EVEN TO A NONSCIENTIFIC OBSERVER LIKE ME, there are several obvious peculiarities about the life and work of Garrett Lisi. For instance, despite his being 40 years old and possessing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he has held few steady jobs鈥攁nd those the likes of hiking guide and snowboarding instructor. An adventurer who’s happiest when he’s sliding down snow or waves, Lisi routinely follows a morning of surfing or boarding with an afternoon spent hunched at his laptop, puzzling over high-level mathematics. And he does it while leading a rootless, ascetic existence, sleeping on couches, house-sitting, or living in a van parked at Maui surf breaks.

Garrett Lisi

Lisi requires little more to do his work than a laptop and an Internet connection.

Most peculiar of all, though, is that he’s sitting in the dining room of his latest borrowed home, overlooking Lake Tahoe, explaining to me that he is not the next Albert Einstein. Only the most arrogant or deluded person would mention himself alongside the frizzy-haired former patent clerk. But Lisi appears to be neither. He seems “very sane,” says John Baez, a mathematician at the University of California at Riverside. “Which is not exactly universal in people who are trying to crack the mysteries of physics.”

A few weeks ago, Lisi posted an academic paper called “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” to arxiv.org, a site for scientists that’s maintained by Cornell University. The paper outlined his attempt at a theory that would lay out the physics of the universe in one tidy package. For half a century, researchers have sought to reconcile gravity with the three forces that operate inside atoms, where gravity seems to hold no sway. No one鈥攏ot even Einstein, who spent the later years of his life trying鈥攈as been able to explain how these four forces can coexist.

To understand fully Lisi’s own stab at the problem requires a grasp of mathematics far beyond all but a handful of people, but the basic premise is that all physical forces and particles can be explained by mapping them onto an incredibly complex geometrical structure known as E₈. If Lisi is right, his theory would give an elegant shape to the physics of the cosmos, and E₈ would become as significant as E=MC². This would be a remarkable feat coming from any of the most accomplished physicists alive. Coming from a surf bum, it would be beyond extraordinary.

Lisi began presenting his theory at conferences last year, and many well-regarded physicists found it interesting, even plausible. So he posted the paper, hoping for feedback. And with that, he set off a rogue wave of hype and backlash that he’s having a hard time riding. SURFER DUDE STUNS PHYSICISTS WITH THEORY OF EVERYTHING, thundered London’s Telegraph. Discover magazine asked, COULD THE NEXT EINSTEIN BE A SURFER DUDE?

More than a few physicists, meanwhile, took to blogs to trash his idea. “A huge joke,” one called it. “Nonsense,” said another. Some reached for the ultimate scientific insult: “crackpot.” More thorough critics argued that the E₈ model wouldn’t be able to accommodate all the universe’s particles.

Though Lisi has detractors, he also has his fans, those who like the idea that it’s still possible for a maverick physics genius to exist. “I and other people think the academic world suffers from not being more inclusive of people of this kind,” says Lee Smolin, a highly regarded researcher at the Waterloo, Canada鈥揵ased Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, who has corre颅sponded with Lisi. “We’re not talking about a crackpot. He has a Ph.D. from a good graduate program, and his work is well within the bounds of good research.”

The furor is still raging in November 2007, when I meet Lisi in Tahoe. He greets me in a pair of fluffy bear-paw slippers and has a slightly top-heavy surfer’s physique, with wide shoulders and a thick neck. Having recently started shaving his head of its receding blond hair, he has a tendency to rub his scalp idly when he’s thinking. And he’s had a lot to ponder lately.

Lisi knows that by even addressing the Einstein comparison he risks coming off as a lunatic, but too many people have reached for the E-word for him to ignore it totally. “Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia,” he says, shuffling his bear paws on the Pergo floor. “But I’m nowhere near Einstein’s caliber. Certainly in terms of what I’ve accomplished, and also because this theory might be wrong. It’s not a justified comparison.”

There’s nothing unusual about Lisi suggesting that he might be off target=. Only one grand theoretical picture of reality can be correct, after all鈥攂oth mathematically consistent and experimentally validated against the real world. All the rest are just scribblings on paper. What is truly peculiar is that this scientist hobo, a man who abandoned the security of academia to take his chances as a physics nomad, has any shot at all at being right.

