disorders and depression to children without rigorous evaluation, just as they do for adults.

“There is no doubt that kids are more medicated than they used to be,” said Dr. Edward A. Walton, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan and an expert on camp medicine for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And we know that the people prescribing these drugs are not that precise about diagnosis. So the percentage of kids on these meds is probably higher than it needs to be.”

A few medicines growing in popularity, like Abilify and Risperdal, are used for a grab bag of mood disorders. But according to the Physicians’ Desk Reference, the encyclopedia of prescription medications, they can have troublesome side effects in children and teenagers, including elevated blood sugar or the tendency toward heat exhaustion, which requires vigilance by counselors in long, hot days on the ball fields.

Some doctors, nurses and camp directors are uneasy about giving children so-called off-label drugs like Lexapro and Luvox. Such medications are used for depression and anxiety, and have been tested only on adults but can legally be prescribed to children. Clonidine is approved as a medication for high blood pressure but is routinely used for behavioral and emotional problems in children.

“That doesn’t mean they are inappropriate or unsafe,” Dr. Fassler said, adding that camp nurses should be able to call the physician when they have questions, but that not all parents welcome that.

Few camp directors risk discussions with parents about behavioral or psychiatric drugs. “We don’t make these judgments for families,” said Marla Coleman, an owner of Camp Echo and a past president of the American Camp Association.

Figuring out how to distribute all this medicine has taken some trial and error, beginning with supervision by the nurses, who watch the children take their pills.

Some camps do it in the mess hall, citing informality to put campers at ease and the convenience of having everyone assembled in one place.

Other camps prefer the infirmary, to provide more privacy. Camp Pontiac in Copake, N.Y., built a special medication wing with its own entrance and a porch where campers wait their turn.

In Fishkill, N.Y., at a Fresh Air Fund camp for underprivileged children, one nurse in the infirmary deals with bug bites and skinned knees and the other dispenses Strattera and Zoloft, the first for attention deficit disorder and the second for depression, social anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder. Children at the camp take a comparable amount of medication for behavioral and psychological problems as their more privileged counterparts, but more of them suffer from asthma and fewer from seasonal allergies.

The potential for drug interactions is compounded by the widespread use of allergy and asthma medications. Tofranil, an antidepressant for adults that is used for bed-wetting in children, is not recommended in combination with Allegra, for seasonal allergies, Advair, an asthma drug, or epinephrine, the injectable antidote to deadly allergic reactions to bee stings, insect bites and certain foods, primarily peanuts.

Despite a tenfold increase in childhood allergies over the last decade, some camp doctors think daily medication is overused. The owners of Camp Pontiac, Ken and Rick Etra, brothers who are ear, nose and throat doctors, urge parents to forgo prescription remedies for seasonal allergies when occasional over-the-counter antihistamines are sufficient. Their summer camp does not overlap with the height of the pollen and grass season, the Etras say.

They also discourage bed-wetting medications, which can leave a youngster groggy. “They don’t pee, but they’re zombies,” said Mimi Burcham, Pontiac’s head nurse. Instead, camp directors train counselors to wake certain children at midnight for a trip to the bathroom and replace soiled linens with identical sheets to avoid embarrassment.

CampMeds charges $40 per child for any length of stay or for any regimen, a cost that most camps pass along to families. The Fresh Air Fund camps do not use CampMeds, but not because of cost, said Jenny Morgenthau, the fund’s executive director. Rather, she said, many of the families are too disorganized — some in shelters or in prison — to do the preparatory paperwork.

So Fresh Air’s campers arrive with unmarked bags and bottles that cannot be used under state regulations, and without some of their essential medicines. Susan Powers and Leticia Diaz, who run the infirmary at the girls’ camp, are accustomed to children bringing their brother’s expired asthma inhaler or their grandmother’s sleeping pills in a perfume bottle. Sometimes the medications are missing because they have been sold on the street or used by adults, Ms. Powers and Ms. Diaz said. It takes a few days to unscramble.

The nurses at high-end camps have the opposite problem, with parents who try to involve themselves in all aspects of their children’s lives. Some, for instance, may view photographs on the camp Web site, see their child is sunburned and call the camp director to ask for more diligent application of sunscreen. That mind-set may produce ceaseless efforts to help the child, but it has the potential to lead to overmedication, many camp owners and doctors say.

Ms. Burcham, a special-education nurse during the school year, said she often worried about her unfamiliarity with some of the drugs. She turns to the Physicians’ Desk Reference for guidance, or sometimes calls her father, a psychiatrist.

Unpacking the shipment of medicine at Pontiac in mid-June, she tried to make sense of a packet from CampMeds for an 11-year-old who, for the first time, would be taking Concerta, for attention deficit disorder, along with Clonidine and Wellbutrin, both mood disorder drugs.

“I’m not a specialist, and that’s very disturbing sometimes,” Ms. Burcham said. “How do I know if we’re really getting it right?”

Then she carefully placed the medications in a plastic bin marked with the camper’s name.

Walking / Hiking

This is a spectacular example of living well. Pick an adventure. Do it. No excuses matter. Only action.

