American Spirit

This thing was there, I thought as I climbed out of the car. 

From 215 miles out at sea, the ship’s planes swooped in over Pearl Harbor too late to stop the attack, although they did have a brief, confused tangle with the Japanese and came under fire from panicked Americans on the ground below.  This thing was on board as the ship sailed into a smoking, devastated Pearl on December 8, refueled, and headed out to draw blood two days later, sinking its first Japanese ship, the submarine I-70.  It was at the Doolittle Raid, Midway, Guadalcanal, and campaigns across the Pacific and throughout the war, eventually reaching Iwo Jima and Okinawa as the Americans closed in on Japan.  This is the 25,000 pound anchor, the hardest, heaviest hunk of iron on board, hanging beneath the bow of the USS ENTERPRISE, the hardest hunk of warfighting steel in American history.  In January 1945, ENTERPRISE’s planes struck targets on land and sea to support the US Army landing on the Philippine island of Luzon.  My father was part of that force they were safeguarding, and here I was, nearly 76 years later, resting my hand on that anchor at Washington DC’s Navy Yard.  

Massive as it is at 12 feet tall and nine wide, it’s apparently pretty small as far as aircraft carrier anchors go.  That’s the funny thing about things heroic - or even heroes: they’re a little less prepossessing than you might imagine.  At the White House, I’ve seen George Washington’s sword from the Revolutionary War, which would have seemed perfectly ordinary if I didn’t know what it was.  I’ve met a few pro football players, who despite their stardom were not larger than life.  Still, this anchor boggles the mind: no other object in existence has been party to the sheer amount of violence it has: years and thousands of miles of tracer bullets flying, dogfights, explosions, torpedoes and planes screaming past, her own planes launching and returning, kamikaze attacks, anti-aircraft fire lighting up the night sky, the bombs that struck ENTERPRISE, and the 911 enemy planes and 71 ships she sent to the bottom of the ocean.  

On three separate occasions, the Japanese declared that ENTERPRISE had been sunk in battle.  They would soon be horrified to see ‘The Grey Ghost’ on the horizon once more.  The American public had grown used to her name in the headlines as through the years their fear slowly dared to become hope and then finally blossomed into joy.  In October 1945, after the war, when the fleet sailed into New York Harbor for Navy Day, everybody, including President Harry Truman, came out to stare at her battle hardened steel.  

A number of Navy ships named ENTERPRISE existed before this one, the first being a 70 foot schooner that saw action on Lake Champlain in the Revolutionary War.  The carrier was 761 feet at the waterline, 827 from one end of her flight deck to the other, which was merely a long rectangle mounted on top of a plainly conventional hull.  She was launched in 1936 as CV-6, the sixth carrier ever built.  In fact, she was even less impressive than two of her predecessors, SARATOGA and RANGER, a third smaller, the result of engineering and efficiency improvements.  

The day before ten fighting ships paraded into New York Harbor in October 1945, 101 planes were launched at sea from the decks of ENTERPRISE, MONTEREY, AND BATAAN.  They flew in a giant V-formation over the city as below windows flew open and people stood in the streets and cheered.  The planes then landed at the Naval Air Station in Brooklyn, ‘with the salt of Tokyo Bay still on their wings.’  The following morning at 4 AM, the flotilla was off Ambrose Light.  At 6 AM, they sailed into the harbor.  The AUGUSTA was there, the ship that bore President Truman to the Potsdam Conference to negotiate terms with Churchill and Stalin, as was the MISSOURI, which hosted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.  MONTEREY led the parade, flying an enormous flag and a string of balloons as sailors standing on the Battery shouted and waved.  

Next out of the mists came ENTERPRISE.    

‘Well, there she is, boys,’ a sailor said.  ‘There’s the old Big E.’  The crowd watched in utter silence as she passed.  

The reaction was probably similar in Pearl Harbor in the days following the Japanese attack.  As ENTERPRISE sailed in and towered silently over the pier, Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey ordered every available hand away from the surrounding smoldering wreckage to assist with refueling and resupplying the Big E.  A rush job at 24 hours, the task was done in seven, and ENTERPRISE turned to the business at hand. 

Thus begins one of history’s most compelling narratives of American greatness.  Simply put, World War Two’s decisive battles on land could not have been won without decisive victories at sea.  The Battle of the Atlantic fed England and delivered food and industrial supplies to the Soviet Union, making possible the victories over Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk.  In the Pacific, the assaults on key Japanese holdings were made possible by clearing the sea lanes for American use.  

In the first months of the war, the Japanese with their six carriers cruised the Pacific with impunity.  The United States had three, so strategy called for a calculated blend of all-out aggression and defensive caution.  The shock of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, where carriers ENTERPRISE and HORNET ventured dangerously close to Japan in secret, launching B-17 bombers that stunned Japan and electrified America, compelled Japan to stretch and thereby weaken its defensive perimeter.  The plan to cut Australia and New Zealand off from the world was thwarted in the Battle of the Coral Sea.  A month later, the Battle of Midway was an intelligence coup for the Americans, who were ready and waiting in superior numbers to pounce upon a Japanese invasion force that was pretty sure the Americans were nowhere near.  In the sustained and bloody fighting, Japan lost four carriers.  Rather than pursue the defeated stragglers, the US cautiously retired behind Midway to protect both the island and their fleet.

It’s important to remember that the battle hardened hunk of steel we’re admiring is a metaphor for American will, particularly the brave fliers who risked and gave their lives in ferocious combat, as well as the admirals who allocated their limited resources so brilliantly.  It was they who prevailed at Guadalcanal, Truk Lagoon, the Philippine Sea, and beyond.  Battle scarred, ENTERPRISE had to undergo repairs on numerous occasions.  In the Summer of 1943, she headed to Bremerton, Washington, to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, for a major overhaul.  The muscle she put on there, the torpedo blisters along her hull and the batteries of the newest and deadliest anti-aircraft weaponry, reflected lessons hard learned.   Those sailors who stood in awe on the Battery in October 1945 were not thinking of the ship but the blood spilled and bravery shown on her decks and in the sky.  

This brand of greatness appeals to those of us on the long, slow march of a strength training routine.  Whether you’re saving the world from the forces of tyranny or a deadly pandemic, slow and steady is the way.  ENTERPRISE’s lesson is that brains must determine how brawn is used - and sometimes bravery has to make up for gaps in the plan.  That’s just as true in the weight room as it was in the Pacific.  

It’s important to know that this American spirit still exists somewhere.  I slapped my palm against that anchor last week.  It’s there: hard, cold, quiet . . . waiting.  

“Have you tried 22?”

It’s a long story, but I did not make it as an actor.  Despite a great deal of fun as an amateur and a few professional successes, I had a hard time passing auditions or surrendering myself to the ridiculous displays of emotional fluency demanded by directors or workshop leaders.  Not only could I not do it, I’d be surprised they’d even ask for such contrivances.  Disillusioned and tired of failing at a process I couldn’t respect, I dropped out of the business.  It’s one of my life’s great disappointments - if not mysteries: how did I completely miss the boat on the dynamics of storytelling and imagination, subjects near and dear to my heart?

I listen to podcasts when I lift, and once I’m done with my usual John Oliver, NFL commentary, and coronavirus science updates, I branch out into new territory: military history, Malcolm Gladwell, and most recently, film criticism.  Approving of the recent version of DUNE, one critic asked, ‘Isn’t it nice when characters are mature adults who make smart and sensible decisions?  They actually control their emotions and take time to consider their actions instead of acting like hyperactive teenagers driven by emotions and hormones . . .  It seems like a luxury from a bygone era, but it brought me to a pretty interesting conclusion about [modern movies]: they’re written by children for children - or rather, people with the intelligence, attention span, and emotional maturity of children.’

Villains today are lightweights.  He compares the coldly efficient Darth Vader to the STAR WARS franchise’s newest embodiment of evil, the brooding, impulsive, conflicted man-child Kylo Ren, incredulous that he’s the best they can come up with.

The real victim in this case becomes the hero, who is only as strong as the villain he or she defeats.  If an audience senses that a villain is no real threat, then they’re less invested in the hero and subsequently the story.  

When he’s not ‘out in Edinburgh getting absolutely rat-arsed,’ The Critical Drinker, as he calls himself, also rails against poor plotting, which gives way to snarky humor and special effects, the hallmarks of big spectacles but shallow experiences.  His theory is that many modern screenwriters come from such sheltered, privileged lives that they simply have no experience with hardship or danger.  They have had no contact with tough, stoic, confident, or self reliant people who know how to keep their emotions or behavior under control.  The result is an existence in which they thrive being weak, fragile, spoiled, narcissistic, and emotionally insecure.  If they know nothing about handling adversity in a constructive manner, then how could they write about it?

These attacks are aimed mainly at the explosion filled STAR WARS and Marvel Comics extravaganzas that barely pass for narrative.   A small minority of original, well produced films, TV shows, and plays do exist, where the characters do not veer from one emotional extreme to the next.  That’s the world I aspired to be part of, stories that would thrill, amaze, or amuse intelligent audiences.  In workshops, as directors demanded that I be more demonstrative, I’d think, In the shows I watch, the actors don’t do that.    

I should have had a line ready, like that from the Critical Drinker, when asked why I kept myself from being emotionally volatile: ‘Because that’s how grown fucking men deal with things.’  Some of us completed the process of growing up.  Grief, fear, delirious joy, or anxiety are not supposed to be readily accessible for careless juggling.  

That kind of response, however worth it, would have just hastened my excusal by directors busy assembling their paint-by-numbers productions.  My consolation usually came a few weeks later, when newspaper reviews would attack their cartoonish shows.  

The directors never learned.  My contempt prevented me from getting gigs.  

It wasn’t until these recent podcasts that I realized others that felt the same way.

Try to imagine the response had a director ever dared ask Gene Hackman what emotions he was feeling, or the laughter that would have descended from the casts of GUNS OF NAVARONE, BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, or GONE WITH THE WIND had someone tried to manipulate their feelings for effect.  In CASABLANCA, in quite possibly the most heroic, emotional scene ever committed to film, cafe and casino owner Humphrey Bogart ‘wins’ the money to send a young couple to America, away from the war enveloping Europe.  He doesn’t bat an eye.  The desperate young bride, overcome with gratitude, holds it together.  It’s the audience that’s a mess.  

Grown men overcome adversity.  Maybe I should get back into it.  

Lee

Lee called last week, so sadly I won’t hear from him for another month.  

Lee represents manhood, strength, the call to a higher purpose, but unfortunately he’s a criminal, a telemarketer representing a long running police charity scam.  He has a southern accent, one so perfectly delivered that it can’t be real.  It’s like being contacted by a college football coach with high hopes: ‘I’m calling today on behalf of the National Police Foundation.  As you know, our officers are having a terrible time out there, and we want to raise money for the equipment they need.  Your support is vital to the welfare of our officers.  What level of commitment can I put you down for today?’

This comes real fast.  He’s been trained not to let you get a word in edgewise.  

Lee’s been calling every month or so for at least a year.  We get a lot of scam calls on our landline, which seems to be the main purpose of having a landline, but Lee has begun to stand out because it’s the same guy every time around.  He’s not a robot.  I can get him to respond to me, though this has made him betray a few things:

1.  Modern conservatism, a connection I’m making based on the strong pro-police, ‘Blue Lives Matter’ slant to these calls, identifies with masculinity.  Lee tries to play upon the impression of a well grounded, strong male donating time to a worthy cause.  

2.  The problem is that this brand of conservatism isn’t very intellectually rigorous.  Lee ain’t one for details.  

‘Hang on,’ I’d say.  ‘Our officers are having a terrible time out there?  In what way?’

Lee is surprised by this every single time.  A criminal willing to make the least possible effort could pluck anything from the headlines: gun violence, calls for reform or defunding, or the fact that more police are being killed by coronavirus than any other cause nowadays.  However, Lee is not interested in proving his case.  He wants you to take for granted the crisis is real.  Half the time, unable to form a thought, he’ll just hang up.  More recently he’s attempted to sound generous: ‘Well, I don’t want to overwhelm you.’

Clearly, this gives away that Lee is preying upon the elderly.  He’s trying to do one of a few things: 

 - maybe bait the other party into responding, ‘Oh, you’re not overwhelming me,’ at which point he can continue his pitch.  

 - He might also be smart enough not to burn any bridges.  If the caller is in fact a bit overwhelmed, it’s probably best to keep the interaction friendly and try again another day.  

 - Having been thrown by someone going off script, Lee is trying to reassert his dominance.  He’s the one who will steer this conversation, he’ll have you know.  He’s either trying to fool me or himself.  

I think it’s this third option - especially since I’ve been been matching his college football coach with my own Sam Elliot: ‘Lee, how the HELL are ya?  Now, Lee, I’m gonna ask you a question, and I don’t want you to go all wobbly on me.  Stay strong.  Stay with me, Lee.’

He simply cannot do it.  I’d actually respect him a bit more as a criminal if he had some game, but he’s as weak as the poor souls he preys upon.  Obviously he’s successful, since he’s been at it so long, and he’s probably not sensitive, since any number of folks hang up or get angry at him.  He’s undeterred.  He’s in a volume business, and since only so many people are going to hand over money, he has to keep cracking along.  Therefore, those tiny moments when I can knock him off balance are victories to be savored.  

When he first calls, I can be ready with a strong greeting:

‘Lee, it is a pleasure to hear your voice again.  You’re an icon, a patriotic, self reliant man of purpose.  I am honored you would consider a moment with me worthy of your time.’

‘Lee, the only thing greater than your courage is your impeccable sense of timing.  We are under siege.  How can I join the battle to take America back?’

He’s a bully with only one punch.  Once he’s asked what kind of donation he can rely upon, the trick would be to get him to engage on where the money’s going.

‘Lee, you silver tongued devil, I bet you can talk a cowgirl out of her blue jeans in no time, but I’m going to need some details.’   

‘Lee, we sure got a lot of problems, but you sound like a man with solutions.  Let’s hear some of them.’  

‘Lee, you’re a leader.  I’m a follower.  Tell me everything I should be doing.’

‘Lee, those police officers need new equipment?  How about I buy some of that equipment myself and take it down to the police station?  Would that be good idea?’

If he’s not getting his money, he’s going to bail.  This will be my last shot to assert dominance.  

‘Lee, you are not psychologically prepared for this battle.’

‘Lee, I am not overwhelmed.  Slow down a minute.  Take a breath.  I’m beginning to think you’re the one who’s overwhelmed.’  

‘Lee, you are an insect splattered on the windshield of life.’

‘Lee, can you give me your number so I can call you?’

Lee calls from different spoofed out of state numbers, so that starts every encounter off on pretty shady terms.  The way to verify a charity’s validity is to obtain their EIN, the Employer Identification Number, or request a copy of the IRS Tax Return Form 990.  The 990 is a public record that must be made available to a donor by mail or in person at the charity’s office, in accordance with IRS regulations.  

This would be interesting, asking Lee for the address of his organization and his EIN number.  That’s probably the best way to get his attention.  It could make for some squirming on his part - or what could be funnier is that Lee’s cause is an actual registered charity.  That creates even more squirming: ‘Lee, if this is a legitimate operation, why won’t you answer any questions?’

Ultimately, it won’t matter.  He’ll be back in a month, having forgotten the whole sparring session.    

‘Lee, it’s been a pleasure.  I’ll talk to you again next time.’

Even the Anchors Are Gone

It’s a strength training blog, so I should start with a mighty feat:

My parents sent me down to the Point, a beach and boating area in our Northeast town, to pick up our mooring anchor.  It was a chilly October day, the sailing season long done, the boats hauled out of the water and placed on their cradles, and finally the anchors all pulled and placed at the top of a concrete ramp running into the water.  Mooring anchors are shaped like upside down mushrooms; the genius in the design is that the dish at the end of the shank would sink into the mud, get filled up, and create a seal and stability that far exceeded its 250 pound weight.  A special barge with a powerful winch was necessary to tear them out each Fall - and drop them back in place each Spring.  

A 250 pound rusty and muddy anchor with 20 feet of chain and heavy line was nothing to sneeze at for owners who had to come claim them and take them home.  Also in the parking lot, beside the cluster of standing shanks at the top of the ramp, were two of the big floats for the dock, which was at the end of a long pier, the center of the action as boats would come and go, loading their crew members, or from where the motor launch would bear people out to the moorings.  

Two workers were on their hands and knees on one of the big floats, sanding the surface by hand.  As I pulled up, they stopped and shook their heads at one another.  The misery of the job was interrupted only by owners showing up and acting entitled to assistance.  They each sat sullenly, one leg up, an arm draped over that knee, unwilling to move until I went to the trouble of appealing to them.  

Having opened the back of the station wagon, I walked in amongst the anchor shanks and turned our mushroom on its side.  From there, I bent over, grabbed the edges of the ‘bell,’ and hoisted the 250 pounds up to belly level.  With the shank protruding in front of me and the chain dragging behind, I walked over and put it inside the car.  I coiled the chain around the bell where it rested on its edge (so it wouldn’t roll around), closed the door, gave the fellas a nod, and I was off, leaving them where they sat slack jawed in surprise. 

That was pretty emblematic of a youth spent at the Point.  One of the spoiled little preps lifted weights, it turned out, but beyond that the moment was proof that some of us knew our way around.  This was where we sailed boats large and small, in good weather and bad.  As a little kid, I cried in terror sometimes at sailing camp.  As a college kid, I swam to a couple in distress in a storm and sailed them and their boat, tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other, to the ramp, tearing down the channel in shrieking winds.  It was where my father dove beneath the boat every Saturday before a Sunday race, sandpapering away the first film of growth that would slow the hull as it moved through the water.  We were the ones who hauled our boat out every Fall - ourselves - getting it on the trailer, and the trailer jacked up and on blocks before we built a wooden frame for the heavy canvas cover that would protect it for the winter.  

Sailboats were  - are - a ton of work even for casual weekend racers.  More than that, they provide a soul defining way of life which I fear is being lost.  

The other day my sister sent pictures from a visit with an old friend, with whom she walked through our old haunts at the Point.  At the ramp, she was surprised to see a crew of workers fetching boats from their moorings and towing them to the ramp to be hauled out.  Not a single owner was there to participate or even observe.  

She was further surprised to see that these guys were not taking out the masts prior to putting the hulls on stands and shrink wrapping them for the season.  In the old days, stepping or unstepping a mast was always a brief but intense group struggle, a barn raising with a slight Marines-at-Iwo-Jima flavor.  Owners always helped each other out; the other families in our fleet racing ‘class’ hauled their boats at the same time.  Nobody would dream of leaving the end of season evolution to a crew at the boatyard.  

I texted my sister: at the top of the ramp, were the mushroom anchors waiting to be picked up?

They were not.

I had to figure out what she was seeing.  People are not picking up their 250-pound mushrooms and taking them home anymore - because they can’t.  They don’t have the cars for it, and they’d all be physically unable to pull them out and put them in the garage the way my Dad did before I got big enough to handle it, or the way every other businessman and weekend sailor took care of this years ago.  

The workers are not unstepping the masts.  Of course, these owners wouldn’t even consider strapping one to the top of their car - think of the menace to traffic or the trouble of performing any necessary maintenance before wrapping it in plastic and storing it for the winter.  

The mushroom anchors and mooring lines must all be getting winched into a truck and taken to a storage yard.  People probably don’t even own these.  They rent them.

That’s it: those boats getting pulled that day must have been rentals owned by the town or yacht club.  Seriously, no owners came to keep an eye on something they bought with hard earned cash?

The cell-phone picture she sent from the ramp made me sad.  Whether those boats were rentals or their Soft-Boy owners were willing to pay to avoid hard work, a certain number of people were reducing sailing to a very superficial experience.  I feel badly for them and especially their kids.

There are a lot of ghosts running up and down that ramp, where decades ago we wheeled Sunfishes and Lasers and up and down every day of sailing camp.  Starting at age 10, dripping wet in our T-shirts and bathing suits, squinting in the sun, we were part of an operation that was criminally negligent by today’s standards, yet this was precisely how we overcame our awkwardness and naïveté, surviving somehow and getting home every night despite being two to a Sunfish and part of a fleet spread across a broad swath of water with scant supervision.   When the college aged instructors did bother to direct any attention our way, it was usually to torment and capsize us.  We were quick studies, creating our own mayhem, happy to  capsize our own boats and duck under the hull or swim around the stern to climb up on the dagger board and right the boat once more.  Soon, rough and windy weather or any actual disasters held no fear for us.  