LISI GREW UP IN SAN DIEGO, oscillating between riding waves and geeking out. When he was a kid, he says, “my mom could never get me off the beach,” but by the time he reached adolescence, in the early eighties, he had forsaken the ocean for an Apple II, programming and designing video games in his bedroom. When his father, a probate attorney, gave him an old VW microbus at age 16, Lisi drifted back to the beach, turning his body to surfing while his mind chased science.

“Math does come easily to me,” he says, “but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.” While studying physics and mathematics as an undergrad at UCLA, he became obsessed with unraveling the machinery of the universe. Lisi was the top physics student in his graduating class and was accepted to several Ph.D. programs, including UC Berkeley, one of the world’s finest. He chose UC San Diego for its funding offer and proximity to the surf, and he lived for eight years with the beach as his backyard.

During the fourth year of his doctorate, Lisi uncovered what he thought might be the kind of deeper pattern he’d been seeking, though it was a bit outside the physics mainstream. It involved a mathematical anomaly that, he speculated, might explain certain properties of an electron. Soon thereafter, his adviser鈥擱oger Dashen, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who had encouraged Lisi’s research鈥攄ied in front of Lisi during a seminar, of a massive heart attack. Devastated, Lisi suddenly found that “no one else was particularly interested in what I was doing.” He finished his dissertation on a more conventional topic鈥攈ydraulic drag on dolphin skin鈥攁nd abandoned his discovery as nothing more than a mathematical curiosity.

After earning his doctorate in mid-1999, Lisi glumly realized that postdoc research would require working on string theory, the dominant unifying idea in physics for the past decade. If you got into physics in the nineties looking for a theory of everything, string was the place to be. To skeptics, however, the theory had become a kind of mathematical Rube Goldberg machine, with strange parts and ideas welded on to keep it viable. Its researchers postulated the existence of half a dozen or more additional physical dimensions, folded up inside the ones we know about but well beyond our capacity for measurement. Lisi considers string theory “overly speculative.” Even its proponents admit it might be impossible to confirm experimentally.

Like most theoretical physicists, Lisi requires few tools to do his work, which mostly entails reading, doing calculations, and just plain thinking. So, backed by a nest egg of Ph.D. stipend money he’d invested in Apple, he moved to Hawaii with a friend, Brandyn Webb鈥攁 computer scientist who shares Lisi’s intellectual and independent streaks鈥攖o surf and contemplate physics on his own.

“There’s an academic establishment that almost values conformity over ingenuity, and he wouldn’t conform,” says Stephen Applebaum, a doctoral classmate who now works for a medical-device company in San Diego. “He was certainly one of the most gifted people, but he hasn’t always been the best at applying himself. Something really has to interest him.”

Lisi and Webb became what Webb describes as “freelance perpetual grad students.” They mixed serious research (Webb wrote computer-science algorithms while Lisi continued probing the universe) with a taste for adventure, exploring Maui’s big waves on surf- and sailboards. Reichart Von Wolfsheild, a Maui-based computer scientist who has been Lisi’s friend for nearly a decade, still chuckles when he recalls meeting the pair. Walking on the beach one afternoon, he saw two men with surfboards, deep in conversation. “Even at a distance,” he says, “something suggested that these guys don’t belong on the beach.” As he approached, he noticed that one board was covered in arcane symbols:

For years, Lisi had been having a shaper adorn his surfboards with the mathematical description for the propagation of waves.

“You meet certain people,” Von Wolfsheild says, “and you realize instantly that you are going to be friends.” He joined Lisi’s growing circle of thrill seekers and intellectual enablers and was soon inviting him to house-sit at his home north of Lahaina, where Lisi could access the legendary breaks at Honolua Bay.

“I would never go out there,” says Von Wolfsheild. “Garrett’s got way more balls than I’ve got. He’s happiest when he’s falling down in water.”

IN 2002, LISI SUCCUMBED to island fever and relocated to Breckenridge, Colorado, where he taught snowboarding. He rode an extra-long carving board and was known for bombing down slopes in a lab coat. Because he tends to think most clearly early in the day, which also happens to be when conditions are best for surfing and snowboarding, Lisi typically alternates mornings between recreation and work鈥攖he former a head-clearing jaunt that enables him to dive happily into the latter. It was in the shadow of the mountains that he began making progress on unifying gravity with the Standard Model, the collective name for the three subatomic forces and their interactions with matter.

