The Hero that Gotham deserves

I saw The Dark Knight this past Friday. I was blown away. Very few movies I see make me wish I was a movie maker. The acting, plot, cinematography, musical score of this movie was brilliant. Its gotten outstanding reviews and is the number one movie on IMDB .

The story picks up where Batman Begins ends. The mob is running scared but the Joker is about the give Gotham a better class of criminal, and a scarier one at that. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is brilliant. I hope he gets a posthumous Oscar recognition for his work. Its *that* good. Christian Bale does an awesome job as Batman again. I love how deep his voice gets with the Joker in the police interrogation room. I think the reason why I love both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight is best explained by this quote by the director of both films, Chistopher Nolan:

"We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale."

Get Smart

Anne Hathaway is hot. I still hadn't got around to see her in Get Smart until tonight. The movie was quite entertaining. And she definitely kicks some ass in the action scenes. And better still, she is tall (well sort of, 5'8'')

Keeping me honest

I'm taking a swimming conditioning class and its pretty small. I'm the fastest person in the class (which isn't saying that much) So usually I don't have someone else that is faster or about the same speed as me. This usually translates into me not swimming as fast as I am capable.

But today was different. There was a woman in the lane adjacent to mine who decided to swim the same workout as us. It was a combination of 150s followed by 200 pulls. The 150s were split into 2x75s, 3x50s, and 6x25s and the 200s were on 3:30. The lady in the next lane was about the same speed as me and I wasn't about to let anyone show me up. I ended up going 3:00 and 2:59s on the pull, which is about 5-10s faster than I usually go. She ended up getting out of the water by the time the last 200 came around and my last rep was a 3:10! :( But having someone faster or as fast as you definitely makes you a faster swimmer! Now I know how Michael Phelps must have felt swimming the 400IM against Ryan Lochte at the Trials! If Lochte wasn't on his tail, there would have been no world record!

Thank God, This Will Only Get Worse

I was reading article in the NYTimes sports magazine, Play, by Stuart Stevens, about his experience in the Etape du Tour in which amateur cyclists can do the same mountain stage through the Pyrenees . Basically, the story outlines how the author became an endurance athlete junkie. And while I don't consider myself an endurance junkie (yet), the article is pretty funny and some of the things he says I can relate to.

Endurance sports brought order to my days. In an ever-confusing and chaotic world in which truth seems elusive, a serious training session or race made it inescapable. Truth, often ugly and disappointing but honest, was impossible to deny.

And the ugly truth is when I'm in the hardest part of my workout, the pain is hard to escape.

But as you get older and life becomes more complicated, it’s easy to start questioning the value of spending huge chunks of your days going in what amounts to glorified circles. One morning you wake up and it suddenly hits you — all the things you could be doing with an extra 15 to 25 hours a week. It’s an entirely rational epiphany and one that must, of course, be crushed immediately.

The key is to reassure yourself that what you are doing is perfectly normal and worthwhile and that it’s all those other people who clearly don’t understand the true meaning of life. I’m sure that’s how Jim Jones or David Koresh kept wavering disciples from leaving the cult — What are you, crazy? We have everything figured out. Here, drink some of this.

My personal garden of Gethsemane came after an encounter between my bike and a cement truck about a month before an Ironman race. Almost inevitably, I’d fallen into a triathlon stage, a near mandatory passage for someone like me — middle-aged, unaccomplished at any specific sport, afflicted with an equipment fetish and in desperate need of new ways to underperform. Why be good at one sport when you can be unimpressive at three?

That last sentence is pretty funny!

And finally ....

“Fun” is what happens when you enter that zone where the ordinary is suspended and the normal rules of time and space are strikingly rearranged. Ask anyone who runs a marathon about the difference between those first miles — the ordinary ones — and the last few, when each stride requires the effort of 10 earlier ones. That’s the Fun Zone, when minutes can seem like hours or, just as capriciously, hours can zoom by in a trance-like state. It’s not why most of us take on absurd endurance endeavors, but I doubt we would keep coming back without those moments. It’s a sweaty sort of transcendence .

I'm hoping to reach the Fun zone in my next triathlon in 2 and half weeks.

Height matters

I'm 6 feet 7 inches tall and by far the tallest person at the pool I swim at. The average height of the Mens' 100M freestyle at the USA swimming Olympic trials was 6'4''. One of those in the race was 6'8'' Matt Grevers, subject of this NYTimes story . His parent's are Dutch and the Dutch national team was pretty much offering him a spot on their Olympic team. But he decided against it, choosing to swim for the USA. In the story it states that he had been focusing his efforts on the 100M free and his coach entered him in the 100M backstroke as a 'warmup'. He ended up punching his ticket to Beijing in that event by finishing second to Aaron Piersol and out-touching Ryan Lochte by a couple hundreth's of a second. The difference?

Undoubtedly, his height.

Phelps interview

Read a good interview/story about Michael Phelps in Men's Health . I think it was from last year. Anyways, the last part struck a chord in me:

"Swimming's done so much for me, more than I can give back to it, and I just want them to feel some part of what I feel," Phelps says. "On my crappiest day, when I'm tired or jetlagged, I jump in that water and just something happens that I can't even put into words. I feel better and stronger, all the soreness goes, and I'm me again, a hundred percent back."

I'll admit, some days when my job is a drag, the only thing that keeps me going is knowing that I'm doing a pool workout that day. All my worries go away and when I get done, I feel much better.

