If you’re really into the whole fitness thing, you can also pick up a $299 version which comes with a “footpod” which lets you accurately track your performance by uploading information to your computer, like the Nike+ system.

The watch also works with cyclists wanting to track their bike riding skills, which is something the Nike+ can’t offer you. It has a user-replaceable battery that will last about a year, and weighs 44 grams. It’ll also play nice with other ANT+ fitness devices, which probably means something to gadget fans who actually exercise. To me, not so much.

[Garmin]

Baseball King Balls are specially designed polyethylene baseballs from Japan. By making adjustments to that band in the centre of each ball, you can alter their aerodynamics, thereby throwing a sinker, curveball, knuckleball, riser or screwball at will (no special training required!). The catch? There is no catch! Well… other than the obvious fact that these puppies aren’t regulation.

But I’m sure that millions of fans and countless MLB officials won’t even notice you holding the Baseball King on the cover of Sports Illustrated. [Japan Trend Shop via OhGizmo!]

GoPro Hero HD cam: HD video, mounts for helmets, chests, boards — even cars — make it pretty easy to share high-def versions of your adventures back home or on the internet. $US270 [Review; GoPro]

The cheapest MP3 player you can find: Everyone has a nice one. But if you’re roughing it up outside, you want to bring a crappy one and you want it to be somewhat disposable. SanDisk has some on Amazon. I used to use an iPod shuffle ’til they removed the buttons. For sports involving gloves, things with big buttons are best. A good stocking-stuffer, but explain it as such so you don’t look like a cheap arse. [Amazon]

Nike + iPod Sport Kit: If you like running, the Nike Plus informatics system will track and log and compare your mileage with that of your friends. (I hate running.) $48 at the Australian Apple store [Review; Nike + iPod Sport Kit]

Remember, though, that Nike doesn’t map your routes. If you’ve got an iPhone, I recommend Motion X GPS Sport app for tracking all sorts of outdoor activity routes. $4 [iTunes Store]

Rugged Cameras: The W80 Pentax is pretty compact, takes OK photos and videos, and is shockproof to a few metres, cold-proof to -10C and waterproof to 4.8m. I like it for winter sports. $US300 [Review; Pentax]

The larger Lumix DMC-TS1 is only cold-proof to 0C on paper and waterproof to 3m, but it takes superb images and videos. $US400 [Review; Panasonic]

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite outdoor adventure gear in the comments.

This video shows Oli Lemieux practising on the trampoline wall of Cirque du Soleil and I’ve watched it twice already. I keep searching for clues that it’s just a cleverly edited video, that someone couldn’t possibly do these stunts.

Despite all the discussion of what the human body can be pushed to do, I feel feel a sense of disbelief watching Oli jumping around. I know that he’s a talented man and that this clip is almost certainly not edited in ways that enhance the stunts. But a part of me desperately wants the video to be fake, because despite the many years of practice it must’ve taken him to make everything look easy, Oli has forced me to realise my own personal limitations.

The Amazons, after all, amputated their left breast so it wouldn’t impede their skill in archery. Though athletes have taken some truly crazy stuff to have an advantage, nobody’s gone so far as elective amputation.

I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime trying to get out from under an idea of being “disabled”, and the baggage that comes with that label. (Look it up in a thesaurus if you want a taste of what I mean.) As of yet, the best prosthetic available is not as efficient and not as capable as what Mother Nature gives us — or, what she was supposed to give me and South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. The revolutionary design of the woven carbon-fibre Cheetah Leg, nicknamed for its design inspiration, has been in existence for nearly 15 years — and after my initial triumphs with them in the mid 1990s, it has been the leg of choice for nearly all elite amputee sprinters. But in one instant, after Pistorius entered a summer 2007 track meet in Rome and placed second in a field of runners possessing flesh and bone legs, he and I were deemed too abled.

Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an “unfair advantage” in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years — and were still comfortably categorised as “disabled” — were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society’s regard of a disabled athlete as an “inspiration” (cue the patronising “awwwww”) to a legitimate threat to other athletes (”Uh, what the hell do we do now?”).

