#gale make a post that isn’t 10 miles long challenge

[danggerine]

i made the mistake of reading the notes on a lot of trans naoto posts so now y’all get responses to some of the bad takes i keep seeing. buckle the fuck up

• “naoto’s arc is about sexism specific to the japanese workplace and calling her trans erases that to fit it into a western lens!!!”

you guys do know that there are japanese trans people right. like i agree that there are lots of issues with workplace sexism and gender roles in japan, but there’s also lots of issues with transphobia. y’all do know that you do not have to be white and/or live in a western country to be trans, and that queer stories and issues are GLOBAL stories and issues right.

• “naoto isn’t a man, she just pretended to be one to get respect in a male-dominated field, if you say she’s a trans man you’re ruining that whole character arc about accepting your true self!”

here’s the thing! the way that character arc was done was fucking transphobic! the trope of a woman going into disguise as a man for safety/respect/etc is tried and tested, it shows up literally everywhere, and the trope itself is not inherently transphobic. HOWEVER, when persona 4 incorporates Really Obviously Trans elements into that trope, like chest binding and literal gender reassignment surgery, then we have a problem, because now you have a cis character going through a trans narrative in the name of insecurity.

p4 does everything it can to embody the typical narrative of a young transitioning trans guy: binding, changing your name, revising official documents to be known as a man in work and school records, dressing masculine, and forming a shadow literally based on transitional surgery. plus the stuff naoto’s shadow says isn’t about being “a weak little girl” or “no one will ever take you seriously when you’re just a little girl” like you would expect it to be for someone who’s arc is supposed to be about dealing with misogyny, it’s all “you’ll never be a real man,” “you can’t cross the boundary between the sexes,” “no one will ever see you as you are” comments. you know, textbook trans guy insecurity. but the game backtracks on that and says naoto was just insecure about being a female detective and wanted people to take them seriously, and that they should get rid of these feelings and accept their true, female self.

and this is where the problem lies. when you write an obviously trans-coded narrative, but make the character experiencing it an insecure cis person or someone trying to avoid discrimination, you say either 1. trans people are really their assigned gender and are just insecure, but accepting the gender they were given at birth will make them happier and more confident or 2. being a trans man is a way for cis women to escape misogyny. 1 is obviously stupid and has been talked about by plenty of people, but 2 is a BIG problem and a wild assumption to me. being a trans man is seen as an “out” for naoto, or a solution to a problem, as if once they’re a man they’ll face no discrimination whatsoever, when in reality things like getting their gender marker changed in official documents that would allow them to go by “he” and wear the boy’s uniform at school and passing well enough to be seen as a boy in public would be a HUGE ordeal that includes a lot of stress and rejection and danger. realistically, naoto is putting themself in a really precarious position, because if they are exposed as actually afab to the media, to the detective agency, or to the school, they are set for a hell of a lot of ridicule, discrimination, and potential physical danger. but persona 4 doesn’t reflect this at all, because it’s transphobic and thinks that being trans is the easy way out for cis women experiencing misogyny!

• really any argument that boils down to “naoto is a cis woman in canon whose struggle is about sexism, not being trans”

like i already addressed enough of this, i think, but what really gets me is that kanji’s arc is fucked up in a lot of the same ways naoto is and no one is clowning on posts about kanji being gay? his shadow is a very clear (and offensive) gay caricature, and his narrative is very much one about a mlm guy experiencing homophobia from his peers and acting out because of that. and yet the game backtracks to saying “oh no it’s not about liking men, kanji is insecure about his femininity and softer hobbies because of toxic masculinity” and then literally uses naoto to refute his queerness because “look the only guy kanji was ever shown as attracted to was ACTUALLY a woman all along and now that kanji knows she’s a girl he can be openly attracted to her!” in canon, naoto is about as cis as kanji is straight, and yet EVERYONE is on board for portraying kanji as gay in fan works like it’s not even a question, but there has to be a huge debate anytime anyone wants to call naoto trans. legitimately, i think i’ve seen someone argue about kanji being mlm on a post...once? ever? meanwhile every post about naoto being trans has to have a horde of discourse, i’m literally already prepping for the bad notes this post will get because y’all cannot leave this ALONE

in conclusion, i am not saying that everyone has to think naoto is a trans man or forcing anyone to stop liking a character in the way they want or anything like that. i am saying that the naoto’s canon character arc is transphobic and if you’re trying to fight with trans people about how they want to reclaim something that uses a lot of their experiences, don’t.

