2) Fire your coach. *Suunto's t4 heart-rate monitor measures the effectiveness of your workout, showing how much aerobic benefit you're getting. $199; suuntousa.com

3) Get instant shelter for two with the *2-Second Tent. $69; decathlontent.com

4-6) The sum is greater than the parts (which are pretty damn good to begin with) when you collect all three of these surf epics: Kelly Slater rides big waves in Barbados in Taylor Steele's limited-edition film-and-book box set, *Sipping Jetstreams. $120; studio411.com. Andy Irons gets filmed in South Africa by snow-turned-surf-masters Teton Gravity Research in *Shack Therapy. $25; tetongravity.com. The Malloy brothers take a biofueled road trip to Mexico in Jeff Johnson's book *Bend to Baja. $30; bendtobaja.com

7) Endless summer, circa 2007: Liz Clark, 26, is making all previous surf trips look like warm-ups. She's sailing and surfing her way around the world—Costa Rica last fall, Tahiti this spring—aboard her 40-foot boat, Swell. Ending date TBD.

8) GUERRILLA GARDENING
Can urban vandals make the world a better place?
The rain fell all day, and the soil, I couldn't help thinking, would be perfect. Everything was set. Spades and headlamps and cheap but hardy species of plants—and my team of renegade green thumbs—had been assembled. That night we would put Chicago on the guerrilla-gardening map. // Guerrilla Gardening started two years ago when Richard Reynolds, 29, surreptitiously spruced up the "wastelands" around his London apartment. He soon staged more ambitious raids, and, Brits being Brits, people joined up. It grew like tansy ragwort in spring. By the time I signed up for my free membership, which gets me sporadic e-newsletters, instructions for making a Seed Bomb, and invitations to picnics in the UK, there were well over a thousand members worldwide. And the home page promoted an audaciously deviant goal: to beautify 100 public places across four continents in 2006. // I determined to make Chicago one of them. My wife and I found just the spot: A forsaken table-size planter in front of a convalescent home. At 9:40 p.m. my team swooped in. Thirty minutes later we had planted four sprawling juniper bushes, a flowering potentilla, and half a dozen other perennials that, if their tags didn't lie, could withstand temperatures as low as 40 below. Despite the fact that we were, technically speaking, vandalizing, no one paid us much mind. Buoyed by our success, we talked about doing something bigger and bolder—like carpet-bombing a downtown median with daylilies. guerrillagardening.org —Sam Moulton

9) He's inspiring and demoralizing all at once: At August's grueling Mount Washington Hillclimb, 51-year-old Mountain Bike Hall of Famer Ned "the Lung" Overend bested all but one—Tyler Hamilton, who's, um, suspect.

10) Indoor rowing classes. Don't believe us? Just try to get a spot at Sports Club/LA's Indo-Row session.

NOT ON OUR LIST: Testosterone patches

11) Survivor of the Year: dead-then-alive Everest climber Lincoln Hall.

12) Bad news: Buildings generate almost half of all greenhouse-gas emissions nationwide. Good news: In June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors endorsed Architecture 2030, a plan to convert all buildings to carbon neutral by that year.