It’s not all joy.  Days can be marked by crushing boredom, stifling heat, sunburn, starvation, dehydration, or other miseries like searing bladder pain or hours of driving rain, shivering cold, and longing for the warm clothes at home you forgot to bring.  One of sailing’s great gifts is the ability to grasp completely the setting in any war drama or adventure story you read.  

Self reliance is the theme on various levels, something I simply don’t see as possible for those who are merely dipping their toes in the sport.  Our parents didn’t rent boats or leave the dirty work to others; all the sanding, painting, and fiddling with hardware was rendering with their own hands the craft with which they went out to take on the world.  

If those boats getting pulled the other day had owners who were elsewhere, then I hope they were doing something truly soul enriching.  Otherwise, they were missing an enormous opportunity.  

We were awesome there.  I wonder if anyone else has been.  

On Certification I: Ballet and the Boot

The horrified look on that grandmother’s face confirmed my fears.  

That moment just about marked the end of my daughter’s ballet career.  It began innocently enough: we had just transferred to Hawaii, the kid was six and happy to sign up at a local little storefront studio, where she began an introductory movement class with other little ones.  They wore little leotards and dance slippers - and maybe frilly tutus once in a while.  Through the weeks, months, and ultimately three years we were there she had progressed quite a bit and had a great time.  

Her instructor was great - a tall beauty with extensive experience dancing with the Pittsburgh Ballet and in Department of Education funded events around the United States before returning to her native Hawaii to marry and have her own baby.  She was a strict traditionalist, the right blend of sweetness and no-nonsense that had the kids in her thrall and at the barre practicing every step and point and turn with precision.  Lessons would work toward THE NUTCRACKER at Christmas or another big show at the end of the school year, so the girls of all ages would experience the achievement of performance.  

The instructor’s resume on her studio’s website is very impressive, both in her past achievements and  her continued development as an artist, as she blends the traditions of ballet and Hawaiian music.  

Nowhere is it mentioned that she’s been certified - by anybody presuming to sit in judgment.  

I bring up the subject of certifications because that’s a major impediment to my ever getting to coach strength training around here.  The CSCS, the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist qualification from the National Strength and Conditioning Association is considered the ‘gold standard’ of certification in the business and seems to be required for all kinds of jobs, from the elite collegiate level to babysitting flabby grown-ups one on one as a personal trainer. 

I strongly suspect that the CSCS is a racket perpetrated by an outfit that is slowly gaining monopolistic control of a lucrative industry.  I also suspect that their quality of content is weak; AGAIN, a young high schooler, this time the rugby playing boyfriend of that same daughter, dropped into my gym for a workout and revealed a number of ways that he’s been coached to lift that are just plain wrong.  The last time this happened was when I met a young neighbor trying to play football back in Ohio four years ago.  They were both taught by certified coaches.

I will gladly admit that I have much to learn about strength and conditioning, and I would certainly apprentice under a more knowledgeable supervisor.  I’d have to be convinced of his or her merits, however, which would be an easier sell than the prospect of an elaborate effort of studying for a corrupt and unnecessary certification exam.

On the night we flew out over the Pacific, leaving Hawaii, it dawned on my daughter that this was a one way trip and she’d never see her dance instructor again.  That’s when the tears started.  We were all starting over, I said, and I assured her we’d find a new ballet studio.  

Despite the size of the military town where we settled, there was only one dance studio, a huge operation in an aluminum warehouse building.  Inside, studios were behind giant glass windows to one side or the other, and parents watched from benches in the wide hallway.  

The ballet class was taught by an elderly woman who had to sit for the entire session.  Assisting would be one or two older girls, who demonstrated the work at the barre, which didn’t last very long each time around.  My wife, who had been a ballerina in her youth, caught one of the classes and noticed a number of flaws, among them ‘sickled feet,’ which is a weakness, a collapse of form, and a tell-tale indicator of poor standards.  The older dancers were invariably overweight.  

At the end of the summer, the school had a little show, and my daughter was the star for her age group.  She was the best dancer by far, though interestingly she was nowhere near the top of her class back in Hawaii.  

Week by week I’d catch a glimpse when I wasn’t reading my book, and though I didn’t know enough to spot things like sickled feet, I knew that the precision I saw in Hawaii was utterly lacking.  

One afternoon, an older woman sat beside me on one of the benches.  I could divine her story immediately.  She was in nice earrings and a coat, steps above the schlock parents wear when they’re shuttling kids around in the minivan, so she was obviously a grandmother who had come to visit.  Her family had similarly just rotated into town.  

I looked up from my book when I heard a sharp intake of breath.  Grandma knew her ballet.  She straightened in her seat.  Her eyes went to the door, searching for her own daughter, the Mom who was running an errand or parking the car.  She turned slowly to me.

Our eyes met.  I nodded and said quietly, ‘Yeah.  This is how it is.’  

Tragedy ensued.  Her granddaughter was either plucked out of the class in short order, or she stayed in, either of which would have negative consequences.  My kid ended up getting hurt not long after this, dislocating one of the bones in her foot.  She had to stump around in a plastic boot for three weeks, and we never went back.  

She wasn’t as sad as we expected.  I think she knew the score.  Plan B was horseback riding, which she’s stuck with ever since.  

I haven’t the slightest idea whether this second operation was certified by some ballet council or another.  (They probably were.)  In any competitive sport, this level of incompetence would have Darwinian consequences to the team’s standing and the coaches’ employment prospects.  By the same token, the excellence in Hawaii would establish a long winning tradition, fully independent of whether or not it was sanctioned by some set of self appointed parasites.

I grasp that the certification of coaches is to ensure quality or safety.  A quick round of Googling indicates that for soccer coaches a basic diploma from their federation to coach on the high school level requires about 10 hours of work.  Swim coaches have a series of courses to take, totaling about 50 hours, though people are allowed to begin work before they finish the process.  Wrestling awards lifelong certifications that take only a few hours.  

Other sports, such as hockey, football, or basketball are hit and miss on their requirements, mainly because state regulations vary.  Many states are happy to fall back on regular teaching certifications for their public schools.  Common sense requirements apply, like CPR and First Aid qualifications, background checks  - and drug tests in some cases.  Most importantly, successful coaching in any of these sports requires a solid base of expertise both in the sport itself and conveying skills to young people.  

Only strength and conditioning has a stringent test demanding a months-long period of preparation.  One of two conspiracies is afoot: the National Strength and Conditioning Association is protecting its paying membership by creating a barrier to those looking to join a lucrative field - OR, they are fooling the membership, along with insurance companies and lawyers, as they take control of the industry.  

Afghanistan, Irish Girls, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

This is what really happened:

Paddy Crowe, a retired ferry captain living on the Aran island of Inish Oirr (Inisheer) answered his phone at 11 ’o’clock that Thursday morning.  

‘I’m calling you because I’m not sure what to do,’ a voice said.  They were calling from the ‘back’ side of the island.  ‘I’m out here with a child, and I think I see something in the sea.’  

‘Oh?’ Crowe asked.  ‘What do you think you see?’  

‘I don’t know, but I know those girls are missing.’

Crowe called the Coast Guard.  This was 13 hours into the frantic search for paddleboarders Sarah Feeney and Ellen Glynn, who had been swept off Furbo Beach, in the northeast of Galway Bay, the previous evening.  

The Irish Coast Guard had already been dealing with numerous false sightings.  Still, over the radio they contacted the ferry JACK B, running between Doolin and the Aran Islands, and urged them to keep a sharp lookout, and for the first time they directed a helicopter, RESCUE 117, one of its giant Sikorsky S-92’s, to proceed south from where they had been searching.  

The voice of commercial fisherman Patrick Oliver came up on the radio.  ‘Valentia Coast Guard, this is the JOHNNY O, JOHNNY O; you getting us there on Six-Seven?’

‘JOHNNY O, this is Valentia Coast Guard on Six-Seven.  Go ahead.’

‘For your information, we’re at [the fishing bank] Killa Patch and just heard there’s a possible sighting.  Is that toward inish Oirr, or is that nothing?’

‘Roger - a member of the public on Inish Oirr is reporting a possible sighting in the south side of Foul Sound, between Inish Oirr and Inish Mann [the next Aran Island], over.’

‘We can head in that direction.  We’re about four miles away.  We can check it out.’

‘ . . . 117 is in the area.  If you can proceed and give it a look over, that’d be much appreciated, over.’

‘Yeah, that’s no problem.  We’ll head in that direction now.’

Said Patrick Oliver on ‘The Miracle in Galway Bay,’ a radio program produced by Irish broadcaster RTE, ‘We just took off as fast as possible.’

Apparently, the waves were still huge at that time of the morning, which would make spotting the girls that much more difficult, and if that caller to Captain Crowe was on the ‘back’ side of the island and looking at the Foul Sound and not the South Sound, then Sarah and Ellen were swept much further to the West than I or certainly the Irish Coast Guard imagined.  

These are among the revelations in the RTE broadcast [and now, a podcast].  The truth of the matter is a great deal more heroic and emotionally intense than I was able to convey in that blog post a few clicks back, entitled ’Two Fathers.’   Still, trying my hand at a rippin’ yarn was the most fun I had writing in a long time.  As a father I wanted to depict the duality of the job, helplessness and fear on one hand, and the power of the protector riding into the storm on the other.  The problem with fiction is that it reveals more about the author than the subject at hand.  

According to RTE, Johnny Glynn, Ellen’s father, had already largely lost his composure by sunrise Thursday, when he and Ellen’s mother were on the Clare coast.  Hours later, at Furbo Beach with his family when his phone rang with news of the rescue, he was a profoundly blubbering, sodden wreck.  He did not drop to his knees and clench his fists like he had just scored the game winner in Ireland’s Senior Challenge Cup - and even when he did score in 1991, Glynn was at a dead run when he picked up a perfect pass.  He blasted the ball past a goalie who never had a chance and was moving so fast that he flew past the goal and hurdled a barrier between the field and the frenzied crowd in the stands.  It’s on YouTube.

Still, Johnny Glynn, sports hero, professional footballer, and household name for decades, was a mighty oak felled by the prospect of losing his daughter.  

Of course, Patrick Oliver knew nothing about the search as he went to bed on the night of Wednesday, August 12.  However, the next morning, as soon as they heard the news, he and Morgan rolled out to join the search.  He did immediately grasp that with a northeast wind the girls had been swept far beyond where anyone was looking, and interestingly, he made sure to bring his credit card, figuring that they’d be out pretty far and would have to refuel in the Aran Islands.  Running out of fuel was not only possible; it was likely, meaning they’d have to anchor and call somebody to come get them.  18-year-old Morgan suggested they ‘bring extra slack,’ additional lengths of line, in case they had to anchor in deep water.  

After that radio call, once they had sped to where the girls might have been sighted, they slowed to a stop and looked in every direction as they rose and fell on two-meter waves.  Suddenly Morgan spotted what looked like ‘a black stick a mile and a half in the distance.’  Sarah had seen them and was waving her paddle.  

From standing at the boats’s stern, Morgan actually ran to the controls and slammed the JOHNNY O into motion, his ‘instincts taking over,’ he explained.  

As cool as Nelson striding the quarterdeck, Patrick Oliver was absolutely in his element.  The story of his losing a friend whose body was found just beyond a search zone is true, as is the part about his scaling back his lifeboat commitment.  The friction with those in authority was purely my invention, a means of making him an all the more the epic Hero: hardened by years at sea, ready to answer the call to glory as summoned by Fate or the Gods, and destined to beat the doubters at their own game.  

Yeah, that definitely says something about me.  

If Patrick Oliver was communicating on VHF Channel 67, then his call ‘We got ‘em!’ to the Valentia Coordination Centre must have stopped heartbeats the length of Galway Bay.  All around the weeping Johnny Glynn, Furbo Beach transformed into jubilation, horns honking and people jumping and shouting in celebration.  One of the Oliver daughters, interviewed by a TV news crew, described how social media also went berserk.  Her father - dopey old Dad, of all people - was all over Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp . . . and everyone was going completely mental.  

At any rate, I wrote a story that said more about me than it did the the rescue of Sarah Feeney and Ellen Glynn.  I’d like to think that on some level I captured some truths.

That’s the magic - and danger  - of storytelling.  Even when an author is making things up, they can reveal a truth that a reader will seize upon.  Authors write the stories they need to - innocently or not - and readers are captivated by what they need to hear - again, innocently or not, which makes for a matrix of various possible outcomes.  

Consider the position of the Irish Coast Guard, who faced a government inquiry after the incident.  How did they not find these girls, they were asked.  How did the thermal sensors and the night vision gear on the helicopters not help, and how on earth were they miles and miles off from where the girls were found?

I had worried that this was the most far-fetched part of my story, but it turned out to be utterly true.

The sheer size of the waves made visual searches extremely difficult, and both the waves and the weather negated the workings of the electronics, was the explanation.  

Why were they so far off with their search zones, mule-headedly believing that despite howling northeast winds the girls would be in the inner bay?  The explanation was that inflatable paddle boards were not included in the software the Coast Guard used to predict drift trajectories.  [That’s a revelation from the podcast: the girls were on inflatable boards, which were blown along by the storm even faster than foam boards would have been.)

That’s the Irish Coast Guard’s end of the transaction, which I can’t imagine a great many people are going to buy.  Software?  Have they no mariners in the Coast Guard?  Patrick Oliver, the saltiest dog out there, worried that he’d be so far out to sea, he’d run out of gas.  

In his book DERELICTION OF DUTY, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster depicts a Joint Chiefs of Staff who told President Lyndon Johnson ‘only what he wanted to hear’ about the war in Vietnam.  They never provided him practical military advice, preferring instead to escalate a bombing campaign that only confused activity, in the form of bombing raids and body counts, with actual progress.  

This brings us to the Greek Tragedy of the Afghanistan occupation, which has come to a crashing end in recent days.  According to scholar Robin Bates, the fate here was inevitable.  The American public, like the audience Aristotle described, undergoes catharsis as the result of the contradiction they witness: ‘They simultaneously believed that something could have been done and that nothing could have been done.’

“Three presidents allowed an unwinnable war and an unrealizable project to go on and on, like the Theban plague, because they didn’t want to be blamed for exposing America’s helplessness, as Biden is being blamed. It certainly may be true that Biden could have handled the withdrawal better—we can debate about that—but I suspect that his critics’ major grievance is that he’s exposing them. If the foreign policy establishment doesn’t scapegoat the president, it will have to admit it screwed up royally, that the project was a fool’s errand from the get-go. Teiresias’s words to Oedipus apply equally well to them: “You have your eyesight, and you do not see.”

We did not spot a problem as general after general assured us that as hopeless as things appear to be, Afghan Forces would be suitably trained in short order.  Bates also says, “We thought that a trillion dollars and the world’s most powerful military could save women and girls from fundamentalist patriarchy and are now paying emotionally for our arrogance.”   The problem with fiction is that it reveals more about the author than the subject at hand. 

As with Johnson and Vietnam, we were misled because we were willing to be.  With any luck, this story will be instructive to future generations, because it certainly hasn’t done us any good at the time.  

Stories about rescues and loving fathers are a lot more fun - even when they contain amazing surprises: it was a phone call from someone walking on a beach with a little kid that saved the lives of those two girls. 

Validation

The frontal assault took the Marines completely by surprise.  They stood dumbfounded, unsure of which one of them should react first.

Striding across the road was my 17-year-old daughter, who with palms up called out, ‘How many dead hang pull ups do I have to do for a T-shirt?’

They had to think fast: A girl?  Dead hangs?.  

This was at a big festival, where the Marines had set up a recruiting booth.  They brought a pull up bar, and their clever enticement to potential recruits was a challenge to their masculinity: do a certain number of reps to win a lanyard, water bottle, or T-shirt - and maybe that would lead to a talk about joining the Corps.  Above their boots and camouflage pants the Marines wore tight black T-shirts to showcase their arms.  The strategy worked; plenty of young, cool dudes took up the gauntlet, many of them quickly running out of horsepower after only a few reps.  This is what made the Marines pretty sure that while this chick had guts, she wasn’t going to do any dead hangs.  

She nailed four, to their immense surprise.  The recruiter in charge tossed her a T-shirt and followed up with a packet of literature on a career in the Marine Corps.  This was the best thing they saw all day.  

We’ve been away at this week-long festival in The Great Lakes, which is why I haven’t been writing.  In truth, I’ve been writing a great deal in preparation for the event, our working vacation and first chance to travel and have fun since the pandemic began.  

It was also our first chance in years to lift in a public gym, which was eye opening.  We’ve always known that we’re doing pretty well in our little garage, but even when progress slows and we’re feeling beaten up, it’s encouraging to see that a solid background in science, technique, and programming really does go a long way.  

Really, what surprised me more is just how many people don’t have that kind of background.  

A number of public officials were in attendance, which called for a protective detail, essentially SWAT-level trained guys with rifles, vests, and dogs, and like the Marines, T-shirts that were tight on their arms and shoulders.  A few of them were at the gym early one morning, where it was clear that their elite level training did not extend to strength work.  Squats were done with a 60-pound dumbbell clutched to the chest goblet style.  Romanian deadlifts were done with a whole 135 pounds.  If anything was amazing, it was that their arms were as respectable looking as they were, considering the pedestrian level curls and pull ups I was seeing.  

I wrote about running into this same Special Operations command years ago, hundreds of miles away at their home base, when one of their big guys was doing deadlifts and I was using the same weight for power cleans.  

A mother and father came in with a ten year old boy who was all long bones and joints, utterly lacking muscle or the merest suggestion of hormones that could provide some.  Still, it was time for strength training, they had decided, and they proceeded to misinform him on every single exercise in the gym.  The bands supporting his pull ups were not strong enough, so despite his brave, albeit jerky, attempts at reps, they urged him to move slowly in each direction.  On the deadlifts, he had to keep his hips down, which only worsened the bend in his back.  They tried goblet squats, box jumps, push ups, and tricep push ups, of all things - done with his hands close together beneath his chest.  His posture collapsed constantly.  

There’s a way to handle this, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.  The parents meant well, and the Dad was a nice enough guy to say to me, ‘Hey!  Holy Cow, did I see you squatting with three plates on each end of the bar?’  

To take stock of what you’re doing, sometimes you have to see what other people are up to.

Steroids

Every now and then, we should take a moment to explore the logic of evil.  I’m not talking about anything too murderous or inhumane in this case, as much as history demands that we keep an eye on that sort of thing.  For now, I’m talking about a lesser version, merely the willingness to take the easy way out of a challenge and ignore the consequences.  

I can see how easy it would be for people to take steroids.  Athletes up against their limits get frustrated, especially when record weights or longtime goals are just out of reach.  Trust me: I know the feeling.  Steroids solve the greatest problem in training, the human body’s lack of complete dependability.  We can program; we can hope and plan, but whether building strength is an art or science, your gains never quite equal what you’ve put into it.  

A friend I’ve written about a number of times, who played Division One college football before short forays with two NFL teams, had an eye opening experience on this topic.  He was newly arrived as a freshman, on campus a day or two before practice started, and walking through the dorm to see if anyone wanted to go lift.  After all, this was what got him there, the 480 pound squat and the 350 pound incline bench, along with being a champion discus thrower.  

Nobody was interested.  In fact, the upperclassmen in particular looked at him like he was crazy.  

I guess I’m naive, he thought.  Practice will be brutal, so nobody wants to work any harder than they have to.  These guys are partying, too.  If they’re not just hung over, they’re probably drinking beers during the day.  

He wasn’t even close to the reality of it.  Talking with a teammate soon after, he was surprised to be chided with, ‘Dude, nobody lifts.’

‘Then how are they all so big?’

The guy was surprised by the question.  ‘Hello?  Dianabol.  They’re juicing.’

Sheltered by our prep school, we virgins were released into the wild like white doves - which would explain the 40 years it took for me to realize that there are no accidents in training.  Successes and failures have specific causes, which come down to set and rep schemes, progressions, and numerous other variables.  Science has slowly been peeling away the mystery surrounding it all.  

This throws the logic of steroid use into sharper relief.  Physically, it covers a multitude of training sins.  Mentally, it saves people the trouble of arriving at the engineering solutions necessary to meet their goals.  