The first obvious issue for me was the deliberate ignoring of the truly excellent athletic feat performed by Pistorius and the insistence that if he could beat able-bodied athletes, “it must be the legs”. Look, I also beat a few able-bodied athletes when I ran Division I track in university, and so have plenty of other well-trained amputees in the last decade. The difference is, none of us have ever posted his times. Bottom line: If it were just the legs making us super-fast, I would have done a decade ago what he’s doing now and so would others. Oscar’s not running with any different technology than what I ran with 14 years ago.

The modern sports ethos that we’ve constructed is based upon increasing advantages. Because certainly, in so many sports, we have pushed past natural human function to facilitate a more exciting game — better times, better performance. But where does an advantage become unfair? The crux of that question lays under the umbrella of ethics, which should indeed govern our rule structure within the competitive arena, but there’s something in this story which specifically points toward a deep-seated fear, one we don’t want to talk about in polite conversation, one which parallels historical instances of racial integration of sport and gender integration of sport. If we allow a person, one who we view as our inferior (in whatever way), to play with us, and then that person beats us what does that say about us?

In the 1930s, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis blew the lid off common thinking of how “capable” an athlete of African descent was compared to an athlete of European descent, although the beginning of league integration took a decade more to achieve, and in some sports another three decades. It was as recent as 2003 when some members of the PGA balked at Annika Sorenstam’s quest to compare her talent to the best men in the world, admitting their fear of how it might feel to have a woman beat them, an embarrassing display of archaic thinking.

In 2001, golfer Casey Martin, who played with a degenerative circulatory leg condition that made it nearly impossible to walk an 18-hole course, successfully won a Supreme Court decision allowing him to use a cart as an acceptable assisted medical device. The PGA Tour fought Martin for years, saying all pro golfers must walk because uniform rules are essential for the integrity of the sport. “Accommodating Martin with a golf cart will not fundamentally change the game,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for a 7-2 majority.

What keeps percolating for me is this perceived discrepancy between advantage and “unfair” advantage. It’s absurd to look at a star line-up of athletes and think that they all have an equal shot. We don’t cry foul play when an athlete from the United States, with the best access to training facilities, coaching staffs and nutritional science is up against someone from say… Uzkbekistan. It’s tough luck that 180cm Tyson Gay has to line up against a 195cm Usain Bolt.

It makes me twitch when we talk about “a level playing field”. No two athletes are the same genetically and environmentally, and the mental and emotional factors they’ve endured in their life are relevant in their performance, too. The only reason athletes today are better than those of decades ago is because of science and technology: We know exactly what and when to feed our bodies for maximum energy, we have lighter shoes and better bikes and new rubberised track surfaces and (legal) supplements and altitude training. We are upping the ante each Olympic year with “smarter” design of an athlete’s tools, both inside and outside the body.

A whopping 74 world records were broken last year between March and November with the Speedo Fastskin LZR Racer suit. Do you wonder if Mark Spitz is annoyed that his times are compared to those of athletes using something he didn’t have the opportunity to use or wear?

My interest was piqued in the latest version of the Fastskin LZR suit, an R&D collaboration with NASA. From the initial press releases to subsequent monthly articles, whatever I could find describing it was overwhelmingly celebratory: Writers cooed about the sharkskin-inspired biometric fibre panels for less drag in the water, and its corset-like torso construction, enabling a swimmer to compress their physique and keep better, more supported form during fatigue, making them markedly more efficient in the water.

Very, very few writers brought up any kind of ethical concern of such a tool like this suit until after the Beijing Olympics, choosing to focus on the race between swimwear companies to develop their own supersuit. Even then, the majority of articles on swimming were marvelling at how Michael Phelps says he “literally felt like a rocket coming off the wall” using the device. Jason Rance, the lead designer on this Speedo suit, commented, “It’s part of the evolution of the sport, and it’s really exciting for swimmers. They say they feel like Superman.”