Friday, July 14, 2006 - Page updated at 12:52 AM

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Trekkers hike 622 miles of Alaska

By Mary Pemberton

The Associated Press

PREV 1 of 2 NEXT PHOTOS COURTESY OF ROMAN DIAL Roman Dial, left, and Jason Geck about 15 days into their journey. Dial, Geck and Ryan Jordan hiked 622 miles across northwest Alaska. Ryan Jordan hiking along a ridge in the Kukpowruk River uplands, about 100 miles from Kivalina, Alaska. The three men followed animal paths, picking routes along gravel bars and ridge tops as they hiked first north and then east from the village of Kivalina on the Chukchi Sea.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Roman Dial wanted to know how far he could hike across the Alaska wilderness carrying all his own food, gear and supplies.

The long-distance trekker found out by hiking 622 miles in northwest Alaska, carrying a pack that in the beginning weighed 59 pounds — 42 pounds of that in food, including 45 chocolate bars, 40 small bags of chips, 3 pounds of almond butter, brown sugar, freeze-dried meals, butter, noodles, olive oil, dried cherries, mashed potato powder, cocoa and powdered milk.

Dial, a 45-year-old professor of biology and mathematics at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, and two other trekkers started last month from the village of Kivalina on the Chukchi Sea. Dial was accompanied by Ryan Jordan, 36, of Bozeman, Mont., who publishes Backpacking Light Magazine, and Jason Geck, 33, a geography instructor and teacher of an outdoor studies class at APU.

"I think everybody was a little apprehensive because it was such a daunting distance," Dial said Wednesday.

Dial, the only one to go all the way from Kivalina to the Dalton Highway, completed the trek in 23 days and eight hours.

The trio started June 11, following animal paths and picking routes along gravel bars and ridge tops as they moved first north and then east, at one point crossing over the Brooks Range. They also made dangerous chest-high crossings of rivers swollen with snowmelt — one time inflating the waterproof bags they kept their food in — to swim across a wide channel of the Colville River.

The route the hikers took included stopping at the most remote spot in the United States, defined by the team as that place farthest from roads and towns. The spot, pinpointed with the help of global-positioning satellites, is along the Ipnavik River, 120 miles from the villages of Ambler and Atqasuk, and about 380 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Dial said.

Information

More on the trek: www.Arctic1000.com

"We walked to it and took some pictures," he said.

On the second day of the hike about 30 miles from Kivalina, the trio surprised a grizzly bear on the Wulik River. The bear was eating a moose and did not want to be interrupted.

Dial was in the lead when the bear took a couple of steps toward them. They took a couple of steps back and began yelling at it.

"He stood up and he was tall," Dial said Thursday. "I yelled the loudest."

Dial said there were a few tense moments before the bear slowly moved off. It was then the hikers discovered the moose carcass.

"It explained his begrudging behavior," Dial said.

Jordan said one of his favorite moments was finding some ancient Inupiat hunting structures with arrowhead fragments and piles of caribou bones on a ridge between Surprise Creek and Kokolik River, near the northernmost point of their route.

Then, there was the time a large, white wolf followed the hikers for about a half-hour.

"We howled at it and it howled back," Dial said.

In the beginning, the trio walked 10 hours a day, stopping every two hours to rest and drink at least a quart of water each, dipping it straight out of rivers and streams.

Jordan walked five days and nearly 100 miles when he twisted his ankle.

"I fell through a small section of rotten shelf ice over a creek and landed onto my ankle," he said.

Jordan walked another 80 miles on the bad ankle before the pain got so bad he couldn't ignore it. He initially thought it was just a bad sprain but as the swelling went down he could see the ankle was badly bruised and not holding together very well.

A pilot was called and Jordan was picked up from a gravel bar on the Utukok River, about 170 miles into the trek. It turned out that he'd torn a tendon and ligaments in his lower leg.

"This was a bad step. This is really rugged terrain. You just have to try and accept there is some level of risk if you are going long distances like this," he said.

Dial trekked on with Geck. Now that their packs were lighter, the two often hiked four hours without stopping and usually put in at least 12-hour days. In one 22-hour period, they hiked a marathon 49 miles to reach Anaktuvik Pass. Geck, whose goal was to reach Anaktuvik Pass, decided he'd go home.

Geck said he went through his food pretty fast and was hungry by the second week.

Geck, who is 5 feet, 11 inches, ended up losing 15 pounds, going from 163 pounds to 148 pounds.

"Toward the end I was craving his chocolate," he said of Dial's cache of chocolate bars.

In hindsight, Geck said he wishes he'd pushed to the end with Dial. But at the time he wanted to get back for the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, a race he helps organize.

Even so, he's pleased with his 530-mile trek.

"I don't think there are a lot of places left like this in the world and I felt privileged to be able to walk through it," Geck said.

Dial's trek ended north of Wiseman at about midnight on July 4. He had some food left over in his pack, mostly small amounts of noodles, olive oil, brown sugar, powdered milk and cereal. He also has a full can of potato chips.

"I think I could go 700 miles," he said. "But I don't have to. I'm satisfied. I was ready to come home."

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

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