A year ago, in the thick of the pandemic, Oxford University set up the Recovery program, a system by which they could organize very rapid evaluations for drugs that might face down the lethality of COVID-19.  A lot of new antivirals and immuno-modulatories were put forward - but somewhere an old, steady hand suggested plain old dexamethasone, a steroid that’s been around since the 60’s.  

It worked better than anything else.  

When patients were critically ill with COVID, that often meant that the molecular tricks of the virus had suppressed their immediate immune reaction.  Viral infection would would progress to disease within their bodies, and soon that person’s immune system would launch a massive, desperate ‘cytokine storm’ of inflammatory chemicals.  The sheer potency of this assault would cause tremendous collateral damage to the organs; their own bodies were killing these patients; it wasn’t the disease.  

Dexamethasone saved the day because steroids reduce inflammation.

When it comes to weight lifting, two facts emerge:

1.  Steroids reduce the amount of muscle damage in a workout, allowing athletes to recover more quickly and train more frequently.  

2.  They also enable the body to produce more protein, which translates into greater strength and size, and produce more ATP, which is muscles’ cellular fuel.  

Steroids have done a lot of good for a great many critically ill people, limiting destruction and fostering construction, restoring them to strength and health.  

However, you have to know what you’re doing.  Doctors’ prescriptions take into consideration that steroids have a number of effects on the body’s many complicated systems, the cardiovascular, hormonal, and musculoskeletal systems among them, as well as the liver and skin.   Weight lifters and athletes who consider training to be an open ended enterprise - and just want more, more, more - create havoc with this powerful intervention.  

A proper training program should also be a powerful intervention.  You have to understand the mathematics of progressions and the rest intervals that distinguish novices from intermediates, and so on.  You have to stay on top of the full breadth of research and be willing to go deep where needed, especially if you’re trying to wring out every last bit of potential.  Solving great mysteries is not for the lazy.

In fact, I just learned an important lesson the hard way: folks my age probably can’t afford time off.  Every three months, I’ve been taking a week off to allow some healing from all the wear and tear.  The problem is that the first few days back at it are always brutal - speaking of inflammatory cytokines - with lots of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.  When I resumed training right after the Fourth of July, I added negative and isometric reps to the mix, per my recent research, and the enhanced load really did a number on me, giving me a sinus infection and sore throat.  

The rest from the time off is probably creating more harm than good.  In late September, I’ll have to find the best of both worlds: 50 percent weights and just some fooling around, enough to keep the right juices flowing while body parts recuperate.  

I see the logic of the negatives and the isometrics.  The force-velocity curve, if not all the changing leverages as limbs and body segments unfold, doesn’t allow for maximal contractions at every point in the ranges of motion.  The negatives and isometrics allow for targeting these spots.  I’m only a few weeks in, and I’ve started pretty modestly, so I haven’t really gained much aside of this hacking cough.  

I’m optimistic, however, looking forward to two things: reaching new heights as well as knowing that I alone deserve the credit.  

Two Fathers

The following is based on a true story.  At sunset on Wednesday, August 12, 2020, cousins Sara Feeney and Ellen Glynn were paddleboarding when they were swept off the beach by a freak storm.  As the entire nation of Ireland anxiously awaited news, the Coast Guard and Royal National Lifeboat Institution looked in all the wrong places while fishermen Patrick and Morgan Oliver sped out of Galway and found them relatively easily.  ‘The girls drifted in a pretty straight line throughout the night,’ Patrick remarked to a television news crew back at the quay, but otherwise he offered no comments about the search effort.  Members of the Irish government caught his message, however, and called for an investigation.  

The story below is nearly 100 percent fabrication on my part.     

The first father stood outside the pub door, a coronavirus mask on his face, having stepped out when he saw the second father parking his car.  This was a meeting that never made it to the press, despite the fact that it involved one of Ireland’s most sensational stories in years.  The daughter of that first father and his niece, her close cousin, were swept out to sea just a few evenings prior, in a storm that struck suddenly as they were paddleboarding.  All of Ireland hung on the news of the frantic search that went through the night, and just as hope began to fade, that second father scooped them up in his boat and rushed them to a waiting helicopter on one of the Aran Islands. In the midst of the pandemic, Ireland celebrated deliriously.

Johnny Glynn figured he owed the man a beer.  Though everything was closed, he prevailed upon a friend who owned a pub to let him host this private meeting.  As Johnny stood outside the front door, he should have been the happiest man in Ireland.  He was troubled to a surprising extent, however.  It had been been an admittedly rough week.  

He had been labeled ‘The Happiest Man in Ireland’ once before, the day he scored the game winning goal for Galway United as they clinched the Football Association of Ireland’s Senior Challenge Cup in 1991.  Glynn was a sports celebrity, playing for Galway United, Cork City, St Patrick’s Athletic, and the Shamrock Rovers in a career that spanned over 15 years.  Though his hair was gray, he still had the same tall and rangy outlines of his playing days.  

The second father, as he came up the sidewalk with a nautical chart folded under one arm, was 20 years younger, with dark hair and beneath his mask the faint stubble of a beard.  He was perfectly amiable yet the kind of fellow who made you look twice and realize he was a pretty tough customer, well shouldered beneath his shirt from a lifetime at sea as a commercial fisherman.  He was also prominent in his own right, ‘fishing royalty,’ part of a family that had fished for generations and were anchors in the Claddagh, an enclave of ancient families living in the heart of Galway.  

‘Patrick Oliver,’ Johnny began from behind his mask as he extended a hand, ‘it is truly a pleasure to meet you.’  The handshake progressed to a hug on Johnny’s part, as he he drew close to give Patrick an earnest slap on the back.  He stood back and looked him straight in the eye.  ‘From the bottom of my heart, thank you for bringing my daughter back to me.’

‘It was my pleasure.’

Johnny suggested they get inside before somebody noticed them.  They passed a table on which two large Helly Hansen foul weather jackets had been lain, along with a pair of freshly laundered and neatly folded sweatshirts.  ‘I believe these are yours.’

‘Yes, they are,’ Patrick smiled.  

At the back of the pub, a few employees were readying for an evening of making take-out orders.  Johnny and Patrick stepped out to the open back porch, where they settled at a table.  The masks came off.  ‘Is that okay?’ 

‘Sure.’   

Two pints of Guinness arrived immediately, by way of the pub owner, who was pleased to meet Patrick and quick to say, ‘This one’s not even from Johnny.  It’s on the house.’

He headed off, and in the silence, Johnny worked to put his feelings into words.  ‘I’m glad you came.  Families would have gotten in the way, and at some ceremony or TV show, we wouldn’t really have a chance to talk.’

He drew another breath, trying to remember what he rehearsed.  ‘My wife and I went through that long night together, and we’ve had a priest at the house - a couple of times.  We’re coming to terms with it each in a different way, or the whole thing affected me more than I realized.’

Patrick tilted back in his chair.  ‘I thought so.  I heard you on OFF THE BALL,’  where, on the nationwide morning sports radio show, Johnny confessed to fearing the worst.

‘I don’t think I’m over it yet.  The next night, even though Sara was home and Ellen was safe and sound in hospital, I still couldn’t sleep.’   

Patrick let him talk.  

‘The problem is, I can’t picture what they went through.  Every time I do, it always comes back to me - desperate, on a beach, facing an empty darkness.  My whole world turned just about upside down that night, but the worst thing was not knowing what was happening.   I still don’t understand the story.  I couldn’t see the game.’  He tried to smile.  ‘Luckily, though, you got in there and scored the game winner.’

‘Well, kind of,’ Patrick allowed.  ‘A lot of people were searching that night, not just the next morning.’

‘I know.  The whole thing blows my mind - the sheer scale of it.  God, how do I thank people?’  Johnny folded his arms across his chest and took a steadying breath.  ‘You think a stormy, black night is bad?  No, the worst, WORST part was getting home to a silent house - like Death was there waiting for me.  It hasn’t gone away - which makes this whole thing sound like a therapy session.  Sorry.’   

Patrick nodded sympathetically.  ‘That’s all right.  There is a story to this,’ he acknowledged.  ‘Parts of it you might not want to hear.’

‘No, I need to hear it.’  For the first time, he put a hand on his Guinness.  He gave a shrug and hoisted it.  ‘To a happy ending.’  

Patrick hoisted his.  ‘Amen.’

Wednesday night, August 12th, at Furbo Beach was an ever nicer night than two days before, when 23 year old Sarah Feeney and her 17 year old cousin, Ellen Glynn, had last gone paddle boarding.  It was so warm that they were hardly wearing anything - only bikinis under their lifejackets, and the water was so glassy and quiet that for the first time Ellen elected not to put her cellphone in a plastic pouch and tuck it in her waistband.  Sarah’s mother would walk the dog while the girls tooled around not far off the beach.   With Ireland so far north, the sun had not yet set at 9 p.m.    

A gradient wind, one that curves over the contours of a landscape, started to blow from the northeast as the day drew to a close.  As it comes off the land and slants down to the surface of the water, it makes what are known as ‘cat’s paws,’ which can be deceptively strong puffs in areas of calm.  Apparently, a few of these had caught the girls unawares, pushing them away from shore further than they realized at first - but it was quickly too late to muster enough force to paddle back in.  The average paddle boarder can be brought to a standstill by only 10 knots of wind.

As dusk set in, the gradient wind was compounded by wind off the cooling land (since the warm air over the sea was still rising) and wind from thunderstorms brewing in the distance.  A powerful nor’easter was forming rapidly.  

If you hold your right hand up in the shape of a crab’s claw, though with your fingers and thumb fairly straight, the space between them is the shape of the west-facing Galway Bay.  Up in the top right, at the big knuckle where your finger joins your hand, is the city of Galway itself.  The Glynn family home and Furbo Beach are down along the underside of your index finger, the beach in a little cove right in the crease beneath your next knuckle. 

 The force of the nor’easter was slanting down and left from beyond Galway.  Sarah and Ellen, when they first realized they couldn’t paddle back in to the beach, called to Sarah’s mother on shore but couldn’t be heard.  The darkness came frighteningly fast, as a mass of blackness crashing downward from behind the hills, split by terrifying cracks of thunder and lightning and rain that lashed so hard into them that it hurt.  Immediately, however, the girls were smart enough to lash their paddle boards together with their lead lines.    The wind was pushing them backwards, they knew, but with an eye on the city lights in the distance, they thought maybe they could paddle hard enough to stay in place.

At 10:00 pm, the cell phones and pagers belonging to members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution sounded, summoning crewmen, all of them volunteers from the community, to the Galway station.  They dressed in helmets and exposure suits, and rescue craft headed into the night.  Soon, the Irish Coast Guard launched the first of its helicopters, one of its fleet of massive, 68-foot, 25,000 pound Sikorsky S-92’s.

Johnny Glynn stayed in football after his playing days ended. working through a number of positions to become the head of player development in the area.    

‘Wednesday was like any other day,’ he said.  ‘I watched a practice and was heading home when a phone call from my wife had me driving to Furbo in a panic.  The wind or the tide had carried Sarah and Ellen away.  Sarah’s mother had dialed 999 to contact the Coast Guard, and there we were, climbing out on a line of rocks to shout over the water.  It was pitch black, either absolutely silent out there, or we were drenched in rain.  When we sat in the car, I called a friend who’s with the Doolin Ferry.  He said he had a radar plot of the entire bay and could see the lifeboats heading out of Galway.’

‘I had contacts on my phone from football.  The first friend I called was actually out further west, in Loughaunbeg.  I asked whether he could round up a few of the players from his team and get down to the beach to shine some lights and make some noise.  That’s when the Garda [the police] came to Furbo and started shining their lights around, investigating.  They said the belief was that the wind would blow the girls south, across to the Clare side, so the Garda over there were alerting the residents to be on the lookout.  That first coach was getting the word out to other teams around the bay.  I called friends in Oranmore and Ballyvaughan.’

‘I said to my wife, ‘You’re sure they had their life jackets on?’

‘Yes.’

‘They had their leashes, those straps that wrap around their ankles, tied to the boards  - they had them on?’

‘I think so, Johnny.’  

At first, she said, ‘It’s only been an hour.  It’s too soon to get worried.’

Patrick Oliver had not quite fallen asleep at 11 when his cell phone on the nightstand beside him buzzed with a text.

‘You awake?  They’re not finding those two girls.’

‘What two girls?’

‘Active case: two 20yo girls paddleboarding  - swept off Furbo 90m ago.  3 boats out and a helo - and not a trace.  Something doesn’t seem right.’

‘Did they find the boards?’

’No.’

‘Hang on.’  This got Patrick out of bed and heading into the kitchen, dialing his cousin Michael, who was standing watch at Galway’s RNLI station.  ‘Hey,’ he said.  ‘These girls are on stand up paddleboards?’

‘Yeah - lifejackets, leashed up, a pair of beginners.  They get pushed off shore, storm lands right on top of them, and they simply vanish.’

‘No sign of the boards?’

‘None.’

‘What does that tell you?

‘We’re in the wrong spot.’

‘Yep.’

‘I thought so.  The current’s running east until about 1:30 in the morning.’

‘We don’t care about the current.  Where’s the wind?’

’Zero Five Zero.’

‘See, this is what I had to explain,’ Patrick told Johnny in the pub.  ‘If they were in a motorboat out of gas and sitting low in the water, the wind would blow them one way, and the current would also take hold and pull them another.  You can predict mathematically where they’re going to be, based on the speed of each.’

Patrick reached for the chart he had brought and unfolded it to the size of newspaper front page, laying it on the table sideways.  They both turned their chairs.  ‘I thought you might like to see this.’

‘Wow,’ Johnny whispered reverently. The land masses were a shade of yellow.  Light blue ran along the edges, denoting shallow water.  The open bay itself was white, with all manner of navigation marks identified  and channels outlined.  Spaced an inch apart in the open white were numbers in a tiny font indicating depth.     A set of lines had been penciled in, obviously drawn along a straight edge, one slanting down and left from Furbo Beach and another from Galway Harbor. They came together forming a downward point.  The line from Furbo Beach extended down the page, but not far past the Aran Islands, and barely off the line was an ‘X,’ and ‘53° 0.713’ N / 9° 29.991’ W,’ along with the time, ’11:07.’    

Johnny bent to look closely.  ’So X marks the spot.’   

‘Yes, and this is where we took them.’  Patrick traced a little arc with his finger around Inish Oirr, (pronounced and often spelled Inisheer).  ‘The ferry pier is right at the top.’   

Beyond the tips of your finger and thumb in that crab’s claw, the three Aran Islands stand at the mouth of Galway Bay.  The largest is up to the left, and then following in a slant down to the right come medium and then small.   The last island, Inish Oirr, is five miles off the coast of County Clare.  Below the end of your thumb, the Clare coastline runs pretty much south.  

That gap, between Inish Oirr and Clare is the South Sound and runs to the open Atlantic. 

Johnny looked further up that long slanting line to where the path from Furbo and the path from Galway Harbor came together.  Something was written.  ‘What does that say?’

‘Midnight.  At 11 o’clock when I was on the phone, that’s where I figured the girls would be at midnight.  Do you see that for simplicity’s sake I made it directly west of Blackhead Light on Clare?’

‘I do.’

This spot is six and three-quarters - a bit more - nautical miles from Furbo.  This line is also the direction the wind was blowing.’  Patrick then made a point of picking up his finger and moving it.  He rubbed the open white to the right of the line from Furbo.  ‘This is where they were looking.  Does that make sense to you?’

Johnny lowered his brows, confused.

‘Paddleboards are big, broad chunks of styrofoam coated in a little plastic.  They’re light; they can hold a ton of weight, and they’re easy to move around - which is why everyone likes them, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So if they’re easy for a person to move, they’re easy for the wind to move.  The girls are at the beach the other night, and they get pushed off shore in this direction - ‘ he ran his finger along the line - ‘a little bit before they realize it.  Then the storm hits, and it’s blowing them right along this line.  The wind coming from Zero Five Zero means it’s headed toward Two Three Zero on the compass.  The girls were going southwest.’

‘I get it.’

’So why would they be looking over here, to the East?  The current has no bearing on a pieces of foam that sit on top of the water, especially in that wind.’

This was a surprise.  Johnny could only look at him.  

Patrick leaned back and took a drink of his Guinness. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is where the story begins.’

‘Three years ago, I lost a very close friend, who went over the side while lobstering near your friend’s place out at Loughaunbeg.  I can still picture us playing together as boys in school.  I was a coxswain on one of the lifeboats in the search, and the pattern was that at a certain set of coordinates, I had to turn back.  After hours of no luck, I radioed whether we could go out further west, but the answer was no.  The next day, his body was found a mile - west - from where we turned.  We didn’t go far enough - I didn’t go far enough - and I knew it the entire time.  That led to words about it, and eventually I started scaling back my commitment.  Believe me, for years I had done my part, but  . . . ’  He shrugged.    

‘In their defense,’ he went on, ‘searches are hard enough as it is.  You have to be focused and systematic.  The operations center can’t have members taking off after every wild idea that comes into their heads.  The other night, they couldn’t listen to every armchair expert sitting in his living room.’

Wednesday night, hearing his father come into the kitchen, turn on the lights and his laptop, pull a chart out of a desk and spread it across the kitchen table, 18 year old Morgan Oliver came out of the den, where he had been watching TV.  

Patrick’s phone lay on the chart with its speaker mode on.  He placed a set of parallel rules over a compass rose on the chart, lined them up to the 50-230 degree axis, and then walked them over to the cove that formed Furbo Beach.  With a pencil he drew a long line down the chart.  ‘They’re not going to Clare.  They’re going straight out the South Sound.  Michael, those boards are like stones skipping across a pond.’

On his laptop he opened an electronic chart, clicking on Furbo and typing 230.  ‘Is there a boat near Furbo now?’  Get them to go back and then fly out after them along 230.’

‘You know I’m in no position to do that.’

‘Whoa!  Whoops - ‘ Patrick had hit a wrong computer key, and suddenly the view backed away from Galway and showed the entire Atlantic.  The 230 line slanted down its length, missing the States and even the Caribbean before ending on the northern coast of Venezuela.  

Morgan came around the table to the laptop.  ‘I got it.’

‘Plan B,’ Patrick said.  ‘I’ll give you a shortcut.  When did the storm hit?’  

‘9:25 or 9:30.’

OK, not quite two hours.  They’re moving maybe three knots - probably two.’  He opened the ends of a set of metal dividers and held them against the right margin of the chart, measuring six minutes of latitude, which is six nautical miles.  He then placed one pinpoint on Furbo and the other along the 230 line.  ‘All right, I know where they are.’

‘You do?’

‘Yep.  Better yet, let’s plan ahead.’  He dropped the dividers, and after a quick slide of the parallel rules to a compass rose and back, he put a tiny notch a bit further down the line.  Around it he made a five point star and a circle, and scrawled the word ‘Midnight.’  

He tapped the laptop screen with his finger as Morgan was seated next to him.  ‘On this line, find the spot due west of Blackhead.’  The Blackhead light is at the northwest corner of Clare - the end of your thumb in that crab’s claw.

‘I’ve got a fix for their position at midnight.  You want a set of coordinates?  Send a boat.  The girls will come to them.’

‘Patrick, if I pick up the phone and get the wrong person on the line - ‘

‘Jesus, I KNOW, Michael.  Just text one of the guys on staff.  Tell him to call you when he takes a break.’

Michael said nothing.

‘I can leave the house right now and be there on time.’

‘Not tonight you can’t.  It’s snotty out there.’

‘I’ll take the big boat.’

‘You won’t be there by midnight.’

‘I’ll chase ‘em down.’

‘Go ahead.  That’d be just brilliant.  You go parading right across the search zone, telling everyone, ‘Follow me!’

‘No, I’ll go out there and stop, and have them explain how paddle boards suddenly develop the miraculous ability to sail into the wind.  Strange, though, that when the storm hit, these girls weren’t transported right back to the beach.’

They heard Michael click away.  Something was happening.  

Patrick took the parallel rules and drew a line from ‘Midnight’ to the end of the Galway channel.  He walked them down to the compass rose to get the heading: 072, which meant 252 headed out.  

‘They’re launching a second helicopter,’ Michael said, ‘and a fourth boat is coming out of Kilronan.’

Patrick had no reaction.  In an odd, anticlimactic silence, he just sat, saying and thinking nothing.

‘That’ll double the search area.’ 