[crosbyru-blog]

Snowball express: Ford Fiesta ST vs. Cortina D'Ampezzo

Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the heart of the Dolomites, hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics When Ford named a car after a Winter Olympics place, nobody envisioned an F1 champion driving it down a bobsleigh run. But that is what happened. We revisit the website 55 years on Former world champion Jim Clark says it is the most exciting game he has ever tackled. But if you have any doubts, he urges”a Cortina, plenty of nerve, and airplane tickets to Italy for you — and your doctor.”  You can read about this audacious (read foolhardy) event at the bottom of this page. Fifty-five years on, we are taking one of Ford’s current stars, the appropriately game Ford Fiesta ST, to revisit the site of the historical madness.  Following a night-time handover at Treviso Airport, our eager little three-door ST lbs up the empty Autostrada before climbing deep into the Dolomites to the chic ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, home of the 1956 Winter Olympics and regional epicentre for la dolce vita. There’s a particular excitement to coming somewhere scenic in the dark, and we bed down in a hotel with all the city’s landmark bell tower in anticipation of what sunrise will reveal.  And rightly so. The next day, drifting wisps of mist can not hide the huge, broken crags of limestone which cradle the Ampezzo Valley, their haywire structures jutting at all angles, barely softened by January’s snow.  At the base of the Tofane range on the north edge of town, we meet Gianfranco Rezzadore, president of Bob Club Cortina and former Italian international bobsleigh driver. Our rendezvous is Bob Bar, a tiny wooden shack and neighborhood hang-out nestled beside the Eugenio Monti bob track’s finish. Founded almost a century ago, the course has been 1700 metres long by the 1956 Winter Games, with 16 turns and a 152m vertical fall. Unchanged by 1964, it was only wide enough to accommodate a Ford Cortina. The track has been shortened, narrowed and artificially refrigerated from 1979 (until then, ice and snow were hand-packed) but closed in 2008. He says bobs used to hit 80mph on track, and that centrifugal forces pushed 4g through his spine on the’Cristallo’ hairpin:”I was taller.” Rezzadore’s sceptical that the Ford Cortinas attained the 50mph-plus maintained from the newsreel, but the risks were quite real. Back then, the huge, banked corners — easily double my height — had no flat safety barriers above them. At times, the cars ran almost vertically along what were walls of death: sleighs have abandoned this route with fatal consequences, including throughout the filming of For Your Eyes Only in 1981.  Turning to look back down, it disturbs me how anyone — let alone a valuable sporting professional — might have driven an unmodified, carburetted family saloon with woolly steering, rear cart springs and 1960s tyre compounds down in the snow. Different times indeed.  This is where group photographs were shot, Clark embellishing his race overalls and iconic two-tone lid with a fetching cable-knit sweater, before the cars took to the icy helter-skelter.  With the straights now barely wide enough for a bobsleigh, we’ll enjoy no such mischief — but we have another plan to receive our alpine thrills while we’re here. You see, Cortina was a haven for racing drivers long before Clark et al arrived. Most famously, the Coppa d’Oro delle Dolomiti road race was based in the town each July for 10 post-war years along a 189- mile mountain route. The thought of period sports cars from Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and Ferrari thrashing between those peaks is spine-tingling.  Nowadays, regularity rallies are the next best thing, and we are going to trace the very best bit of this WinteRace — an annual, snow-bound classic car rally whose seventh edition kicks off from Cortina this Friday. Its organisers point us towards part of the route that strings together a series of mountain passes to the west. Soon after dawn the next day, we burble out of town onto a smooth, rising back street towards the first summit at Passo di Giau.  We are immediately met with hairpins — lots of them. Between corners, the Fiesta’s 197bhp, 1.5-litre blown triple supplies ample thrust. Such will be the incline, short straights and gearing which I’m mostly riding second, the engine climbing from 2000rpm to 6000rpm and back without complaint nor more than fleeting inductive hesitation. When shifting is required, the short-throw gearbox activity is neat and doesn’t mind being rushed.  I don’t really need the sharpened throttle, heightened mapping and bass-drum overrun of Sport mode, and Regular’s Faster steering feels more natural, so I stick with that. Turn-in is immediate, and while the sub-zero temperature and glistening asphalt stop our Performance Pack-equipped car from grapple-hooking round the corners as it might on a dry British B-road, the Quaife limited-slip differential at least puts paid to any ungainly front-end scrambling — instead, it gently and progressively runs wide until a throttle lift clips us back into line. Body control impresses also — at these moderate speeds, long-wave lumps are tidily parried and roll hardly registers.  But grit soon starts pinging off the underside, and past the treeline hefty snowbanks flank the street and glassy strips of ice leach across it. The banks close in to leave barely a car’s width of blacktop as we nip beyond a vented snowplough that is spewing a suspended white arc down the mountainside. Moments later the road disappears, so it is steady with the throttle to keep momentum, then a little patch of black allows us add sufficient speed to crest the summit.  