Lisi’s first significant insight came from an obscure formulation of gravity he found in a paper by Lee Smolin. Instead of viewing gravity, as Einstein had, in terms of how matter disrupts space-time (the frequent analogy is a bowling ball on a trampoline), Smolin and two colleagues had revived an unusual description involving the connection between moving shapes. That’s the kind of gravity a snowboarder can get behind. And by looking at it in this way, Lisi was able to combine gravity and the Standard Model into a crude geometric structure. “But,” he says, “I didn’t know what the heck it was.”

Restless again, Lisi decided to head back to Maui in 2004, in true drifter style. Before leaving, he bought a white utility van, tore out the seats, and outfitted it with a sleeping platform, 12-volt shower pump, sink, stove, and surfboard storage. Around the same time, he started dating Crystal Bara颅nyk, an artist he’d met online. “We were just starting to get to know one another,” recalls Baranyk, who’s been with Lisi for four years now. “He said, 鈥楧o you want to go live in a van?’ And I said, 鈥業 guess I’ll know if our relationship will work out, so better now than later.’ ” They shipped the van to Maui and lived wherever the surf took them.

In Maui, Lisi continued to explore the questions his Breckenridge insight had raised. But physics theories don’t buy food, so he and Baranyk scraped together a piecemeal income. Lisi worked as a script consultant for a Hollywood sci-fi movie鈥攕till in development鈥攊nvolving spaceships with fusion drives. Von Wolfsheild hired him to create probability tables that predict payout rates for Las Vegas poker machines. Baranyk sold paintings and worked as a hiking guide. Lisi also took a job teaching introductory physics at a branch of the University of Hawaii.

Through it all, he stayed busy piling up adventures, many of which he gleefully chronicled on his Web site, : kitesurfing on a skateboard; scaring off car strippers trying to steal parts from his van; hiding from park rangers looking to evict him and Baranyk; snapping his surfboard while diving through triple-overhead swells and getting swept so far down the coast he had to hitchhike back, his face bloodied. One of his most enthusiastic posts is about getting his ass kicked in chess by a naked man on a life-size board, during one of his frequent visits to Burning Man.

“I’ve tried to make the rest of my life good enough that even if the physics theories don’t work out,” he says, “it wasn’t a waste of time.”

BY 2006 LISI WAS “damn near broke” and still lacked a cohesive theory. Then he heard that the Foundational Questions Institute, a U.S. group that funds theoretical research, was offering grants for research into “new frontiers” of physics. He threw together an application in a last-ditch effort to make good on seven years of solitary scribbling. A rejection, he mused on his Web site, “will probably really mean my work just isn’t that good.”

Instead, the institute selected Lisi’s proposal, along with those of 29 other applicants from places like Harvard and MIT. Lisi was the only researcher not housed at a major university or institute.

“We never want to forget that Albert Einstein wasn’t working in academia when he discovered the theory of relativity,” says Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and the institute’s director. “It’s important to gamble, because sometimes long shots can turn out to be home runs.” Lisi got $77,000 for two years. Upon receiving his first research check in a decade, he bought the most valuable research tool he could think of: a new mountain bike.

He and Baranyk stashed their van in Maui and drifted to Tahoe, where friends loaned them a house above the lake. It was there, early last year, that Lisi stumbled onto his second significant insight. Up one morning reading mathematics blogs, he came across a posting by John Baez about an elaborate structure called E₈ that, when projected in two dimensions, looks like the world’s most elegant Spirograph. E₈ is one of a number of complex symmetrical shapes discovered in the late 1800s. With 240 separate vertices, it is so complicated that it recently took a team of 18 academics four years to sort through its mathematical possibilities.

When Lisi saw Baez’s posting, he realized instantly that E₈ matched the rough model he’d been building since Breckenridge. “It was the most stunning thing I could ever ask for,” he says. “I walked around with my brain tickling, thinking, This is going to work.”

He began doing the calculations to map some of the 226 known subatomic particles and forces, together with gravity, explicitly onto E₈. The math seemed to hold, at least for what are known as “first-generation” particles. (Most subatomic particles have three variations, called generations. First-generation particles make up everyday matter, while the others show up only at extraordinarily high energies.) When Lisi rotated the shape or added together its points, the mathematical results matched the properties already discovered at particle accelerators, where physicists bash matter together to test theories about forces and sub-particles. On the E₈ model, there were 20 points left over, perhaps representing particles yet to be discovered. An E₈ model of the universe, Lisi concluded, had the potential to be proved or disproved by the discovery of these unknown particles.

