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Thread: A Middle Aged Adolescent (who cannot possibly be the only one)

  1. #261
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    • starting strength seminar april 2024
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    It is indeed true that a person can be offended, even infuriated, by a professional football team. I speak from experience.
    I’m not talking about the Redskins - just yet. Their retirement of that offensive name is big headlines around here, though mainly from the standpoint of an amused sort of pity. They’re like those idiots you see on the side of the highway struggling to retie a mattress to the roof of their car. Really, they had no idea that thing was going to come off at 60 miles an hour?

    I have more experience with the Cleveland Browns, which means I’ve learned the sad truth that disappointment on the field is a reflection of what’s happening in the office.
    My naďveté led to a broken heart. Here I was in a new town; I figured I’d get into the spirit of things and be a fan. Cleveland was already proud of the Cavs and the Indians, both of whom were winners. When it came to the Browns, people knew better.
    I had arrived just in time for their 0 and 16 season and found myself shocked at the constant betrayal. Every week, I’d do my part in good faith, wearing my Browns T-shirt while gutting out my 5’s; if these guys had prepped with half my intensity, they wouldn’t be klutzing around like the Keystone Cops, their entire offense encircled and driven in against their poor quarterback, DeShone Kizer, who would cough the ball straight upwards as the entire assemblage spilled over in a giant, helpless pile.
    I’m out, I decided. This is not a healthy relationship. It’s like pouring my heart into a love affair with a girl who doesn’t give a damn. My first thought was to run back to safe embrace of the Steelers, but upon reflection I realized life moves on. This is the price of a new commitment: patience and hope.
    Something had to change. Owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam hired John Dorsey, a general manager with a track record of establishing a championship programs in Green Bay and Kansas City. We’re next, thought Cleveland. A dynasty could take a few years, which is fine. Just being competitive will be awesome. Dorsey transformed the roster, drafting quarterback Baker Mayfield, trading for wide receiver Jarvis Landry, and remaking the running game, for starters.
    2018 was not without its growing pains, which made the triumphs all the more exciting. I’ve described this before, but when rookie Baker Mayfield was dramatically called into action for the first time, the sheer audacity with which he gunned balls down the field was breathtaking, as were the resounding smacks of the ball striking receivers’ pads. No one had told him that this was not how Browns behave. The team marched down the field. Grown men wept.
    I’ve also said that I think that the coaching staff was so undone by the loss of starter Tyrod Taylor and the arrival of Mayfield, as the crowd thundered with earsplitting volume everywhere around them, that Mayfield and some young assistant coach freelanced an entirely seat-of-the-pants game plan.
    That would be the defining characteristic of 2018. The Browns were quickly hamstrung once more by the coach who had led the 0 and 16 campaign, but he was fired a few games later. It took some time, but football as insurgency returned. My theory was that opposing defenses had the Browns’ pass routes figured out. Mayfield would drop back, but everyone would be covered, so he’d be sacked as he hoped someone could get open. Everyone blamed the offensive line.
    ‘Screw the pattern. Cut across the middle,’ Mayfield must have started saying, or a receiver would come back to the huddle with, ‘I can beat this guy long.’
    They were drawing up plays in the dirt or in practice each week. The Browns’ transformation was the result of a daring recklessness - which is one thing on the field but quite another when it comes to a coaching staff. 2019 was a disaster. As a journalist puts it: “As soon as the Browns began the regular season, it was clear that [coach] Kitchens was in over his head. His use of timeouts and challenges was abysmal. His situational playcalling was horrible. The offense never seemed to be in sync. Calls were made late in the play clock, causing many delay of game penalties and robbing Mayfield of the ability to perform pre-snap reads and checks at the line. Players were constantly out of position, receivers ran the wrong routes, everything felt rushed and disorganized.”
    At the end of a dreadful season, it became known that John Dorsey’s choice of an inexperienced Freddie Kitchens as head coach created a great deal of contention in the office. Kitchens was gone - and Dorsey was gone soon after, leaving Cleveland fans wondering if the Haslams can shore up a foundation beneath the team - if there’s a 2020 season.

    When I moved back to DC, it was pretty easy to overlook the [Redacteds], as they’re now called. They’re dismissed by everyone in town anyway, as the paper seems to have as many stories about dissatisfaction and dysfunction in the office as it does on-field misery. Coaches and front office personnel have come and gone. Quarterback Alex Smith broke his leg in grotesque fashion during a game, and tackle Trent Williams sat out for an entire year, refusing to play for an organization that had minimized the danger of what turned out to be a cancerous skin growth.
    The subject of dropping ‘Redskins’ as a name has come up a few times in recent years, but owner Dan Snyder has steadfastly refused to consider it.
    Of course it’s racist, but they’re such a low rent operation, nobody in DC has cared enough to complain. The stadium is largely empty during home games - although when the Cowboys came to town this past season, the place was packed, with the vast majority of the of the crowd cheering for Dallas.
    This morning, an investigative report in THE WASHINGTON POST details long standing sexual harassment and verbal abuse of female employees in the team offices.

