weightlifting in the park

...or, How to get private space in a public park

Labor Day weekend, our neighbors smoked us out with a big burnpile, so we took to the park. Nice diversion. Fresh air, quiet open space. Yeah, it gets private pretty quick because people aren't really ready to see this going on. It started raining on my last set.


Tips for working out in the field

1. Take minimum equipment. This isn't the time for fiddling with lots of small plates.
2. Take a pen with your work out log.
3. Ideally, take a spotter who can act as a rack, and cameraman if you blog.
4. Take a chair for your spotter.
   
5. Take extra batteries for the camera (Doh!)
   

Ohio August pics

Back from a lovely visit to Ohio.

Brant apple orchard

Had a gorgeous visit to Brant apple orchard/agri-tourism biz while in Ohio. Sunny, not too hot... cicadas, pond.... Turnovers, cider slushy. Mmmm.

Nation's longest covered bridge opens in Ohio

Sneaked a peek at the nation's longest covered bridge before opening. Star Beacon article by the esteemed Carl Feather. "The new bridge is 613 feet long and cost $8 million. It is No. 17 for Ashtabula County and the longest in the United States."

summer sights

summer work out

Esther Phiri breaks barriers for grrrl boxers in Zambia

Esther Phiri holds the Women's International Boxing Federation (WIBF) super featherweight world title, her third title title. Her managers hope to position her for a fight in Europe or the United States. Meanwhile, she made the Wall Street Journal, of all places, as a barrier-breaking beacon of hope for the women of Zambia.

Joseph Schatz, Wall Street Journal -- For over a century boxing has been known as a long-shot avenue to success for athletic strivers from poor areas. But Esther Phiri's rise from the slums to stardom as Zambia's first female boxing champion sounds extreme even by her sport's standards. It is also a window into the challenges and opportunities of the sports business in Africa – and how Ms. Ms. Phiri and her corporate promoters have parlayed her prowess in the ring into the highest profile sports endorsement in the history of this peaceful but stubbornly poor southern African country.

Photo credit Landov, Wall Street Journal

Prison work out

Here's a distilled, intense full-body work out that works in the most austere conditions - the prison work out, and it's written with some intimate insights. From Mark Sisson's Daily Apple, by way of Straight to the Bar.

It’s intense, it builds muscle, it requires that you use your local environment and resources to get fit, and there is a survival-of-the-fittest aspect here.

Olympian: are you a boy or a grrrl?

Lab Is Set to Test the Gender of Some Female Athletes

NY TIMES - "Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate “suspect” female athletes, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported."

"The lab is similar to ones set up at previous Olympics in Sydney and Athens, and will draw on the resources of the Peking Union Medical College Hospital to evaluate an athlete’s external appearance, hormones and genes."

The article continues with some titillating background.

"The lab is a relic of an earlier Olympic era, when every female athlete was required to submit to a sex-verification test before competing in the Games. The tests emerged in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering male athletes in women’s events to gain an edge. At first, women were asked to parade nude before a panel of doctors to verify their sex. "