After communicating with several physicists, he went to an academic conference last June in Morelia, Mexico, and met Smolin. This was followed by a presentation at the Perimeter Institute, which is dedicated to nonestablishment physics research. “The talk was very clear, and he emphasized the open issues and the high-risk nature of things,” says Smolin. “He knew he was putting forward something that, if correct, is highly interesting, but he did it cautiously and modestly.” Buoyed by the reception, Lisi was stoked enough to post the paper online.

THE SHITSTORM BLEW IN the moment the paper hit the Web. First, the managers of arxiv.org recategorized Lisi’s paper from the respectable “high energy” section to the “general” area, a graveyard for laymen and quacks. They subsequently moved it back, but the shuffling foreshadowed difficulties to come. On November 15, an article appeared in New Scientist, a respected British science magazine, describing the paper and mentioning Lisi’s unusual background. Within days, the story spiraled across the globe, from the Daily News & Analysis in Bombay to Fox News here.

The media explosion drew the attention of physics blogs devoted to disputes over the latest research. For many theoretical physicists, a lifetime’s work on a theory鈥攃ombined with a high danger of ending up wrong鈥攏ecessitates serious emotional investment. So the decibel level of criticism, especially online, tends to start at 11.

Most of the broadsides simply echoed problems Lisi himself had admitted in the paper, like the incorporation of only first-generation particles. But some people simply waved it off. The truth is, most theoretical physicists can’t be bothered to sort out Lisi’s theory until he solves its problems.

“Lisi’s paper seems to me to be pretty much nonsense,” responded Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize鈥搘inning physicist from Boston University, when I e-mailed him about Lisi. “I have no interest in discussing it or in enhancing the idiotic hoopla about it.”

More sanguine researchers, however, argue that Lisi’s approach is both intriguing and elegant, and that it lacks any glaring, fatal flaws. “No one has come up with a theory that works yet. It’s the same for all of us,” says John Donoghue, a theoretical physicist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “It’s premature to canonize him but premature to say he’s barking up the wrong tree.”

Smolin has already posted a paper online building on Lisi’s, offering a simpler way to formulate some of Lisi’s math. “I don’t see it as a finished theory,” he says of Lisi’s formulation. “I see it as some mathematical observations and then a proposal.”

What’s required to make it work, according to Lisi, is a combination of mathematical grunt work and a new insight or two. “The main problem is finding how the second and third generations work. If you try any of the obvious ways to make them fit, it doesn’t work. So it has to be nonobvious.” If he can solve that, E₈ would allow him to predict the properties of some of the 20 unknown particles. The ultimate proof, or disproof, could then come when the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, begins operating later this year in Switzerland. It is widely anticipated that the LHC will lead to the discovery of new subatomic particles, and string theorists are also betting on it to validate some of their ideas.

“Right now there is no experimental reason to have confidence in this theory鈥攆or the same reason that there is no experimental reason to have confidence in string theory,” Lisi says. “Either the numbers that come out of the geometry are going to match up with these physical constants, or they are not. If they don’t, then the theory is wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

BACK IN TAHOE, Lisi seems worn down by the attention. “It stresses me out that some people are very angry. I’m not used to having enemies,” he says between slices of homemade pizza. “There is a lot of press saying, 鈥楬e is the next Einstein, he has solved everything!’ It’s probably bad for this theory, and for me personally, that it got this much attention.”

Still, he admits to enjoying the encouraging e-mails. (“Nice work, man!” read one physics student’s message. “I am trying to digest your theory right now… it’s coming in focus slowly.”) “Deep down, everybody wants to do what they want to be doing,” Lisi says. “They just feel that they can’t. So I think they find it kind of inspiring to see that it’s possible. It just takes some sacrifices.”

The next afternoon, Lisi suggests we go mountain biking on the Tahoe Rim Trail. Despite the late-fall chill, he shows up wearing tropical-print boardshorts. He rides with a kind of fearless joy, tearing down the trail at questionable speeds, whooping as he weaves between boulders, and soon disappearing ahead. When I finally catch up, Lisi has paused to check out a sweeping view of the valley. “Not bad, eh?” he says. “It’s doing things like this that keep me from ever wanting to have a real job.”