    Like fish, teams rot from the head. In the wake of the George Floyd killing, Snyder and his last snickering confederates found the organization being managed from without. Nike and Amazon stopped selling Redskins gear. Pepsi informed them they were losing interest, and Fed Ex, sponsor of the stadium itself, threatened to withdraw their name and support if the slur ‘Redskins’ was not replaced.
    Reluctantly, the team took to Twitter to announce the inevitable.
    That they could not make this decision for themselves does not bode well for the players, coaches, or fans, regardless of the new name and all the excitement sure to follow. That’s the lesson from the Browns: leadership tells the tale.

    (8, 5, & 2 and 3, 2, 1 rotation)
    Week of: 7/20/20 2 and 1 week
    MONDAY
    1. Squat: 3 sets of 2: Tom 425
    2. Romanian deadlifts: 4 sets of 5 reps Tom 377.5 JC 180
    3. Power Cleans (3x3) light JC 75 - 95
    3. 4 sets of heavy shrugs 485
    4. reverse hypers (3x10)
    5. abs; banded pulldowns

    TUESDAY
    1. Inclined bench press: 3 sets of 2 Tom 215
    2. Bench press: 2 sets of 8 Tom 200, then add 50# 2 sets of 2 chains
    3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
    4. 4 sets: 8 lying triceps extensions or 15-20 push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    Conditioning (second session)
    sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)

    THURSDAY
    1. Deadlift: work up to a set of 1* reps Tom 515
    2. Deadlift: back off sets - 90% of top set; 2 sets of same* reps Tom 460
    3. Squats: (90% of Monday’s weight) 3 sets of 2 Tom 382.5
    4. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
    5. abs: hollow rockers

    FRIDAY
    1. Inclined Bench Press: (10 sets of 3) Tom 152.5, mini bands
    2. Press: 4 sets: Tom 155 -180
    3. Pull ups (5x10)
    4. 4 sets Dips or push ups
    5. (JC) Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5
    6. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups

    SATURDAY - Conditioning
    swim 1 mile

  2. #262
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nunedog View Post
    They’re like those idiots you see on the side of the highway struggling to retie a mattress to the roof of their car. Really, they had no idea that thing was going to come off at 60 miles an hour?
    Gold

  3. #263
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    In the summer of 1984 or 1985, when I was home from college, I was invited to the home of Mark Cameron, the weightlifter of renown, the youngest and lightest American to clean and jerk 500 pounds. The occasion was a beers-and-barbecue birthday bash for our coach, Joe Mills, who had brought a young Cameron to national prominence and whom I was seeing as often as I could when I was home at various points of the year. Cameron at the time was out of weightlifting, married to a pretty and pregnant blonde, and working in marketing for Anheuser-Busch (I think). He was a good guy, taking the time to chat and say he was happy to hear that Joe had ‘high hopes’ for my career.
    When the beers kicked in and the sun went down, the fireworks came out, and because Olympic weightlifters were involved, things had to progress from simply naughty to illegal and ultimately the irrationally dangerous, which means bottle rockets large and small morphed into M-80’s and blockbusters - and then training grenades boosted from the National Guard. These were massive blasts, exploding in four foot tall, millisecond domes of light that would sear into your retinas, as well as deep booms that made you jump in spite of yourself. I was up on a wooden deck watching from some distance, hoping that some of my competitors would blow their arms off, and I could move up in the standings.
    The subject of the 1980 Summer Olympic boycott had not come up, and inside Cameron’s house I did not see any display of mementos, despite the fact that he had been on the 1976 Olympic Team and medaled in separate Pan Am Games and a World Championships. However, he and I did have one of those, ‘Hey - you want to see something?’ moments in his house. From a nearby shelf, he produced a roll of Jimmy Carter toilet paper, a real roll imprinted with miniature portraits. ‘That’s for not letting us go to the Games,’ Cameron said.

    This memory has been stirred by various reflections marking the 40th anniversary of the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about this, which I never got around to as it slipped into the past. Standing in Mark Cameron’s kitchen, I laughed at the roll of toilet paper but felt no sense of any great tragedy or crime perpetrated against him. A major drag, but it had to happen, so far as I knew. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was serious. Besides, the Reagan 80’s were so transformative that Jimmy Carter was ancient history.
    To be fair to Cameron, he might have just been getting some more mileage out of an old joke. This might have been just a knickknack on the shelf; he was over the disappointment and saw the big picture. Maybe he still was furious, the way people take their politics personally nowadays. I honestly don’t know - but he was a perfectly cool dude at his party.

