June 02, 2007
Barack on Basketball
I recently finished reading Barak Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, written in 1995. I’m prone to like the guy anyway, and the fact that he can string a few sentences together gracefully and tell a really good story endears him to me even more. As does knowing he’s a fellow hoops enthusiast, who says he played (like me) “with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent.”
Here’s what he says about what he found in the game, besides friends, a self-defining attitude, and respect:
…A way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that’s how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, “Damn…”
Every sport has its sublime moments, which share something in common, but all are shaped differently. There’s the fun of it.
(Obama only devotes two pages of his 442-page book to basketball; don’t want to give anyone the impression they should read it if they are looking for insights on the game. You should read it though, for a candid and compelling family history and surprisingly uncomfortable look at race today.)
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June 27, 2006
Research on Fitness and Training
I’ve found tons of really interesting research and reports at Peak Performance, a U.K. publication you can subscribe to, or get online info through its blog. It’s got everything from “How to Train for a Triathlon,” to “Sports Drinks and Teeth.” Did you know the acidity in sports drinks is high and therefore if you drink them regularly your teeth enamel may erode 30 percent faster than if you just drink water? Yikes.
19:15 Posted in Publications , Science , Sports , Training | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
August 25, 2005
Doubt
I had dinner last night with a few former national lightweight rowing team compadres. Phew, that’s a lot of adjectives! The culture of rowing has a kind of stupid feature in the show of celebrating pain. Lots of t-shirts attest to this; I'm thinking of “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” That is a groovy existential thing to sport on your chest when you're in your indestructible 20s, I suppose. But it occurs to me that the phrase remains true about the friendships one forms doing something very difficult together. So there’s an old love built on competition and survival among these women.
Anyhow, not to wax philosophical yet again. We don’t all see each other much (one now lives in France) but we fall into easy comfort with each other. We talked a lot about sports, of course. And, in light of my undertaking this little project, we were talking about sports magazines. I lamented the loss several years ago of Sports Illustrated for Women. In fact, the gap that I felt was left on the newsstand was part of what inspired me to explore this space. To my surprise, two of my jock friends said, “Oh, I was so disappointed in that magazine,” or “I hated it.” To me it was the only fitness magazine that addressed athletes who were interested in performance rather than appearance (though there was always some nod to beauty concerns). But these two were looking for the same format as SI for men, which is all about being a spectator and following the stars. This, they thought, would legitimize women’s sports, market and promote it. I was so stunned that they’d want a spectator magazine that I didn’t know what to say next.
Or what to say here. Since they are probably right, come to think of it, as SI-Women folded because of a lack of “numbers.” Lacking myself the wherewithal to follow or assign others to follow all the major (and often more interesting minor) sports where women are excelling, I must let Lisa and Carey down and cover just the little world of jockdom around me, the useful information that comes my way at random or by research, the interesting sporting tales of my friends and their x degrees of separation. My apologies, I guess.
I knew someone who called self-doubt a killer, and another someone who found people who lacked self-doubt completely boring. All new ventures, be they sports goals, jobs, projects, relationships, recipes… seem to have a moment (at least) of piercing dubiousness. Let it be noted that this is it, here.
And also that a good website that covers high-level women’s sports is Womens Sportsnet.com. There’s also a great one focusing on Canadian women’s sports called Women Warriors, and another Canadian one that focuses more on issues and social policies regarding women's and girls’ sports, with the archaicly lugubrious name of Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity.
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