All posts tagged: Sport

A male athlete reaches upward during a fitness competition inside a stadium, with judges and other competitors visible in the background.

He Was Done — I Still Had to Tell Him It Wasn’t Enough

His legs were shak­ing before he even went down into the next squat. He stood in front of me at the wall ball sta­tion with that look peo­ple get when they are no longer real­ly decid­ing any­thing. They are just try­ing to keep the body mov­ing for one more rep, then one more, then some­how anoth­er. He picked up the ball, dropped down, came back up, threw, caught it. I watched the move­ment and called it straight away: no rep. Not because he missed the tar­get. Because he had not gone low enough.

Nurmi, right, and Joie Ray, left, with U.S. President Calvin Coolidge during Nurmi's 1925 U.S. tour.

Records as Toys

It’s no secret that I have a crush on Fin­land and there­fore devour every arti­cle I can find about this coun­try. When, in addi­tion, jour­nal­ists write about Fin­land and run­ning, I am hooked. So let me rec­om­mend a piece writ­ten by Liam Boy­lan-Pett for the Løpe Mag­a­zine about an inim­itable run­ner from the north, Paa­vo Nur­mi, and his U.S. tour in 1924 and 1925. Boy­lan-Pett recon­structs his jour­ney and all the races he ran. Like this one in the Madi­son Square Gar­den in New York.