    In an April 8 USA TODAY article, a number of athletes, after recalling the bitterness of the time, also found themselves getting over their own disappointment in view of the postponement of the 2020 Games. They called themselves ‘pawns in a political game,’ and some sued the US Olympic Committee at the time, to no avail. Some had stories of failing to make the 1984 team, and their Olympic dreams coming to naught. Still, they went on to express sympathy for the 2020 athletes and the disruption in their athletic careers, if not lives.
    Hurdler Edwin Moses is quite outspoken in a teamusa.org article from July of this year: ‘We paid a horrible price,’ he says. Moses was the odds-on favorite for gold in 1980, yet he feels, “We were abused politically in the way that we didn’t get to go. And we weren’t really honored properly.” Despite a gold medal at the 1976 Games in Montreal, winning 122 consecutive races between the years 1977 and 1987, including gold in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Moses feels the loss acutely. “It was all futile,” he said of the boycott. “It was all done for political reasons. It had nothing to do with sports, nothing to do with the Olympics. We as Olympians just got totally caught up in it.”

    I wonder if Mr. Moses is willing to reconsider those statements in the grand scheme of things and in light of the effects of this pandemic, from the thousands who’ve lost their lives to the hundreds of thousands of high school and college athletes whose Fall and Winter sports seasons are being canceled. They too are experiencing disruptions in athletic careers they take no less seriously than he did his.
    Moses is not wrong. The athletes of 1980 were indeed ‘caught up’ in world events; they absolutely were ‘pawns’ in a larger game. From POLITICO: “The sight of Soviet tanks rumbling into Afghanistan in December 1979 can easily be regarded as the moment the stage was set for the U.S. boycott . . . . While Americans saw themselves making economic concessions in return for good Soviet behavior and negotiating from a position of equality with Moscow, the Kremlin considered the concessions a reward for its military buildup. It was against this backdrop that Kremlin leaders decided to make their move in Afghanistan.”
    The Soviets were building bases from which bombers could reach the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf, and thereby cut off US oil supplies. With national security at stake, Carter had little choice but to demonstrate similar resolve. The Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser, a former correspondent in Moscow, wrote, “[The Soviets] have been treating this Olympiad as one of the great events of their modern history.” A boycott, he argued, “would be a tremendous blow to Soviet prestige; but perhaps more significant, the collapse of this Olympiad would send a genuine shock through Soviet society.”

    The principle seemed sound, that US participation in the Moscow Olympics would be seen as an implicit approval of the Soviets’ aggression in Afghanistan. However, the boycott didn’t seem to have any real effect in altering Soviet behavior, which vindicates the point the athletes tried to make at the time. Edwin Moses’ claims of political abuse and futility are probably intended purely in the context of a needless price paid by the athletes of 1980, but he’s not likely to arouse a great deal of sympathy in view of current events. This won’t be as profound a remembrance as he might have imagined.

    ‘Get over it,’ Joe Mills would say to Edwin Moses - and which he probably did say to Mark Cameron. In Joe’s day, the 1940 Olympics were canceled, after which his athletic career was further disrupted by having to walk across Eastern Europe with George Patton and the Third Army. (Joe was not on the Olympic team but probably had been in the running. The 132-pound class would have been represented by John Terry - himself quite a story - a lifter of whom Joe spoke quite highly.)

    Now the athletes of 2020, Olympic and otherwise, join those of 1980 alongside Joe Mills, staring into the fire as night falls. ‘Go blow up a grenade if that’ll make you feel better,’ he’d say, ‘but tomorrow will be here soon enough.’

    (8, 5, & 2 and 3, 2, 1 rotation)
    Week of: 7/27/20 8 and 3 week
    MONDAY
    1. Squat: 5, 1, 1, 5, 5; with 80, 90% 377.5, 427.5
    2. Romanian deadlifts: 4 sets of 5 reps Tom 377.5x3, 380 JC 182.5
    3. Power Cleans (3x3) light JC 75 - 95
    3. 4 sets of heavy shrugs 485
    4. reverse hypers (3x10)
    5. abs; banded pulldowns

    TUESDAY
    1. Inclined bench press: 3 sets of 8 Tom 177.5
    2. Bench press: 2 sets of 8 Tom 202.5; add 50 lbs - 2x2
    3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
    4. 4 sets: 8 lying triceps extensions or 15-20 push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    Conditioning (second session)
    sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)

    THURSDAY
    1. Deadlift: work up to a set of 3* reps Tom 467.5
    2. Deadlift: back off sets - 90% of top set; 2 sets of same* reps Tom 420
    3. Squats: (90% of Monday’s weight) 4 sets of 5 Tom 340 bands
    4. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
    5. abs: hollow rockers