‘All right,’ Patrick said at last.  ‘Text me the good news.’

In the pub, Patrick said to Johnny, ‘For the second time, and I swore I’d never let this happen, I let them convince me, when I knew - I absolutely knew better.  I gambled with the lives of your daughter and niece, and for that I will always be sorry.’

Johnny’s face fell open with astonishment.  He shook his head.  ‘I won’t accept that.  It was never your responsibility.’

‘I was the only one who knew where they were.’

It was still light when the first squall line struck Ellen and Sara.  They were 200 yards off shore, which was more than twice what they had planned.  Their initial reaction was confusion; the sky over the parking lot was suddenly the color of a deep purple bruise and then black, while behind them the sunset still appeared perfect.  They had never seen that before, or for that matter the way the green water turned gray and then darkened with the densely packed ripples of heavy winds.  

When they first tried to shout to Sara’s mother, it was purely the roar of the wind that blunted their sound, but in a few seconds, a flash of lightning and crack of thunder above the hill in the distance dropped them simultaneously to their knees.  On her stomach with her paddle lying crossways beneath her, Sara quickly paddled with her hands to Ellen.  ‘Give me your rope!  Tie these together!’  

Ellen lunged forward to her stomach, fished her lead line from dragging beneath her bow, and quickly tied and tightened, tied and tightened, three, four, five times in a row to make as strong a knot as she knew how.  

In another minute, the rain came in huge drops, driving so hard that it hurt.  Where it hit the water around them, the surface was obscured by furious splashing.  Ellen backed up to her hands and knees and grabbed her paddle.  ‘Try to stay in place!’ she yelled, and from their knees they tried to paddle in unison.  Far off to their right, the lights of Galway were disappearing.  They’d paddle until a clap of thunder - louder than they had ever heard in their lives - startled them, which made them freeze in place, wondering what kind of danger they were in.  After a few seconds, they’d paddle once more.  

Their skin was raw, which they noticed only when the hard, pelting rain had passed.  What followed was wind, signaled by long rolls of thunder from the land, as if the storm were announcing it was on the move.  They were 500 yards from the beach, or more, and the wind was blowing so hard that the spray was stinging their eyes.  The waves were growing larger, so the girls flattened out on their stomachs once more.  They reached over to put an arm around one another’s back, but this presented its own danger.  As the boards pitched up and down, the edge of one could get beneath the other and turn it over.   They extended their grips, each clutching the nearest shoulder strap of the other’s life jacket, creating in effect a catamaran, with a good six to eight inches of space between the boards.  

The wind shrieked even harder, blowing the tops off waves and driving spray in straight lines with whip-like violence.  Waves started coming over the fronts of the boards, and both girls caught blasts in their mouths, making them gag and vomit acidic, burning blends of salt water and bile.  

When they first tied their boards together, they were saying to one another, ‘Is there a boat anywhere?  Did anyone see us?’  Their last view of the beach was of a few families running for their cars when the rain struck.  Not seeing any boats made them paddle as hard as they did for a while, but now suffering this lashing, it was easiest to put their heads down and keep their eyes on their boards as they endured the fury.  

Soon the thunder was directly above.  Ellen happened to glance up and divine the source of a strange sound they’d been hearing.  Three hundred yards off to their right, a lightning bolt hit the water.  It made a split second hiss, as if a blacksmith were dunking a red hot piece of iron in a bucket.  Then came the blast of thunder, as much a shock wave as it was a sound.  

The waves grew into huge, rolling, green-grey mountains taller than either of them.  As they lay on their boards, rising on a wave wasn’t so scary; it was the sudden, precipitous drops that made them scream.  They’d clutch all the more tightly, one hand on the others lifejacket and the other on the outside edge of their board.  Their paddles were beneath their bodies, lengthwise along the boards.  

Without warning came the biggest drop of all, and then suddenly they were in a silent, heavy world of green and black for one-long-whole-second, as a big wave rolled over them in its entirety. 

That was the deepest they’d be all night.  They were dunked twice more but only at the level of their heads  and shoulders, and only for a split second.  The more they hung on and anticipated these awful moments, and the more they didn’t happen, the braver the girls grew.  

Asked to describe their ordeal, Sara and Ellen used words like ‘long,’ ‘freezing,’ ‘seasick,’ and ‘boring.’  Despite those few moments of genuine terror, ‘scary’ didn’t come to mind immediately.  Their emotions had evolved like the phases of the storm.  

When that first thunderclap sounded over the beach, they were both paralyzed with that same dread they had as little girls, when thunderstorms were best watched through the window or their parents had to come calm them in the middle of the night.  In the first few moments as they paddled desperately from their knees, they did panic, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ and scream with each thunderclap. Soon, however, in the rush of all the breathing, ‘Oh-my God-ding,’ and paddling, one of them starting urging, ‘It’s OK, It’s OK, It’s OK,’ and the talking stopped.  

Bellying down on the boards was the lesser of two evils.  They were losing their balance on their knees, but as the rain hit the water as hard as it did and the wind whipped the spray, it actually seemed like it was raining from the ocean up, and they were sticking their faces into it.  Side by side, their boards bashed into one another, and Sara’s almost flipped, so the the quick shout of, ‘Spread out!’ and the new grip was purely a tactical adjustment.

Truth be told, they only gagged on waves once or twice.  They picked their heads up enough to see what was in front of them and time their breaths, ducking like surfers when waves crashed over.  

In the blackness when things had calmed, the distant lights in various directions would come and go as the storm blew through.  The girls were aware of a certain duality: one one hand, it’d be perfectly understandable to cry and complain.  On the other, the utter preposterousness of sitting on paddle boards, sometimes like they were on horseback, sometimes with their legs crossed in front of them, in the dark out in the middle of nowhere, was balanced by the danger of being struck by lightning or rolled sideways by a big wave.  Yes, it was cold, and they couldn’t friggin’ believe this was happening, but they were too busy paying attention.  

The sky rumbled almost continuously in the distance, thin bolts crossed high above them, but it was all background to a calming sea.  ‘We have to paddle.’

‘Why?’

‘To stay warm.  Aim for the waves, so we don’t flip over.’

They synchronized five or six strokes but felt no sense of progress whatsoever.  

‘Let’s go back to Furbo.  Screw this.  I’m out of here.’

‘Good idea.’ 

After a few more mainly pointless strokes, one of them started belting out Taylor Swift’s ‘You Belong With Me,’ joined shortly by the other:

‘But she wears short skirts

I wear T-shirts

She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers

Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find

That what you're looking for has been here the whole time . . . ‘

Sometimes when you’re scared in the dark, all you can do is sing a Taylor Swift song.

A dozen miles off to the east, another storm was running down the length of the Irish land mass.  The lightning at the top of the thunderhead was as bright as sunrise, illuminating the massive cloud as if it were a snowy mountain top.  Other flashes were hidden below the horizon, and tiny rolls of thunder crossed the water.  

The size of the waves picked up again, so they bellied down and rafted up like before, but it wasn’t very scary.  They watched the storm roll past.  

‘Mom, I’m OK.’  Ellen made the sentence echo in her head, trying to send a psychic message.  

‘I’m supposed to go to work tomorrow,’ Sara said.  

‘Are they going to be mad?’

‘Probably.’

‘You have the lamest excuse ever.  They’ll never believe you.’

Seated on their rear ends a while later, they paddled idly and hollered out another Taylor Swift song:

‘And I remember that fight, two-thirty am

'Cause everything was slipping right out of our hands

I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street

Braced myself for the goodbye,

'Cause that's all I've ever known

Then, you took me by surprise

You said, "I'll never leave you alone"

You said, "I remember how we felt, sitting by the water

And every time I look at you, it's like the first time

I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter

She is the best thing that's ever been mine"

You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter

You are the best thing, that's ever been mine . . . ‘

‘It’s raining again.’

‘So what.’

‘At one o’clock in the morning,’ Johnny said, ‘I was about to go mad.  We had been at Furbo walking up and down that beach, sitting in our cars, or listening to the police car’s radio for hours.  I said to Deidre that we have to go around to the Clare side and figure out the best spot to be at first light.

‘It’s hard to get close to the water there.  I’ll tell you, though, the most amazing thing: in the middle of the night, lights were on in houses, and we could see dozens of little flashlights in the distance as people combed the shore.  We stopped at Bishop’s Quarter Beach, and a bunch of kids the girls’ age had a big bonfire - a signal fire - going.’  His eyes misted up.  

‘I have an old teammate in Ballyvaughan, and we went out to the end of the old pier.  There were only about five or 10 people there, but he promised me, ‘Don’t worry.  In the morning, we’ll have all kinds of folks out to help.’

‘Every hour got worse, but Deidre would say these things like, ‘OK, think for a second.  Ellen is a smart, strong, resourceful girl.  The two of them would think of something.  They wouldn’t just give up - and they had lifejackets on.  They wouldn’t just disappear.’  

‘I couldn’t answer.’  After a sip of Guinness and a deep breath, he held his hands up beside his eyes, as if to suggest blinders or a narrow field of vision.  He had to wrap his mind around a concept.  ‘We were looking north, trying to see into the dark, praying that they would just appear.’  He extended his left arm to the side, pointing across the pub.  ‘And the whole time, they were miles in that direction.’

‘Right,’ Patrick said.  

The dawn broke cold and drizzly.  Having exhausted the Taylor Swift library, the girls lay belly down, slanted across the boards, their legs on one, their upper bodies on the other, and with their sides and legs pressed together as they tried to stay warm.  Mentally, they had defaulted to conserving energy.  They were exhausted and hungry, and their heads hurt, so they huddled on the boards and just waited for time to pass.  

A few hours before, a helicopter came as close as 50 yards away and 50 yards up as its crew scanned the area.  They waved and screamed with all their might.  Knowing they couldn’t be heard, they hoped that a light would catch the reflective fabric on their lifejackets, but it was not to be.  A little while later, a big boat crossed not far away. They shouted once more, but no searchlight swept over them, and no one on board could hear over the wind, waves, and probably most of all, their own engine.  

Despite those disappointments, they hung tough and sang a few more songs, either as they paddled or into the tops of the paddle handles as if they were microphones.  

Lying motionless felt like they were sulking.  The cold and wet could make just about anyone feel sorry for themselves.   

Already they could tell the conditions had changed.  The choppy wave action had stopped, but they rose and fell on large, slow swells, as if they were on the stomach of some enormous sleeping animal.  The water was quiet.  

The light changed enough to make them raise their heads.  For the next few minutes the fog lifted before their very eyes, allowing them to see further and further along the surface where the jagged ends of the mist peeled away from the water.  The land in the distance took shape as a dark mass and eventually revealed more detail.  

‘Oh my God.’

‘What is that?’

‘Those are the Cliffs of Moher.’  To the other side, ‘That’s one of the Aran Islands.’

‘We are SO far away.’  They had the same thought: this just got really serious.  We are totally off the beaten path.  That giant, breathing animal was the Atlantic Ocean.  The water darkened with ripples from the breeze clearing the fog.  ‘Not again,’  came the pang of fear.  

Luckily, the zephyr faded.  

‘Look!’ Sara said, pointing.  Coming toward them it seemed, chugging its way up from the Cliffs of Moher and pushing a little wake against the wind and water, was a little light blue lobster buoy the size of a wine bottle.  In reality, they were drifting towards it.  The buoy would have meandered right by if the girls, on their knees, hadn’t paddled over to cross its path.  Ellen fell to her stomach and reached for the rope that trailed into the depths.  She could feel the force necessary to bring them to a stop.  When that slackened, she heaved on the line.  Sara then ran the line a few times through the black elastic shock cord that criss-crossed the front of her board and then did the same with Ellen’s, as if the buoy were a sewing needle.  The two of them kneeled over this configuration, their hands poised to grab the buoy and rope as Ellen released the lower part of the line.  The slack disappeared, but the entanglement held.  Soon the boards appeared to be pushing their own little wakes against the moving water.   

Patrick sat up suddenly and turned to the phone on the nightstand.  The screen was empty.

‘Any news?’  he texted.

‘Nada.’

‘Did anyone go down the South Sound?’

The delay in the response told him all he needed to know.  Patrick was on his feet, headed to the chart in the kitchen.

‘Not down it.’

He thought of dialing, but instead whirled and headed for Morgan’s room down the hall.  He gave a loud knock and opened the door.  ‘Let’s go.  They’re not looking far enough.’

Idiots, he thought.  Whether or not Michael passed that message, they should have known to look down there anyway.  He stopped as he passed an open door.  After Morgan, Patrick and his wife had six daughters.  He looked at a sleeping mass of long blonde hair.  Those parents must be basket cases, he thought.

Michael, as it turns out, was in a radio room and texting on his phone on the sly.  ‘I did call and go through  050 - 230 - and you’re not finding the boards . . . etc., but they didn’t want to hear it.’

Fucking morons, Patrick thought.  Then an image and the smell of incense brought him up short.  He was suddenly back in the church for that funeral three years before.  I’m the fucking moron here, he realized.  If anything has happened to those girls, it’s on me.  

Minutes later, Morgan stood at the kitchen table, jeans and a sweatshirt on and carrying a big red Helly Hansen foul weather gear jacket under his arm.  His mother was up as well, moving quickly, putting sandwiches and thermoses of hot tea in a cooler.  She didn’t say a word (although she kissed them both to pieces in all the fanfare when they returned to the pier later in the day.)  

Patrick came out to the chart.  He bracketed his fingers at the distance between Furbo and Midnight.  ‘That’s seven miles, just about?  At two knots, they’re twice that far - more.’  He slid his hand down to mark the next bracket length.  ‘Everybody else is flouncing around up here.’  He rubbed the north shore of the bay.  

At the quay, they chose their little speedboat, the JOHNNY O, a 7-meter Cheetah class catamaran with a snub-nosed bow, since the little cabin and steering console was far forward, leaving a large, open working cockpit.  On the stern corners were racks for lobster traps.  Most importantly, the boat was powered by two aggressively sized outboards. 

As they pulled away, Morgan was amazed to watch his father glance up at the buildings surrounding the quay, and then, as if daring someone to do something about it, gun the throttle forward and speed down the channel before turning hard onto the main drag.  If Morgan ever pulled a stunt like that, his father would have his head.  A wave smacked a buoy that said, ‘No wake.’

‘Take it,’ Patrick said, stepping away from the wheel.  On the console was the chart from the kitchen table, refolded to show the routes he drew, as well as his cell phone.  

‘Trim the bow up.’

Tilting the outboards up and away from the boat’s stern has the effect of adding a downward component to the otherwise horizontal force.  This pushes the stern down and consequently the bow up, important in following seas.  If a motorboat flying along falls down the front of a wave, its bow can plow in deeply, causing the boat to veer.   The wave then rising beneath the stern can roll the boat sideways.  A good skipper knows how to keep his boat level and adjust his speed to the swells.

‘When you turn the corner, Two Five Two.’  On the radio bolted to the ceiling, VHF Channel 16 was a mash of conversations between Good Samaritan boaters searching all over the bay.  Patrick dialed the cell phone.  ‘I’m rolling out,’ he announced curtly.  ‘I have Morgan with me in the little boat.’

‘All right,’ Michael said quietly.  ‘Good luck.’

Morgan cleared the line of marks outside of Mutton Island and its causeway.  ’12 miles to Midnight,’ Patrick said.  ‘Let ‘er rip.’

When Johnny and Deidre Glynn stood on the Furbo shore until 1 a.m. and then drove to the Clare side, their three younger daughters, along with the grandparents, had gone to bed without knowing how grim the situation had become.  Now, driving back at dawn, they would have to wake the girls and explain things to them.  The rest of Ireland was well aware; Sara and Ellen’s disappearance exploded across social media through the night, alerts multiplying about the storm, the search, and eventually the girl’s names.  It had become the lead story on every radio station.  Announcers were providing updates on locations around the bay where police would be briefing searchers willing to scour the coastline.  

The family gathering in a bedroom for two of the girls was as brutal was expected.  The girls were silent, shocked at first, but then each exploded into tears in her own way.  ’She’s not coming back?’

’She’ll never be in this house again.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Deidre countered.  (’She was 100 times braver than I was,’ Johnny told Patrick.  ‘Dead level serious.  Didn’t give a thing away.’)  Deidre insisted, ’They’re still searching.’

‘But where would she be that they can’t find her?’

The girls seemed to give voice to every one of Johnny’s worst thoughts, which is precisely when the doorbell rang and scared him further out of his wits.  It was Father David, from their church.  

With a thick dread beating through his heart, Johnny went to the door.  

‘Hiya, Johnny.’

‘Good morning, Father.’

The two of them regarded one another.

‘You’re not bearing any news, are you?’ Johnny asked.

‘No, no.  I just came by in case you needed to talk.’

‘Oh.  You scared me to death.  Sure, come on in.’

It was all a little much.  ‘Excuse me, Father.  These clothes are still wet from all the rain.’  

Upstairs, he found himself in Ellen’s room, standing still, trying to calm down, breathing quietly to try to sense her there.  On a shelf was a program and a dried corsage from a school dance.  Further along was necklace she often wore, makeup and moisturizer, and a hair dryer and a brush,with strands of blonde hair still wound in it.  He slid open her closet door.  I can really sense her, he thought.  I can smell her.  

She’ll never be in this house again.

How long would this presence linger as they mourned, he wondered.

‘Johnny, Father wants to say a prayer,’ Deidre said from downstairs.

‘You go ahead,’ he called down.

A moment later Father David’s quiet voice came up the stairs; ‘Heavenly Father, guardian on land and sea . . .’

My tall, shy girl, Johnny thought.  Seventeen already, but a tender soul and soft-spoken - not savvy like some girls her age.  She only has little sisters; no wicked influences, he smiled.   After another year of school she would have been off to University.  

‘Now we should say a Hail Mary,’ Father instructed.  

The girls’ voices murmured in unison.  ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee . . ‘

The JOHNNY O, true to the name Cheetah, bounded across the waves, running up the back of one, rising with it, and shooting forward to attack the next.  The engines were at a good, hard thrum, but like a cat, JOHNNY O threw no great wake or splashes at each contact with the water.  Patrick and Morgan’s eyes moved between a blinking dot on a set of converging lines on the GPS screen over Morgan’s head and Blackhead’s repeating five second light, high on a hill more than two miles off to the left.  

‘Blessed art thou amongst women, and Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus . . ‘

‘Bring it down a little.’

Morgan eased back on the throttle, though they were still moving fast.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . ‘

‘Ready to come left to Two Three Zero.’

‘Ready.’

Through the sight of a hand-held compass, Blackhead was at 100 . . . 95 degrees, shaking.

‘Pray for us sinners - ’

‘Now - Two Three Zero.’  JOHNNY O banked to the left, then leveled off once more.

‘Two Three Zero.’   On the GPS, their trackline snapped into place on top of the line from Furbo.  ‘Right on the money,’ Morgan said.

‘Bring it back up.’

The tone of the engine changed.  The boat rose on a wave and surged ahead.  Patrick exchanged the compass for a set of binoculars and studied the water and then Clare coast, towering walls of rock laid bare by centuries of Atlantic weather.  Anything that could be called a beach was really a rockfall for debris blasted loose.  

He turned around and leaned against the bulkhead inside the tiny cabin.  ‘Here’s where we lay our cards on the table,’ he said speculatively.  ‘I don’t think the wind would let the girls get in to the rocks.’ 

‘They never saw the rocks - from here, at night, in weather?’  Morgan replied. 

‘They’ve fooled everyone else; they can fool us.’

With the binoculars Patrick scanned the empty horizon ahead.  He turned to look at the row of extra red plastic five-gallon fuel cans lining the back of the cockpit.  Hell no, he thought.  We’re going to Venezuela.  

‘Johnny,’ Deirdre said, ‘the girls want to go to Furbo.’

‘Really?’

‘They have to see it.  They want to be part of the search.’

He’d have to face that expanse, that hungry monster that swallowed two souls.  But where would she be that they can’t find her?   

‘Okay.’

Sara and Ellen were lying slanted on the boards once more, taking turns dozing while the other tried to stay alert.  The mild puffs of wind brought cold, but the breaks in between, while not warm, were almost decent by comparison, in that they weren’t completely miserable.  Like the night before, when they waited and their worst fears didn’t come true, the trick to enduring the cold was to let a good bit of time pass by, after which they’d realize they weren’t too much worse off.  Then they’d repeat the process.  They were always shivering, but it was only when they let themselves think about it that they’d get the big bodily shakes.  