Around here, it’s compulsory to have winter tyres or chains from November to April. Our car comes with the latter, so 2236m above sea level and with frost-tingled fingers (it is –5deg C), we’re reading how to attach our’Maggi Trak Auto’ snow chains to front tyres. In a pattern that gets swifter as the afternoon progresses, we hook them up and shuffle around to feel them out. From outside, the chains make the merry jangle of Saint Nick’s sleigh, but at the cabin the continuous rumble of graunching snow is underscored by a locomotive clickety-clack. Crucially, however, they supply the purchase the Fiesta should claw itself onwards.  Before pressing on, we take a moment to drink in our location. The pass sits under sky-scraping Monte Nuvolau, and I can see zig-zagging footpaths from the scree that lead climbers into the foot of its perilous vertical faces. On the summit’s far side 339m above us is an eagle’s nest of a wooden hut out of 1883 — after a military appearance, it now welcomes daring climbers.  Our route down is a perfect sequence of hairpins with barely a directly between and, as the snow clears within a few hundred metres, it’s off with the chains and upward with the speed. We carve down the mountain, past the first of countless ski areas and along frozen streams, then barely touch the valley floor and begin rising again. We join a wider road with fast sweepers that the Fiesta gobbles up before the Tarmac starts to writhe again. Subsident lumps and bumps don’t worry the chassis, while broken, frost-fissured stains of Tarmac reveal its company setup, though without undue resonance.  Year-round trench warfare with this terrain defies contemplation. The road flits between clear straights and snowbound corners, so it is on with the chains again, the heavily cambered corners helping press us to the surface as we clamber on up.  It’s blowing a gale as wind funnels through the 2239m summit’s saddle, so we don’t tarry. The snow thins on the descent, so we eliminate the wheel jewellery for another slalom whose switchbacks and kinks do not let up for three complete miles, plunging from windswept mountainside to sheltered forest. Trunk-shaped dents in the Armco denote the enduring timber trade; before the early 1900s tourism boom helped invent this road, wood was rather transported by the area’s numerous ice-blue rivers.  Rising again to Passo Sella (2244m), we pause on a scenic hairpin so photographer Luc Lacey can capture the jagged skyline beyond. There aren’t any other cars, and there isn’t any sound but for the creaking Armco and a whirling snow devil whispering by. It is one of those moments to feel small.  The pass itself is an ice-free up and down, then we barrel along the smooth, tree-lined Val Gardena road, skirting bizarre, precarious-looking rock formations so tall and so intense that I get dizzy peering up their walls. Winding upward again, we dive swiftly between second and third gears before cresting spectacular Passo Gardena at 2115m where, since the sunset turns peaks into molten lava, a few well-heeled skiers hitch a helicopter ride down the valley before the weather turns.  Even with chains reinstalled, it’s tricky going, the road dipping and diving up to it spins. Approaching one particularly evil left-hander, the naked rear tyres try to overtake the fronts in front of a delicate dose of throttle straightens us out.  Once below the snowline, we veer east again under a freezing, clear sky, the crescent moon peeping between peaks as we home in on the welcoming lights of Cortina. It has been a brilliant drive and, unlike our counterparts from 1964, we have maintained our borrowed Ford largely horizontal and completely undamaged. Mind you, there is one remaining Olympic bobsleigh track wide enough to drive a car down. We just need them to launch the Ford St Moritz. The 1964 Salute to Cortina Champions celebrated more than 200 aggressive wins in 26 countries for the humble Ford Cortina, launched just two decades before. Alongside Jim Clark, the area of 19 drivers included luminaries such as Colin Chapman, John Whitmore, Jack Sears, Vic Elford, Eric Jackson, neighborhood Olympic sledder Lino Zanettin and rate polymath Henry Taylor — a British bobsleigh team captain turned Formula 1 pilot turned Ford works saloon racer.  Their challenge was to navigate a half-mile section of the Cortina d’Ampezzo bobsleigh track used for the 1956 Winter Olympics in a collection of two- and four-door Cortinas. The cars came in road-going GT trim, which meant an uprated, 78bhp version of the 1498cc Kent four-pot with a Cosworth camshaft and a kerb weight of 864kg — though some baited gravity by forcing four-up. As for the results, a Ford insider reported:”It was never designed to be competitive but rather a celebration of the Cortina’s successes. But, it quickly developed into a game between the race and rally drivers, with each side doing much more runs than initially envisaged. The Cortinas were absolutely bog-standard — with the result that the front suspension struts broke through the top mounts”  Competitive spirits thus unsated, a snowball fight broke out, during which Clark slipped a disk in his back, causing him to wear a corset for the following South African Grand Prix (which he won). He really did want that doctor after all. Jim Clark: how Autocar remembered an F1 legend​ Driving Britain’s best streets in a Ford Fiesta ST Ford Fiesta ST review The post Snowball express: Ford Fiesta ST vs. Cortina D'Ampezzo appeared first on Auto Note Buyer - Sell Your Auto Notes For Cash. https://autonotebuyerinc.com/snowball-express-ford-fiesta-st-vs-cortina-dampezzo/

