July 2010

”I’m always a hopeful kind of guy,” says Bothwell, who has been in regular contact with Yoeli’s design team for the past two years. ”By 2010, I can see us having five or six X-Hawks in our fleet.” But by then, Yoeli reckons, you may already have one in yours.

—From “Going Way Off Road,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 26, 2004

Six MIT studs are making more than just themselves look smart. Six years ago, I wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine about the race to create the first road-worthy, flight-approved, buy-one-yourself, flying car. A handful of independent dreamers were cranking away on their own designs, each aiming to come up with a vehicle that was small enough to park in your garage, speedy and stylish to drive on the highway, yet aerodynamically engineered to unfold its wings at the push of a dashboard button and take flight. It was a vision almost too delicious to entertain. Instead of fuming in traffic and fidgeting in check-in lines, you could just zip along to your tiny nearby airfield, pop a button on the dashboard, and settle back as your car transformed into a Jetson-jet.

So when would this dream come true?

The prediction: 2010.

The reality: 2010

The Terrafugia Flying Car

What if every runner had as much fun as Catra Corbett always does?

TEDx, the worldwide conference series devoted to “ideas worth spreading”, invited me to speak at the Washington, DC event on Sunday, July 11.

http://tedxpennquarter.com/speakers

It’s at the Newseum, and limited general admission tickets are available. While it’s been hard recently to avoid talking about running shoes, I’m not planning to focus on feet. Instead, I’m more interested in drilling down into transferable skills of the Tarahumara, looking at realistic ways we can adopt the best traits of the Running People.

Because think about it: what if running was no longer considered painful and dangerous? What if all the fear that’s been used to market running shoes disappeared? Millions of people who’ve been injured in the past could shake their butts again, and millions more who’ve been turned off by scare stories of ruined knees and aching feet could give it a try. Maybe it won’t end violence, greed and obesity… but it’s got to bring us a little closer.

ps: Anything worth knowing about the joy of running, Catra “Dirt Diva” Corbett discovered long ago. Don’t check out her blog unless you’ve got hours to kill — she’s been through the rock tumbler, and writes about her life so honestly and beautifully that you won’t tear yourself away until you’re read back for at least two year’s worth of post. Plus, she’s Rembrandt with that iPhone, or whatever she’s using for those shots. No one ever made a 3,000-foot ascent seem like such a party.

Atop Half Dome, Yosemite-stylin'