Culture
In my late teens and early twenties I was a meathead, visiting the gym several times a week to toss around heavy things. At some point during this period I developed a hypothesis that there are both relative and absolute components to how weightlifters perceive resistance. Suppose you are able to bench press 200 pounds, […]
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I’m not one for hot takes. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to ,or have opinions on, current events. It’s just I prefer to keep silent except when I have something to say that hasn’t already been said. So, I wait until others have shared their takes, and when I find that my own […]
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For the past several months I’ve been working on a book called Screw Loose, Shit Together: A Theory of Athletic Greatness. In it, I propose that there are two kinds of talent, physical and mental. Physical talent, loosely speaking, is what makes some athletes better than others at a given sport as untrained beginners. Mental […]
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My wife and I are in the process of relocating from Oakdale, California, to Flagstaff, Arizona. All moves are momentous—we should know, having executed no fewer than 12 of them in our first 11 years together—but this one feels especially so. Nataki and I have lived in Oakdale off and on (but mostly on) since […]
Read MoreSALT LAKE CITY — Executives of the endurance sports company 80/20 Endurance are scrambling to respond to the announcement that the fast food chain Taco Bell will be offering $10 (USD) monthly subscriptions, according to sources within both organizations. The surprise taco subscription is believed to be a direct response and threat to the booming […]
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Like a lot of children of the 1970s, I grew up mostly outdoors. Perhaps it was different in the big city, but in the piney woods of southern New Hampshire where I was raised, kids had to find their own fun, yet there was plenty of fun to be found if you looked hard enough. […]
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Recently I had a disturbing experience on social media. I know, I know. Join the club, right? But This one’s worth sharing, I believe. Let me start by saying that I’m not naïve in these matters. I’ve been aware for some time that social media is a cesspool of idiocy and viciousness. That’s why I […]
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The first adult sports camp I participated in was a Multisport School of Champions event hosted in San Diego by Triathlete publisher John Duke and eight-time Ironman world champion Paula Newby-Fraser way back in 1996. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to take part in many more triathlon and running camps, and I remember each […]
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Even before long covid scrambled my brain, I was absentminded. It sounds like such a benign foible, but absentmindedness can be deadly. For example, it nearly killed my dog in a Kansas hotel one time. It was a raw, gray Friday at the tail end of March, stubborn winter turfing out nominal spring. I’d just […]
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In 2018, Bernadette Brady of Western Sydney University got together with a few colleagues and designed a study to determine to what degree, if any, implicit ethnic bias negatively impacted physiotherapy care among Australian ethnic minorities. Forty-eight patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain who identified as Mandaean, Assyrian, or Vietnamese participated in the trial. Half of […]
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