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Frédéric Dion Blows the South Pole

1/31/2015

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How low can one go solo? Ask Frédéric Dion. Once he stops shivering the Quebecer, a motivational speaker, will tell you. Then you’ll shake. The guy hit the South Pole all on his lonesome using a kite ski.

Let’s not even ask what on earth he was doing going to the bottom of the earth. He says one must follow one’s dreams. Geez, if this is how far his dreams go, lord knows how far his nightmares reach.

What’s with people like Dion? What’s with people and herculean quests? Is it a hale, healthy ego identity or a horrid, huge personal complexity that drives people to do other-worldly tasks? Why this indulgence to be first in something that no one, save your mom, Ripley’s (and this writer) will care about two years after?

Maybe one needs a break from things, or has a bit too much spare time on his hands. (This trek took nearly two months.) Perhaps such a voyage is simply a manifestation of one being so collected, with ducks all in a row, and so cohere, with I’s dotted and t’s crossed, that the time can be taken to explore the extremities of one’s psyche and the nadir of one’s planet.

Or perhaps one is bored…

Whatever the reason, when that soul meets his maker, and tells the deities, deity, or non-deity of his choice that he kite-skied around Antarctica solo, will the response be: that’s great, but did you take out the garbage like you were supposed to? Hmmm?

Specifically, this is what Frédéric did do. He hit the “geographic South Pole” – please don’t ask for a precise definition, all you need to know is that there’s ice and snow - after 45 days of kite skiing. What about the South Pole of Inaccessibility, you ask? He hit that marker after 35 days. That point is the greatest distance from all the surrounding Antarctica seas. And all with just 137 kg of food and equipment and a climactic conundrum. When the winds were light, he didn't feel those – 50C degrees as much. But he also didn't travel as far, so his trip back to civilization (and reality) would take longer.

Let’s take a brief look at Britisher, Felicity Aston. She, like Dion, has gone all the way and tripped out. She could relate to Dion’s odyssey of highs and lows. The 34-year-old skied across Antarctica alone, setting a world record for this feat in 2012 and she did it knowing, as a meteorologist, how formidable that frontier is. Yet, she did it anyway.

She pulled two sledges for 1,084 miles. She battled craziness and loneliness, cranky knees, sore fingers, and “frost nibbled lips” all the while facing whiteouts and katabatic (downhill) winds.  

Her trek took 59 days. One savings grace was she toured in the summertime. Though 30-degree days were not uncommon the temperatures were generally not bone-chilling killing, averaging in at a hot and heavy 3 degrees Celsius daily - with the place lit more than Charlie Sheen on a bender.

Aah, benders. Let’s look at the root causes of lunacy in this nowhere land. The main culprit for kookiness there is hypothermia. That’s when one’s body temperature drops drastically and precipitously. Hypothermia can trigger insanity, resulting in actions contrary to one’s well being. For example, people who are freezing to death may actually remove clothing, thinking they are too hot!

Dion didn't go off the deep end into lunacy– but he admits now that a couple of records he thought he set were disallowed.

(For you must know, there is a wizardly weird castle, in a desperately, dark land, which keeps the gnomes with the tomes - that keep the records, that keeps disallowing some, which keeps allowing others – for a sum. Just kidding on the sum – most people that care about this stuff are scrupulous in their honesty and soberly serious in their notational observances.) The problems for Dion were 1) he got help when his “homemade” sled busted up (thanks Dixie Dansercoer!) - and 2) got help being stocked up with more food. The big record hype would be in declaring that all these points he reached – were done alone. Solo. Still, we should give him part marks for trying.

As for the 37-year-old Frédéric, much of the brunt of his trying – his resistance training – put into practice - was mental: to not blow a fuse when winds blew the wrong way; to not get enraged when whiteouts hampered sight; to not get bummed when Sastrugi (ridge-rife) snow landscapes slowed progress; to not freak out when he misplaced his sled for a half an hour; to not get down, missing his daughters; to not get depressed not seeing another human for weeks on end...

He did get down, losing 7 kilos all told – that’s gotta count for...not much.

Come to think of it, when all is said and done, getting back to normal, to persevere without weather severe, may be Dion’s biggest, hardest, longest, test yet. He does, however, have a term and tactic for breaking down seemingly insurmountable obstacles into, if not bite-sized, at least somewhat manageable chunks: Unit Thinking. But upon seeing his family, a unit in itself, after his journey, with all safe and sound, there was only joy.

 

 

 

 

 

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Thighs - Rugby. My.

