💪Issue #80 - The Insane Iron Cowboy & Tiki Barber & Kevin Mitchell

ISSUE #80 - August 9th, 2019

ONE

MOVIES - These are the distances in an Ironman Triathlon: 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, 26.2 mile run. For the average pain-loving, boundary-pushing endurance athlete, the race takes roughly 12 and 1/2 hours, with the fastest finish ever being 7:35 by German racer Jan Frodeno.

Typically, racers can barely move the day after an Ironman, so the idea of doing another one back-to-back is pure lunacy, which makes the idea of doing 50 Ironmans in 50 days in 50 different states an act of personal punishment and physical torture that would be unthinkable...unless you're the Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence, who accomplished the feat and made a documentary about it. The movie is fascinating, stomach-turning and at times baffling. Logistically, the effort was as much of a challenge as the event itself, and some of the decisions were questionable, but it's definitely worth watching to witness a man pushed to his absolute physical and mental limit, only to have a near total breakdown and keep pushing forward. Check out the trailer and Iron Cowboy site here.

TWO

FITNESS - As long as I have been a swimmer I've been fascinated with cool and unique pools to do laps in. I've had the pleasure of swimming at dozens of major college facilities, some interesting pools at rec centers and hotels and even this greenhouse-turned-swimming-pool on a plantation in Georgia.

I'm always on the lookout for pools that would be tremendous to swim in and when I saw that a company was planning a 360-degree infinity pool on the top of a 55-story building in London, with a staircase that submerges up through the water for you to get in, well, I had to learn more. Here's a photo and story about the upcoming pool. It would be cool to do the butterfly in that pool and have someone 55 stories down on the street yell at you to stop splashing.

THREE

NOSTALGIA - Over the course of a lifetime of watching sports, certain moments or highlights happen involving random players that stick with you forever. All you have to do is say the guy's name and the play pops into your head...or vice versa...you just mention the play and the guy's name pops in your head.

One of those plays for me is Kevin Mitchell's bare-handed catch in left field off of an Ozzie Smith fly ball. If you're reading this and nodding your head, you know exactly what I mean. If you're at a bar talking sports and some dude says 'bare-handed catch' you think Kevin Mitchell... and if someone randomly mentions his name, you think of the catch. That happened to me this week, and I immediately went on Google and lo-and-behold, the catch is there, and it's as sick as it was roughly three decades ago when it happened.

FOUR

PUBLISHING - Sixteen years ago Men’s Fitness completely relaunched and revamped its magazine and a 24-year-old me was put in charge of not only finding the right athlete for the cover but also writing the cover story and setting up the photo shoot. It was my first national cover and big shout out to my best bud Eddie who worked at the NFLPA at the time for setting it up.

I got to spend a day with Tiki in his prime New York Giants stardom days and here we are at the premiere party. This was a huge turning point for me because back then magazines still mattered and so did landing a national cover story. I used that to do another half-dozen or more for Men’s Fitness and then kept pushing to bigger magazines and bigger stories and eventually my goal of writing books. I remember the e-mail I got accepting my pitch for the cover story like it was yesterday, because it was yesterday, just 16 years ago.

FIVE

A COUNTERINTUITIVE QUOTE ABOUT LEARNING:

"For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.”

– David Epstein

(This is from Epstein's book, Range, which I recommended last week. So many great concepts and takeaways.)