The gravel roads of eastern Kansas broke my spirit somewhere around mile 70. Two hours before I had been cruising along the trails of the Dirty Kanza 200 bike race. When I reached the first checkpoint, 48 miles in, I had been sure I could race against the light and complete the 206-mile course before sunset. But by 11 a.m., my carbon bike was heavy and slow, the remaining 136 miles stretching out before me. You won’t finish, I feared.

Dirty Kanza is a double century bike race on fire roads around Emporia, Ks. On a good year—Saturday, Jun. 4, 2017, for example—the winds are low and the roads are dry, the sun doesn’t scorch and the humidity isn’t oppressive. The lead racers take about 11 hours, and around 80% of riders finish. On other years, rain can turn the trails to thick clay, winds can blow riders off their bikes and temperatures can soar. Few finish in daylight, many fail to make the 20-hour cutoff and others abandon the attempt.

But even on a good year, the race presents a significant challenge to bike, body and brain. Finishing DK, regardless of the conditions or the time, has become a badge of honor in the endurance-racing world.

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On May 23, 2016, less than a thousand feet from the summit of Everest, Adrian Ballinger’s energy reserves ran out. Ballinger was attempting his first ascent without breathing supplemental oxygen—he’d already been to the top of the world’s highest mountain six times in a climbing career that spans two decades—but on the knife-edge ridge near the top of the 29,035-foot peak, fatigue overwhelmed him.

Cold seeped into Ballinger’s body and he lost all feeling in his hands. Unable to operate the mechanical device on the rope that would support his weight if he slipped, Ballinger was essentially solo climbing Everest. On his right, the ground dropped away thousands of feet towards Nepal; on his left it dropped towards Tibet. Watching his climbing partner, Cory Richards, forge on ahead, Ballinger turned back, defeated.

Last fall, home in California, Ballinger went searching for answers, trying to work out why he had struggled so badly on that final summit push. He hired two coaches, Scott Johnston and Steve House, as advisers. Both Johnston and House are experienced mountain climbers themselves, and co-wrote a manual on strength and conditioning for climbers called Training for the New Alpinism before founding their coaching company, Uphill Athlete.

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Every winter legions of NFL prospects dedicate their winter months to training for the combine. Every year NFL coaches, execs and pundits grumble about the applicability of the combine’s drills to the players’ future pursuits. (This is Bill Belichick, in July 2015, dismissing the utility of “those February drills”: “In the end, [players are] going to make their career playing football.”) Then every year some obscure player rips off a lightning-fast 40-yard dash in Indianapolis. At which point, we all seem to forget about those reservations.

There are, however, at least a few technology-fueled changes afoot. When a runner competes in the 40 today, the NFL Network also shares his split from the first 10 yards, a distance far more relevant to most football positions. At the 2011 combine Under Armour introduced workout shirts featuring built-in sensors that measured heart rate, breathing and acceleration—data that can be used to quantify fitness rather than just raw performance. Last year National Football Scouting Inc., which runs the combine, even established a committee to review the entire event, raising the possibility of further innovations. Just don’t expect any soon. According to its president, Jeff Foster, NFS’s focus over the last 12 months has been on introducing new fan activities. He declined to comment on any future changes for athletes.

So here we are, in 2017, staging the Underwear Olympics in its current form for a 33rd straight year while technology zooms by, creating a “kind of discrepancy,” according to Timothy Roberts, an exercise scientist at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. And it’s not just the tech community leaving the combine in its dust; teams have embraced cutting-edge developments behind the scenes. The 49ers, for example, are investors in PUSH, a tech company that uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure performance in the weight room—not just the number of reps of an exercise, but the power and speed an athlete brings to bear. “Teams are ahead of it; they’re doing their own thing,” says Roberts. “Now the NFL has to catch up.”