Ellen dozed with her forehead on the end of one fist, which in turn was on the other hand as it lay on the board.  Sara’s head came up as she heard a splash and a breath.  Some ways off, a pod of dolphins was passing by.  Two big backs and fins arched out of the water and then disappeared, followed in alternating fashion by two others.  

Sara brought her chin back down to her hands.  The idea was to stay as flat and below the wind as possible.  As she looked over to check on the lobster buoy and line, her eye caught a flash of moving white.  

She stared at it for several seconds.  The speck was getting bigger - and coming toward them.  ‘Ellen,’ she whispered.  ‘Ellen!’

‘Got ‘em!’ said Morgan.  

‘Where?’

‘To the left a little.  Hang on.  I just lost them.  There we go.’  He extended his arm and blade of his hand.  

Patrick looked through the binoculars.  One girl was on her feet, waving her paddle overhead.  The other was trying to get up.  

‘Well played, ladies. Very well played,’ Patrick said slowly.  

‘I’m sure you were pleased,’ Patrick said to Johnny.  ‘I know there’s been a big fuss, but believe me, no one in Ireland was happier to see those girls than I was.’

Patrick had taken the wheel.  Morgan dropped down to open the hatch to the V-shaped storage locker in the bow.  He pulled out a mass of towels and blankets and then popped up to look at the GPS screen.  The blinking dot was separating from the 230 line. 

Patrick steered wide of the boards, even going past them before throwing the boat into a wide arc so he could approach with his bow into the wind.  Sara followed this, turning in place where she stood waving her paddle.  In so doing, she stepped on the other board and sent Ellen reeling with a scream and a leg kicked in the air as she went over backwards with a splash.  The lifejacket had her high out of the water, blowing columns of water out her nostrils.  They were both pretty wobbly to be standing on boards in the Atlantic Ocean.  

As the boat drew alongside, Sara bent at the waist and reached for the rail with both hands.  Morgan took the paddle from her hand and flung it clattering into the rear of the cockpit.  ’Sit on the rail,’ he said and reached down to tear open the velcro ankle strap on the board’s leash.

Patrick punched a button to snapshot a screen on the GPS and rushed to the rail with arms extended.  Having taken off her leash, Ellen was kneeling on a board with her hands on the rail.  Patrick tossed her paddle aft.  ‘Up you come.’

In the boat, the girls turned around and sat with their backs against the cabin bulkhead as the Olivers eased them down.  Patrick reached into the cabin and then dropped the pile of towels and blankets between them.  ‘Now, let’s take off those lifejackets and dry yourselves off.’

Ellen pulled the towel around her shoulders.  

‘Don’t worry about that.’  He waved the towel away.  ‘Here’s a sweatshirt.  Put your arms up.’  He pulled it down like he was dressing a little kid.  Morgan did the same.  

Next came the big, fleece-insulated foul weather jackets and then the blankets.  ’Sit on this part.  There you go.  Now wrap all this around your legs.’

Last of all were a pair of thick woolen hats.  He stepped back.  ‘Outstanding,’ he pronounced.

Ellen scrunched up her eyes and looked at them.  ‘Where are the people who are supposed to rescue us?’

‘Good question,’ Patrick granted.

‘You don’t understand,’ Sara protested.  ‘We’ve been out here all night.  We got caught in a storm.  People are looking for us in boats and helicopters.’

Another thought occurred to her.  She turned to Ellen and said, ‘If we go with these guys, now they’ll never find us.’

For the first time all week, Johnny allowed himself a good, rollicking laugh.  ‘Even in the hospital,’ he said, ‘they had no idea who you guys were.  They knew there was a search, but they figured you were up to something else entirely.  You just happened to cruise by and ask if they needed a ride.’

‘Girls,’ Patrick admonished as sternly as a father, ‘you’re safe now.  Do you understand me?  You’re safe.  We’re going to get you home.’  

They had drifted from where the paddle boards were still attached to the lobster buoy.  Patrick went into the cabin to drive back up.  He stepped quickly back into the cockpit, leaned over the rail to untie them, and hauled them into the boat.  

Morgan kneeled between the girls and poured tea from a thermos into plastic cups.  ‘Loads and loads of people are looking for you.  You have no idea.  The two of you are all over social media.’

‘Really?’

Back in the cabin, Patrick picked up his cell phone.  ‘Michael, we found the girls.  They’re safe.  We’re headed back to Inish Oirr.’

This caught Michael at the end of a very long double shift, where his moods had swung between hopelessness at the worst moments and divided loyalties at the best.  He pressed the speaker button on his phone and cranked up the volume.  In a remarkably calm voice, he replied, ‘Where were they, right down that line?’

’150 feet off it.  They tied up to a lobster pot.’

Behind him, other station members’ heads came up at their desks.  They looked at each other and then Michael.    

Michael gave a contented, albeit weary chuckle.  ‘You should have gone out last night.’

‘Yeah.  Look, I don’t have a lot of time to mess around.  We have to make this official.  I have numbers.  Ready to log this?’

‘Hit me.’  Michael scooted his chair back toward the radio console.  He leaned his phone against a computer screen.  

‘Mark: contact and recovery at 53 degrees, Zero point 713 minutes North, by 9 degrees, 29 point 991 minutes West.  Fishing vessel JOHNNY O has Zero Four persons on board: two crew, two survivors.  The girls are conscious, no injuries.  Late Stage One or Early Two hypothermia; shivering yet disoriented.  They’re wrapped up in jackets and blankets.  Recovered the boards, and we’re heading up the East Side of Inish Oirr.  Request a helo at Inish Oirr for med-evac,  Two Zero minutes.’

A line of station members was now behind Michael, leaning over his shoulders, each tilting an ear toward the phone.  

‘Good copy: mark at 53 degrees, Zero point 713 minutes North, by 9 degrees, 29 point 991 minutes West. Vessel JOHNNY O, Zero-Four P-O-B, including two survivors; treating for possible Stage Two hypothermia.  Northbound, South Sound; Inish Oirr,  Request med-evac, Two Zero minutes.  Oh, you slick son of a bitch.’

‘Gotta go.’

‘Well done.’

The line behind Michael exploded into activity, people dashing for phones and computers.  

It was a gesture the Glynn family all knew, based on Johnny’s ability to predict a goal well before it happened.  As players swirled in front of the net and the ball flew back and forth, his fist would rise to head height, pause for a moment, and then drive overhead in triumph.  The Glynns had seen it 100 times on the sidelines.  On the beach, that same motion stopped them in their tracks.  

His cellphone had rung.

‘Johnny, the girls are safe.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘They’ve been found!’

‘They’re safe!’ he called out, pulling the phone beneath his chin.  As the girls ran in from every direction, he held the phone out and hit the speaker button.  They gathered in a circle.

It was his friend from Ballyvaughan.  ‘I’m still at the pier.  A couple of boats are in - people who’ve been searching - and all their marine radios just kicked off with a big broadcast.  A fisherman picked up the girls.  They gave the latitude and longitude.  The girls are OK; they’re conscious, but they have hypothermia.  They’re going to the Aran Islands for a med-evac.

‘There it goes again.  You hear that?’  A deep, amplified voice echoed in the background.  ‘They’re standing down the search.’

‘They were down by the Cliffs of Moher!’ one of the boaters called out.

Johnny and Deidre had thrown their arms around one another.  For all her bravery, her body shook with sobs.  The girls jumped up and down and cheered as they crashed into a group hug.  

‘Thank you so much,’ Johnny said into the phone, ‘for everything - for what everyone’s done.’

’Sure thing, buddy.  You take care of your family.’

Johnny looked out at the gray expanse.  ‘Not today,’ he sobbed defiantly.  His fists came up from his sides, and in a burst of exultation he dropped to his knees, his eyes closed, teeth gritted, and flexing his arms in front of him, the very position he hit in 1991, when with five minutes left in the game and the score tied 0-0, he scored the game winner over the Shamrock Rovers and sent Galway United to the European Cup.  

He dimly perceived that somebody shouted, ‘Come on!’ and looked to see the girls and even Deidre tearing at full speed up the beach and back to the car.  

The girls’ first inclination was to get home and turn on the television.  In the car, radio stations up and down the dial were breaking the news that - 

‘missing paddleboarders Ellen Glynn and Sara Feeney have been rescued . . ‘

‘after surviving all night lost at sea, they were found clinging to a lobster pot  . . ‘

‘by a fisherman bringing them to Inish Oirr to a waiting helicopter.  They will be flown to University Hospital in Galway.’

‘Dad! We have to go to the hospital!’  The girls were bouncing in their seats and shouting, ‘Drive faster, Dad!’

Deidre had a finger in one ear and a phone to the other as she called Sara’s mother.  ‘Did you hear?’

They made it to the service road near the helipad and ran to the fence just in time to see the great beast touch down in a deafening roar of rotor wash and blinking strobe lights.  

Patrick stared at Johnny.  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘What’s that?’

’In all of your years of coaching, have you ever missed a game?’

‘Never.’

‘Yeah, I figured.  You didn’t fail her.’

Johnny’s eyes came up.  ‘I know, but - ‘

‘In that storm, there’s nothing anyone could have done.’

He shook his head slowly.  ‘That was the longest, most helpless night of my life.  There wasn’t a damned thing I could do to protect her.’  

‘But you did.  Beforehand.  She went into the biggest game of her life - which would have killed a great many other people - without any coach, and she won.  You must have done something right.’

Johnny looked away and thought about that.  ‘I’m the one who lost hope.’

‘Yeah.’  Patrick took a drink.  ‘Yeah, that’s bad.’   They laughed.  

’She never did,’ Patrick said.  ‘What did you call her, a tender soul?  I don’t think so.  That’s a badass chick.’

Johnny kept looking away.  ‘I think I’m the tender soul around here.’

A moment passed.  ‘You know, neither one of us comes off very well in this whole thing.’  Patrick pushed his chair back and walked to the bar.  He came back with a pen.  On the chart, he pointed at the white section of open Atlantic Ocean, west of the Aran Islands, away from the 230 and 252 lines and all the notations.  ’Sign your name down there.’

He signed next to Johnny’s name.  Above, he wrote, ‘To Sara and Ellen, Thank you for saving the two of us.’

‘There you go.  You’ll have to explain that to them.’

That One Key Quality

A screaming two-year-old at the pool the other day made me think of this: I’ve seen a lot of poor coaching over the years, which raises the question: What is a good coach’s most important quality?

That two-year-old was having a swim lesson, but really she was far too little to be doing anything constructive like blowing bubbles or kicking her legs.   The water was a little chilly and the circumstances apparently terrifying, and her parents, who had been a little too ambitious with this whole endeavor to begin with, were also quick to pluck her away from the poor lifeguard at every scream.  

At my Catholic prep school, the ‘Duke,’ the legendary football coach in the mold of Bear Bryant, though named in the vein of John Wayne, was little more than a bully on the rare occasions he went to the trouble of saying anything.  His mystique rested squarely upon keeping his mouth shut, which compelled his players to think that he was the solemn guardian of some sacred tradition they had to honor.  They responded - giving the Duke a legendary career, though with that level of player talent and the superb cadre of assistant coaches, the school nurse could have compiled the same record.  

In Guam I was under the tutelage of a prominent Judo sensei who had been a ranked competitor on the US national level and gone on to develop important international and Olympic connections.  He had little use for actual coaching.  He also disappeared for long stretches, probably discouraged at how his best players  lost interest in only a few months’ time.  In the 100 degree dojo, we’d practice a few a few throws, after which he’d bark the command, ‘Randori!’ which meant fight practice.  He was frustrated that I wasn’t improving as a fighter, to which I’d reply, ‘Tell me what I should be doing,’ because the throws we were practicing certainly didn’t have any bearing on randori.  I definitely wouldn’t jump out of a plane with a parachute or dive underwater with a scuba tank boasting the efficacy of a Judo throw.  I was getting my clock cleaned by those advanced players who would lose interest after two or three months.  If the sensei wasn’t teaching anything, how did they become advanced enough to throw me?  They had been similarly brutalized by a previous set of players who had been through the same routine, losing interest when progress stopped.  

If the ideal climate a coach can create consists of a winning team and confident, self assured players who are working hard and having fun, then how do we get there?  

The single most important quality a coach must have is the ability to confer simple tools for success.  The strength coach has to know how to get kids stronger.  The judo sensei has to show students how to gain leverage and position so that throws actually work.  Granted, the basketball coach teaching six-year-olds how to dribble is in a very different position from the high school coach teaching plays and defenses, but the skill in question for any athlete must be clearly defined and within reach.  

Hall of Fame quarterback Sonny Jurgensen said that of the nine coaches for whom he played, his favorite, Vince Lombardi, was the only one who ever simplified the game for him.  

The relationship between a player and coach is first and foremost a transaction.  Players will be happy to put in the work; they’ll be there early and stay late, or show ‘mental toughness’ - and all the other nonsense people write about too much - if the reward is imminent. 

If there’s no progress, then it’s all pointless.  The kid is not going to get off the bench, or lift any more weight, and soon they’re checked out, mentally if not physically.  The coach who relies on motivation, whether he’s a nice guy or a bastard, will also be miserable if the kids fail to deliver.      

If Vince Lombardi was tough on his players, it was because he demanded they use the tools he provided.  Sonny Jurgensen always sported a gut, about which other coaches had always given him flak.  ‘How come you never mentioned it?’ he once asked Lombardi.  

‘Because if you can make it through my practices, I’ll know you’re in shape, with or without that belly.’

Lombardi ran his teams hard.  Everyone participated in extensive conditioning.  The punt returner for the Redskins, where Lombardi spent his last season, said that for the first time in his career, his teammates were capable of running out ahead of him and blocking.  

Lombardi’s players loved him not for his determination or inspiration or any other extraneous qualities.  It was because he specifically, fundamentally taught them how to play great football.  

If he were at the pool the other day, he might have pulled those young parents aside.  ‘That little one only wants to hang on her Daddy’s neck - so let her.  You zoom around the pool with and without a kickboard, and with that turtle she likes.  After a while, see if she’ll hold the kickboard, and down the line try getting her into a lifejacket.  This is purely acclimation.  Don’t worry about the swimming.  If she’s having fun, she’ll be greased lightning before you know it.’

Dave Was Right

The only occasion on which my high school weight lifting Coach and I butted heads was over the advice of another coach.  I was in college and training with the famous Joe Mills of Central Falls, Rhode Island, who   advocated technique work exclusively, snatches and clean and jerks drilled to perfection.  His belief was that, as with a baseball pitcher, expertise and speed made for optimal training.

To my first Coach, this was madness.  I’d drop into my high school weight room when I was home on breaks, where to my great surprise the topic of training with the man responsible for World Champions Bob Bednarski and Mark Cameron became a point of contention.  I’m not sure which surprised Coach more, Mills’ neglect of strength training in a strength sport, or the willingness of a kid who worked his way from scrawniness to a 460 pound squat to cast that all aside.  ‘Tommy, this guy is not God,’ he said at one point.  

Yeah, but he was about as close as someone could get, I thought.  On the world stage through the 1960’s, Mills’ protege Bednarski defeated the Soviet Leonid Zhabotinsky time and time again.  During this time, a young Vasily Alexeev would set up cameras to capture Bednarski in action, after which he’d pore over the films to study his technique.  In the 70’s, Alexeev became weightlifting’s greatest international superstar.  He knew all too well who Joe Mills was - and Joe played upon this, taunting him backstage at the 1970 World Championships in Columbus Ohio, ‘You copied my boy Bednarski.’  

Alexeev tried to pretend he didn’t understand English, but he was rattled to the point that before his first snatch attempt, he angrily tore down a set of television lights that were shining in his eyes.  

I was running in faster company with a different set of rules, Coach failed to see. 

The story is too long and miserable to re-live, but it turned out that Coach - capital ‘C’ Coach - from high school was right all along.  This was on two levels: (1.) do not invest all your faith in one person, and (2.) some of the technical approaches to training in which he dabbled decades ago are being validated by recent research.  

Years passed.  Having figured that my strength career ran its course, I pursued other interests, namely running, swimming, and martial arts.  It was CrossFit that brought me, along with millions (or probably hundreds of thousands) of other ordinary fitness enthusiasts, back to barbell training.  CrossFit deserves recognition for its transformative role in both the fitness industry and internet culture.  It became a hub, the focus of a dozen other websites for people getting in on the act of this exciting new and outlaw fitness trend. CrossFit’s costliest mistake was the result of one of its best intentions, educating athletes on the various disciplines it embraced, running, powerlifting, gymnastics, and so on.  People loved what they discovered and left cross training to specialize in these newfound interests.  

It was CrossFit that introduced Louie Simmons and the monstrous powerlifters of Westside Barbell to the wider world.  These were the guys using bands and chains as well as leaping onto boxes or mats stacked to impressive heights.  Really, Simmons’ achievement in the late 80’s and early 90’s was to get hold of translations of Russian training manuals.  He revealed to the Western world that as far as strength and athleticism were concerned, the human central nervous system has a five gear transmission consisting of - 

1.  Isometric Strength

2.  Maximal Strength

3.  Strength Speed

4.  Speed Strength

5.  Quickness

Understanding the role of each gear in a given sport, as well as how best to train it, is what enabled Eastern Bloc athletes to eclipse their Western counterparts.  This utterly boggled the mind of American industrialist  and weightlifting advocate Bob Hoffman, founder of York Barbell.  He simply could not fathom how smaller, ‘fattier’ looking Russians could outperform the sheer specimens he sponsored, who often competed on the weightlifting platform and physique stage on the same day.  

Decades later, Louie Simmons and his lifters enjoyed great success putting to use some of the methodology the Soviets had developed.  Broadly speaking, this involves training both the muscular and neurological systems, the latter being the central nervous system’s ability to recruit greater numbers of motor units in every contraction.  It includes:

1.  Eccentric Action Training: muscles yielding or lengthening under load

2.  Concentric Action Training: muscle action as it’s conventionally understood, muscles shortening under load

3.  Isometric Action Training: when muscles neither shorten or lengthen but exert maximal force against immovable resistance

4.  Kinetic Energy Accumulation Training: also known as plyometrics, this exploits muscles’ enhanced contractile potential after forceful or rapid lengthening

5.  Contrast Training: varies the external load either during workout, an exercise, a set, or even during a repetition

Despite the considerable depth and breadth all this represents, Simmons’ Westside method is a strangely narrow approach to strength training.  I didn’t get too far on it, so this was when I jumped to Mark Rippetoe’s STARTING STRENGTH approach.  I was simply following Coach’s advice and not putting all my eggs in one training basket.  

More interesting is the idea that even if the Eastern Bloc coaches knew more about optimizing these methods, they were not lost on there Americans decades ago - if Coach’s instruction back in high school was any indication.  

We did quarter squats on occasion with hundreds of pounds, using enormous truck and crane gears as plates to load as much as 800 pounds on a bar.  This builds tendon strength and trains the Golgi tendon organs, proprioceptors that sense tension and function as circuit breakers for the central nervous system, though they tend to be a little conservative in their tolerances.  

We did fairly rapid-peaking progressions, usually lasting about eight weeks, moving up five pounds a workout, allowing reps to decrease as the loads increased.  Once we reached new maximum singles, we switched groups of exercises and repeated the process.  This worked better for some than others - but it’s certainly on the list of viable training options.  

Coach also had us doing jump squats - any time someone’s attitude needed adjusting, as they were crippling - but also to develop explosiveness.  His shot putters similarly did rapid presses with light weights as the track season drew near.  

From Rippetoe and STARTING STRENGTH I learned the core logic of programming, which is what got me to surpass those limits I reached long ago.  Still, the view from that mountain does not take in the entire landscape, so it’s time to move on.  

The trick now is to see who’s made better sense of all that depth and breadth of training science from Russia - and everywhere else by this point.  News both good and bad must be considered:

GOOD - It was neurological training, namely pin presses, that finally allowed me to break the 300-pound bench press barrier a few years ago.  Similarly, it was pin presses along with a relatively light amount of concentric work that brought me to my all time best, 310.  

BAD - Afterward in each case above, I was so eager to lift even more that I put all my effort into standard concentric sets and reps, beating the Hell out of myself with volume and intensity to the point that I made myself regress.  I was like one of Bob Hoffman’s magnificent bronzed gods losing out to a lesser mortal.