    FRIDAY
    1. Inclined Bench Press: (10 sets of 3) Tom 155, mini bands
    2. Press: 4 sets Tom 160 - 180
    3. Pull ups (5x10)
    4. 4 sets Dips or push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5
    6. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups

    SATURDAY - Conditioning
    swim 1 mile

  4. #264
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    It didn’t happen the way the movies would have you believe.
    The U-Boat sights a convoy on the horizon and watches as the ships cross the periscope’s field of vision from one side to the other. Upon choosing a fat target, the captain would bark a series of bearings and ranges to the firing plot, who would respond with a solution, a bearing at which to fire their torpedoes, really a vector factoring in the speeds and distances between predator and prey. The resulting explosion was at once a display of marksmanship on the part of the Germans as well as the sheer helplessness of Allied ships.
    For a while, even the Royal Navy and the merchant fleet thought this was how it happened. When a ship in the convoy was struck, all eyes turned outward, scanning with binoculars off to the sides of the convoy’s track. The destroyers raced outward, pinging with their ASDIC’s, an early form of sonar, but could not find the enemy.
    It turns out, they weren’t there.

    This is among the things I’ve been learning while lifting weights in recent weeks, by way of podcasts on my phone. Turning the tide in the Battle of The Atlantic is owed in no small part to a group of women in their late teens and early 20’s, who became experts in Game Theory and puzzled out, with wooden toys on a vast floor, what the U-Boats were in fact doing, and how their tactics could be anticipated and defeated. I’ve also come to understand that not only did William Shakespeare not write the works attributed to him, neither he nor Edward DeVere, who was the author, are buried in Stratford upon Avon. The gravestone says as much, which is clear once you understand the considerable amount of cryptology surrounding the Bard’s identity. Finally, I was not convinced that the CIA wrote the Scorpions’ rock anthem ‘Winds of Change.’ I’m not sure the podcast host was, either. If the CIA did, that was a Hell of a cultural propaganda coup hastening the twilight of the Soviet Union, and while the circumstantial case is intriguing, the story dies for a lack of information.
    These have been fantastic escapes from everyday news, particularly about the coronavirus, which has been relentless, repetitive, and plagued by a lack of information, a misery eclipsed only by the shocking number of people who’ve thought they were clever enough to tempt fate.

    In 1941, England was on the verge of being starved into submission. German U-Boats were sinking merchant ships faster than they could be replaced, and food was among the critical supplies lost at sea. At the same time, a Navy Commander by the name of Gilbert Roberts was in similarly dire straits. Retired by the Navy for tuberculosis, he searched in vain for a sense of purpose as his marriage and psyche crumbled. That was until one day when the phone rang and the Admiralty informed him that not only was he being reinstated, he was expected to be in full uniform at a series of meetings in short order. Somebody had remembered that he was a skilled strategist with a knack for gaming. He was headed to Liverpool to run the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, it was explained to him. Roberts would be starting from scratch, and his staff would be entirely young, female trainees, Navy Wrens, all of which would looked upon as a dubious enterprise, he was warned. Still, Roberts was treated to lunch, shown around the headquarters building, and eventually led to an office where he was motioned inside.
    From behind a desk, none other than Prime Minister Winston Churchill looked up at him. ‘Find out what is happening and sink the U-Boats,’ he commanded.
    Roberts set up shop in the abandoned third floor of an old mercantile exchange that was serving as a Naval headquarters. His staff of Wrens had been trained only in plotting, like a great many of their peers who were serving in operations centers around the country. They were new to gaming, however. A great expanse of floor was set up to represent the Atlantic Ocean and marked with an enormous grid. When Roberts and the Wrens first started messing around with their little wooden ships, they reenacted recent attacks, based on after-action reports.
    Hang on, they realized almost right away. If this boat sank first, and then that one second, then the U-Boat couldn’t have been firing from some distance off to the side. They were inside the convoy.
    Roberts’ dubious enterprise had divined what was actually happening at sea: at night, when visibility was poor and any radar plots only showed a varying, fuzzy set of blips anyway, U-Boats would sail into the convoy and get into optimum position for attack. U-Boats had to do this, as they weren’t really submarines. They were surface craft capable of diving. Underwater, they ran on battery power, not very fast and not for very long.
    The WATU also surmised that if a U-Boat did spot a convoy crossing the horizon, the very first thing it did was contact others, so that a ‘wolfpack’ of them could attack at once. That first U-Boat might indeed stay off to the side, but as the pack started running with the herd, its role was to coordinate the action.
    It was a young Wren, Jean Laidlaw, who created the ‘Raspberry’ countermeasure, named for the rude gesture, a thumbing of the nose at Hitler. U-Boats inside the convoy would fire their torpedoes at close range and then dive, turning to flee astern or simply letting the convoy run right over them. Laidlaw’s Raspberry had the escorts peel backward and form a broad line behind the convoy, where they were likely to find and depth charge the attackers.
    Soon, Roberts and the Wrens were running a course attended by scores of Naval officers. They had perfected the game, which included rolls of the dice, a timer, and maneuvers to choose from, such as diving, surfacing, turning, firing, etc. More than a few august, snooty sea captains were surprised to have their clocks cleaned in war games by 20-year-old girls. Roberts developed quite the flair for showmanship in his debriefing lectures - but the Germans got the worst of it.

    Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the works attributed to the person or, at the very least, the name of Willian Shakespeare. I had heard this theory before but as an English major been aware of the fallacies involved in drawing connections between an artist’s life and the content of his works. However, scholar Alexander Waugh, grandson of author Evelyn Waugh, takes a very different approach, presenting some very complex de-encryptions to prove that Oxford’s fellow writers put the record straight, though not in plain sight.
    This I saw in YouTube videos running on my phone as I lifted, as opposed to podcasts, as Waugh demonstrates the deconstruction of elaborately hidden coded messages. Hidden in the dedication to the Sonnets are numerous messages in the form of anagrams in the shape of crosses, which can be located if the text is laid out on a grid. Quickly we see that in ‘Westminster’s South Cross ‘ile’ lies Edward DeVere.’ He’s not officially recorded as being there; Waugh says his body was moved some years after his death.
    The strangely spaced and punctuated title page for the sonnets is a geometric triangulation, which, when laid over a plan of Westminster Abbey, places DeVere’s grave in Poet’s Corner, beside those of Beaumont, Spenser, and Chaucer - which is exactly what it says on the bogus grave at Stratford upon Avon, as encoded by poet Ben Jonson.
    To buy the premise of all this de-coding, you have to assume that a great deal of en-coding was done. Cryptology, or the use of ciphers, was indeed extensive in the 16th and 17th Centuries. “Diplomatic and commercial business throughout the medieval and early modern periods depended heavily on handwritten codes and ciphers,” according to the Folger Library. Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, used ciphers; Sir Francis Bacon devised a powerful two-letter system to represent every letter in the alphabet, an approach that formed the basis of military cryptanalysis classes taught in the early 20th Century.

    I’m sure that members who click around between training logs on this website have noticed the presence of a cipher.

    The ‘Winds of Change’ podcast is great fun, like a rippin’ spy novel, a globetrotting adventure featuring rock stars, drug smugglers, spies, dinner parties, a charter flight to Moscow full of inebriated musicians (‘Ozzy pissed himself!’) and a Soviet Union on its last wobbly legs, taken down by a power ballad from a West German band called The Scorpions. You’ve heard this song, especially with its famous whistling introduction:
    “Take me to the magic of the moment
    On a glory night
    Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
    In the wind of change . . . “
    Acting on a tip, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who has written about the National Security Agency, pursues the idea that this song was actually composed by the CIA as part of its Cold War ideological battle against Communism. If it’s true, then it’s probably one of the most successful CIA plots in history, as the song became a monster hit with surprisingly deep resonance across Western and Eastern Europe.
    The CIA certainly had the motive and opportunity to pull it off, especially in view of how they had previously penetrated the Soviet Union with copies of the banned novel DOCTOR ZHIVAGO as well as sponsored a tour featuring jazz singer Nina Simone. Interestingly, folks actually connected to the agency wanted nothing to do with this story. The memorable figures in this wild saga of hair-band festivals - which might have been fronts - guys who must have been on the payroll, also kept the CIA at arm’s length, sticking to elaborate stories of the wildly illegal or immoral ways they were caught up in the action.
    (continued below)
    Last edited by Nunedog; 07-31-2020 at 07:07 AM.

  5. #265
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    (from above)

    Ultimately Keefe finds himself adrift, not knowing what to believe and in awe of the power of information - or disinformation. Intelligence is a game of probability. To find the U-Boats, these are the patterns to follow, says Jean Laidlaw. Waugh says that any coded revelation must be part of a set of three, for the sake of verification. Keefe doesn’t have a way to test his wild theory.

    The US is about to be presented with a pretty wild idea about the coronavirus: paper at-home saliva tests that cost about a buck apiece and produce results within 15 minutes. The good news is that this is the only way we can manage putting kids in school or holding an NFL season. The bad news is that the test isn’t quite as sensitive as the lab tests used so far - but in view of the power of reasoning demonstrated above, we have a fighting chance.
    What’s the problem with students or athletes gathered in close quarters? Spreading the disease.
    Consider a graph of the typical history of a viral infection. Time is on the X-axis, and viral load - or transmissibility - is on the Y-axis. A person first catches the virus, and viral load increases exponentially to where the amount of particles they’re spreading around is quite high. The curve stays at full height for a day or two, and then it drops exponentially and gets pretty low, running along the bottom of the graph for some time.