Right or wrong, Lisi offers a different approach to work and ambition鈥攐ne that is potentially more valuable than an improbable, inscrutable theory of everything. “To my perception, Lisi hasn’t advanced the story,” says MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize winner. “That said, I admire people who think for themselves and dare to take on reality directly rather than writing footnotes to fashionable literature. So I hope he keeps trying and inspires others.”

For now, at least, Lisi is no longer working alone. Other researchers have taken up parts of the E₈ theory to investigate, and Lisi says he’d consider a temporary academic post鈥攊f it were near decent snow or surf. “I’ve gotten e-mails asking, 鈥楢re you taking students?’ ” he says. “Well, come visit and I’ll be happy to talk to you. But I’m not a degree-granting institution. And I don’t want the surf breaks to get more crowded.”

The danger of working out on the solitary edge of human thought, of course, is that the sharpest minds still need a check against self-delusion. Even the smoothest-seeming face can be plagued by hidden reefs. “It could be nature’s big joke on me,” Lisi says. “Sometimes we see patterns that aren’t there. But it’s certainly an adventure to think about. There aren’t that many frontiers left in our world.”

The Idiot’s Guide to Incomprehensible Physics
Just nod and pretend you understand

GRAVITY
Gravity is the mysterious force that makes all objects with mass attract each other. It explains why apples fall from trees and why you can’t dunk. Einstein ascribed it to a distortion of space-time, a theory that holds true as long as you’re talking about “big” stuff鈥攆rom snowflakes on up to the cosmos.

THE STANDARD MODEL
Gravity is too weak to explain the strong bonds between subatomic particles. Break gravity, you get NASA. Break the nucleus of an atom, you could get an atomic bomb. Researchers have defined three forces鈥攅lectromagne颅tism, the strong force, and the weak force鈥攖hat hold atoms together and regulate their decay. The catch is that the theory, known as the Standard Model, can’t account for gravity.

String Theory
This is the leading contender for grand unification, a theory that would bring gravity and the Standard Model together into one happy package. It holds that at the core of every subatomic particle there are much, much smaller vibrating entities called superstrings, and that their vibrations form all energy and mass. But the theory also assumes the existence of nine or more dimensions of space, a concept that, so far, renders much of it untestable.

E₈
With 248 individual coordinates, E₈ is one of the most complex symmetrical shapes possible. (Many equations can be mapped out geo颅metrically; if the math behind E₈ were written in newspaper type, it would cover an area the size of Manhattan.) Physicists routinely use shapes to construct theories and probe relationships. Garrett Lisi noticed similarities between the equations of E₈ and his own work on grand unification. By plotting particles and forces on various coordinates, he started generating potentially testable results that suggested an underlying mathematical structure to the universe.

The post Has A Surfer/Snowboarder Who Lives In A Van Rewritten Physics? Maybe. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Strel, 49, doesn’t look like Aquaman: At five foot 11 and 230 pounds, he’s a potbellied fireplug. But for 58 days on central Europe’s Danube, in 2000, 68 days on the Mississippi, in 2002, and 24 days on Argentina’s Paran谩, in 2003, Strel聴wearing a wetsuit and goggles, swimming freestyle, and escorted by a support team in kayaks and a motorboat聴stroked an average of 12 hours and 40 miles a day. Along the way, he racked up world records for the longest nonstop swim (313 miles over 84 hours, set on the Danube) and the longest continous swim (the 2,360 miles he stroked down the Mississippi).

On all three rivers, Strel allowed himself just one daily creature comfort: a bottle of Slovenian wine called Cvicek, half of which he drank during onshore lunches to wash down his energy bars, the other half with dinner at a hotel. “I like it,” he says, “because it doesn’t get me drunk right away.”

Even with a buzz, marathon swimming is rough. One dark morning on the Danube, Strel collided with a barge and was trapped underwater for more than a minute. On day 41 of the Mississippi swim, lightning struck a buoy three feet from Strel, blasting him halfway out of the water. (He kept going.) Two weeks later, a stomach infection forced him to switch to the backstroke so he could roll to one side and barf.

Strel says he first began dreaming of epic swims as a young boy. At 23, he quit teaching guitar and began racing in open-water swimming events, but didn’t feel “psychologically mature” enough to take on extreme distances until 1997, when, at 42, he raised $50,000 to make a 48-mile crawl from Cape Bon, Tunisia, to the Italian island of Pantelleria.