GOOD - My bench presses right now are rolling along, thanks to neurological work, the floor presses done from a dead stop and which compel a high level of motor unit recruitment.  

Those quarter squats once upon a time probably had something to do with the fantastic progress I made as a novice.  

BAD - I lifted some pretty heavy weights up until two months ago, deadlifting 527.5, and squatting 445 for singles - plural - in a workout.  I’m paying the price for it, however, with that piriformis, glute, or ham that doesn’t want to go heavy nowadays.  

So what got me in trouble, the volume or the intensity of concentric reps?  It used to be that those were the only two variables to consider, but now it would appear that they’ll be sharing the bill with those from new domains.   Figuring out where I went wrong is just as important as finding out what might be right.  Did too much volume deplete glycogen, sparking an increased cortisol output - the effect of which can be a blunting of protein synthesis?  There’s more than meets the eye.

This is the larger realization:  it’s not just that some training routines work while others fall short.  Sets, reps, time, and effort WILL effect physical change, which can be either positive or negative.  

Stay tuned for the details on the new neurological and muscular brew.  

Frailty

I can recall a debate raging on the forum of a strength training site some years ago: which would be better for an elderly person, aerobic or strength training?  The aerobic work is critical for the heart and its ability to send blood and oxygen everywhere its needed, said one side.  The other maintained that strength, the capacity to exert force against external resistance, is critical for mobility and completing the everyday tasks of life.  Each side had to convince the other they weren’t speaking in extreme terms.  No, ‘we’re not talking about six minute miles in a 10-K,’  - or for that matter, squatting 400.  It was a question of sustained heightened metabolic activity versus sets and reps.  

It was around this time that I was at a YMCA to swim some laps.  In a nearby lane was a man well into his 70’s who was having a rough go of it.  Face down in the water, he couldn’t pull either arm out of the water to effect a stroke, and he certainly couldn’t extend them fully overhead.  He pulled himself along - barely - with painful looking half strokes.  The result was not a heightened metabolic output.  

The strength guys win that one, I thought.  Having limbs that can make it through their full range of motion is vital, and doing so against some degree of resistance is even better.  You can do all the things life might require of you, including aerobic work.  

My neighbor’s parents are visiting, which is why this memory came up.  They’re well into their 70’s, and unfortunately Grandma has become very frail.  The trip from the car to the front door is a major event, as as she slowly slides her feet in tiny steps.  She’s always been very thin, which didn’t matter too much when her trace amounts of muscle had some spring to them.  Recently, though, tissue has been lost, or its capacity to function has utterly deteriorated.  She can barely move her own limbs, let alone other things with them.  

My reaction is more impatience than sympathy.  The daughter this woman is visiting is a doctor who can no doubt list the dangers of sarcopenia: falls, fractures, osteoporosis, decreased activity, diabetes, and losses of function and independence. This doctor also drives past our garage everyday and sees either my wife, daughter, or me lifting weights, yet remains at a loss for a solution.  Of course, strength training is completely out of this family’s frame of reference.  We must seem as strange as a family trapeze act in the circus.  Then again, they’re the ones with a problem they can’t solve.  This brand of frailty, which could very possibly be an unnecessary weakness and decline when nothing else is actually killing this poor woman, strikes me as a frailty of the mind first and foremost.

This type of judgment goes through everybody’s mind, but polite people keep it to themselves.  I could also be wrong; a serious health condition might have brought this about - so in that case, this is not her fault.  To some degree, that is.  In a health crisis (or otherwise) how can an increasingly impaired person not be desperate to rage, rage against the dying of the light?  

As a strength athlete at the age of 56, I can attest that strength levels on various lifts rise and fall like the levels on a stereo equalizer display.  My benches, as described, were stalled by shoulder pain until a coaching cue fixed my form.  That piriformis trouble I mentioned might actually be a problem in my high hamstring.  I’ve had to switch to box squats and rack pulls for squats and deads, respectively.  They’re not ideal, but they’re decent alternatives.  

The point is that you still have to train.  You still have to struggle physically - and in some cases mentally, coming up with new bases for improvement.  From all the podcasts I listen to as I lift, I’ve gathered that I have to expand my horizons to new training modalities, which means new exercises and different rep schemes.  I can’t go though life with diminishing strokes or steps, sticking with only one author’s view of the world after it’s run its course.  

Injuries, age, and training immunity happen.  Luckily, the first benefit of getting out in the garage and under the bar is overcoming mental frailty.  

Saving Aaron Jastrow

By the time Aaron Jastrow enters the underground chamber, he knows as well as we do what’s about to happen.  This is a poignant moment in the massive 1980’s television miniseries WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, a sweeping depiction of both the European and Pacific theaters in World War Two, based on the novel by Herman Wouk.  

The saga is told from the perspective of the family of Victor ‘Pug’ Henry, a naval officer and ship captain whose two sons follow him into service as the war breaks out.  Warren, the older one, is killed in the Battle of Midway.  Byron, named for the poet, is a restless soul with an uneasy relationship with his father.  He reveals himself to be a gifted submariner in combat in the Pacific, though before the war he spent time in Europe, where he met and married Natalie, the beautiful niece of Aaron Jastrow.   

Played by Sir John Gielgud, Aaron Jastrow is a Jewish American author and professor living in Siena, Italy.  He shares some of the blame for his plight, though really this is in Wouk’s preceding volume, WINDS OF WAR, where he and Natalie stay in place far too long, Jastrow shaking his head over the troubling developments throughout Europe yet not really believing anything could happen to them.  By the time WAR AND REMEMBRANCE picks up, Aaron, Natalie, and her young son are on the run, trying to outwit a German agent who demands that the prominent Jastrow make propaganda broadcasts.  The chess game has them moving between Lourdes, Baden-Baden, and Paris, but they are caught and sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstat, and eventually Auschwitz.

Natalie and the boy are spared, but Aaron, his usefulness as an elder ended, is sent to the ‘showers.’  The audience has already seen what happens when masses of people who’ve arrived in railroad freight cars are immediately ordered to the ‘showers.’  In the first underground chamber, they must remove all their clothing.  Then, in all their embarrassing and awkward nakedness, young and old are herded into the next large chamber.  They probably are actually filthy after a train ride of hundreds of miles, packed standing so tightly that they couldn’t move.  Any semblances of dignity or suspicion have been defeated by exhaustion.

Once they’re in the second chamber, packed once again, the heavy doors are slammed shut behind them, and at numerous wall apertures, open canisters of Zyklon B are tossed in from above.  

Zyklon B, German for ‘Cyclone B,’ is a pesticide that attacks every single cell at the level of its electron transport chain, the most vital function.  The throats, eyes, and lungs of people trapped below ground are destroyed nearly instantly, creating a writhing, naked mass of convulsions and rapid death.

When Aaron Jastrow finds himself in a line proceeding into the underground shower chambers, he is simply willing himself not to panic.  Below ground, he recites the prayers that have defined his soul for a lifetime, even in his final agonizing moments.  

Before that, just for a moment as he reaches the metal railings and concrete stairs that lead underground, Jastrow looks up and beholds the moon in a cloudless night sky.  In all its simplicity, the pale full moon is Creation’s farewell.  

The heavy doors slam shut.  

‘The Lord is My Shepherd  . . . ‘

This is exactly where I want the scene to change.  When the doors slam shut, the crowd rushes to pound them, screaming, realizing they are trapped.  However, this time, a series of explosions from above silences them.   Several more explosions sound, though loud as they are, the sounds are sharp and short; these are large rounds being fired.  Muffled explosions shake the ground further away.  Bursts of machine gun fire can be heard.  

The crowd pounds desperately at the door once more, but suddenly the whole room shakes in a series of prolonged roars.  Frightened eyes travel over the walls and ceiling.  In the moments of breathless silence, most notably, there are no sounds of canisters dropping into the apertures.  

The heavy doors are torn open, but by American soldiers shocked at what they see.  

The scene I’ve been trying to imagine is when Jastrow emerges above ground once more.  Those were tanks that thundered overhead, which have gone on to smash through the front gate and press into the camp.  Two more enormous tanks hang back, idling like locomotives not far from the concrete stairs.  Behind them are jeeps and trucks.  This has already become a rear area.  A white map is spread across the hood of one jeep, and a young radioman briefs a general, gesturing over the map.  

Jastrow is about to be ushered in the opposite direction, to an open field where people fleeing the chamber are being met by medical personnel.  The general, having heard his report, nods to the radioman but now must wait for further developments.  Hands in his pockets, he turns away to stroll a few yards.  This is as Jastrow is at the top of the steps.  The two men’s eyes meet, and briefly they exchange nods.

That’s the scene.  If that moment in which Jastrow regards the moon captures the universe’s indifference, then that nod conveys deliverance: You’re safe now.   The hero’s strength is as much in his steadiness and quiet as it is the awesome array of forces at his command.  

That’s the imagery that danced in my head as I got my second coronavirus shot, an occasion that was far too low key for its importance.     

I’ve used a number of metaphors, all of them heroic, some military, to describe the battle against the Coronavirus pandemic.  It’s probably in bad taste to compare this to the murder of millions of Jews in a world war, but I was searching for some kind of vivid juxtaposition between Evil and those who have defeated it.  In April a year ago, when a medical expert explained the pathology of the disease, which begins with oxidative damage in the cells of the endothelium and leads to clotting in the bloodstream, I thought, He’s broken the code.  Now we can sink the U-Boats.  

Little did I know that Pfizer and Moderna had already created mRNA vaccines they were injecting into the arms of test subjects.  They had not only broken the code, they had outwitted it completely.  The good guys are even better than I thought.

Reality also has lessons on the brutality my naive little fantasy overlooks - both in terms of liberating concentration camps and in the pandemic.   

Troops from the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz, so a better example of Americans crashing through the gates would be Dachau, on April 29, 1945.  

Having attacked Germany from two different directions, American and Soviet forces, when they linked, effectively cut the country in two.  As the Americans swiftly captured territory, they received orders concerning Dachau: surround it so no one escapes, and touch nothing, said the intelligence and legal advisors in the Allied command.  

When American troops were spotted moving outside the fence line, a huge, wildly excited crowd poured out of the buildings inside the camp and rushed the wire, cheering.  However, very grim discoveries awaited the Americans.  In a train of freight cars outside the camp, they found some 3000 mostly naked, skeletal bodies.  In various buildings inside the camp were similarly discarded piles of corpses.  

They did not react well.  Groups of SS guards either trying to escape or surrender were shot on sight.  The vicious Alsatian dogs used to terrorize prisoners were machine gunned in their kennels.  The camp commandant, who had stood with his staff and a Red Cross official to surrender in orderly fashion, was hauled off to the train to account for the finding.  He did not return from the trip.  

Accounts vary, which has caused controversy, but it’s been said that American soldiers handed over weapons so that vengeful Jewish prisoners could execute their tormentors.  

Two separate American forces converged upon Dachau without coordination from above.  Tactically this could be dangerous, two units entering the same area, firing ahead of themselves while not knowing much about the other.  In this case the battle was over jurisdiction.  As an enormous supply column bearing food and medicine drew closer, the officers’ first meeting ended in pushing and shoving, weapons drawn, and threats flying back and forth.  The Americans were clearly traumatized by what they found and had racked up a number of their own war crimes in short order.  The entire situation was written up and presented to General George Patton.  Upon considering what they’d been through, he elected not to act.  

This might provide a sense of the horror faced by medical workers during the course of the pandemic.  Starting at about midnight after my second Pfizer shot, I had the chills and some wild fever dreams in what little sleep I got.  It was just enough to let me know I didn’t want any part of the real battle.  

(STRONG Gym Advanced template  - PPST3)

Week of:  5/17/21 De-Load week

MONDAY   

1.  Squat: 3 sets of 8; Tom 315

2.  Romanian Deads  4 sets of 6  275

3.  4 sets of shrugs  400

4.  reverse hypers  (3x10)

5.  abs; banded pulldowns

TUESDAY 

1.  Bench press:  3 sets of 3;  80%  Tom 220

2.  Incline bench: 2x2  220 

3.  5 sets of 10 Hanging rows

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8 

Conditioning (second session)

sled pull   2 miles;  20, 0  (and six 50-yard runs)

THURSDAY

1.  Deadlift: 3 reps, 425;  2 sets at 90% - same reps  382.5

2.  Squats:   90% of Monday;  then work up to 405 single  

3.  Reverse Hypers (3x10)

4.  abs: hollow rockers

FRIDAY

1.  Press: 3x3 at 80%  Tom 160

2.  Floor press 252.5   2x2

3.  Pull ups  (5x10)

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5-8

5.  3 sets kettlebell sit ups

SATURDAY - Conditioning

swim 1 mile or row 6000 meters

Backside: Emerging from the Dark Side

This was probably clear enough last week - if not a little dry and technical: the key to addressing injuries is effective troubleshooting.  It has to be procedural detective work, something reliable and thoughtful especially as things get emotional.  Pain and frustration can mount.  Last week, I did lose Thursday’s deadlift workout, settling for light and fast reps, as 475 did not want to come off the floor.  

Today, however, I hope I can present things in a more emotionally compelling way: there’s hope - the first crescent of sunlight on the horizon.  We have some solutions.

Last week, I described the three broad approaches to treating injuries:  (Notice that rest is not among them.)

- Mobility work: deep tissue massage by way of rolling on lacrosse or softballs

- Starr Protocol: lightly putting a muscle to work through its full range of motion, to restore neurological and circulatory function

- identifying the source of the problem: a movement fault

I’m hitching with my hips to the left in my squats, about half the time and more noticeably some in some cases than others.  Trying to unhitch or lean more on the other leg doesn’t fix this; the only thing that does - and I’m summarizing after some trial and error - is pushing the hips back an inch or two right as I come out of the hole.  This puts the load that much more on the hamstrings.

It also suggests that I’m not bellying down with a level back to the extent that the Rippetoe method might prescribe.  I’m dropping to some extent like a baseball catcher, and at the bottom of the motion the job is left to my glutes and quads a bit disproportionately, exploiting a weakness or bad habit.  

I have to make a habit of that tiny maneuver with the hips to compensate, and I should be in business.  

The second part of the solution has been a version of the Starr Protocol.  The focus in my last squat workout was so much on mechanics that it only dawned on me hours afterward that the whole workout hurt a great deal less than the previous time around.  I had been doing some band work, but the occasional twinge made me worry it wasn’t working.  Lo and behold, it is, but the process might take a few weeks.

Here’s a clearer example: a few years ago, I had some brutal knee pain in my squats, which felt like the big patella tendon below my right kneecap was in shreds.   Something above, one of the quad muscles, was tight and unhappy and pulling at it.  

Those sets of 25 reps with the lightest weights in the Starr Protocol are usually meant for the worst cases of torn muscle bellies, ones complete with swelling and skin discoloration from blood sloshing around within.  My solution to the angry quad was slightly less dramatic but rehabilitative nonetheless: with a miniband wrapped around my ankle and pulling my foot up against my rear end as I stood, I did rounds of 10 standing leg extensions against that resistance, raising a knee and then extending my leg as if I were punting a football.  That worked that quad from A to Z in his range of motion and reminded him how to behave.

The way to stretch a left piriformis muscle is to lift your left calf up and turn it in front of your right thigh, making a figure-4.  If that’s one end of its range of motion, and its purpose is to rotate your femur outward, I figured I’d set up a resistance band arrangement to work that motion, much as I did with that quad.  I hang one end of the band fairly high on my rack; the lower end is wrapped around my ankle and foot.  At rest, at the beginning of the motion, my left calf is up and crossing in front of my right thigh.  The motion against resistance, then, is to sweep that foot down toward where it should be standing, and then out and behind, along the ground in a sort of ice skating motion, to let the piriformis finish its job.  

I do 4 sets of 10 with both legs, like I did with the kicking motion for that quad, even though the other side in each case has been fine, mainly because I’m trying to remedy imbalances, not create new ones.  

The squats are the first indication that my hip is improving.  Deadlifts last week only went as far as 425 pounds.  My first honest workout weight, 475, did not want to go, and the pain was a sensation of everything being strapped just too tight around my left hip.  

With any luck, the band work has loosened the straps.  However, if a big weight does not want to come off the floor, then I’m going to raise it, by propping the bar four inches higher in the rack, and still lift heavy weights.  The band work has me covered for the light Starr stuff.  Light deadlifts, on the other hand, are pointless.  Deadlifts are for hardening a stem to stern integrity through an athlete’s entire body - and soul.  They train the ability to solidify into a single unit and withstand force in every linkage.  If the hip still doesn’t want to play along at the very bottom, then a partial lift with real weight will still convey more benefit than messing around with 135.  

The cell phone will continue to be my coach’s eye.  

If this piece didn’t turn out as emotionally fulfilling as promised, then at least the results will be.  The best way to view the situation is along the lines of, ‘You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.’  Lifting heavy weights is awesome.  Once in a while, however, you have to bring the engine into the shop and fix the parts that are wearing down.

(STRONG Gym Advanced template  - PPST3)

Week of:  5/10/21 Week 7

MONDAY   

1.  Squat: 97% - 1 REP; 92% - 2 REPS; 90% - 2 SETS OF 2 REPS; 88% 2 REPS  Tom 432.5, 410, 400, 392.5

2.  back extensions 4x10  

3.  4 sets of shrugs  400

4.  reverse hypers  (3x10)

5.  abs; banded pulldowns

TUESDAY 

1.  Bench press:  97% - 1 REP; 92% - 2 REPS; 90% - 2 SETS OF 2 REPS; 88% 2 REPS  Tom 267.5, 252.5,  247.5, 242.5

2.  Incline bench: 2x2  215 

3.  5 sets of 10 Hanging rows

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8 

Conditioning (second session)

sled pull   2 miles;  20, 0  (and six 50-yard runs)

THURSDAY

1.  Deadlift: 97% - 1 rep; 92% - 2 reps; 88%- 2 SETS OF 2 REPS  Tom 512.5, 485, 465

2.  Front squats: 2x2  220  

3.  Reverse Hypers (3x10)

4.  abs: hollow rockers

FRIDAY

1.  Press: 97% - 1 rep; 92% 4 SETS OF 2 REPS  TOM 195, 185

2.  Floor press 250 2x2

3.  Pull ups  (5x10)

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5-8

5.  3 sets kettlebell sit ups

SATURDAY - Conditioning

swim 1 mile or row 6000 meters

A Pain in the Backside

Aches and pains come and go all the time, which is a big part of strength training.  An injury, however, interrupts training.  You can’t go as heavy as you want, which means progress is delayed or maybe even reversed, and getting over it takes some time, either in terms of outright healing or figuring out what error is causing the problem to begin with.  

I am battling what is quite literally a pain in my rear end, where at the top of my squat and deadlift motions I get quite the angry twinge when handling a heavy weight.  The culprit would seem to be the pirifomis, a belt-wide little guy who runs sideways from the lower spine to the upper surface of my femur.  He’s there to aid in turning the leg and foot outward.  He’s very deep, in against the bones beneath my glute, so that seems to match what it feels like.  The twinges have been coming on for a month, but they’ve gotten worse in the last week, costing me a deadlift set in one workout.  The hope is that I can recall enough from previous experiences to limit any further training loss.  

When muscles become painful and tight, they’re injured on some level, whether they’re just depleted from a workout or torn or bruised from some kind of trauma.  Every muscle ‘pull’ is a tear of some number of fibers.  On the minor end of the misery spectrum, usually mobilization can solve the problem.  Most often, this is rolling the affected muscle on a softball or lacrosse ball on the floor, with bodyweight and the ball combining to provide a penetrating force, an approach made famous back in the Golden Age of CrossFit by coach and Doctor of Physical Therapy Kelly Starrett.  

That deep push through the muscle fibers is very effective, either releasing chemical wastes that have been trapped between muscle fibers, so they can be carried off by the circulatory system, or by stretching overly taut fibers and compelling them to relax and lengthen.  General stretching goes in this category of loosening things that are tight, though athletes have learned that this direct pressure is far more immediate and effective.

When fibers and cells have been seriously torn or bruised, only bolder steps will help them heal.   Excess rest is a danger; damaged muscles can create scar tissue in only days.  Adjacent muscles will seize up like the injured one as a means of protecting the area.  The athlete is hobbled.  To prevent all this, the injured muscle has to be put to use, reminded neurologically to keep doing its work, and getting some blood to run through it will take out the garbage and bring in the groceries to aid in cellular repair.    