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This offseason, Craig Breslow is searching for an edge. The 36-year-old left-handed pitcher won the World Series with the Red Sox in 2013, but was put on the disabled list after straining his throwing shoulder the following March and never seemed to fully recover. His ERA jumped from 1.81 in 2013 to 5.96 the following year. Last season he was signed as a free agent and then released by both the Marlins and the Rangers. “I hadn’t been a successful pitcher for three years,” he says.

To attempt to resurrect his decade-long career in the major league, Breslow is turning to a pitch-tracking camera made by Rapsodo. The Yale-educated molecular biophysics and biochemistry major is hoping he can reverse engineer the best pitches in baseball by looking back at other players’ PITCHf/x and TrackMan data. Then by getting real-time feedback on each throw’s velocity, spin, and trajectory through Rapsodo, he plans to tune up his own throws.

“We all just watched [Cleveland left handed relief pitcher] Andrew Miller dominate the post season with his devastating slider,” Breslow says. “There are a number of factors that go into his ability to make the ball do what it does. He’s 6’8”, he’s got incredibly long levers. He’s got a great ability to spin a ball. At 5’11” and probably a wingspan two feet shorter, I may never be able to impart the same spin rate on a baseball as he can, but I should be able to spin it in the same direction, which will give me the same shape of the breaking ball.”

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Every two years the sports world is treated to a celebration of exceptionalism—the summer and winter Olympic Games—followed by a festival of inspiration—the Paralympics—a few weeks later. But does the popular representation of the Paralympics reinforce stereotypes of those with disabilities?

Born in 1948 as an annual competition for World War II veterans with spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England, the first official quadrennial Paralympic Games were held in Rome in 1960. In the 56 years since, the Paralympics have evolved from a competition for wheelchair athletes to a major international sporting event. Some 4,350 athletes, from more than 160 countries, will compete in Rio. In 1960, everyone was guaranteed a medal. In 2016, most will go home empty-handed.

The visibility of disability sports has been boosted recently with the introduction of events like the U.S.-based Warrior Games and the international Invictus Games, for injured military service personnel. At the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Games, International Paralympic Committee (IPC) president Sir Philip Craven recounted the story of a five-year-old boy, George Glen, whose response to seeing a peg-legged pirate in a children’s book was to say to his mom, “Well he only has one leg, so he must be an athlete.”

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The Olympics of 2016 will be a Games of many firsts: the first Summer Games to be held in winter—though the Sydney Olympics were also in the Southern Hemisphere, their September start put it in spring—the first in South America, the first in a Portuguese-speaking nation, the first to feature a refugee team and the first Games for Kosovo and South Sudan. They will also be the first in 52 years without Kuwait (suspended due to government interference with its national Olympic committee) and in 32 years without a track and field delegation—and perhaps other athletes—from Russia or the former U.S.S.R. (sanctioned for systematic doping).

On the field, golf and rugby sevens are making their contemporary debuts, though most sports changes are subtle shifts in regulations. Scores from the qualification rounds of the shooting competitions will be wiped before the finals—gold will be decided in a head-to-head competition. Swimmers brought to Rio to compete only in relay events must compete in either heats or finals, or their team will face disqualification. The weight classes in wrestling have been revamped in order to achieve more parity between men’s and women’s events. Now there will be six men’s freestyle divisions, six men’s Greco-Roman divisions and six women’s divisions. Field hockey games will now consist of quarters of 15 minutes, instead of 35-minute halves. Badminton, handball, judo and modern pentathlon also have changes in format since London 2012.

The biggest alterations to existing Olympic sports apply to boxing and soccer. For the first time since Moscow in 1980, male boxers will compete without protective headgear. And for the first time, professional prizefighters will be eligible for the Olympics. The decision to allow pros to compete was made only on June 1, and thus is unlikely to have a significant effect this year. The highest-profile pros in Rio will be former IBF flyweight champion Amnat Ruenroeng of Thailand and former WBO middleweight champion Hassan N’Dam from Cameroon.