[egooksconnolly]

How to go from zero to Half-Ironman-ready in 6 months

So, you’ve eaten way too many of Grandma Irene’s Christmas cookies and skipped the gym a few too many times in December. You’re afraid the talking scale you got for Christmas will start calling you “Lard Ass”.

But hey: It’s 2018, and it's time for a fresh start. Now you just need a goal—a New Year’s resolution that's reachable, but not too easy.

A 5K? Lame. The full 26.2 marathon? Getting warm. But for something really Facebook-worthy that doesn’t require quite so much running (and that your brother-in-law Steve hasn't already done), try a different number: 70.3. Of course, on Facebook you’ll post that goal by its other name: Half-Ironman.

For the man who wants to really turn his fitness around, the half-Ironman triathlon is the Goldilocks distance, the “just right” balance of multi-sport training that's challenging, doable before autumn, and not as insane as the full Ironman. (Save that for 2019.)

The 70.3 figure is the number of miles you will travel: 1.2 miles in the water, 56 miles on the bike, and a half-marathon (13.1 miles) on your own two feet. While that may seem like a helluva lot to reckon with in January, with hard work and daily commitment, it’s a goal that is very attainable, says Gale Bernhardt, an elite-level triathlon coach and author of Triathlon Training Basics.

[RELATED1]

“I think literally anyone can [do it]," Bernhardt says. “A person can go from zero to an Olympic distance [.9-mile swim, 24.8-mile bike, 6.2-mile run] in about 12 weeks. You need only about an 8-10 week bump on top of that to get to a half-Ironman. It’s a pretty achievable goal.”

Don’t believer her? Talk to Marcus Cook, who went from weighing 489lbs to completing both a half-Ironman and a full Ironman in fewer than 20 months.

You're not the only person considering a half-Ironman, either. Since the inaugural Ironman-branded 70.3 race in 2001, the sport has grown steadily, and there are now 100 races. There are many other nonbranded 70.3 races sanctioned by USA Triathlon (USAT), such as the Illinois Route 66 Triathlon started in 2013 by Steve O’Connor and Tri Harder Promotions, in response to athlete requests for a longer race.

“People will start with the sprint and then go to an Olympic, and then the half is the next step,” O’Connor says. “A lot of people will just stop at the half, because the full is such a big time commitment.”

USAT Communications Manager Caryn Maconi agrees: “It’s much more accessible than a full Ironman. It doesn’t require giving up your life and free time like the Ironman does. A lot of people start with the sprint and Olympic and move up, seeing the half-Ironman as the next step in that challenge.”

[RELATED2]

Some tips to get you started:

1. Find a good race

In addition to the Ironman.com website, two other good sites on which to find triathlons are trifind.com and active.com.

“For your first race, pick a course that isn’t the hardest or hilliest one around,” Bernhardt says. “You want to set yourself up for success.”

