Word: heartbreakingly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last, Mystery Train, was released, Presley had connected with a deadeye promoter named Colonel Tom Parker, who landed him a national contract with RCA Records for the outlandish sum of $35,000. In the winter of 1956, not six months after Mystery Train came out, Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel and sent American popular culture into a collective delirium that came, after a while, to be called "the Rock...
Those early Sun sides, typified by the wonderfully spooky, smoky Mystery Train, were arguably the best music Elvis ever made. The more familiar songs, like Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog and Don't Be Cruel are great tunes, joyful and sassy. They have become cultural artifacts, but no amount of historical respectability can fully dim their raucous vitality. They also represent a high point. Only four or five years after they came out, Presley's music had virtually become a patented mixture of heavy breathing and hokum...
...wasn't until I vaguely heard a spectator say "Look, that guy ain't even sweatin'" that I realized what I'd done. Dehydration. Heat stroke bait. A very unhealthy situation, especially with Heartbreak Hill looming ominously down the road...
...Heartbreak Hill starts at the 25-mile mark of the course. With the exception of Wellesley and the finish line, more fans line that intersection than any other part of the course. I could see the crowd about half a mile away, a frightening harbinger of things to come...
Twenty miles is the physical limit of non-destructive running. By that point, a runner has used up all his expendable energy. After that, proteins and muscles start tearing down. That's why Heartbreak Hill is so torturous. If it were during the first ten miles of the race, the insidiously gentle two-mile ascent up to Boston College would raise nary an eyebrow. But instead, it must be dealt with at the runner's true breaking point--when every cell in his body starts screaming surrender...