Everyone's favorite ripped 41 year old swimmer

I am still amazed by Dara Torres making her 5th Olympic team. And while I'm never going to be an elite athlete, stories of athletes continuing to compete at an elite level at ages past there athletic prime are inspiring. (Andre Agassi in the later stages of his career comes to mind as well)

From an article in the NY Times Aging Swimmer shows there's hope for rest of us:

At 41, Torres is heading for her fifth Olympics -- despite taking several years off, giving birth just two years ago and undergoing two surgeries within the past eight months.

Her remarkable feat has left armchair athletes doing a double-take. But exercise experts say Torres' success at least partly reflects advances in training -- and that many of us could come closer to similar achievements than we think.

True, genetic makeup certainly has helped Torres compete at an elite level so relatively late in life. As Dr. Kathy Weber, director of women's sports medicine at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, puts it, she has the right ''protoplasm.''

She also has three other key advantages -- opportunity, motivation and incentive to train hard, said exercise physiologist Joel Stager, who directs a science of swimming program at Indiana University.

And those things aren't impossible to achieve, as Torres has demonstrated.

''It shows us what we can do,'' Stager said. ''It's just that most of us don't.''

I'm hoping as far as my swimming ability (and hopefully a lot of other things in my life), the best is yet to come.

Vamos!

Wow. Best. Final. Ever. And I missed it the final set. Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer to win his first Wimbledon title in an epic 4 hour 48 minute match that featured high quality tennis, two rain delays, and denied a chance for Federer to become the first man in the Open era to win 6 straight Wimbledon championships.

I am looking forward to the roof on Centre Court next year because the two rain delays were so aggravating as a fan watching it on TV. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to the players. After the second rain delay at 2-2 in the fifth set and darkness ensuing I was certain that the match would be played out on Monday. So I went to run an errand. Big, big, big mistake. It only lasted 30 minutes and Nadal went on the win the 5th set 9-7 (there are no tie breakers in the last set). I am kicking myself for not staying glued to the TV.

I really am hoping to move to a climate where I can play tennis year round. I loved watching these guys play with such intensity. What a match.

Way to go Venus!

My favorite women's tennis player Venus Williams won her fifth Wimbledon title this morning, beating her younger sister Serena. Both of them were just punishing the ball and it was a high quality match. But Venus moves so well on the court and won in straight sets.

Swimmer of a certain age

Pretty cool article about Dara Torres in the NYTimes Sports magazine. She's in the finals of the women's 100M freestyle today and if she makes it in the top 2, will at 41 be the oldest athlete to be on the team. (For a 41 year old mother she looks pretty good to me ).

I want to be like Mike

I missed last night's Olympic Trials because I was at work :( I missed the 200IM Women's final showdown between Katie Hoff and Natalie Coughlin. Coughlin lead through the backstroke and butterfly, but Hoff caught here on the back half of the race and got first.

I'm far from being a fast swimmer - I think its a monumental accomplishment just to qualify for the Trials. But the competition is cutthroat. Only the top two finishers go to the Olympics. You can swim a best time and that might not even be good enough. In some ways, the pressure is even higher at this event.

Which brings me to this article I read in the NYTimes how Michael Phelps performs so well under pressure .

The people who know Phelps best say he is plenty personable outside of work. But at the pool, he is all business. After winning the 100 breaststroke here with a time that was mildly disappointing, Brendan Hansen talked about wanting to be more like Mike in that respect. It fleshed out Phelps’s greatness to hear Hansen, himself one of the planet’s more accomplished athletes, wish for Phelps’s imperviousness to nervousness.

At any trials there is static, as if from an open microphone, because the whole world is tuning in. The best swimmers ignore it. John Naber, who won four gold medals at the 1976 Olympics, said, “I don’t think Michael even receives the static.”

His body transmits very little. Unlike most of his competitors here, whose faces are tighter than their racing suits, Phelps stood behind the starting blocks Tuesday wearing an expression as impenetrable as the ocean’s depths.

...


Phelps makes winning look ludicrously easy. On occasion he’ll say something that illuminates how hard it really is. Asked what he did Monday night to celebrate his birthday, Phelps replied: “Ate and slept. That’s about it.”

Eat. Sleep. Swim. That’s pretty much the life it takes to be like Mike.

Some days I wish I had that life. It beats working behind a desk.

USA Swimming Olympic Trials Day 3

A good friend who I hadn't heard from in a while called just as the trials coverage began tonight, so I was just kinda half watching them. But the high points of the evening were Aaron Peirsol and Natalie Coughlin setting new WR in the 100M backstroke and Michael Phelps just missing lower his own in the 200M freestyle.

I can't believe how killer Phelps' turns have been. His tight streamlines and dolphin kicks just destroy any hope of swimmers keeping up with him. Its really something to watch. I was also pumped that Peirsol set a WR that Ryan Lochte took from him in 2007. I was expecting Peirsol and Lochte to go 1-2, but Lochte got 3rd and 2nd went to Matt Grevers. Finally, I can't believe how clutch Natalie Coughlin was in her 100M back final. After setting a WR in the prelims, she lowers her own mark tonight by being the first ever to swim in under 59 seconds, coming in at 58.97. Just amazing. When I swam competitively in high school, I used to get so nervous on the starting blocks. Phelps and Coughlin seem to do their best when the stakes are the highest. Its something that I really admire.