2. Take it easy at first—and build in recovery time

Follow the 10% rule: Try not to increase your training mileage more than roughly 10% each week, O’Connor suggests. “Everyone wants to do too much too fast. Don’t overdo it. That’s the risk with the half-Ironman people—they tend to be overzealous.”

Bernhardt advocates having some weeks that increase mileage a little bit more than 10%. At the same time, you should insert recovery days and recovery weeks to avoid potential injury. Her ideal training week for beginner triathletes involves fewer than three hours of total training:

Monday: 30 minutes on the bike Tuesday: 10 x 50-yard swim, with 20 seconds between each 50-yard lap Wednesday: 15-minute jog or walk/jog Thursday: Repeat swim workout Friday: Recovery Saturday: Hour on the bike Sunday: 20-minute steady jog or walk/jog

By the fourth week of her beginning training plan (she has several plans on her website), you should be able to put those legs together for a sprint triathlon (usually around a 500-yard swim, 15-mile bike, and a 5K). From there, the training involves both building up distances and having a recovery week every few weeks, in which you'll reduce your distances by about 50%. The longest week of training is only about 6.5-7.5 hours total, with individual workouts that approximate the half-Ironman legs, outside of an extra-long swim workout to boost confidence in the water.

3. Do a few open-water swims

Training outside of the clear, pristine pool lanes, where you turn around every 25 yards, is also critical for confidence.

“The swim’s a big concern for everybody,” O’Connor says. “You can train in the pool all you want, but you really need that exposure to the open water.”

4. Do a sprint and/or Olympic-distance triathlon first

Both O’Conner and Bernhardt strongly advise doing a shorter triathlon first, because it will grant you open-water experience and practice for the logistics and transitions of the half-Ironman. Getting used to setting up your transition area, changing shoes and equipment and handling nutrition can help you avoid mistakes for the half-Ironman.

5. Know your nutrition needs

When you’re sweating quarts and burning through a couple thousand calories a day, your fluid and caloric intake is critical. But don't assume you need to carb-load like old-school marathoners did, says Bernhardt, co-author of The Fat Burning Machine. A better option is to try a variation of the keto diet: Bernhardt shuns carb-rich diets and instead trains the body to burn fat, reducing race-day calorie intake to 100 calories/hour and, in doing so, reducing stomach problems many carb-gorging triathletes encounter.

6. Get good equipment—but don’t go overboard

With the miles you’ll be doing, you’ll want to have good running shoes and more than just a garage-sale 10-speed. But, don’t feel the need to drop thousands of dollars on top-of-the-line cycling equipment just yet. “It’s not about the equipment,” Bernhardt says. “When you get really fit, it makes a difference, but when you’re a beginner, I’m not sure how much it buys you.” In many cases, losing a few pounds off that lard ass makes more sense than shelling out big bucks for a slightly lighter all-carbon-fiber bike. Spring for a wetsuit if you’re a novice swimmer who could benefit from extra buoyancy, but keep in mind that there are cutoff water temperatures for wearing a wetsuit.

7. Have fun

Yes, some days will require a lot of willpower to get out there and put in the miles you need. But in your training and on race day, be sure to have fun and enjoy the ride. If you do, who knows? Maybe in 2019 you'll get an Ironman logo tattooed on the back of your calf.

[RELATED3]

Distance running

Article source here:Men’s Fitness

[crosbyru-blog]

