Sublime Clarity in an Energy Gel
5 stories to get you through the week.
1. The Sublime Clarity of Goo (Defector)
Stephen Lurie was born allergic to eggs, milk, tree nuts, peanuts, shellfish, and other foods. Eventually, he outgrew many of these allergies. However, his ability to feel in tune with his food was always off. That is, until he ate an energy gel during a run:
“A swift transformation of 20-something grams of carbs into pushing legs, pumping arms, twisting core. Unlike the capricious effects of eating throughout my life, the goo allows me to feel the miraculous transformation of food right into body. It doesn’t cause a shock; it doesn’t leave anything behind. It feels like space travel, it feels like the future.”
2. Elite runners live longer (ScienceAlert)
Canadian and Australian researchers analyzed public-health data from the first 200 people to run a mile in under 4 minutes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
The study found these professional runners lived, on average, almost 5 years longer than the general population. The researchers compared the current age or age at death of sub-4 men with the United Nations Life Tables.
Curiously, the runners who notched their sub-4 in the 1960s had greater life expectancy than runners who achieved the feat in successive decades.
The study suggests sustained, high-intensity training over many years could be beneficial (or at least, not bad) for your health.
3. Feel-good moment: Whittni Morgan finds out she’s an Olympian
After winning the women’s 5000m at the Olympic Trials, Elle St. Pierre decided she would only race in the 1500m. Last week, Parker Valby, who finished fourth in the 5K, decided to only contest the 10K.
That means 5th-place finisher Whittni Morgan is going to the Olympics. Watch her coach, Diljeet Taylor, tell her she was going to Paris. Hat tip to Fast Women for sharing this.
Watch Morgan’s 5K finish at 2:41 in this clip filmed from the stands. She’s completely gassed, having left it on all the track even though a 3rd-place Olympic berth had slipped away.
I think the life lesson here is never ever ever ever ever give up. Even when the chips are down. Even when you seem out of the hunt. If you’ve got a bit left in the tank, use it. You never know how things will shake out in the end.
4. Hitler’s Olympics (Revisionist History)
Just in time for Paris, Malcolm Gladwell has released a podcast about the 1936 Olympic Games. It examines the story behind the Games, how countries decided to assemble national teams and compete in Germany despite being quite aware of the National Socialist Party’s grotesque ideas and thuggish policies.
I’ve found it an interesting listen. I’m particularly glad to have learned a little about the life of journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was granted an interview with Adolf Hitler and warned about the moral compromises of legitimizing the Nazis. She also wrote the most savage takedown of Hitler I’ve ever come across:
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”
5. The Truth Behind the Slouching Epidemic (New Yorker)
Rebecca Mead reviews a new book by Beth Linker about the history of modern anxiety over posture. “Poor posture” became a contagion that damaged not only one’s individual health but also that of the nation itself.
This isn’t to say that poor posture doesn’t cause medical issues, only that concern about posture are among the “diseases of civilization,” ongoing anxieties resting on a mythology that we’ve fallen from the ideal human ancestry of the hunter-gatherer.
This is the same myth that supports the arguments in books like Born to Run, which romanticize barefoot running as a cure for present-day problems by appealing to a glorified past.
What I’m listening to
Princess Mononoke soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi
I love running to film scores. So rediscovering the Princess Mononoke soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi has been a delight.
I was thunderstruck the first time I watched Princess Mononoke. The anime is so different from the crisp Disney-fied cartoons I grew up with. The film’s characters are complex, its villains morally complicated. And the environments were naturalistic, so green and forested, that it inspired me to apply on a whim (and unsuccessfully) to the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.
The main theme’s beautiful upwardly lifting strings are straightforwardly cinematic, but you’ll also hear motifs that remind of video games from the 1990s, suggesting both game and film composers were drawing from the same cultural milieu.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination . . . Surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
— Winston Churchill, October 29, 1941, speech at Harrow School
Thinking #2 is actually “people of the 50s, 60s, and 70s lived longer if they did not smoke.”
I've always wondered if no2 is actually "people who live longer are more likely to be able to be elite athletes"