1/23/2015

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Rugby thighs are not small and humble. They’re made to rumble and we’ll find out why, in just a jiff.  
We know why fans love sports – they like competition. We know why certain folks like playing sports – they like competition, camaraderie, and contact - but why this game of rugby where the players contact via tackles? After all, those tackles are harder (but way less dirty) than those applied by the American Internal Revenue Service on politically conservative taxpayers and those tackles, don’t forget, are dished out by men bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter than those of yore.

Remember, too, that rugby is played without much padding. All fifteen players must wear mouth guards and some wear headgear (scrum caps), but that’s about it. Now compare that to the 20 pounds or so of pads that NFL players prance around in. One has to wonder, in which sport are the men tougher? It seems more rugby stars are willing to dip their big toe in the NFL interview, if not playing, pool, than are NFLers willing to check out Rugby, with Australian Rugby footballer Jarryd Hayne being the latest, after meeting with the NFL Detroit Lions in 2014. (The Lions needed help at running back.) Perhaps one shouldn’t wonder much: who playing American (or Canadian) football would want to go from padding to no padding?

Speaking of words ending with “ing” there are a lot of “ings” in rugby: throwing, kicking, our aforementioned tackling, pushing, jumping and they all are rooted in power – powering stemming from the legs - thighs and hamstrings...and all for a ball, a rugby ball that is about the size and shape of a brontosaurus egg, that is if a brontosaurus egg was shaped and sized like a rugby ball.

Have you seen the players’ thighs? They have more striations than does the face of Rolling Stones rocker, Keith Richards, except the players’ definitions are from healthy, muscular growth while Keith’s ditches are from wealthy, party-hearty growth.

Eye Candy

Break.

Look. Cheer. Leer, if you must, at these chiseled chunks of beefy thigh hunks.

Finished now?

Now?

Can we continue?

Outside of a man who doesn’t fart when you pull his finger, who flosses at least once a month, and who holds down a part-time job - semi-occasionally, surely having heavily muscled thighs has got to be man’s sexiest feature. (This is a family blog: we’re not talking other parts.)

Now what kind of exercises for thighs, specifically, and the body, generally, can an aspiring player do now to make the big leagues later? The intent of exercises will be to defer (for it can’t be defeated) muscle fatigue and to develop dynamic acceleration - while ensuring that the hamstrings and quads are in balance - and that the left and right legs are also in balance. Don’t do too many isolation exercises. Do exercises that will replicate moves and motions on the field (pitch) such as box squats, lateral box squats, and one arm barbell push presses. Make sure you sprint and jump rope, jog backwards, run while passing the brontosaurus egg, and row. Get the heart rate to about 65 to 75% for starters, then increase intensity and heart rate to emulate game conditions.

Rugby is survival of the fittest and grittiest. Those are the game conditions. UK Fitness coach, Brian Mackenzie, knows this; for sure he knows his fitness standards for rugby. Brian cites Canadian research on rugby motion averages: standing 38%, walking or jogging 47%, running 6%, and tackling 9%. It is these last 2 parts that demand all that strength, speed, and stamina.

Rugby has been called the most dangerous outdoor sport. Fact or fiction? Played improperly, with high tackling putting heads at risk, lends credence to the assertion. (A wrap tackle, where the head is not involved and the arms embrace the ball carrier, is a proper tackle.) Concussions happen. Broken bones occur. Tiredness leads to injury and since the sport has relatively few stoppages in play, as compared to NFL football say, it’s no big shock to have players landing or falling wrongly on others, causing pain.

Rugby is thinking long and hard about concussions. The International Rugby Board (IRB) has the results from an independent study on concussions in rugby and stresses that changed protocols dealing with a competitor suspected of having been concussed are now - fortunately - ensuring that the player does not return to the game until really ready to play.  

Now, let’s say you are not thinking long or hard about anything, save for thighs, or are an innocent to the game’s ingredients. An ingénue’s inkling of this venue, this push-me-pull-you, might be:

You have a hooker, “into touch”, where a ruck may form, with an open fly-half, on a fullback, availing a prop, in a scrummage. And a line-out.

You gotta think, this isn’t a sport, it’s a sordid political sex-soiree cavort with a cocaine snort - with cohorts.

But for fans that know the sport, they’ll tell you how popular it is. Only the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup draw more than does the Rugby World Cup. But coming up is the World Rugby 2015 Six Nations tournament. For the casual peeping Tom or Tommette, they’re in it for the thighs, for the hard-core sporting thighs these men sport, for the thighs’ size, their shape, their suppleness. They revel when thighs get banged – tackled – over and over and over again – harder and harder, pounding and pounding, until…

Phew. Gotta stop. Let’s just start and stop with this. The rugby thigh – it is to sigh.