    The big news, from the gang at Harvard, is that the threshold of transmissibility - where people can give each other the virus - is actually pretty narrow, up in the peak of that curve. The paper tests, even if they’re not as sensitive as the fancy lab tests, are good enough to catch people when they’re there.
    This means that everyday, kids going to school can give themselves the test - and stop themselves from going in if they get a positive, even when they don’t feel anything but would spread the virus like mad.
    Just like Laidlaw said, you don’t need to scan the entire ocean; just look where the U-Boats are likely to be.

    Can a school trust 200 or 500 families to be as disciplined as a tactical gaming unit or a crypto department? That’s the question - but, but - as history promised, we can win this.

    (8, 5, & 2 and 3, 2, 1 rotation)
    Week of: 8/3/20 5 and 2 week
    MONDAY
    1. Squat: 3 sets of 5 Tom 395
    2. Romanian deadlifts: 4 sets of 5 reps Tom 377.5x2, 380x2
    3. Power Cleans (3x3) light JC 75 - 95
    3. 4 sets of heavy shrugs 485
    4. reverse hypers (3x10)
    5. abs; banded pulldowns

    TUESDAY
    1. Inclined bench press: 3 sets of 5 Tom 197.5
    2. Bench press: 4 sets; 2x 8, 205, add 50#: 2 sets of 2
    3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
    4. 4 sets: 8 lying triceps extensions or 15-20 push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    Conditioning (second session)
    sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)

    THURSDAY
    1. Deadlift: work up to a set of 2* reps Tom 497.5
    2. Deadlift: back off sets - 90% of top set; 2 sets of same* reps Tom 447.5
    3. Squats: (90% of Monday’s weight) 5 sets of 3 Tom 355 bands
    4. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
    5. abs: hollow rockers

    FRIDAY
    1. Inclined Bench Press: (10 sets of 3) Tom 155.5, mini bands
    2. Press: 4 sets Tom 155 - 180
    3. Pull ups (5x10)
    4. 4 sets Dips or push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    6. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups

    SATURDAY - Conditioning
    swim 1 mile

  6. #266
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    Washington, DC
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    Kids are going to have to play on their own this Fall.
    I’m opting for a modern, electronically enhanced version of self sufficiency as opposed to being purely Old School, but as the SARS-COV-2 pandemic shutters classrooms once more and cancels the Fall sports season, kids can get together on their own - and where they might need help with skill development, the net has plenty of information available at their fingertips. Grown ups will be the most expendable part of athletics in the near future.
    Decades ago, back in my day, kids rode their bikes or hoofed it to the nearest park or school field, chose teams, and got going. The same thing can happen now for football, basketball, soccer - whatever the game. First of all, around here the County took down all the public basketball hoops in the initial panic over the disease, so I hope they’re back up, since the swingset and jungle gym playgrounds are open once more. Secondly, this can be pretty easy, contacting a bunch of players by way of a cell phone app and setting a time to meet.

    The only thing I wonder is whether kids will have the motivation to do this. A week ago, as I drove through the neighborhood, I noticed a handful of high school kids running down the sidewalk while carrying medicine balls; on my way back I spotted them in a driveway hitting power cleans, so somebody’s set up a garage full of CrossFit stuff. I wonder if this is because kids are dying for some kind of physical action, even if it’s home grown. The flip side of this question is whether kids will slack off because there are no seasons or practices to train for. Will the performance training center con men be gaining or losing business during the shutdown?

    At the house where I grew up, the distance from our back patio to the edge of the property was 65 feet, which happens to be the distance between the blue line and the goal in hockey. It also happened that our backyard was edged by an old stone wall about four feet high, on top of which was a six-foot stockade fence, made of narrow wooden slats standing closely together. This is where I’d practice my shots. I can remember the very first time I heaved a wobbly wrist shot across the lawn and hit the bottom of the stone wall on the fly. In the months and years that followed, I went through a dozen or so sticks, slinging wrist shots and blasting boomers. The boomers started to rise, so I busted a lot of the boards in the fence with shots I’d wager were doing 70 or 80 miles an hour. In a game once, when I wound up for a boomer from the point, the goalie simply dove out of the way. I missed the goal, of course, and the puck cracked against the glass behind it like a rifle shot, but I appreciated the gesture.