After the ensuing arms-race to outdo the performance of the Speedo, the Americans and Australians led a protest to FINA, the governing body of swimming. In July of this year, FINA banned the full-length suit, having the suit stop at the knee instead, and mandated that all must be constructed of a “textile”, which is in itself an incredibly ambiguous, vague rule. The ban will take effect in January 2010, and — most intriguing — FINA will allow all records set with the suits to stand.

Let’s think about Tiger Woods having not one, but two LASIK surgeries to achieve 20/15 vision, when what we consider the best of natural vision to be is a mere 20/20. Before his first LASIK surgery, Woods had lost 16 straight tournaments. Immediately following the surgery, he won seven of his next 10. Advantage through technology, or not?

On a company website he endorses, there’s a quote from Tiger after his first LASIK surgery, and I found what he said remarkable on a few levels. He said:

For years I played golf with an invisible handicap, invisible to everyone but me. It was my contact lenses. My eyes would sting burn and water all the while I was trying to concentrate on championship golf. I had the Lasik procedure with a TLC laser eye centre surgeon and the results were fabulous. I’m 20/20 with no contacts. My vision is so crisp I feel I can read all the subtleties of the green and look down the fairway hundreds of yards and focus perfectly on the fly. I’m very happy with the results, and grateful for my TLC centre experience.

The first remarkable aspect of this is that for him, the “handicap” was the ineptitude of the contact lenses, and not the fact that he was visually impaired. (He suffered from -11 nearsightedness, considered the worst 1 per cent, legally blind without corrective glasses or contacts.) The second is his own literal description of being able to now clearly see — without the impediment of burning, stinging eyes — hundreds of yards down the fairway thanks to his technological altering. He himself declares the advantage.

“Invisible to everyone but me.” So is that why nobody’s up in arms, the fact that you can’t see his augmentation? Is that why nobody’s challenging this medical method which assists him in achieving dominance in golf? Of course, in the same way that my running legs don’t power themselves, Tiger’s new eyes don’t power and execute a beautiful swing. His athletic talent is further revealed and enabled than what it would have been under the limits of nature, thanks to technology.

Advantage is just something that is part of sports. No athletes are created equal. They simply aren’t, due to a multitude of factors including geography, access to training, facilities, health care, injury prevention, and sure, technology.

I really don’t know how we compare world records of today to those of 50 years ago. A modern climber’s ascent to Everest has innumerable inherent differences than an ascent of a climber who didn’t have access to lighter tanks, comfortable breathable fibres against the skin, medical support at base camp, etc. The competitive benchmarks in that sport have changed from simply being, “Can you climb the mountain?” to “Can you climb it with oxygen, or without?” A wooden tennis racket isn’t the same thing as the graphite ones used now. We wholeheartedly accept titanium golf clubs, LASIK surgery, the invention of new pitches, better injury prevention and repair, titanium knee and hip replacements, and a notable shift in the size of the average footy player.

Where do we draw this ethical line on performance enhancement? I’m not sure I can answer that right now. What I will say is that I don’t think it’s useful to have this discussion around the existing Cheetah Leg, confusing the current non-enhanced technology with future prosthetics that will indeed provide augmentation. As with all evolution in sport, let’s decide the parameters of competition when the technology actually exists, when we have metrics that inform us as to what extent augmentation is a certainty. Conjecture has no place in this discussion.

Maybe our acceptance of Tiger’s LASIK super vision is really answered in the question, “Can everyone have access to it?” In other words, perhaps because the average citizen out there on the street can get laser surgery, it’s OK for Tiger to get it too, whereas the nature of a bionic prosthetic is still viewed as exclusive, and having to wear one isn’t exactly a position the average citizen covets.

What’s going to happen in the future, especially with the rise of more capable prostheses? The human leg is actually a series of internal motors and springs, so the fact that external motors aren’t allowed in track is kind of interesting. (Case in point: Dean Kamen placed 14 motors in his new design of the artificial arm to simulate human function.)

In the not-so-distant future, designers will be able to build a prosthetic leg with a chip in it that they can program to accurately simulate human performance thresholds. (Since we know that no two “able-bodied” athletes have the same bodies, and therefore what they can achieve with their bodies are different, will they average out individual “able-bodied” thresholds to get those metrics? Will they cap how fast they imagine the fastest man on earth to be at 9.58? That time was unimaginable even 18 months ago, when Bolt then set the new WR at 9.72.)