 

 

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Lindsey Vonn. Above. Beyond.

1/17/2015

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Take that, Tiger. Lindsey Vonn, rehabbing her right knee for two years...incredibly, in her second downhill race this season – won. For the 60th time in World Cup racing. Lake Louise was the spot – and no doubt her win hit the spot for boyfriend Tiger Woods as he rehabs from a bad back. And now - with her win in the downhill in Italy on Jan 18th, she has tied Annemarie Moser-Proell's World Cup wins total of 62.

Lindsey had had two knee surgeries. Her ACL and MCL were torn. How does someone come back from such operational ordeals to sit atop a sport that, as Tiger marvels: “...it’s just scary how fast it is and how dangerous...” It’s astoundingly newsworthy.

Not surprisingly, NBC news has created a documentary on her struggles and successes. It’s called “The Climb.” It’ll air January 25th.

While you and I might wear a brace after injuries like these it would hinder performance in a sport where 1/100th of a second can mean the difference between victory and loss and where, according to Lindsey, the sport is “about 70/30 lower body to upper body.” (Her win at Lake “Lindsey” was by .49 of a second!)

Lindsey says she falls a lot. Physical tumbles, we don’t doubt her word but, boy, when she falls mentally, we walk from our words and watch in awe as she gets back on the saddle and figures out a winning ride, right quick. It takes a special breed of singular-purpose athlete to come back from pain, anguish, and despair. It takes an incredibly brave person to have no fear in a sport where mountains’ of risks loom. Her Sochi dreams were snuffed out just a scant few months prior in a training run wipeout but she’s determined to compete in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea. Maybe her caption, shared with other supreme female athletes in the Under Armour sports clothing campaign, being: I Will What I Want – says it all.

Listening to Lindsey, you get the feeling she’s driven not so much to best others, but to best herself. She doesn’t seem to have a voracious vindictive streak. Rather, she does seem to have a quiet confidence, under pinned by now a somewhat delicate knee and an “and-how!” resolutely hardened steel plate of resolve.

It’s like she learns from mistakes without unduly harping on them, and has found a balance in walking the fine line between introspection and depressive navel gazing.

A few years back she used her Giant Slalom wins at Soelden and Lake Louise as confidence builders. It may seem strange to talk confidence when talking Lindsey Vonn but even for a supreme athlete, confidence can be as fleeting as a downhill run - what with spotting indentations and best lines on the mountain - with the sky a slate gray under a blizzard, when darn it, minutes earlier the conditions were bright; what with summoning new data collection and calculation indices when course condition intricacies change around the next bend; what with musing while shushing why one didn’t take up tennis instead -  where an all-points bulletin goes out at the sniff of showers.

Looking at ski racing from the safety of a rocking chair, armed with nothing more than a remote, is still a nerve tingling, jaw clenching, experience. The ski hill slope angles confound: as the cameras track skier progress around tight curves it seems those athletes will ski off the end of the earth - for gravity alone won’t be enough to restrain their momentum into the solar system; they whoosh down the hill at what, 50 some-odd miles per hour? And that is for the GS. Downhill speeds can hit over 70 mph.

It’s hard to fathom how a skier can excel at 5 disciplines all calling for special requirements in physical skills and equipment specifics. The Super Giant Slalom, or Super G, and the Downhill are known as speed events, the Slalom and Giant Slalom as technical. The Super Combined consists of one downhill and two slalom races. Best aggregate time wins…

Now what’s physiologically entailed in her disciplines? Muscular endurance and general balance, for starters. Try holding the skier’s crouch for 2 to 3 minutes. If your thighs haven’t quivered to kingdom come, why not go down a hill steeper than sin and try it? Even watching Vonn in a slalom training run, with turns every second or so, shows the core and lower body strength needed for such grueling, exacting exertions.

When Lindsey, at 20, turned her ski training and fitness routines upside down, overhauling all, and joined forces with Coach Robert Trenkwalder, her high altitude athleticism peaked - but not before she must have wondered of the risks in messing with a good thing. A comparable revamp might be to boyfriend Woods changing his swing when at the top of his game.

To be malleable and to not, despite stellar skiing success, deem oneself infallible, surely is integral to staying on top. And bouncing back after being laid flat by injuries would seem essential. Diligence in persistence, despite race result resistance, surely too, is crucial.

Lindsey Vonn, chock full of these features, also, seemingly, has the capacity to undergo rigorous self-analysis of her progress and position - unvarnished by praise from family and friends - and untarnished by dismay and trepidation from arm-chair quarterbacks - and this, too, separates her from the competition. She’s world famous, the best female American ski racer ever, but should she continue apace she’ll but one day be alone, on the throne, in space, in the rarefied air of a professional champion nearing perfection.  With her will and skill on the hill, she’ll rule skiing’s citadel.

