My Backyard: Outdoor Lifestyle
2006 Outdoor Person of the Year Awards
By Event MC, John Byorth
Jan 1, 2006, 11:13

For the past three years, we’ve asked readers, contributors and friends to nominate and vote for a person who defines the outdoor lifestyle. The nominees are individuals who give back to the outdoor community in a selfless manner, who create community and expand the boundaries of outdoor sport. They are people who have accomplished much more than simply ticking off extreme athletic feats.

Any one of our finalists could have been awarded the Outdoor Person of the Year—indeed they are all the Outdoor People of the Year—as they overwhelmingly define the greatest potential of our outdoor community. They truly are role models, and we believe the rest of us would do well to follow them. And to do that, as our winner says, is to livestrong.

Lance Armstrong: The Lance Factor

It was impossible to ignore Lance Armstrong’s achievements in 2005, both in winning a record seventh consecutive Tour de France and in giving back to the industry, the sport, the outdoor community and everyone who has been inspired by his story. It’s only fitting that the Outdoor Person of the Year is so influential in how he lives that he has created an eponymous
phenomenon, the Lance Factor.

On the most basic level, what Lance Armstrong has done is win. He turned pro triathlete at the age of 16 and began training with the US Olympic Cycling developmental team—nearly to the detriment of his high school diploma. By 1991, he was the US National Amateur Champion. By 1996, he was ranked number one in the world and became a member of the US Olympic cycling team for the Atlanta Games.

Then, as we all know, in October of 1996 as his career was beginning to boom, Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs and brain. Given a 50 percent chance of survival, he stepped off his bike—not knowing if it was for good. Aggressive chemotherapy tipped the balance in his favor, and as treatment turned to recovery in 1998, he returned to competition.

That same year, the Tour de France experienced its own failed health, mired in doping scandals that included several team disqualifications. It was as if Armstrong and the Tour de France needed each other for their respective comebacks.

Armstrong’s return was ignomious: He had to pull off and quit in an early-season Paris–Nice race. But he had started another project, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, to raise funds for cancer research. Its first fundraiser, the LAF Downtown Criterium bike race in Austin, Texas, was not just a success in gaining awareness for cancer but also for Armstrong as a competitor. He won the race. He built on that victory, finishing top five at the Tour of Spain and the World Championships. Then, in 1999, he won the Tour de France.

“When we made the deal with Lance,” says Zapata “Zap” Espinosa, Trek’s director of public relations, of the company’s 1999 sponsorship, “there was no way anyone could foresee the fortune of events that would come. He was a solid rider who needed to make a comeback, and we trusted that he would.”

In the wake of the previous year’s scandals, the ’99 Tour became known as the Tour of Renewal among some European journalists. Matt Wiebe, technical editor of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, remembers, “Lance breathed new life into the industry with his dominance and his personality, and then remained dominant.”

And a breath of new life was exactly what the bike industry needed. Lance’s Tour victory came just as the mountain bike boom was winding down. Sales began to plateau, then became stagnant. But as Armstrong kept winning the Tour de France, year after year, road bike sales grew alongside his collection of yellow jerseys. It was hard for bike industry wonks not to notice the increasing influence he was having on the sport.

“Percentage-wise, road bike sales have doubled since 1999,” says Espinosa. “You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t admit Lance was part of that.”

Although exactly how many bikes the Lance Factor has sold is impossible to quantify. The fact that cycling is now a primetime sport on TV with a 1.0 rating share—meaning about 700,000 households watched the Tour each day, more than Major League Baseball in the same timeslot—says something of how Armstrong has raised the profile of the sport. By 2005, the Tour de France had become the most watched telecast ever on OLN, with 1.7 million viewers. An 18 percent increase over 2004.

“We’ve heard such a crazy cross-section of testimonies,” Espinosa says. “Housewives, businessmen and people from all walks of life tell me how they were inspired by Lance. He speaks to so many people in so many ways.”