The chip used in a prosthetic that will dictate “acceptable human” metric-based output is what will be allowed in the Olympic standard; meanwhile, the Paralympics will be no holds barred. In an ironic, amazing cultural flip, you will see runners in the Paralympics going faster than those in the Olympics. Now won’t that be an interesting comment on “dis”ability?

Aimee Mullins is an athlete, speaker, actress and model we met at TEDMED. She’s also the guest editor for our theme week This Cyborg Life. Read her bio here.

[LASIK image: Stefan Zaklin/Stringer/Getty; Tiger image: Lucas Dawson/Stringer/Getty Images; LZR image: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images; Aimee image: Greg Kadel]

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

Yes, this ludicrous item consists of a green bra that transforms into a putting green, with the cups turning into holes. Sink a putt and a speaker says “Nice shot!” There’s also a skirt that turns into a flag that says “Be Quiet” on it, for keeping onlookers hushed while you golf next to a naked woman.

What I like about the whole getup is how practical it is. [Pink Tentacle via Tokyo Mango]

Definitely one for the things-I-wish-I-were-talented-enough-to-do category. These five guys are playing a way-bigger-than-life-size game of Guitar Hero by shooting soccer balls at sensors made from torn-apart Guitar Hero controllers. Oh and they’re scoring some pretty decent accuracy too.

Well, at least I would consider 76 per cent accuracy to be pretty great when you need to time your kick so that the ball actually hits the right sensor. That and it’s better than I score on a regular round of the game to begin with. [YouTube via HacknMod]

Let me just preface this by saying that I worked as a personal trainer for years and, for the most part, I steered my clients towards cardio programs that did not involve a lot of high-impact running. The bottom line is this—an effective cardio workout is all about getting your heart rate into the appropriate training zones—and you don’t need to run in order to achieve this. That’s where Nautilus is coming from with the Mobia.

Mobia Gallery

Mobia strengthens the core, builds endurance and improves balance by combining the movements of the most popular and effective gym equipment: the forward motion of a treadmill, the stepping motion of a stair stepper and the low-impact benefits of an elliptical. This three-in-one motion is possible because Mobia operates with two separate “treadles” that rise to meet the users` feet as they walk. The action of pushing down the gently resistant treadles provides an intense workout with maximum efficiency, while reducing stress on knees and ankles.

So you are walking here — not running. But the stair-stepping and elliptical motion should provide enough of a challenge that even fit users can get a real workout. Of course, it is up to you to decide whether or not walking vs running will keep you motivated — but the $US2000 price tag might decide for you. [Mobia and Reuters]

That is an Egyptian vultures, a Neophron percnopterus. Mason have been rescuing them since he was 11, and now he keeps doing that and trains them as his fly instruments. This is how it works: He carries one at take off. Once he is airborne, he frees the raptor, who starts looking for warm, ascending air currents. Mason—who usually flies with another person, charging $US147 per flight—then steers the paraglider following the vulture for a while. Every now and then, Mason will use a whistle to call the vulture, who returns to the owner from behind, landing on his arm.

Mason has other birds too. In fact, he rescues, nurtures, and then frees them into the wilderness as soon as he can. I so want to do this. [SFGate]

It sounds pretty lame, but apparently USA Track and Field rules state that elite runners competing for USATF championships or cash prizes aren’t allowed to use electronic devices. Everyone else is free to.

Adding to the whole mess, Goebel was only made the winner after the fastest woman was earlier disqualified for accepting a water bottle from a friend, instead of just official water stations. On a forum debating the water incident, a photo of Goebel using the iPod turned up, and then the shit hit the fan. Again.

If they’re going to disqualify me for having an iPod they should disqualify everyone who had one,” she said. “It’s just a little ridiculous. I went there to have a fun race with my friends. If you’re bored, it pumps you up a little bit.”

I hear ya, but rules are rules, I guess. [JSOnline via The Sporting Blog]