 

 

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bear-bogganing Best exercise

1/10/2015

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Animals teach us stuff. In nature and indoors. We want animals to educate us on the majesty and mystery of their species but yet, in these past few have-no-fun-politically-correct years, we have now deemed that having animals perform fun, crazy and entertaining acts is humiliating for them and demeaning to us. Sad to say, watching with amazement as bears wearing short skirts wheel on bicycles and tiger’s wearing stripes spring through hoops of fire, may become a thing of the past. Fast. (Nowadays humans demand humans perform acts of degradation. Witness hazing at higher educational institutions.)

Well nuts to that. According to those in the know, we had better plead for animals to begin anew to do wild and crazy, ignoble things indoors, like they used to do because, because, well...animals, in zoos for instance, are getting rather plump.

Why? Well, animals have a sweet tooth. Just like us humans. Animals crave stuff that isn’t necessarily good for them. Add in their zoo habitats and habits which, while having come a long way from the steel cage death waits, can - in no way - come close to approaching their wildlife venues - where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play – and where lions must run down said deer and antelope – if lions want to eat that day.

Zoo life spells nothing but trouble for animal health. So how should people ensure animals in captivity don’t let their sweet teeth get the better of them? Sorry, freeing the animals is not an option. They’ve become conditioned to incarceration (and so have we as their fans) and, anyway, how would they cope with some of the truly wild, vile folks that prowl our streets?

One answer is to ration sweets.  Animals would be rewarded with Fruit Loops, or its equivalent, if they behave - or much better yet for us exploiters and voyeurs - act loopy.

Get this: animals are being fed junk food to get them to exercise! “…they like sugary, high fat food, and they're not moving as much as they're genetically programmed to, said Jennifer Watts, staff nutritionist at Suburban Brookfield Zoo, west of Chicago." Apparently molasses:

". . . Is a favorite treat of the bears and gorillas. Keepers often spread it around their enclosures to get them moving."

So wouldn’t it be better, for animal and man to have those lions and tigers and bears perform in circuses even if curmudgeons and caterwaulers are offended? At least those routines were rewarded with hand clapping. And applause, don’t forget, is a calorie free possible inducement to exercise.  

Another answer: feed the beasts road kill instead of junk food. At the zoo in Toledo, Ohio, wolves dine out on deer “road kill.” This is apparently a better emulation of life in the wild, experts figure, even if a car figured in – in bashing and braising the meal.

Speaking of clapping and animals, and their exercise habits, have you heard of the latest fitness craze invented by the beloved and oh-so-cuddly panda bear? One enterprising, energetic giant panda bear who hangs (not literally) in the Toronto zoo has come up with bear-bogganing. In November of 2014 on a Monday snowy morn, the bear decided to play.

He noticed that his yard had a pretty steep hill, and that the snow was particularly slippery that day. He knew his fur coat and blubbery body were perfect for doing a roly-poly tumble down the hill. Then the bear saw his bamboo and thought, what the hay/hey, I’ll slide down on that too. It’ll be my sled. And a renowned viral video and a round virile body came to be. The panda’s personal best (so far as we can tell from this video) is a double somersault.

Perhaps, however, we should not be too amazed at this bear’s antics. For consider the species itself. A giant panda, when born, weighs about 180 grams – in cooking terms that’s a cup of flour. From that flowering it blooms into big butter ball, no mean feat. Just having mom not squish her babies astounds – almost as much as bear-bogganing does. And talk of virile – did you know that male pandas, even in their late sixties, find fooling around between the bamboo sheets fun, and are fecund enough to procreate? But please, fitness instructors, bear in mind that although the giant panda bear is way cuter than half your clientele, it is a bear and is dangerous, so don’t contemplate contracting it as a client.

Ok, where were we? Right! The sweet tooth. Even pandas have ‘em. Everybody thinks the panda lives on bamboo alone, but they also, at least in zoos, will knock back sugar cane and sweet potatoes in a pinch. Unfortunately, owing to an inefficient digestive system, pandas are always in a pinch and apart from sleeping and lolling about they must forage about half the day looking to chomp comestibles. Us folks only forage half the day while we’re watching TV.

It would seem, therefore, that our learning of animal edible and exercise habits is a process. We don’t have all the answers, but given our nature, we won’t stop looking for solutions to the wildlife’s wild side of eating sugary stuff, on the side. Of course if we were really smart we’d stop pestering them and penning them in the first place, and leave them be, in the great outdoors, in the second.