Snowball express: Ford Fiesta ST vs. Cortina D'Ampezzo

Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the heart of the Dolomites, hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics When Ford named a car after a Winter Olympics place, nobody envisioned an F1 champion driving it down a bobsleigh run. But that is what happened. We revisit the website 55 years on Former world champion Jim Clark says it is the most exciting game he has ever tackled. But if you have any doubts, he urges”a Cortina, plenty of nerve, and airplane tickets to Italy for you — and your doctor.”  You can read about this audacious (read foolhardy) event at the bottom of this page. Fifty-five years on, we are taking one of Ford’s current stars, the appropriately game Ford Fiesta ST, to revisit the site of the historical madness.  Following a night-time handover at Treviso Airport, our eager little three-door ST lbs up the empty Autostrada before climbing deep into the Dolomites to the chic ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, home of the 1956 Winter Olympics and regional epicentre for la dolce vita. There’s a particular excitement to coming somewhere scenic in the dark, and we bed down in a hotel with all the city’s landmark bell tower in anticipation of what sunrise will reveal.  And rightly so. The next day, drifting wisps of mist can not hide the huge, broken crags of limestone which cradle the Ampezzo Valley, their haywire structures jutting at all angles, barely softened by January’s snow.  At the base of the Tofane range on the north edge of town, we meet Gianfranco Rezzadore, president of Bob Club Cortina and former Italian international bobsleigh driver. Our rendezvous is Bob Bar, a tiny wooden shack and neighborhood hang-out nestled beside the Eugenio Monti bob track’s finish. Founded almost a century ago, the course has been 1700 metres long by the 1956 Winter Games, with 16 turns and a 152m vertical fall. Unchanged by 1964, it was only wide enough to accommodate a Ford Cortina. The track has been shortened, narrowed and artificially refrigerated from 1979 (until then, ice and snow were hand-packed) but closed in 2008. He says bobs used to hit 80mph on track, and that centrifugal forces pushed 4g through his spine on the’Cristallo’ hairpin:”I was taller.” Rezzadore’s sceptical that the Ford Cortinas attained the 50mph-plus maintained from the newsreel, but the risks were quite real. Back then, the huge, banked corners — easily double my height — had no flat safety barriers above them. At times, the cars ran almost vertically along what were walls of death: sleighs have abandoned this route with fatal consequences, including throughout the filming of For Your Eyes Only in 1981.  Turning to look back down, it disturbs me how anyone — let alone a valuable sporting professional — might have driven an unmodified, carburetted family saloon with woolly steering, rear cart springs and 1960s tyre compounds down in the snow. Different times indeed.  This is where group photographs were shot, Clark embellishing his race overalls and iconic two-tone lid with a fetching cable-knit sweater, before the cars took to the icy helter-skelter.  With the straights now barely wide enough for a bobsleigh, we’ll enjoy no such mischief — but we have another plan to receive our alpine thrills while we’re here. You see, Cortina was a haven for racing drivers long before Clark et al arrived. Most famously, the Coppa d’Oro delle Dolomiti road race was based in the town each July for 10 post-war years along a 189- mile mountain route. The thought of period sports cars from Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and Ferrari thrashing between those peaks is spine-tingling.  Nowadays, regularity rallies are the next best thing, and we are going to trace the very best bit of this WinteRace — an annual, snow-bound classic car rally whose seventh edition kicks off from Cortina this Friday. Its organisers point us towards part of the route that strings together a series of mountain passes to the west. Soon after dawn the next day, we burble out of town onto a smooth, rising back street towards the first summit at Passo di Giau.  We are immediately met with hairpins — lots of them. Between corners, the Fiesta’s 197bhp, 1.5-litre blown triple supplies ample thrust. Such will be the incline, short straights and gearing which I’m mostly riding second, the engine climbing from 2000rpm to 6000rpm and back without complaint nor more than fleeting inductive hesitation. When shifting is required, the short-throw gearbox activity is neat and doesn’t mind being rushed.  I don’t really need the sharpened throttle, heightened mapping and bass-drum overrun of Sport mode, and Regular’s Faster steering feels more natural, so I stick with that. Turn-in is immediate, and while the sub-zero temperature and glistening asphalt stop our Performance Pack-equipped car from grapple-hooking round the corners as it might on a dry British B-road, the Quaife limited-slip differential at least puts paid to any ungainly front-end scrambling — instead, it gently and progressively runs wide until a throttle lift clips us back into line. Body control impresses also — at these moderate speeds, long-wave lumps are tidily parried and roll hardly registers.  But grit soon starts pinging off the underside, and past the treeline hefty snowbanks flank the street and glassy strips of ice leach across it. The banks close in to leave barely a car’s width of blacktop as we nip beyond a vented snowplough that is spewing a suspended white arc down the mountainside. Moments later the road disappears, so it is steady with the throttle to keep momentum, then a little patch of black allows us add sufficient speed to crest the summit.  