The approach has been codified into the ‘Starr Protocol,’ named for legendary weightlifter and writer Bill Starr.  His explanation was that the weight should be light and the reps high; the athlete will probably have to begin the process with only the empty bar.  The slow build in weight - with 25 rep sets - can last as long as 10 days.  Reps then drop to 15 and 10 in the next few workouts - as the weight rises slowly - and eventually back to 5’s with full weight, all within two or three weeks.  Creating a cycle of adaptation at the level an injured muscle can handle is the fastest way to restore it.  

I’m not sure which approach this left side of my rear end is going to require.  Googling my symptoms quickly brings up the pirfiormis as a suspect, as well as TONS of articles and videos on how to handle it - so many so that it sounds like the problem is pretty easily solved.  When I do that classic stretch, bringing my left calf across my right leg, above the knee, that turn in my hip does stretch somebody tight and unhappy.  I did squat up to 400 pounds the other day, with some twinges of pain.  Deadlifts come later this week, and that exercise is the one that might be reduced to therapeutic levels for high repetitions.  

The larger question is, Why is this happening?  What error in movement is hosing up the leverage in that hip?

About a month ago, as I wrote in the old blog, “The floor press, a lift . . .  which is mostly associated with the goateed, shaven headed giants of the Westside Barbell world who have far bigger Upper Body fish to fry than the rest of us, actually has a fantastic lesson to impart.  It’s a cue that can change people’s understanding of the bench press.  

The idea, as you’re lying on the ground, is to let the bar down slowly and allow the backs of your arms to get fully pushed against the floor.  You relax and commit the weight to the ground, as if this were ‘a box squat for the upper body,’ as the giants would say.  

At this point, you get a freebie - a ‘do-over.’  As the bar rests on your vertical forearms, pull your torso up and reset your shoulder blades so that they’re pinched and shrugged back once more.  You also re-arch your back, as though you’re putting the shoulder blades in your back pockets.

“Yes, you already did that.  You might be following all the rules, setting your shoulders and arching your back for a set of benches, but as you’re lowering the weight, you’re losing that position.  Think about it: obviously, if there’s something to reset on the floor, you’re losing it - even if you had no idea.  It’s been happening more than you realize, which is why that sore shoulder or pec muscle has snuck up on you.  

Then, locked and loaded, you drive the weight up - - with zero pain.  

“That’s the revelation: the pec pain you’ve had is NOT from your grip width and NOT from your elbow angle or all those other stupid things you’ve been trying to fix. IT’S YOUR BACK.  You’re hurting your front because you’re losing your back.”

I went on to quote a few articles from sports and scientific journals, and when I mentioned this to my old high school weightlifting coach, he said that was old news - probably so old that it’s been forgotten.  ‘[The great] Pat Casey wrote about that in STRENGTH AND HEALTH 55 years ago.’

I’ve been off to the races ever since, bench pressing without pain.  I shouldn’t admit how long I tried to defy it.  Now, the same principle applies.  There’s no sense in hoping one treatment or another can help after the fact.  I have to get to the real issue, the cause.  

Meanwhile, I’m not completely sure the pain is in my piriformis.  It’s not a hamstring; they tie in below that, on the rings of bone at the bottom of my butt.  Maybe it’s a glute.  Experts warn against rolling the piriformis too hard, since the sciatic nerve runs through it, and irritating that can create pain and numbness down the leg.  

The problem has to be either the arch in my lower back or some possible sideways hitch as I’m coming up with the weight.  This calls for a little cell phone video analysis.  Once I figure it out, I hope the transformation will be as magical as with my bench press.  

That’s the idea: look for a miracle discovery, because one probably exists.  I got into trouble for a reason. 

(STRONG Gym Advanced template  - PPST3)

Week of:  5/3/21 Week 6

MONDAY   

1.  Squat: 94% 1 rep; 88% - 3 reps; 84% 3 sets of 3;  Tom 417.5, 390, 370

2.  back extensions 4x10  

3.  4 sets of shrugs  400

4.  reverse hypers  (3x10)

5.  abs; banded pulldowns

TUESDAY 

1.  Bench press:  94% - 1 rep; 88% - 2 sets of 3; 83% - 2 sets of 3;  Tom: 257.5, 242.5, 230

2.  Incline bench: 3x3  212.5 

3.  5 sets of 10 Hanging rows

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8 

Conditioning (second session)

sled pull   2 miles;  20, 0  (and six 50-yard runs)

THURSDAY

1.  Deadlift: 94% - 1 rep; 88% - 3 reps; 84% - 3 reps; 82% - 3 reps  Tom: 495, 465, 442.5, 432.5

2.  Front squats: 3x3  215  

3.  Reverse Hypers (3x10)

4.  abs: hollow rockers

FRIDAY

1.  Press: 94% - 1 rep; 88% - 4 sets of 3 reps;  Tom: 187.5, 175

2.  Floor press 247.5; 3x3

3.  Pull ups  (5x10)

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5-8

5.  3 sets kettlebell sit ups

SATURDAY - Conditioning

swim 1 mile or row 6000 meters

Cultural Appropriation and the Tale of Two Steelers

This is an old story, but it bears repeating: 

45 years ago, Moose [Murphy] was the strongest kid in school. That was the word among those of us who kept our distance and spoke of him only in hushed tones.  Murphy was year older than I was and sported a wild, curly mop of hair and crazy, fast eyes with which he sought victims to terrorize. 

This was as we were leaving elementary school and heading into junior high. Moose, with his big husky body, was a dominant athlete. I can remember him wearing his football jersey on game days, pushing kids around in the hall. 

In high school, I largely lost track of Moose, since I was going to a Catholic prep school a few towns away. From time to time though, he would make a nuisance of himself. Moose was the kind of bully who would swoop into the center of a pond hockey game, steal the puck and then lead everyone off on a chase, passing the puck back and forth with one of his laughing goons.

About a year or two into high school, early in my strength apprenticeship, I was with a pair of friends at a local school field, tossing around a football, when one of them suddenly froze in place, his eyes looking past me. Moose Murphy and two other thugs were heading toward us. We all stopped what we were doing. Every kid who’s ever been through one of these showdowns knows that ‘trapped’ feeling one gets in the pit of their stomach. 

They were substantially bigger than we were. Nothing was said. We could only watch them approach. 

Moose picked my friend’s ball up off the ground. ‘Three on three,’ he announced. ‘Our ball.’ He was going to be QB. 

‘Touch or tackle?’ one of my friends asked uncertainly.

Moose just laughed. 

Not wanting to at all, my two friends lined up opposite of Moose’s pals, who were headed out as receivers, which left me in the position of rushing Moose after counting Five Mississippi.

The world can change in an instant. Wars are decided in a single second in a single battle; lives collide and change trajectories forever. 

After five Mississippi, I went straight in at Moose, who still hadn’t thrown the ball. He tried to push himself back away from me, but I had too much speed. I hit him in the ribs right in the right side; it’s a feeling I can recall clearly to this day. His body yielded surprisingly easily, and I landed right on top of him, without touching the ground. 

His friends, who had been running around trying to get open, came trudging back to the scrimmage line. ‘What happened?’ one of them demanded.

‘He got me,’ Moose said quietly.

‘Are you kidding?’ This was not in the plan. 

One of my friends cut me a scared look.

On the next play, Moose decided to run for it once I came across the line, but I turned in pursuit and rode him hard into the ground once more. 

Where before my heart had beaten a thick dread through my body, I had at this point transformed completely into my hero, Jack Lambert, the All-Pro middle linebacker of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  I stood with my hands on hips the way he did between plays, and I hunkered down into his ready stance for the snap counts.  Most importantly, where before I wouldn’t dare look him the eyes, I stared straight and hard at Moose.  He was the one looking away.   

‘One blitz every four downs!’ my friend decided it was a good time to declare.

Moose was not excited at the prospect. He had another serious problem, I had discovered: he was soft. The ferocious Moose Murphy, who had once been the biggest boned, most dominant athlete in junior high and parlayed that into a reign of terror over an entire neighborhood, was becoming ‘Mousse’ Murphy from too much good living.

He had also twice been thumped into the ground harder than ever before in his life.  We quickly scored two or three touchdowns, the three of us being so much quicker than any of them. Moose and his friends, who anticipated pillaging like Vikings but instead found themselves being outrun, out thrown, and flattened unapologetically, surrendered the ball and left without a word. 

On our way home, we could hardly believe it. We recounted every play, tossing the ball to one another as we kicked through the leaves on the sidewalk. ‘We friggin’ killed those guys!’

‘That’s cultural appropriation,’ my daughter said.  We weren’t taking about channeling Jack Lambert.  Rather, it was Spirit Week at her school, where the theme was dressing for various decades and particularly the Disco era.  ‘Are you going to put on a big Afro or something?’ I asked.

That’s when she made her stand, adding, ‘You can’t borrow from oppressed groups.’

‘People who went to discos were oppressed?’

‘No, Black People.  You can’t make fun of their culture.’

‘I’m pretty sure Black people make fun of their culture when it comes to disco.  As a matter of fact, plenty of White people sported enormous heads of hair then as well . . .’  (probably appropriating that, now that I think of it.)

She switched to a story from her horseback riding barn.  ‘[So-and-So] dressed up for our costume parade as an Indian princess.  It was really bad.’

‘Because she wanted to reenact the Trail of Tears?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe she was just thinking of the qualities she admired.’

‘You can’t do that.’

Those who consider cultural appropriation harmful, including Indigenous people concerned with preservation, believe that adopting another culture’s traditions, fashion, symbols, language, or music is exploitative.  Cultural significance is lost or distorted when one of these is removed from its proper context, the result being disrespect or even desecration.

Humans have been imitating, borrowing, or stealing from one another from time immemorial.  Making strenuous objections seems to be a recent and inconsistent phenomenon.  

- Neckties are derived from scarves worn by Croatian mercenaries fighting for France’s Louis XIII.

- The connection between Scottish Tartans and certain clans is largely nonsense.  In the wake of a popular book, the Tartan industry invented various plaid patterns, which, after their years in fancy British circles, became workaday wear for settlers in America driving westward.  

- Cowboy boots and hats, which became common after the American Civil War, are of Mexican derivation.  

- Short haircuts with neat parts came into vogue in the early 16th Century, as European men imitated the styles on Greek and Roman statues.  

- American soldiers in World War Two shaved their heads into ‘Mohawks’ as a form of intimidation.  That was also the motive for punk rockers in the 1980’s.  

100 or so years ago, while hunting or fishing, the dashing then-Prince of Wales adopted the practice of wearing the rough tweed of Irish, English, and Scottish peasantry, complete with patches on worn jacket elbows and rolling his pants up on particularly wet days.  This fashion - including pants cuffs -  became all the rage among British upper classes and spurred the long-standing American Ivy League and Preppie subcultures.

Interestingly, as much as folks admired the Prince, he would be King Edward VIII only briefly, abdicating the throne in 1938 to marry an American divorcee.  

- African Americans’ Rock and Roll was stolen by Whites, of course, though there was probably enough jazz, country, blues, and honky tonk along the way to muddy the waters and make the theft, if not the comparison, less apparent.  See Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley’s respective versions of ‘Hound Dog’ as an example.  

More obvious is the way White singers unashamedly took to becoming rappers, in imitation of Black artists.  This same daughter of mine, who argued against cultural appropriation, used to play Icelandic rap, of all things.  

The people who have the greatest right to worry about disrespect or desecration are probably Native Americans, whose traditions are an ongoing concern.  They live in two cultures, their own as well as America at large, and leaders must worry about diluting, distracting effects from the media.  

A fairly recent and significant example of desecration took place in 2012, when model Karli Kloss wore an elaborate headdress on a runway walk in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.  The sheer spectacle exceeded the reach this show would have had otherwise; the long, tall, tanned Kloss was clad in only a bikini and some jewelry yet framed by a red, white, and black set of feathers that reached the floor.  

The Navajo nation declared it a mockery.  An academic of Cherokee descent wrote in THE NEW YORK TIMES, ‘For the communities that wear these headdresses, they represent respect, power and responsibility. The headdress has to be earned, gifted to a leader in whom the community has placed their trust. When it becomes a cheap commodity anyone can buy and wear to a party, that meaning is erased and disrespected, and Native peoples are reminded that our cultures are still seen as something of the past, as unimportant in contemporary society, and unworthy of respect.’

Kloss and Victoria’s Secret apologized, saying that had not been their intention.

This finally brings me to my point: the values these items represent had better be solid in their own right -  especially when these symbols come under attack.  I have another Pittsburgh Steeler to talk about, a powerful icon who fails to stand up to scrutiny.  

One of the definitions of tradition is ‘the handing down of beliefs.’  This is a process - as well as a fairly open ended definition.  Yes, rituals and symbols are part of it, but the important aspect is that beliefs, values, and objectives are reaffirmed - verbally or nonverbally - to the members of a culture.  The Victoria’s Secret spectacle does place a burden upon a tribal elder.  He - or she - would have to gather their followers and remind them of the significance of the headdress, as in (conceivably) what achievement or historical moment each feather represents.  That’s what they should think about the next time they see it worn, the substance of what they as a group hold dear.

At 6’4” and only 220 pounds, Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert relied on sheer ferocity as he battled opposing linemen far larger, which made him the patron saint of skinny kids hoping to overcome their limitations.  His front teeth were missing, which added to the pure determination he projected, and by all accounts his aggressive play and personality were the catalysts to a defense that won multiple Super Bowls.  I had the privilege of meeting Lambert at a summer football camp around the time of my trouncing Moose Murphy, and Lambert was the real deal.  He taught a forearm shiver that could drop a Brahma bull and gave a no-nonsense speech one night on goal setting and not getting sidetracked by idiotic distractions.  

Also on that Super Bowl era Steeler team was center Mike Webster, ‘Iron Mike,’ the first NFL player to bare his massive arms no matter the weather.  He was the heart and soul of the offense, the linchpin of an offensive line in which every member could bench 500 pounds.  Webster hustled to the line of scrimmage to get over the ball on each play, and as the highlights show, he simply bulldozed the biggest and baddest defensive players out of the way - pretty much every time.  He once had to call plays when quarterback Terry Bradshaw dreamily returned to the huddle after having his bell rung.  Webster stood for the idea that dependability, hustle, and inspiring teammates began with hammer-of-the-Gods strength, which in turn is earned through relentless effort in the weight room.  That resonated for those of us getting under the bar as high schoolers.  

As painful as it is to admit, Webster’s story does not end well.  His phenomenal strength was achievable only through steroid use, and he played so hard and for so long that the damage to his brain from repeated shocks was extensive.  His final few years were hellish, as he lived in his car or in the woods, unable to sleep and increasingly unable to think straight.  In 2002, when he died at age 50, his brain was examined in an autopsy and became the first documented case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in an NFL player.  

Awesome as it is, the muscular icon of Mike Webster only works if you don’t think about it too much.  If we can find another example of great strength as the foundation for all those other qualities, then the lessons from Webster would be about paying too great a price for greatness.  

Symbols change, but the real battle in the face of cultural appropriation is keeping in mind what things stood for in the first place.  

(STRONG Gym Advanced template  - PPST3)

Week of:  4/26/21 Week 5

MONDAY   

1.  Squat: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps  -      Tom 400, 377.5, 357.5

2.  back extensions 4x10  

3.  4 sets of shrugs  400

4.  reverse hypers  (3x10)

5.  abs; banded pulldowns

TUESDAY 

1.  Bench press:  90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps  - Tom 247.5, 235, 220

2.  Incline bench: 4x3  210 

3.  5 sets of 10 Hanging rows

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8 

Conditioning (second session)

sled pull   2 miles;  20, 0  (and six 50-yard runs)

THURSDAY

1.  Deadlift: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 3 reps  - Tom 475, 447.5, 422.5

2.  Front squats: 4x3  205  

3.  Reverse Hypers (3x10)

4.  abs: hollow rockers

FRIDAY

1.  Press: 90% - 1 rep; 85% - 3 reps; 80% - 3 sets of 4 reps  - Tom 180, 170, 160

2.  Floor press 245; 4x3

3.  Pull ups  (5x10)

4.  Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5-8

5.  3 sets kettlebell sit ups

SATURDAY - Conditioning

swim 1 mile or row 6000 meters

Peek-a-Boo Fighters, Tough Guys, and the Vaccine

You can see why most people had their money on Jess Willard.  He was 6’ 6” and 245 pounds, a monster nicknamed the ‘Pottawatomie Giant’ who had knocked out the great Jack Johnson to win the heavyweight boxing crown in 1915.  Four years later, in Toledo, the contender he faced was 60 pounds lighter and a full five inches shorter.  However, this would be the day that made them both famous, Willard for suffering what’s been called the greatest beating in the history of boxing, and Jack Dempsey, the new champion, for dishing it out with a crabbed, bent armed, whole-bodied whirling action that floored Willard seven times in the first round and convinced him not to answer the bell for the fourth.  

Despite his gifts of size and strength, Willard was said to have a very laid back personality.  He probably never imagined the level of fury he would face that day.  Dempsey had brawled his way through Colorado mining camps as a teenager.  

These mechanics, coupled with the gloves held close to the eyes and the body swaying - as opposed to standing and jousting with jabs and crosses - was formalized over time into the ‘Peek-a-Boo’ style.  The whole idea was to avoid being hit while getting one’s self into an advantageous position, which was especially important for smaller fighters trying to breach the defenses of taller men.  It worked pretty well for Floyd Patterson as well as Mike Tyson, who was a genius at both flanking opponents and launching savage levels of whole bodied power. One of the most brutal shots of his early career came as he ducked a big right hand from Michael Jack Johnson, stepping to his left and driving a left hook into Johnson’s exposed liver, dropping him instantly.  Johnson actually got up to face a standing eight-count, but on the very next punch his front teeth were driven through his mouth guard.  It was 39 seconds into the fight.  

In my weekend combatives workouts, my training partner, who is younger, faster, taller, and a far more experienced boxer, though not a Peek-a-Boo fighter, is generously teaching me that style, with its slipping punches and then getting in and turning close to targets that aren’t entirely guarded.  The steps, turns, and punches are all one in the same motion.  I’m starting to land more shots in our sparring sessions, and I’ve seen his eyes go wide a few times even as he’s kind enough to shout, ‘Good!  Good!’

I used to work a lot harder and take more of a beating.  I could always hang tough, but it’s much more fun to be smart.  Does being smarter make me all the more tough in the long run?  

That’s a valid question in view of having gotten my first Pfizer vaccine dose.  In a month’s time, a world altering pandemic could be ending for me.  You’re pretty bulletproof three weeks after the first shot, say the physicians’ website and podcast gang.  The second shot finishes the effect after a week or two more. 

The declines in deaths and disease transmission, not to mention the increase in joyous reunions among family members, are enough to make me wonder why anyone in their right mind would refuse the vaccine.  Various reasons are given, among them distrust of the Biden administration or a vaccine they feel was rushed to the point of being unsafe, a belief that the virus was never that dangerous to begin with, and a desire to pledge loyalty to the Republican Party.  

49 percent of Republican men say they will not get the vaccine.  This is likely the same bunch that wouldn’t wear masks, since that’s an unmanly admission of vulnerability.  Instead, they’d rather be like Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW, shirt off, striding the beach after his ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ air assault has taken a Vietnamese village.  Around him, mortar blasts send his soldiers diving for cover, but Kilgore can’t be bothered.  He has a napalm strike to call in, so a champion surfer who’s along for the ride can take advantage of a perfect set just off shore.  His job done, he utters that famous line, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’

That means these guys are willing to face risks on two levels.  Internally, they’ll take their chances with a disease that doesn’t seem too bad for folks without co-morbidities.  That’s also the case with measles; most folks can beat it, but complications include pneumonia and encephalitis.  It’s best to steer clear.  Most folks can beat whooping cough, but the danger there is pneumonia and seizures, which can lead to brain damage and death.  All these Republican Kilgores striding the beach with their shirts off probably don’t think much of these diseases, since they got vaccinated against them as little kids.  Yeah, they can beat coronavirus, just as long as their antiviral interferons kick in right off the bat - and are not fooled by that interferon suppressing effect found to be common in SARS and MERS viruses.  If things don’t go exactly as planned - which can happen with little penny-ante stuff like measles -  and you let that sucker replicate, the napalm strike that kills you is from your own inflammatory cytokines.  

