The New York Times writes: “Ever since [we] published the Scientific 7‑Minute Workout in May last year, readers have been writing and tweeting their requests for an updated, more advanced version. For them, the workout became too easy or humdrum, as tends to happen when exercises are repeated without variation. So here it is: a new, more technically demanding regimen, one that requires a couple of dumbbells but still takes only seven minutes.”
According to the Times, these short, intense, efficient workouts strengthen muscle groups throughout the upper body, lower body and torso. And they may well “produce greater gains than an hour or more of gentler exercise.” So if you don’t have a lot of free time.…
The Times has notably made the workout available as a free web app that you can access on your phone, tablet or other mobile devices. The app “offers a step-by-step guide to both 7‑minute workouts [the old and new ones], offering animated illustrations of the exercises, as well as a timer and audio cues to help you get the most out of your seven minutes.” Click here to access it.
Or failing that, an extremely bow-legged man, as featured in Sir Everard Digby’s 1587 treatise-cum-manual, De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming). Hubba hubba, who needs trunks?
There were no pools at the time. The male bathers populating Digby’s 40 plus woodcut illustrations are river swimmers, like Ben Franklin, the inventor of swim fins and the only Founding Father to be inducted (posthumously) into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
As Franklin would two centuries later, Digby sought to bring both water safety and proper form to the masses. According to the BBC’s History Magazine, the Cambridge Don’s goal was “to turn swimming from a disregarded skill of bargees and boatmen into an accomplishment for gentlemen, to make them more like the Romans.”
To get closer to his goal, Digby breaks it down as deftly as an online swim instructor in the era of youtube. When not delivering the how to’s on back stroke, side stroke, and doggy paddle, he’s advising absolute beginners on how to enter the water and steer clear of animal-befouled holes, and helping more seasoned students embellish their game with nifty tricks, (dancing, toenail cutting).
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, and extremely enthusiastic swimmer. Follow her @AyunHalliday
As a kid who wore Doc Martins to high school gym class and refused participation on principle, it was my firm belief that “sports aren’t punk.” But had I known then what I know now about the athletic prowess of one of my heroes, Joe Strummer, I might have been a little more motivated to try and compete with the great man’s ability. A champion runner during his lonely years at boarding school, Strummer never lost the runner’s bug, supposedly finishing two marathons, and possibly a third, while with The Clash. Let’s begin with that “possibly,” shall we? First, watch the clip above from the documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.
For context, know that before the release of 1982’s Combat Rock, the band’s manager Bernie Rhodes suggested that Strummer disappear to Austin for a while to stir up some controversy and increase ticket sales. Strummer instead went to Paris without telling anyone—turning a hoax A.W.O.L. story into a real one. He tells it above, casually tossing out, “and I ran the Paris Marathon, too,” a burying of the lede Grantland’s Michael Bertin compares to Buzz Aldrin mentioning his moonwalk between a bass fishing story and his wife’s casserole. People train for months, years, for marathons; Strummer, it seems strolled onto the course with his girlfriend of the time, Gaby Salter, and “allegedly”—alleges this Wikipedia entry—finished in an astonishing 3 hours, 20 minutes. Later, asked by a reporter to describe his regimen before the race, he said, “Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don’t run a single step at least four weeks before the race.”
Everything about this story seems suspect, including the fact that in the supposed photograph of Strummer and Salter post-race (above)—both in running gear but looking as fresh as if they’d just strolled out of the hotel patisserie—neither one wears a bib number … “something,” Bertin points out, “that a race participant should have.” What’s more, Strummer was “capable of rewriting history to make himself look better,” which may explain his cagey reluctance to elaborate. Bertin offers many more reasons to think the story a fabrication, yet there is at least one highly credible fact to support it: The London Marathon, which Strummer most decidedly did run (see him below, race bib and all), finishing with a most respectable time of 4:13 without any prior training at all. Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer quotes Gaby Salter saying “He hadn’t trained. He just bought some shorts and said, ‘Let’s run a marathon.’” Salter petered out halfway through. Later in the book, Antony Genn, Strummer’s collaborator in the Mescaleros, recounts the hard-drinking Strummer saying of his marathon experience, “I didn’t fuckin’ train. Not once. Just turned up and did it.’”
While this seems patently impossible, perhaps it’s true after all that the frontman of the The Clash, who weathered the rise and fall of punk better than any of his contemporaries, had such natural physical endurance he could casually toss off a marathon in-between drunks and packs of smokes. Real runners will surely scoff, but if Joe Strummer ever did train, no one ever saw him do it. If he were alive now, he’d be 62 years old and probably still making records and knocking ’em back. Maybe he’d even breeze through the New York Marathon on his way to the studio. And if we asked him for his secret, he’d probably tell us something like he told that reporter who asked about Paris: “’Do not try this at home.’ I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson, but it might not work for others.” Yeah, ya think?