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Look out France, Africa is coming. Last year Eritrean rider Daniel Teklehaimanot became the first African to wear the polka-dot jersey in the Tour de France, leading the King of the Mountain classification through stages 6 to 9. And British teammate Steve Cummings scored the first stage victory for an African team—in the first ever appearance of an African team at the three-week race—on Jul. 18, 2015: Nelson Mandela Day.

A couple of weeks ago Teklehaimanot won the best climber classification at the Critérium du Dauphiné, one of the main warm-up events for Le Tour, defending a title he’d also won in 2015. Now he is setting his sights on a first stage victory at the main event, which runs from July 2 through July 24.

Since last July, Teklehaimanot’s team has rebranded from MTN-Qhubeka to Team Dimension Data. In September, the team signed rider Mark Cavendish, a previous winner of the points classification at all three Grand Tours, and head of performance Rolf Aldag from the No. 4-ranked Etixx–Quick-Step team. Dimension Data has also rapidly climbed the cycling ladder. It was a Continental team four years ago, a Pro Continental team until last year, and is now a UCI World Tour team. “Those are big steps,” Aldag cautions, explaining that his team may need time to adjust to its new status.

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A road bike race is about just one thing: energy. Pro and elite amateur riders obsess about their personal power data extracted from sensors on bikes, but total energy—power multiplied by time—is what really counts. The team that reaches the finish line in first place is the one that figures out how best to create, conserve, and expend that energy.

Take stage 3 of the 2016 AMGEN Tour of California on May 17, for example. The route opened with a 96.7 mile ride up the coast from Thousand Oaks to Santa Barbara, interspersed with a couple of short climbs, and ended with a 7.4 mile, average 8% gradient, winding climb up Gibraltar Road. The long prologue required endurance, carefully conserving energy; the steep final climb needed raw strength. The rider who had best conserved his energy would be positioned to barge up that final climb.

“It all comes down to the power-to-weight ratio,” says former pro cyclist Jens Voigt of ending inclines. “It’s just survival of the fittest.”

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Heli-skiing guide Jerry Hance took one step forwards and the ground collapsed. The group of five skiers behind him—four clients and a second guide, Adrian Ballinger—was sliced in half as a 40-foot section of the snowy overhang they had been set down on a few minutes before broke away. Kevin Edwards, busy taking photographs on the safe side of the break, turned around to see his friends were gone. David Cole had one foot on solid snow, the other dangling in thin air. Furthest away from safety, Ballinger tumbled into the abyss.

Instinctively, he reached across to his left shoulder to pull the handle on his Backcountry Access backpack. Larger objects rise to the surface in an avalanche, and fully inflated the airbag inside would help ensure that when the snow finally came to a rest, Ballinger would be on top. But he couldn’t find the trigger. Grasping aimlessly with both hands he cursed the manufacturer for making the handle so small, forgetting that the mountain had given way before he’d even had time to put it on.

After a second or so of free fall, Ballinger hit the first of the rocky cliffs below. His helmet and right shoulder took the brunt of the impact. This isn’t going to work, he thought, this is really bad. He was thrown into a tumble, crashing repeatedly against several hundred feet of snow, ice, and rock, then rolling rapidly down a steep snowy incline.

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KC Fontes learned to ride a bike before he could walk. His dad, David, bought him a red DYNO BMX bike for Christmas 1999, when KC was just six months old. “He was my first-born son,” says David, “and all I wanted to do was get him on a bike as soon as I could.”

For the next decade KC spent almost as much time speeding around on two wheels as he did on two legs. But in sixth grade he came home one day from basketball practice at his school in Salinas, Calif., complaining that his right leg hurt. His calf just below the knee was swollen, and doctors discovered a rare tumor.

A month after the diagnosis, KC had an operation to remove the growth. Three months after that he started chemotherapy, but the tumor proved extremely difficult to eradicate. KC missed seventh grade, and for a year-and-a-half he often couldn’t be around friends because the treatment suppressed his immune system.

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