Now that’d be sweet. 

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Hannah Kearney Moguls Skiing Supreme Being

1/3/2015

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Moguls skiing marries the athlete, the acrobat, the touch of the tangible; the how’d they do that. But this acrobat’s trapeze is not under the still air of the big top but is under winds a blow, with sunlight or night lights aglow – and all these conditions must be accounted for - don’t you know - while balancing control with abandon and repetition with innovation. For this is the moguls show.

It all makes for magnificent skiing. And America’s Hannah Kearney, “Miss Mogul” with her pigtails, unparalleled expertise and excellence, demonstrates, year in and year out, that she’s the best. Most of us don’t have anywhere near the full mental and physical faculties to contemplate the competing - let alone the completing - of such winter-feats – but we can all agree to grade the sport, with its vitality, as a “10” for watchability.

Hannah, who skis out of the Waterville Valley BBTS Ski club in New Hampshire (BBTS stands for Black and Blue Trail Smashers) and is the most decorated World Cup athlete – ever – has motivation galore this 2015 after taking a lowly (for her) bronze at Sochi in 2014. Sochi will be her last Olympic competition…She took gold at Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics.

Besides proving a winning style, she has proven that knees are shock absorbers; that reflexes can be honed to milliseconds; that nerve and guts can be either inherent – or learned. Taking the zipper line path, wherein four moguls can be skied over - in a second- is proof that the sport leaves no room for error, if being the best is the goal. And the seven judges that oversee the run give the final verdict, a verdict run on a 26 degree sloped hill with moguls about 3.5 meters apart. The length: about 250 meters.

Hannah knows length. This clip, from her January run in Calgary in 2012, was her 12th win in a row.  By February she had amassed 16 consecutive wins. Despite the short time taken to do a moguls run, the sport reveals the facets of the hellacious and the heavenly, the dreamy (and from these layman’s eyes, the deadly.) Moguls skiing is not only an idiom but an idea, an inkling of what can happen when imaginations are allowed to run just a little bit wild.

For Hannah, and every elite competitor, the major matter - first worth conquering or mastering – is of oneself. Can one marshal body and brain into a fused unit capable of training, performing, and recovering from injury and disappointment to hit the heights at the right time? For Hannah, specifically, she had to conquer a fear of being upside down. Gradually, she overcame her fear of this integral part of her sport – half the flips it seems are back flips - by methodically and determinedly acclimatizing herself to the sensation, by stages. First, she bungee jumped with a spotter. Then she jumped without a spotter. Next, she ski jumped into a pool of water, before taking the show on the road, as it were, onto snow.

Hannah’s a hunkette. Built. When she pours ice water over her head (for the ACLS challenge, not for moguls skiing criterion) you can see her tummy is ripped. She can squat 245 pounds. She jumps rope and pushes over huge tires. She’ll do literally hundreds of jumps into that pool.  She knows what she wants out of off-season training. And she’s got that so-needed, so-hard-to-summon, comeback quality to rise after lowly showings, like she gave at the 2006 Turin Olympics. She didn’t medal. Truthfully, she didn’t even make the second round. Charles De Gaulle once said: “Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself.”

That’s clearly Kearney.

Before we end, let’s go down that injury road for a moment. Formerly, freestyle skiing injury science was anecdotal; now thanks to the FIS – International Ski Federation - along with the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centre, injury science is statistical. A study was presented in 2009 that showed one in three elite skiers or snowboarders suffered injury, with nearly 50% of these occurring during World Cup events.

Hannah wrecked her ACL in a 2007 training run. She underwent reconstructive surgery; she had her doctor do a hamstring graft. She didn’t touch a mogul until nine months later. And she felt pain. But she knew more about her new ACL, her body, and her sport – and the injury actually forged her into a more formidable mogul star, if that was possible. Assuming Hannah can stay clear of hurt and harm, she should have another great 2015 season. She won seven world cups in 2014. She’s still (relatively) flexible in limb and most assuredly flexible in thought. She’s still got that competitive “want.” She still loves her sport, loves laying it on the line, which we fans can certainly appreciate. It’s easy to admire such a tactician of mathematical precision as she winds and wins her way down the course. Of course, however, on the course stuff happens.

Or, as Hannah puts it: I don't crash often, but when I do, I make sure it hurts...

In December 2014 she finished 3rd in Ruka, Finland. It was her 64th World Cup podium. If she wins the overall World Cup title for the sixth time this season – that’ll be another first for her in moguls. And in March of 2015 she retires. Sure it hurts…for us.

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