Founded in London in 1787, The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) began publishing The Laws of Cricket in 1788, and later became the governing body of the game. More than two centuries later, the MCC has passed governing responsibilities to The International Cricket Council. But it still publishesThe Laws of Cricket and helps young players and casual fans learn more about the bat-and-ball game that dates back to early 16th-century England, if not before. And let’s face it, if you didn’t grow up in a country that figured into the British Empire, you can probably use a primer. Or maybe 10 animated ones narrated by actor, writer, cricket lover and occasional umpire Stephen Fry. Click the play button on the video above, and you can watch the collection of animations, covering everything from what happens when a “wicket is down” to when the “batsman is out his ground.” When you’re done, you can enjoy some other Fry narrations we’ve featured in blog posts past. See the “relateds” below.
We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was something of a wunderkind during his high school years. If you’re an OC regular, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan personally recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. Deftly, politely, the young Tyson declined and went to Harvard.
There’s perhaps another side of the precocious Tyson you might not know as much about. The athletic side. While a student at The Bronx High School of Science, Tyson (class of 1976) wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He ran an impressive 4:25 mile. And he captained the school’s wrestling team, during which time he conjured up a new-fangled wrestling move. In professional wrestling, Ric Flair had the dreaded Figure Four Leg Lock, and Jimmy Snuka, a devastating Superfly Splash. Tyson? He had the feared “Double Tidal Lock.” He explains and demonstrates the physics-based move in the video below, originally recorded at the University of Indianapolis.
I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embarrassingly sentimental pride in my home country’s team. I don’t lose all my critical faculties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while recognizing the corruption, deepening poverty and exploitation, and host of other serious sociopolitical issues surrounding it. And as an American, it’s simply much easier to put some distance between the sport itself and the jingoistic bigotry and violence—“sentimental hooliganism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in various parts of the world.
In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in TheNew Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”
There is certainly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soccer is also indicative of his well-known cultural elitism (despite his romanticizing of lower-class gaucho life and the once-demimonde tango). Outside of the hugely expensive World Cup, the class dynamics of soccer fandom in most every country but the U.S. are fairly uncomplicated. New Republic editor Foer summed it up succinctly in How Soccer Explains the World: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” (The inversion of this soccer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Americans’ disdain for the game in general and for elitist soccer dilettantes in particular, though those attitudes are rapidly changing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, American, I imagine he would have had similar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR.
Nonetheless, being Jorge Luis Borges, the writer did not simply lodge cranky complaints, however politically astute, about the game. He wrote a speculative story about it with his close friend and sometime writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares. In “Esse Est Percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”), we learn that soccer has “ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle,” writes Mathews: “representation of sport has replaced actual sport.” The physical stadiums crumble, while the games are performed by “a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.” An easily duped populace follows “nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing.”
The story effectively illustrates Borges’ critique of soccer as an intrinsic part of a mass culture that, Mathews says, “leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.” Borges’ own snobberies aside, his resolute suspicion of mass media spectacle and the coopting of popular culture by political forces seems to me still, as it was in his day, a healthy attitude. You can read the full story here, and an excellent critical essay on Borges’ political philosophy here.
The 19th FIFA World Cup is now underway in Brazil, and that gives us an excuse to revisit the first World Cup, played in July, 1930 in Uruguay. Only 13 teams participated in the tournament, and all matches were played in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital. In the semi-finals, the United States lost to Argentina, 6–1. Uruguay crushed Yugoslavia by the same score. In the end, Uruguay, the favorites all along, triumphed over Argentina (4–2) before a home crowd of 93,000, to become the winner of the inaugural FIFA World Cup.
Recently restored by FIFA, the 13-minute video above lets you revisit the action from the 1930 tournament, and particularly from the championship game. Argentina led going into halftime, but then José Pedro Cea, Victoriano Santos Iriarte (aka “El Canario”), and Héctor Castro went to work and sealed the deal for Uruguay. The footage is bittersweet to watch — sweet, because it’s fun to watch the moves of those historic footballers; bitter, because it’s hard not to think wistfully about those athletes, then in their prime, who have long since passed.
Baseball has the great capacity to transcend politics. People on the right love it. (Think George Will, the columnist who finds himself at the center of a hot controversy this week). The same holds true for folks on the left. One leftist with a deep and abiding love for baseball is Fidel Castro. Before he seized power in 1959, Castro spent some time on the diamond. Baseball-Reference.com tells us that Fidel likely “pitched in intramural competition in college for the University of Havana law school.” But “he was not good enough to pitch on the college’s varsity team.” Nor is the long-standing myth true that “Castro tried out for either the New York Yankees or Washington Senators and failed to impress enough to sign a contract.” He was never going to have a big league career. That’s for sure. But once Castro actually rose to power, no one was going to stop him from hitting or pitching in a 1959 charity game. (Watch above.) As they say, sometimes “it’s good to be the king.” Just ask Vladimir Putin, who recently scored 6 goals, and made 5 assists, in a hockey game.
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