Word: amateurness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When I began training last year for my first marathon, my running partner Dave Freedholm, an experienced amateur distance runner, impressed on me the need to vigilantly avoid dehydration. His drink of choice was Accelerade. Like Gatorade, the original sports drink, it's packed with sugars and sodium to provide energy and replace the electrolytes depleted in sweat. But it also contains protein, which he said would help my muscles repair themselves more quickly after the punishing training runs he took...
...There's the standard eviscerated kangaroo, but also an emu less than a meter away, head tucked under its wing as if sheltering from the wind that fluffs its feathers. Beside it is a foul-smelling black-and-white smear that might have been a penguin, for all the amateur pathologist can make...
...Arneth, a 70-year-old former crocodile hunter who goes by the name of Wolf, is reminiscing about the great Normanton rocket launch of 1957. He was among the party of inebriated amateur scientists gathered by the river that night. They'd heard on the radio that the Soviets had just put the Sputnik spacecraft into orbit. "We thought, We can build a rocket,'' Arneth says. Commandeering a welder, they made a long cylinder from three 44-gallon drums, then rigged up a nose cone from an old hopper. "They got an old car seat and put that...
...Pound sound predictable and sentimental, and it's definitely not predictable. You'll draw a standing eight count (see?) after the plot twist on page 45. You'll learn why boxers grow out the nails on their thumbs and forefingers (it helps getting the tape off) and how amateur gloves differ from pro and why exactly fancy footwork matters and what vodka tastes like hot from the trunk...
...desirability of not kicking a man when he is down. The wonder of modern professional sports, with their teenage soccer millionaires, mass migrations to overseas tournaments and stud fees running into six figures, is not that cheating should dominate the headlines but that so many elements of the bygone amateur ethic should survive. After all, if international football were entirely corrupt, a player sent off for charging down his opponent in sight of goal would be applauded off the pitch. That it isn't - quite - reduced to these depths is a mark of its enduring moral core and the complexity...