The 2005 Tour de France marked the seventh consecutive win for Armstrong—more than any other cyclist in the world—and his retirement. In those seven years, he revolutionized the bike industry both in inspirational sales and in technology. He worked with Trek and others to develop the highest quality carbon-fiber bikes and components, helping to make available to the masses what formerly only riders of custom bikes could acquire. Not only has he made cycling fun to watch, he’s made it even more fun to get on a bike.

But the Lance Factor transcends the sport of cycling. Armstrong’s philanthropy has led to more than $9.6 million in grants for cancer research, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation has become an epicenter for cancer information, support and advocacy. And it would be hard not to notice the nearly 56 million people who wear a little plastic yellow bracelet with Armstrong’s (or any cancer survivor’s) mantra written on it: livestrong. That single word embodies the Lance Factor. It is a message, led by a sparkling example of what we can all hope to achieve. We can only wonder what he will set his sights on next.

To get your own yellow wristband or for more information on the Lance Armstrong Foundation, go to www.livestrong.org

Diane Van Deren Photo by Seth K. Hughes

Diane Van Deren:
The Woman with Talking Legs

Diane Van Deren’s (then Kobbs) name was nothing new to Denver area
newspapers. She was an all-state golfer, all-metro basketball player and athlete of the year in the 1970s. At 17, she was a tennis pro; she won the Junior College Tennis Championship. That was when she began having fuzzy sensations.

They didn’t last long but were enough to throw off her balance. The spells increased in frequency to the point where Van Deren began to have premonitions before their onset. At 29 years old, it was time to seek help. Several doctors and seven months into a pregnancy later, Van Deren was diagnosed with epilepsy, caused by scarring in her brain that was the result of a seizure brought on by an extremely high fever when she was 16 months old.

For 10 years, Van Deren took medication, but the seizures slowly returned. Then, the medication stopped working. Her doctor, Mark Spitz, proposed a radical solution: Let him record a seizure to locate where in the brain the activity was occuring. Through an MRI, he would then pinpoint any scarring or abnormality, so he could perform surgery to remove it. The surgery would impair her short-term memory and some other brain functions.

Van Deren checked into the hospital and it didn’t take long for a seizure to overtake her. Spitz was able to locate abnormal brain activity in the right temporal lobe. The next day, he used a laser to cut parts of it out. Diane Van Deren would never have another seizure, but she would never be the same either.

During recovery, she lost 20 pounds and struggled to keep her hands off the shunts sticking from her scalp. She wanted to be active again. She hoped that if she started training, the pounding pressure of her tremendous headaches would abate. After three weeks, she started running.

“Before the surgery, whenever I felt a seziure coming on I would go running. I never had a seziure while running. It was a safe spot,” Van Deren recollects.

Although running provided some solace after surgery, Van Deren struggled with her organizational skills: “I was constantly asking myself, ‘Where do I have to go? Where are the kids? What’s next?’ My role as a mother is to take care of my children, and here they had to take care of me.”

But soon the Van Deren family settled back into their life on a ranchette in Sedalia, Colorado, with their assortment of horses, dogs, cats and other critters. Diane got involved with the Epilepsy Foundation of Colorado, working with children to educate them about the disease and brain injuries—and she kept running. As a personal goal, she trained for a 50-mile endurance race and won it. Her next goal was a 100-miler. She finished that successfully, too, without a seizure.
“When I finished, sleep deprived and physically stressed, I felt great,” Van Deren recalls. “I had accomplished my goal, which wasn’t just to finish the race, but to finish the race without having a seizure, because the two major triggers of seizures are sleep deprivation and stress.”
Having met her goals, Van Deren felt ready to leave distance running behind and settle back into a more routine life.

“A couple of days after the 100-miler, I went to speak to some kids with epilepsy. My message was that they shouldn’t let doctors tell them they couldn’t do something,” she says. “One little girl named Mandy said that she couldn’t physically run and asked if I would run a 100-mile race for her. I signed up for a second race and that’s when I started using my legs as words.”