Around here, it’s compulsory to have winter tyres or chains from November to April. Our car comes with the latter, so 2236m above sea level and with frost-tingled fingers (it is –5deg C), we’re reading how to attach our’Maggi Trak Auto’ snow chains to front tyres. In a pattern that gets swifter as the afternoon progresses, we hook them up and shuffle around to feel them out. From outside, the chains make the merry jangle of Saint Nick’s sleigh, but at the cabin the continuous rumble of graunching snow is underscored by a locomotive clickety-clack. Crucially, however, they supply the purchase the Fiesta should claw itself onwards.  Before pressing on, we take a moment to drink in our location. The pass sits under sky-scraping Monte Nuvolau, and I can see zig-zagging footpaths from the scree that lead climbers into the foot of its perilous vertical faces. On the summit’s far side 339m above us is an eagle’s nest of a wooden hut out of 1883 — after a military appearance, it now welcomes daring climbers.  Our route down is a perfect sequence of hairpins with barely a directly between and, as the snow clears within a few hundred metres, it’s off with the chains and upward with the speed. We carve down the mountain, past the first of countless ski areas and along frozen streams, then barely touch the valley floor and begin rising again. We join a wider road with fast sweepers that the Fiesta gobbles up before the Tarmac starts to writhe again. Subsident lumps and bumps don’t worry the chassis, while broken, frost-fissured stains of Tarmac reveal its company setup, though without undue resonance.  Year-round trench warfare with this terrain defies contemplation. The road flits between clear straights and snowbound corners, so it is on with the chains again, the heavily cambered corners helping press us to the surface as we clamber on up.  It’s blowing a gale as wind funnels through the 2239m summit’s saddle, so we don’t tarry. The snow thins on the descent, so we eliminate the wheel jewellery for another slalom whose switchbacks and kinks do not let up for three complete miles, plunging from windswept mountainside to sheltered forest. Trunk-shaped dents in the Armco denote the enduring timber trade; before the early 1900s tourism boom helped invent this road, wood was rather transported by the area’s numerous ice-blue rivers.  Rising again to Passo Sella (2244m), we pause on a scenic hairpin so photographer Luc Lacey can capture the jagged skyline beyond. There aren’t any other cars, and there isn’t any sound but for the creaking Armco and a whirling snow devil whispering by. It is one of those moments to feel small.  The pass itself is an ice-free up and down, then we barrel along the smooth, tree-lined Val Gardena road, skirting bizarre, precarious-looking rock formations so tall and so intense that I get dizzy peering up their walls. Winding upward again, we dive swiftly between second and third gears before cresting spectacular Passo Gardena at 2115m where, since the sunset turns peaks into molten lava, a few well-heeled skiers hitch a helicopter ride down the valley before the weather turns.  Even with chains reinstalled, it’s tricky going, the road dipping and diving up to it spins. Approaching one particularly evil left-hander, the naked rear tyres try to overtake the fronts in front of a delicate dose of throttle straightens us out.  Once below the snowline, we veer east again under a freezing, clear sky, the crescent moon peeping between peaks as we home in on the welcoming lights of Cortina. It has been a brilliant drive and, unlike our counterparts from 1964, we have maintained our borrowed Ford largely horizontal and completely undamaged. Mind you, there is one remaining Olympic bobsleigh track wide enough to drive a car down. We just need them to launch the Ford St Moritz. The 1964 Salute to Cortina Champions celebrated more than 200 aggressive wins in 26 countries for the humble Ford Cortina, launched just two decades before. Alongside Jim Clark, the area of 19 drivers included luminaries such as Colin Chapman, John Whitmore, Jack Sears, Vic Elford, Eric Jackson, neighborhood Olympic sledder Lino Zanettin and rate polymath Henry Taylor — a British bobsleigh team captain turned Formula 1 pilot turned Ford works saloon racer.  Their challenge was to navigate a half-mile section of the Cortina d’Ampezzo bobsleigh track used for the 1956 Winter Olympics in a collection of two- and four-door Cortinas. The cars came in road-going GT trim, which meant an uprated, 78bhp version of the 1498cc Kent four-pot with a Cosworth camshaft and a kerb weight of 864kg — though some baited gravity by forcing four-up. As for the results, a Ford insider reported:”It was never designed to be competitive but rather a celebration of the Cortina’s successes. But, it quickly developed into a game between the race and rally drivers, with each side doing much more runs than initially envisaged. The Cortinas were absolutely bog-standard — with the result that the front suspension struts broke through the top mounts”  Competitive spirits thus unsated, a snowball fight broke out, during which Clark slipped a disk in his back, causing him to wear a corset for the following South African Grand Prix (which he won). He really did want that doctor after all. 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