Thousands of miles and millions of dollars in sponsorships later, Strel says the swimming will continue until his body falls apart. “It’s taken me over like a drug,” he admits. He’ll get his next fix this summer in China, where he plans to swim 2,610 miles of the Yangtze聴and down ten gallons of Cvicek along the way.

Walking the Seven Seas

R茅my Bricka: Stalking the 7 Seas

R脡MY BRICKA FIRST CROSSED the Atlantic Ocean in 1972, sailing luxury-class aboard France, a 1,035-foot passenger steamer. For his second trip, he decided to walk.


The French-born Bricka, then 38, left the Canary Islands on April 2, 1988, with his feet lashed to a pair of 14-foot fiberglass pontoons. Behind him, he towed a raft outfitted with a coffin-size sleeping compartment and carrying fishing tackle, compass, sextant, and three portable water desalinators. Walking 50 miles a day with a precarious upright rowing technique that made him look like a drunk nordic skier, Bricka aimed for the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, subsisting on fish and plankton he scooped up from drifting schools.


Strange as it seems, given these foolproof preparations, there were problems. Two of Bricka’s desalinators bonked halfway through his stroll, so he supplemented his hydration with a daily quart of seawater. Two months in, a Japanese trawler plucked him from the Caribbean near Trinidad. Emaciated and hallucinating (“I saw trolls attack my legs!” he recalls), he’d dwindled from 160 pounds to 110.


The feat—a 3,502-mile hike over open ocean—earned Bricka a Guinness world record but grabbed few headlines in France, where he’s famous for another form of performance art. Clad entirely in white, Bricka tours the country with two dozen instruments strapped to his body and a pet dove and rabbit riding shotgun on his shoulders. He’s known to one and all as L’homme Orchestre, or the One-Man Band.


So far, the only person to challenge Bricka’s water-walking record is Bricka himself. In April 2000, he left Los Angeles, planning to walk the Pacific and arrive in Sydney in time to crash the Summer Olympics. Stoeffler, a French deli-foods company, donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut and put up $100,000 for equipment, including freeze-dried meals, an Iridium satellite phone, and a GPS unit.


En route, Bricka ran out of food and his Iridium service shut down. A cyclone packing 50-foot swells thrashed his raft. Using a handheld messaging device, he e-mailed a plea to his wife, in Paris: “Come pick me up now or I’ll have to hitchhike.”


Ten days later, an American tuna boat found Bricka 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d failed, but it was a grand failure: The oompah man of the sea had covered 4,847 miles in 153 days.

Jogging for 27,705 Miles

Genshin Fujinami Ajari: Jogging for Buddha

“THE ONLY ADVICE I GOT before setting out was to keep my feet warm,” says Genshin Fujinami Ajari, a 46-year-old Buddhist monk in Japan. “Of course, the day before I started, it snowed. I thought to myself, Oh, this is going to be tough.”


Well, nobody ever said enlightenment was easy. Last September, Fujinami, a member of Japan’s devout Tendai sect, finished the ultimate ceremonial slog: a seven-year, 27,705-mile series of laps around the five peaks northeast of Kyoto. He’s only the 49th monk since 1585 to complete the Hieizan Sennichi Kaihogyo, or “Mount Hiei Thousand-Day Circumambulation Practice”—and when you break down what he did, it’s easy to see why so few have triumphed.


For 100 consecutive days in each of his first three years as a pilgrim, Fujinami rose at midnight, prayed, ran and walked 18 miles (stopping 250 times to pray), did chores back at the monastery, ate, and hit the sack. In years four and five, he upped his total to 200 consecutive days. Year six saw him complete a 37-mile course every day for 100 consecutive days, then endure the doiri—seven days without food, water, or sleep while sitting upright and chanting 100,000 mantras. In year seven, he trekked 52 miles a day for 100 straight days, usually from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m., then 18 miles a day for 100 consecutive days.


Fujinami looped Mount Hiei through sweltering humidity, typhoons, and snowstorms, wearing only white cotton layers, straw sandals, and (when needed) a straw raincoat. He also carried a rope and a knife—so he could hang or stab himself if he failed on his quest. (Records don’t indicate whether a Tendai runner has ever killed himself, but you’re required to be ready to take this step.)