Jess Willard played those odds.  What were the chances that a six-foot-one, 185 pound guy would climb into the ring and kick his ass?

The second risk, on an external level, is that guys who laugh off the disease create breeding grounds that can give rise to variant forms of the virus.  In the fog of infection that every coronavirus patient breathes, several thousand imperfectly replicated particles exist.  Most of them live and die without making any kind of difference.  However, the more people there are allowing particles to replicate, the more the mutations there will be, and statistically there’s a greater chance of an outlier coming along that is resistant to the antibodies provided by the vaccine or previous infections.  Already, a variant from South Africa has shown these capacities.

Tyson was an outlier.  Peek-a-Boo fighters were outliers.  Michael Jack Johnson had no idea how to handle so much power in so close.  

I can actually sympathize with the guys who don’t have any patience for mask wearing and social distancing.    They’re measures of surrender and avoidance, admissions that we could not engage with this virus.  The difference now, however, is that - as predicted - we’re meeting it on the battlefield on our terms, in the spaces between spike proteins and cell receptors.          

So now these guys aren’t showing up - when the real fight is going down?  If you have the vaccine, and that stuff crawls inside you - it dies.  Game over.  It does not go on to endanger someone else.  You win, and you protect others.

How do they not want to be part of that?  I thought they were tough guys.  

So yes, being tougher does begin with being smarter, which in turn might begin with understanding what kind of role models you like.  Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW is a joke, a cartoon character, ultimately a coward whose attempt to turn the war into Spring Break, complete with surfing and beach parties, is a form of avoidance: do the bare minimum and make the boys feel like they’re still home.  Martin Sheen’s character, Willard, points out that for the enemy, ‘The way home is victory or death.’

The only other person who realizes that is Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, the Special Forces soldier gone rogue, who tells Willard, ‘You have to make a friend of horror and moral terror - or they are enemies to be feared.’  

Willard has been sent to kill Kurtz because the high command believes he’s gone insane.  This makes the entire situation truly insane, because Kurtz is right; the realities of war are absolute.  ‘You must kill without feeling, passion, or judgment.’   That the US Command can’t accept this truth probably explains why the war has been so poorly prosecuted.  

Be sure you know who your tough guys are.  

Do not avoid the war we face.  Show up.  Kill the virus without feeling, passion, or judgment.

Be brave enough to become smart.  

(thanks to ‘Life is a Story on YouTube for the APOCALYPSE NOW INSIGHTS)

Biceps, Benches, and STRONG Gym

In a stunning development, to coin a phrase, and a case of fantastic timing, my biceps are getting bigger as the warm weather approaches.  The secret has been dumbbell hammer curls, after happening upon the following explanation: beneath the bicep is the brachialis, ‘which has a larger cross sectional area than the bicep and therefore contributes more to upper arm thickness than any other muscle.’  The way to engage it is with dumbbell curls, the weight held vertically - which also does something for your brachioradialis, a forearm muscle.  

To my great surprise, this actually works on arms that have been impervious to straight bar curls.  I’m moving more weight with more muscle mass than before, and anyone who says they don’t want better looking arms is lying - or they don’t know how to get them.  

‘Guess what I just figured out,’ I sent in an e-mail to my old high school coach a week or two ago, going into the story about the floor press and learning to brace my upper body.  For all the talk about strained pecs or sore shoulders, I said, properly setting one’s shoulder blades does not seem to be offered as a solution.  

He pulled an example right out of memory.  ‘Well, it used to be.  Pat Casey described exactly that in STRENGTH AND HEALTH about 55 years ago.’  

Shoulder blades pinned together make for efficient motion in the shoulder joints. Pec muscles that are more involved - drawn like bowstrings as far back as possible - mean that more muscle is moving [hopefully] more weight.  So far, the floor presses are flying up, and in particular the first reps in bench sets are flying up, not with amazing weights but with better than I’ve done recently.  

Wow, if I can sport some bigger pipes and bench 315, that would make me . . . seriously cool.  

Programming will be the trick.  For the first time, I’ve dared to venture into Chapter 8 of Rippetoe and Baker’s PRACTICAL PROGRAMMING FOR STRENGTH TRAINING (Third Edition).  If I’m not an advanced lifter, then I’m as advanced as I’m going to be, and I have to find the most effective way possible to push my limits at this age and weight.  

Having run out the last dwindling reps of a long 8-5-2 progression, I first figured I’d reset the whole thing and back up for another charge.  However, it was in doing 5’s a week ago that I realized this would simply bring misery.  5’s with 370 were rough and slow, which would mean that three weeks later, 372.5 would be the same - and every rotation would be hideous as I tried to get up to 400 and beyond.  In fact, more than a year ago, I got up to 407.5 before I had to ditch 5’s.  In this latest cycle, I only got to 400.  Last time, I maxed 465, most recently, 445  - a few times in one workout, but I wasn’t going any further.  This probably means I was beating myself up with too many reps with very heavy weight.  

I did try something different about a year ago, Andy Baker’s Conjugate program, but I bailed out, fearing I was regressing.  I was doing all kinds of deadlifts: deficit, snatch grip, etc., and when it came time for a conventional pull, I struggled with 455, on a lift where I had hit 525.  To Hell with this, I thought.  

Did I quit too early?  Probably, but loss aversion is a powerful psychological reflex.  Strength is all about specificity, I figured, as in the neurological specificity of handling heavy weights, which meant my usual 3-2-1 progression bringing my dead back up to 527.5.  Conversely, my inclines, which became the focus as I guarded that shoulder in my benches, went from something I’d never done to a reasonable 250, by way of an 8-5-2.  

So what works, the blast furnace of intensity or a well calibrated series of adaptive steps?  

The way to delineate between novice, intermediate, and advanced lifters is by the rest intervals required between full-tilt training sessions.  A novice, especially in the example of a young high school athlete, can work through their best 5’s and be ready once again 48 hours later.  Really, this is an interaction between two other variables, the capacity for total tonnage versus the capacity for recovery.  As long as that teenager’s modest numbers do not overwhelm the growth empowering hormonal Perfect Storm inside his body, he can train hard three times a week.  

By the time this kid gets to college, he’s sporting a 200-300-400-500, but his rate of progress has slowed, which means that his 275-pound bench and 365-pound squat sets are heavy enough to demand significant recovery.  Now he needs a few days between workouts, and he’s an intermediate.  

Don’t be fooled by the term ‘Advanced.’  Flattering as it may be, those of us in the category are simply further along the curve of our strength potential.  We’re hardly superior to these other athletes.  In fact, even if our numbers are decent, we need a lot more time to recover after performing our magnificent feats.  

In Chapter 8, Rippetoe and Baker reason by analogy to explain Advanced programming.  ‘For the intermediate,’ they say, ‘the cycle is the week, while for the advanced lifter the cycle is the 8 [or 12] week period.’  They spell out different programs.

For example, in the intermediate Texas Method, the 5x5 rep scheme on a Monday is a volume workout to spur adaptation, which will then yield a 1x5 performance PR on Friday.  In between, on Wednesday, is a light ‘deload’ day.  Advanced level schemes are this same idea, just on a larger scale: a few weeks for each phase - ramping up, recovering, and then peaking.  If recovery takes more time, then so does adaptation.  

If those 5’s with 370 last week felt way worse than they should have, then the lesson for me is that I need more recovery - some right now and more in general.  However, since I hung in fairly well while facing blast furnace intensity, the template I’ve chosen for the next 12-plus weeks is the STRONG Gym program detailed on pp. 203 - 207.  Within its Accumulation, Transition, and Peaking phases are three week ascents, each followed by a deload week.  Other templates with more frequent deloads are available.  

In the meantime, I’ll take the hint on recovery, which means this already planned quarterly de-load week won’t even have one of those ‘neurological stim’ workouts.  (Talk about your loss aversion psychology.)

I should be in a hammock somewhere, sipping from drinks with little umbrellas in them, making grand plans for my bigger arms, stronger chest, and the numbers that drive progress.

Michael Stanley

On just about every Summer night in 1982, I had to make a half-hour drive home from my girlfriend’s house.  She lived in the town where I had been sent to a Catholic prep school, which was where my circle of friends and social activity had shifted, up a 20 mile stretch of dangerous interstate, where as a young driver I logged a great many miles and saw more than my share of bloody wrecks.  Those late trips called for an open cockpit, the windows down and radio blasting, to keep me awake and alert as I flew solo through the dark.  

At some point I started hearing this mysterious but amazing song that never came up in the regular rotation or especially in daylight hours.  On it would come at a night, though; my guess is that the nighttime DJ simply liked it - for good reason.  It lent itself to getting cranked immediately: fast, pulsing guitars getting faster and a wailing saxophone solo, the first of two, unleashed after only seconds, followed by a passionate lover’s plea: the sound of youth, like lightning trapped in a bottle.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HplvE-GXUtw

‘Have you heard this song?’ I’d ask my girlfriend or others we were with.  ‘Michael Stanley Band, ‘He Can’t Love You.’

They’d be surprised by the question, thinking I was referring to an old, familiar Tony Orlando and Dawn song, ‘He Don’t Love You,’ which anyone could sing.  ‘That one?’

‘No, no, no.  This is totally different.  It’s fast.  It’s great - but I only hear it at night.’

I never convinced them this song existed, and I couldn’t find the album, HEARTLAND, in any record stores.  ‘Come on, buddy,’ I’d say to the DJ once I was alone, rolling past dark houses on sleepy neighborhood streets. ‘It’s that time of night.’

He’d rarely let me down.  To this day, I picture a certain stretch of highway whenever I hear it.  

Michael Stanley died this past week, news that has staggered his hometown of Cleveland.  All over social media and local news sites, folks are posting their remembrances of concerts and the role Stanley played in special moments in their lives.  ‘He Can’t Love You’ came out in the era of big hair, half shirts, short track shorts, and knee high socks, according to a great many Facebook pictures, and that song was championship material for sorting out the best air guitar bands of the day.  

The song did crack the BILLBOARD Top 40, reaching number 33 in 1981.  It was also one of the first 50 videos ever played on MTV, that same year.  According to an article by Cleveland’s WKYC, “Stanley was part of what would become known as the genre of "heartland rock," emphasizing the values of blue-collar middle America, along with such artists as Bob Seger and John Cougar Mellencamp. But as popular as MSB was locally, they just couldn’t quite ascend to national stardom.

"We couldn’t get arrested in Columbus,” Stanley said in an interview.  "We were big in San Francisco, but we didn’t do much in LA. We were big in Denver, we were big in Texas and Florida, but we couldn’t get into Indianapolis."

This would explain why they barely penetrated New England.  I was in on a secret.  Having just graduated high school, those long drives at night were when I was beginning to realize that all of life is a solo flight.  

“Anyway, that you want to

Anytime, that I can show you

Listen to me

And you won't be regrettin'

And the

Time we spend, well you won't be

Forgetting, baby

'Cause when I hold you

I'm gonna show you why

It's like I told you

I'm no ordinary guy, and...

[Stacy Patton] was a classic beauty, a strawberry blonde and a cheerleader whose brothers were football legends.  She dated star athletes and was the kind of girl most of us worshipped from afar.  She was way out of my league.  

Still, around Christmas I wound up face to face with her at a party at her house, in her giant, crowded  basement with its pool and ping-pong tables, couches, and stereo.  I could scarcely believe she was willing to talk to me, let alone laugh through a few minutes of beer pong.  This was utterly thrilling, though I had to play it cool for the remainder of the night and the following few days in school.  In a crowded hallway I caught a snatch of conversation between two other seniors, one of whom proudly declared that at some other party he was at a table ‘playing quarters with Stacy Patton.’    Dropping her name was both a claim to status and an expression of awe.  I was instantly jealous.  

That I was even at that party and in a position to entertain thoughts of a long-shot romance was testament to strength training, of course.  As senior year began, I was already squatting 400 and gaining notoriety for guzzling a quart of milk from a cardboard carton on the train every morning.  Socially, my horizons were thrown wide open by having cred in the eyes of the football players.  Physically I was transformed; mentally, too - my confidence had increased with all my lifts.  

It was basketball season, so the general plan was to chat up the cheerleaders at halftime.  The clock would wind down, they would do some kind of routine out on the court, and a bunch of the lads would wander down to the floor.  For the first few times, I’d run into Stacy just casually, completely by accident, and take the chance to say hello, but then I began to notice that other guys weren’t coming around.  Score one for the squats.  I could head for her right off the bat.  

Then came the night I had to ask her to the Valentine’s dance.  I could hardly watch the game.  My eyes kept going to the scoreboard as the first half ticked away.  They’d do their cheer, and I’d slip down to the floor and go for it.  

‘You have to give me a sign.  Let me know how it goes,’ a friend said - which I did.  The deed was done; other cheerleaders swirled around where we stood, and when Stacy looked away for a second, I pumped my fist so that high in the stands, he could see.  When Stacy looked back, I was back to normal.  

Soon after, we were inseparable.  Life had blessed me with quite the love affair, and every night Michael Stanley reminded me how lucky I was.  

35 years later, assigned to Cleveland, I was rolling down a highway, fooling with the stereo when the afternoon DJ identified himself as none other than Michael Stanley.  

I shouted in spite of myself, ‘Hey!  How’ve you been?’ like it was a back slapping bear hug with an old friend.  

Stanley was Cleveland born and bred.  After his touring career was done, he hosted local TV shows and began DJ’ing, which continued for 30 years.  His song ‘My Town’ is a Cleveland anthem, which teams like the Browns, Cavaliers, and -  [the Indians no longer]  - the baseball team, along with numerous sports journalists, have confirmed will remain THE theme during games and shows.  

Even without the isolation of a pandemic, or when in fact there is a good showing at the church, funerals are lonely experiences, as families turn inward.  I can only hope his children and grandchildren can read all the stories people are posting.  In some of life’s most awesome moments, it was Michael Stanley laying down the soundtrack.  

Vaccine Heroes

I was rowing on my Concept 2 erg Saturday morning when a minivan pulled into the driveway.  A woman hopped out, came though our little wooden gate, and headed for the porch outside our kitchen, where we had left some of the mail we still get sometimes, after she and her family had rented the house during our Cleveland years.  This is the wife of a Food and Drug Administration scientist who works at their nearby headquarters.  Only hours before, late on Friday evening, the FDA had issued an Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer corporation’s COVID-19 vaccine.

As I heaved back and forth, I said, “Tell the gang at FDA, ‘Well done.’”

‘Thank you.  I will.’

‘Did you guys celebrate?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she assured me.  ‘There was much celebrating.’

‘Moderna next week, right?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well, let’s do it again.  Work late every night, and slay it the same way.  They can take Christmas week off.’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Tell everybody we’re much obliged.’

Awesome people do awesome things everyday, refining the skills and strengths that come into play when suddenly somebody needs a miracle.  We’ve seen this with cave divers, for example, as well as Army Rangers, deep sea fishermen, a center for the Steelers, dogsled drivers, a Treasury Secretary, codebreakers, and even an iconic cafe owner in Morocco.  As strength athletes, we can relate to the daily grind of trial and error, patience, and high expectations.  Even so, we’re amazed that things actually turn out as well as they do in the worst crises.  So many things could have gone wrong, but whether it was those divers extracting the kids from deep in that cave, the Rangers pushing 30 miles behind enemy lines, or those Irish fishermen calculating set and drift on paper and then executing those turns out on a gray and rainy ocean, these folks just stayed cool, did their thing, and it all worked out.  Was that purely luck?  Maybe the real mistake is all the fear and doubt, and reality is far more Zen than we know.  

Today’s heroes are the scientists who brought us the first two COVID-19 vaccines.  As told in the WASHINGTON POST and elsewhere, their storyline is familiar: a theory - or a hope - takes shape, followed by the first crude experiments and a long, slow grind of halting progress.  Then come a few opportunities to prove the concept in practice - which actually work, prompting a moment of unsure reckoning.  ‘Is that it?  Are we ready?’ the scientists ask one another, when out of the blue, the phone rings.  

The theory behind these seemingly ‘rapidly developed’ vaccines dates back as far as 1961, when scientists came to understand that Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) takes instructions inscribed in the building blocks of DNA  - Deoxyribonucleic Acid - and delivers them to the parts of the cell that form new proteins.  Scientists surmised - or dreamed, really, at this early stage - that this basic function could be manipulated for medicinal purposes.  It wasn’t until 1990 that a University of Wisconsin team demonstrated that they could inject snippets of mRNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories that created proteins on demand.  

This was groundbreaking.  Holy Cow, a new generation realized.  We can ‘encode fragments of virus to teach the immune system to fight against pathogens.’  We can ‘create whole proteins that are missing or damaged in people with devastating genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.’    

mRNA presented two problems: the molecule was almost too fragile to work with, and when it did stay in one piece, it created massive, often fatal, inflammation in the mice.  In 2005, a pair of researchers, one of them a former member of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s laboratory at the National Institute of Health, discovered how to tweak a single component of the RNA code to eliminate the inflammatory response.  This particular accomplishment deserves a Nobel Prize, say those in the field.

In 2016, researchers developed a nanoparticle to deliver messenger RNA to a special cell type that could turn the code into an immune system provoking protein. This was direct and efficient on an unprecedented level, enabling a vaccine to work using only a tiny amount of material.  ‘Each dose of mRNA vaccine relies on an amount that’s about a fifth the weight of a penny to stimulate a powerful immune response.’

Some Americans are wary of a vaccine that appears to have been spun up quickly to the point of recklessly.  The truth is that countless tiny improvements over decades transformed an idea into a working technology.  “It’s new to you,” a scientist said in an interview. “But for basic researchers, it’s been long enough. . . . Even before covid, everyone was talking: RNA, RNA, RNA.”

Old fashioned vaccines work by injecting some amount of dead or weakened virus to stimulate the immune system.  These newer vaccines use bits of viral surface proteins to make the necessary imprint.  The trick, of course, is knowing which bit to use, but there turned out to be another problem: viral proteins change shape when they do their voodoo.  They change their ‘conformation,’ say scientists - using a very interesting term that goes back to the old days of horse racing, as breeders and trainers used to talk about the bone lengths and leverages that made for champions.  My old Olympic lifting coach, Joe Mills, used the term the same way in assessing whether an athlete should catch their lifts in a squat or a split.

A coronavirus particle bent on mischief, once it finds the right cell receptor, changes its spike protein to a more advantageous conformation to inject its RNA code into a cell.  Beforehand, it’s sort of a squat, globular, roughly conical arrowhead - put your thumb and fingertips together.  When it extends, turning inside out, it makes a longer funnel shape, acting like a hypodermic needle.  

In 2013, a scientist by the name of Barney Graham - part of the gang at Fauci’s joint at NIH - discovered it was vital that a vaccine mimics the pre-fusion structure, or the arrowhead.   (It makes no sense to attack the funnel after it’s already done its damage.  Teaching the body to recognize the wrong structure would blow the entire scheme.)  The problem with the experimental vaccines was that the arrowheads were unstable and popped into funnels too easily.  Graham and colleagues, using computers to model the structures of these spikes, identified a protein in the arrowhead that was like a spring bent double.  It was when this snapped open that the funnel shape was formed.  Graham pioneered the ‘2P mutation,’ taking two prolines, the most rigid of 20 amino acids, and clamping the spring shut.

An immune system that knows what proteins to look for intercepts the arrowheads and caps them off before they can find receptors and morph into funnels.  

Graham was among the scientists making what findings they could as the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome emerged in 2003, followed by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2012.  These things are going to make the leap into humans every decade, they realized.  The phone rang for real in January, 2020.  Chinese scientists had just posted the genetic sequence of a troubling new coronavirus.  ‘All right,’ colleagues across government, academia, and industry said to one another.  ‘We have some ideas.’

According to the Post, the phone rang again in Barney Graham’s house some time last month.  It was the director of the NIH, calling with a heads-up.  ‘News is going to break tomorrow morning.  The numbers are in on Pfizer.’

‘Yeah?’

’90 percent effective.’

In spite of himself, when Graham put down the phone, he let fly a sob so loud that his son and grandchildren ran into the room.  That had to be strange for the kids, aged 13 and 5, to see him cry.  

I can only hope that Dad pulled them close and whispered, ‘Always remember tonight.  This is when Grandpa found out he helped save the world.’