And at 45, Diane Van Deren’s legs continue to speak. In 2005, she ran what the endurance community calls the Rocky Mountain Slam—the four hardest stateside races in one year: the Big Horn 100, the Bear Trail 100, the Leadville Trail 100 and the Hard Rock 100. She is also now a spokesperon for KPTI, a branch of the Denver Children’s Hospital.
“I know my story seems heavy, but I have a great time running. I feel a special responsibility to set an example. And when I work with adults and children with disabilities, it drives my passion for running. I just have to remember the basics when I race: Eat, drink and don’t fall.”
To contact Van Deren for a speaking engagement, email dianev1@hometownaccess.net ; to learn more about epilepsy, go to www.epilepsycolorado.org .

Eric EJ Jackson Courtesy of Kristine Jackson

Eric “EJ” Jackson:
Faithful to a Worthy Purpose

WWhen the oldest member of the US Freestyle Kayak Team is asked what motivates him, Eric Jackson, 41, quotes Helen Keller: “True happiness is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Then he adds, “My worthy purpose is kayaking.”
As the current, three-time World Freestyle Champion, it would seem Jackson has found the secret to happiness. Kayak first. Work second. But so much of what some might consider work is all part of what Jackson considers kayaking. There are his kids, Emily, 15, and Dane, 12, who also happen to be teammates of his on the US Freestyle Kayak Team (Dane is the youngest member). And then there are the instructional videos and clinics to produce; the adult’s and children’s kayaks and paddles to design and develop; and tick-lists for upcoming American Whitewater events he told the president of the US Freestyle Committee (his wife Kristine) he’d volunteer to do.

“I’m motivated because I’ve rarely had to work,” Jackson says, “I’m always playing—with a purpose.”

In 2005, his greatest purpose was boosting American Whitewater’s membership because, as he says, “There is no excuse for any kayaker not to be a member of the number one group protecting and adding to our whitewater rivers.” The entire Jackson family worked to make the two membership drives the most successful in the organization’s history. Jackson and his wife donated several boats from their company, Jackson Kayaks, to raffle off to new members while their kids signed up new paddlers. And, they aren’t drawing the line in North America. Jackson Kayaks supports Team Costa Rica, Team Uganda and Team Argentina with boats. With a plan to purchase plane tickets and provide kayaks for athletes from 10 countries at the 2007 World Championships, he opens the door for paddlers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to compete.

Jackson credits his success to one simple philosophy: “Live well, so you can give yourself away to others.”

Get involved with American Whitewater at www.americanwhitewater.org .

Ben Ayers Courtesy of Chris Bettencourt

Ben Ayers:
The Human Tumpline

A tumpline, or naamlo in Nepalese, is the strap strung across a porter’s forehead or chest to support large baskets of cargo. In lieu of fancy gear, porters rely on tumplines to help them transport goods on the isolated rural trade routes throughout Central Asia. An average porter here can carry in excess of 132 pounds, a payload so impressive that the journal Science announced these porters to be the hardest, strongest workers in the world.

In 1998, native New Englander Ben Ayers went to Kathmandu as part of a cultural immersion program to finish his degree from Bates College. While traveling in the mountains, he noticed the porters who were carrying loads for climbing expeditions. They were horribly underdressed, wearing flip-flops and often without jackets that could withstand the weather. So for his final independent study, he decided to become a porter so he could work as they do and “better understand, physically, the desperate poverty that plagues them.”
“I was the white guy who was going to live their life and expose the injustice,” says 29-year old Ayers. “What I found was that the cultural hierarchy is superimposed on the climbing industry, and porters are just from the lowest classes. Many are farmers who go work as porters in the off-season. Competition is so intense that they can come and go—there is no job security, just replacements. There are no labor laws and nobody is being treated well. That’s where basic human rights must come in.”

Ayers finished his project and returned to the States, but he returned to Nepal in 1999 and again worked as a porter for several months. That’s when he decided to start Porters’ Progress with the mission to outfit porters against the elements.