    On YouTube, a young, cool dude by the name of Deestroying features videos of high school football players in 5-on-5 or 7-on-7 games that are impressive displays of ball handling, quickness, and skill. Teams take turns starting at the 40 or 50 yard line. There is no line, in terms of blocking or rushing; this is purely a quarterback’s gunning the ball to a receiver who’s broken free to cross one way or another, or lofting a long shot to the end zone to a receiver whose entire pattern has separated him from a defender. These are amazingly skillful scrambles which would remind you of playground hoop games, where the ball moves very fast between sure hands and guys making quick cuts.
    There’s more than meets the eye with Deestroying. (The high school stuff is probably where he started. You have to choose your videos well, since he’s veered into a certain amount of celebrity self importance.) He’s young, funny, trash-talking, and quite the athlete himself, busy plugging products here and there, and has surprising access to a number of NFL stars like Tyreek Hill, Antonio Brown, Marquise Goodwin, and Dez Bryant. The tutorials he gets on route running and defending from these guys as well as an NFL coach are tremendous. It’s all about keeping your feet underneath you in small, quick steps, the better to have the leverage to change direction quickly in a game of inches, where a quarterback has only a tiny window in which to place the ball.
    This led me to an analysis of the mechanics of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Tyreek Hill, the fastest player in the NFL. He’s compactly built, and his short, choppy running means each foot is in contact with the ground for 80% of a given stride, which, with his bent-legged style, makes for enormous force imparted to the ground for acceleration and change of direction.

    The point is that any kid with a cell phone has access to fantastic information on running and defending pass routes, skills he can work on by himself or as he messes around with friends in these unstructured games. In fact, one can go to YouTube and type in, ‘Learn Basketball Skills,’ and get all kinds of videos on dribbling, shooting, and driving to the hoop. ‘Basketball’ can be replaced with ‘soccer,’ ‘lacrosse,’ ‘’baseball,’ ‘field hockey,’ and ‘swimming.’ I even got results for ‘ping pong.’
    All is not lost this season. Valuable information is available to kids doping around in their backyards the way I was once upon a time.
    If I had a brain back then, I would have gotten a square of plywood that I could drop in various places around the yard, from which to shoot the puck and work on my accuracy. I just didn’t have YouTube in 1980, to take advantage of people in the know.

    (8, 5, & 2 and 3, 2, 1 rotation)
    Week of: 8/10/20 2 and 1 week
    MONDAY
    1. Squat: 3 sets of 2: Tom 427.5
    2. Romanian deadlifts: 4 sets of 5 reps Tom 377.5, 380x3
    3. Power Cleans (3x3) light JC 75 - 95
    3. 4 sets of heavy shrugs 485
    4. reverse hypers (3x10)
    5. abs; banded pulldowns

    TUESDAY
    1. Inclined bench press: 3 sets of 2 Tom 217.5
    2. Bench press: 2 sets of 8 Tom 207.5, then add 50# 2 sets of 2 chains
    3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
    4. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    Conditioning (second session)
    sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)

    THURSDAY
    1. Deadlift: work up to a set of 1* reps Tom 517.5
    2. Deadlift: back off sets - 90% of top set; 2 sets of same* reps Tom 465
    3. Squats: (90% of Monday’s weight) 3 sets of 2 Tom 385
    4. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
    5. abs: hollow rockers

    FRIDAY
    1. Inclined Bench Press: (10 sets of 3) Tom 157.5, mini bands
    2. Press: 4 sets: Tom 160-185
    3. Pull ups (5x10)
    4. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5
    5. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups

    SATURDAY - Conditioning
    swim 1 mile

  7. #267
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    That U-Boat story should be a movie... I’d see it.

    Nice log Nunedog.

  8. #268
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    Hey, ColoWayno, thanks for the comment. That would make for a great movie. Bravery comes in a couple of forms: perseverance to keep working on a seemingly impossible challenge, and faith enough to change tactics when you think you’re on to something. I think we relate to this because strength training is a similar blend of analysis and effort, critical qualities in a time of crisis.
    As I told this story to a friend of mine, he made a very perceptive comment. The story of young Wrens working in tactical gaming was news to him, but when I went on to say that the amazing thing was how well the game theory transferred from a wooden floor to the cold and deadly expanses of the North Atlantic, he said, ‘Yes, but they weren’t fighting U-Boats which were elusive no matter what. They were fighting people - who stuck to habit.’
    He was exactly right. The battle was won by those who adapted to more sophisticated ways of thinking. The British became capable of executing any number of different strategies as if they were chess traps, while the German High Command probably never realized what was happening. Radio messages went unanswered. The submarines simply vanished.

    I’ve made a bit of a mental leap while turning over what I wanted to say this week, after running into the enemy - or my perceived enemies, a sports performance outfit. I decided to cut these guys a little slack and withhold judgment, even though it’s plain that they see the world very differently from the way I do.
    This is also important in a time of crisis, in this case political crisis. I’ve heard it said that Americans don’t disagree with each other any more or less than before; they just hate each other more. Maybe the leap to more sophisticated thought here is that we have to figure out what we have in common, especially if we want to restart this economy and function as a nation.