“The fourth, fifth, and seventh years were the toughest times,” says Fujinami, who hasn’t visited his family since 1996 and won’t for another five years. “No. The sixth year was the toughest, actually, because of the doiri. But also the seventh year: The distance was extended, so that was the hardest part, also.” Pause. “Actually, there was no year that was easy.”


“But,” chirps the saintly master of the severe practice, “I’m thinking of going back to walking the 100 days this year. Why? Because it’s so beneficial to my appreciation.”

Running Seven Marathons in Seven Days on Seven Continents

Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Dr. Michael Stroud: Marathon Madmen

ON JUNE 7, 2003, famed British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 59, suffered a heart attack so severe that he underwent immediate double-bypass surgery and didn’t come to for three days. And yet on October 21, 2003, with only two and a half months of training under his belt—and post-op wires still in place to keep his chest cavity shut—Fiennes and his longtime comrade-in-extremes, Dr. Michael Stroud, 48, stashed a defibrillator in a duffel, flew to Chilean Patagonia, and set out to complete seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.


“Originally, I’d rung Mike up to see if he might have any interest in climbing Everest,” says Fiennes, a gallant gent who insists you call him “Ran.” “But when he learned you can’t do it in under three months, he proposed the marathons instead, to keep it short and sweet.”


Short and sweet? Only for a pair who in 1993 spent 95 days dragging 500-pound sleds across Antarctica. On the marathon trip, air transport alone would have crushed most mortals: 11 flights, 45,000 miles, and 75 hours in the sky.


British Airways helped by comping the men with first-class seats, but Fiennes and Stroud still had to make their flights if they were going to stay on track. Twice, they had only six hours to land, get through customs, run a marathon, and catch their next plane. Their itinerary took them on an east-north-west horseshoe, from Tierra del Fuego, in Chile, out and back to the Falkland Islands (a last-minute substitute for Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, where a storm had halted flights), then on to Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo, and, finally, New York, for the only formal, everyone-else-is-doing-it marathon of the lot. They ran their first marathon in 3:45; they crossed the finish line in Central Park in 5:25. Both men nearly quit after the heat and humidity of Singapore, where Stroud started passing “brown muck” in his urine.


“Myoglobin,” he recalls. “My muscle-tissue destruction had reached 500 times the normal rate.” A gastroenterologist, Stroud is one of the world’s leading experts on physical responses to extreme conditions. He says he and Ran made fine guinea pigs for his research, which, he points out, suggests that some runners may not require extended periods of recovery.


“The day after we returned, I went straight back to work,” he says. “Not a problem.”

Heinz St眉cke: Pedaling the Planet

Heinz Stucke: Pedaling the Planet

IN 1962, 22-YEAR-OLD tool and die maker Heinz St眉cke rode out of H枚velhof, Germany, on a three-speed bicycle, with $300 in his pocket and a plan to see the world. After 42 years and 300,000 miles, there’s still more he wants to see. Sometime in the early eighties, after two decades with no fixed address, St眉cke decided to extend his trip to every country on the globe.


“It was clear that I wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “One day I said, ‘I am going to drop dead on my bicycle.’ ” So in 1996, when he notched his last country—the Seychelles—he just kept going.


At first, he pedaled simply to “see around the next corner.” But as the years piled up, he was driven as much by not wanting to return home, citing “the fear of going back to the factory, and to the very small-minded people in my village.”


St眉cke, a compact man with a friendly smile, says he averages 68 miles a day, lugging 80-plus pounds of gear. He’s spent around $130,000 in all, funding his travels with sales of an autobiographical booklet and photographs, and occasional donations—including, in 1963, $500 from Ethiopia’s emperor at the time, Haile Selassie. Along the way, he’s been hit by a truck in Chile’s Atacama Desert, chased by an angry Haitian mob, beaten unconscious by Egyptian soldiers, detained by Cameroon’s military for “slandering the state” (“I have no idea what I did wrong,” says St眉cke), and attacked by bees while bathing in a river in Mozambique. But even when Zimbabwean rebels shot him in the foot, in 1980, St眉cke never considered quitting. “In the middle of Africa, you don’t have a choice, anyway,” he says. “You don’t go to the nearest airport and fly home.”


Now 64, St眉cke has set up temporary shop in Paris to sort through souvenirs, photos, and letters he accumulated during his days on the road. Since 2001, finances have limited his travels to half the year, but he’s chasing the 22 or so remaining territories—like Greenland and Christmas Island—that he needs to capture the title of world’s most traveled person.