“It was basically me, 12 jackets and a closet,” says Ayers. “I was only 22, so I really had no professional experience.”

But the porters were very receptive. One retired porter who had been part of Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 Everest expedition related a story about how he lusted over the Westerners’ leather boots, hoping that some day he could get a pair.

But the project appealed to a BBC documentary filmmaker. The film, Carrying the Burden, garnered a bit of press, an invitation to tour and speak with the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2002, and it helped raise enough money for Ayers to open an office and hire his first employee.
Today, Porters’ Progress has 24 employees and has outfitted more than 5,000 porters with clothing and equipment donations from Mountain Equipment Co-op, Patagonia and others. The organization also now hosts a variety of classes on everything from English to first aid, HIV education to microfinance, and takes part in projects for the UN Labor Program.

“The intent is to harness the capability of porters and empower them to impact their own lives,” Ayers explains. “We evaluate their talents and dreams, have them set goals, and then put them on the course to realize them.”

The fact that Ayers spends half of the year in Maine working on a dairy farm is an indication in and of itself that his goal is to make Porters’ Progress sustainable.

“I let them run it themselves because I believe in the power of individual progress to bring change. How else are they going to be in charge of their lives?”

To donate to Porters’ Progress, go to www.portersprogress.org .

Steve Sanchez Photo by Tim McManus

Steve Sanchez:
Heart of Stone

The president and owner of Phoenix-based Master Marble, Sanchez founded Hearts of Stone, a chartitable organization that in 2002, created the Pura Vida No Pro Surfing Contest (PVNP) held in Jaco Beach, Costa Rica. Now in its 4th year, the event benefits Hospicio de Huérfanos de San Jose, a Costa Rican orphanage, and raised money to purchase a transitional facility for 18-year-olds who have to leave the orphanages and enter the workforce. Plus, it exposes local kids to the sport, getting them off the streets and on the waves. www.heartsofstone.org .


Cathy Ann Taylor, Sausalito, California
A high-altitude trekking guide for Mountain Travel Sobek for the last 13 years, Taylor is one of the Breast Cancer Fund’s strongest advocates, using her slide presentations as an opportunity to promote the organization’s work. She has participated in expeditions on peaks such as Mount McKinley, Cho Oyu and Mount Fuji and served as a training leader for trips up Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier to help raise cancer awareness. www.breastcancer.org .

Conrad Anker, Bozeman, Montana
The foremost alpine climber in the world is a board member on The Conservation Alliance, the American Alpine Club and the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation. In 2002, he and his wife Jennifer started The Khumbu Climbing School (KCS), which provides vocational training for the Nepali climbers who work in the high, deadly peaks of the Himalayas. www.alexlowe.org ; www.conradanker.com/KCS.htm .

Dennis Madsen, Seattle, Washington
In 2005, after 39 years as CEO and President of REI, Madsen moved on to create a new foundation, Youth Outdoors Legacy Fund, which helps bring urban youth outdoors. To date, he has raised more than $1.3 million for the fund. During his tenure at REI, he directed an amazing increase in the company’s giving programs, which granted $2.5 million in 2005. www.youthoutdoorslegacyfund.com .

Brian Sehner, Chandler, Arizona
The President and Founder of Sundance Outdoors, Inc., which publishes online summer camp directories (including www.Adventure-Camp.com , www.TeenSummerCamps.com  and www.CampBound.com ), is also the founder of Pangaea Quest Teen Adventure School. His latest nonprofit venture is One Percent for Youth, a collection of businesses dedicated to donating at least one percent of their gross sales to youth-serving organizations. www.onepercentforyouth.org .

Karsten Heuer, Dunster, British Columbia, and Canmore, Alberta
A seasonal national park warden and wildlife biologist, Heuer and his wife, Leanne Allison, embarked on a five-month journey on April 8, 2003, to “be caribou.” To do so, the couple skied and hiked with the 123,000-member Porcupine caribou herd from its winter range near Old Crow, Yukon Territory, Canada, to its endangered calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and back. www.beingcaribou.com .