They say that as you get older, your propensity for motion sickness increases. I wasn't quite ready to believe the commercials showing how fast the planes go in the Red Bull Air Race, but after watching the footage from people actually in attendance, I am a believer. I am getting a queasy feeling and sweat is forming around my brow and arm pits. I threw up just a little bit in my mouth after the third turn.
I think I get it. The racket's a little bit different and the shuttlecock looks a little heavier and is called a Speeder, which is nice for those with delicate sensibilities. You don't want Maria Sharapova saying the word "shuttlecock" over and over. Beyond that...
I'll tell you though. I think they might be onto something with this Blackminton stuff:
Blackminton's basically Speedminton with black lights and ridiculous glow-in-the-dark makeup. If there's something that isn't improved tenfold by the addition of black lights and ridiculous glow-in-the-dark makeup, then I have yet to find it.
Imagine that you take cup stacking seriously and you train for a world competition and you get beat by a 4 year old kid who learned the sport by watching Nickelodeon. Imagine how pissed you'd be. That's how I feel right now.
A Colorado Springs 4-year-old broke three international records this week in a cup-stacking competition at the Denver Coliseum, a newspaper said.
"It's kind of silly. He saw a kid stack cups on 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' in November. Now, he's obsessed," the boy's mother said. "Yo Gabba Gabba!" is a television show for children shown aired on the Nick Jr. channel.
Here's a five year old girl who performed her skills on Regis and Kelly:
This is absolutely amazing to me and I would give this as evidence that competitive crossword puzzles effectively combine strategy, intelligence and hand-eye coordination to the point that maybe crossword puzzles aren't a sport-sport, but definitely right in there with darts, pool and pinball.
Lance Mackey has won the Iditarod. The Big Lead wonders if this solidifies Mackey as the best musher ever. Considering his success at Yukon Quest as well, we'd say that he's definitely in the running. We said it at the start of the race and we'll say it again. If there's one thing Lance Mackey knows how to do, it's mush.
I'm trying to find exactly what sort of ratio Mackey used for his run-rest strategy, and so far, this is all I've seen:
Mackey took some risky moves, pushing his dogs to the brink and skipping much-needed rest himself but he blew past King to trot to the finish line on Nome's Front Street to take the Iditarod at 2:46 a.m. Wednesday. His official time was nine days, 11 hours, 46 minutes and 48 seconds. King was second, reaching the finish at 4:05 a.m.
When we learned about Beach Soccer, we found out then that doing things on the beach makes for extra sexy. That's probably why I was excited to learn that there's such a thing as Swamp Soccer. Last year's championships were in Finland. Swamp Soccer should be the perfect combination of soccer and sexy mud wrestling. However, while Finland seems like a good candidate for the sexy, Swamp Soccer just ends up looking really tiring and kinda gross.
I'm fascinated by the Iditarod and mushing in general. Whenever faced with an uncommon sport, the uncommon sportsman should immediately be thinking about uncommon goals and uncommon strategies to achieve these goals. To that end, I've searched high and low (on Google's initial search results page) for Iditarod Winning Strategies.
Being a technology oriented guy, I thought maybe the strategy would've been in ultralight gear and minimizing friction and stuff like that. Then, I thought about it more, and I realized that part of the strategy must involve scoping out untrustworthy gardeners willing to kidnap dogs off of the estates of notable judges in California to sell to dog traders and ship to the Klondike, where they are then turned into race dogs by beating them with clubs.
Turns out, the Iditarod isn't ready for my tech innovations and the practice of stealing dogs away from their comfortable lives isn't much in practice anymore. From Ultimate Iditarod:
Strategy in the Iditarod requires that mushers determine a schedule of running and resting that allows them to make good progress down the trail, but maintains the dogs' energy levels, attitudes, and enthusiasm. The Iditarod has been won and lost because of these very critical decisions.
I like the attitude and enthusiasm part. I can only assume that when one of the kidnapped dogs develops a fierce rivalry with the lead dog, it's an unspoken part of the musher's job to officiate the subsequent fight to the death and ensure that packs of wild dogs don't interfere with the old Alaskan dog ritual.
Actually, much of the strategy relies on perfecting the balance between running and resting. For years and years, Alaskan mushers had gone with relatively equal parts resting and running and focused their breeding on really quick dogs. Then the darn Norwegians showed up and blew that strategy out of the water by breeding and training dogs that ran slower than their American counterparts, but required much less rest. A recent NPR story describes more.
Here's my suggested strategy... Run a full contingent of 16 dogs, but run only 12 dogs and rest the other 4 on the sled. Then rotate the dogs out 4 at a time, stopping very briefly for these rotations. Like tires in a NASCAR race. At the end of the race, you have to finish with at least 5 dogs, so with, say 20 miles to go, send all, but 5 of the dogs home and strip the sled down to nothing and f_ckin' sprint. I'm open to any team, American, Norwegian or otherwise to trying my strategy.
GENERAL BLOGS
GENERAL BLOGS