“It is not my real ambition, but it is something to keep your eyes on,” he says of the record. “Which is what we all need, isn’t it?”

Hiking Britain Naked

Steve Gough: Go Nude

“THERE’S A PART OF ME that says, Don’t be stupid,” Steve Gough confided to a reporter from the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald shortly before he strode into the hamlet of John o’Groat’s, at the northern tip of Scotland, this past January 22. “Just sort of go home and sort of be normal. But part of me thinks, Go on, Steve, go on.”


Seven months earlier, in June 2003, the rangy ex–Royal Marine turned New Ager, then 44, had departed Land’s End, Cornwall, on a bold mission—to walk the 900-mile length of Britain wearing naught but boots, a hat, and a rucksack, regardless of weather—and John o’Groat’s was the end of the road. The man Fleet Street calls “the Naked Rambler” had been arrested 14 times, spent nearly five months behind bars, had his nose broken by a gang of thugs, and suffered public excoriation at the hands of his estranged common-law wife, Alison Ward, for deserting their two children, ages six and seven. (Her tart assessment in the Scottish Daily Record: “I think he was struggling with the anonymity of his life.”)


There’s no law in the UK against public nudity (Gough was arrested for breaching the peace, among other charges), but in recent years emboldened nudists—including one who chained himself to a gate at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s London residence—have adopted the language of the American civil rights movement, aiming to “stop the segregation” of people who prefer to let it all hang out. In line with this loosely knit group, the soft-spoken, occasionally stuttering Gough insists he’s neither streaker nor naturist but an advocate of “the freedom to be yourself.”


“If there was a catalyst, it was one summer when I was looking after my children,” says Gough, speaking by telephone from his girlfriend’s London flat. “They’d strip off and run around naked, and I thought it was great. But I started to notice how often other adults would suggest, in subtle ways, that they put their clothes back on. It really galvanized me. I realized that most of us are damaged in that way from childhood—taught to feel shame.”


What’s next for Gough? A documentary, a book deal, and, no doubt, ongoing legal hassles. “The walk hasn’t ended,” he insists. “The question—do I want to be me or what others want me to be?—didn’t end at John o’Groat’s. It continues.”

Vacation in War-Time Iraq

Derick Williams & Harvey Gough: “Baghdad Sounded Like Fun”

“THERE I WAS, OUTSIDE the Palestine Hotel, sitting in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and sipping an Amstel tall boy,” recalls 35-year-old Texan Derick Williams of his first hours cruising wartime Baghdad, in April 2003. “Then somebody started shooting at us. It was a little surreal.”


Probably so. At the time, Baghdad had just fallen and was rife with looting and potshots. Some 135 U.S. soldiers had been killed and another 495 reportedly wounded. Williams wasn’t in town as an aid worker, journalist, or human shield—he was a freelance risk enthusiast, making him a prime candidate to be shot or arrested. But Williams, a burly Dallas home restorer, didn’t mind at all. “I went for the adventure,” he says, “and I just felt like everything would be OK.”


Williams was traveling with a partner, a 65-year-old Army vet, superpatriot, and burger-joint tycoon named Harvey Gough, who was on a quest to find a Saddam Hussein statue to match the one of Vladimir Lenin perched outside his Dallas restaurant. (“I went because Tommy Franks said I couldn’t,” scowls Gough. He served with the original leader of Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first Gulf war, when Franks was an assistant division commander in the First Cavalry.) After flying to Jordan, the two hired a driver and a Chevy Suburban and bluffed their way into Iraq, claiming to be from a Texas food bank. Their first stop was an isolated airstrip called H3, which was guarded by U.S. Special Forces in tricked-out dune buggies.


“They were big, buff guys in caps and sunglasses, and their guns were drawn,” Williams says. “They were really edgy.”


Other highlights from the five-day tour included browsing for AK-47s at the Baghdad souk and whistling their way into the heavily guarded HQ of the Army’s V Corps. Their hairiest moment came during a day trip to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, when Gough tried to swipe a flag from an abandoned police station. A pissed-off mob chased him away. “That was Harvey’s thing,” sighs Williams. “These guys thought he was being disrespectful, and I thought they were right.”


In the end, Gough didn’t find his statue, but Williams certainly scored a lifetime of adventure. “I’d do it again,” he says. “In a second.”

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