    The kid is 16 now and eager to log her driver training hours. She’s also discovered that the distances she tried to measure on the trails near our place are not accurate, so in the early morning a few times a week we’ve been rolling to the other side of town, to a high school which has a nice track surrounding its brand new astroturf field. She hits her 800’s and 400’s while I, coffee mug in hand and standing at the 50-yard line, take in the scenery.
    In one corner of the field and along the edge of the track, a handful of guys are running a training program. They have lots of cones and agility ladders laid out on the field, and they’re doing all kinds of drills for foot speed and agility: sprinting, starts, changes of direction; they do push ups, planks, one legged jump-ropes.
    I passed close enough by the other day to catch a glimpse of the logo on their T-shirts, so I was able to look them up online. They’re a basketball outfit. The coaches, male and female, played college ball; one guy is in the G-League, the NBA’s developmental minor league. The pictures and videos on their site give away an important fact: they don’t have their own facility. Other sports outfits have big CrossFit-like boxes in industrial areas. The pictures of the basketball action are taken in school gyms, where they must be renting the space.
    That means they’re living dangerously. No doubt they lost access to the buildings when the world shut down in March. They’ll bill this field work as ‘offseason conditioning,’ but they must be considering their options as schools remain closed this Fall. Trucking around a set of portable driveway hoops might be more than they can bear, or it might be the only game in town. Already, it seems to be a pretty lean operation. Most often I see four coaches working with four or five kids.

    So, what the Hell. Technically, there’s a lot to disagree with in terms of conditioning. Clearly, weight training is not in their frame of reference; these guys would know as much about that as they do swallowing swords - which is about as much as I know about basketball. I also wrote last week that it’s the grown ups who’ll find themselves expendable if kids starting texting each other to set up their own games, which I’m sure these guys know all too well.
    I’ve decided not to let any prejudices or rivalries make me go after these guys or kick them if or when they’re down. They might be more like me than I realized: they believe in what they’re doing. Their sport, and their ability to enhance kids’ skills in it, can be transformative.

    Yeah, I’m going back on what I’ve said before. All the animosity isn’t worth the effort.
    Nothing’s at stake.
    A year ago, I made the decision that opening my little garage as a business would be more trouble than it’s worth. Therefore, I’m not competing with these sports training joints.
    Do I still think some of them are ripping parents off? Yes, probably, but I’m going to let the folks involved sort that out. My casting angry judgments from afar isn’t going to do anyone any good, so I might as well spare myself the burden of a noisy and unhappy space in my head.
    If the right kid came along and truly needed to train in the Way of the Jedi, then I’d do it in a heartbeat and probably not even charge for it - since nobody ever charged me.

    In the meantime, as the election nears, I’ll try to remember what’s truly at stake, the sophisticated new chess moves that’ll get us out of trouble, and not shouting down enemies who see the world differently.

    (8, 5, & 2 and 3, 2, 1 rotation)
    Week of: 8/17/20 8 and 3 week
    MONDAY
    1. Squat: 5, 1, 1, 5, 5; with 80, 90% 377.5, 430
    2. Romanian deadlifts: 4 sets of 5 reps 380
    3. Power Cleans (3x3) light JC 75 - 95
    3. 4 sets of heavy shrugs 485
    4. reverse hypers (3x10)
    5. abs; banded pulldowns

    TUESDAY
    1. Inclined bench press: 3 sets of 8 Tom 180
    2. Bench press: 2 sets of 8 Tom 210; add 50 lbs - 2x2
    3. 5 sets of 10 Hanging rows
    4. 4 sets: 8 lying triceps extensions or 15-20 push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 8
    Conditioning (second session)
    sled pull 2 miles; 20, 0 (and six 50-yard runs)

    THURSDAY
    1. Deadlift: work up to a set of 3* reps Tom 470
    2. Deadlift: back off sets - 90% of top set; 2 sets of same* reps Tom 422.5
    3. Squats: (90% of Monday’s weight) 4 sets of 5 Tom 340 bands
    4. Reverse Hypers (3x10)
    5. abs: hollow rockers

    FRIDAY
    1. Inclined Bench Press: (10 sets of 3) Tom 157.5, mini bands
    2. Press: 4 sets Tom 165-190
    3. Pull ups (5x10)
    4. 4 sets Dips or push ups
    5. Barbell curls: 4 sets of 5
    6. 3 sets kettlebell sit ups

    SATURDAY - Conditioning
    swim 1 mile

  9. #269
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    As you know, I’m a sucker for a happy ending, especially in stories of high adventure, where people come together in common cause, and talent, brains, and grit prevail despite desperate odds. Such a story has burst out of Galway, Ireland in the past week, involving a massive search and a sleepless night for several communities when two young ladies, Sarah Feeney, 23, and her cousin, Ellen Glynn, 17, were nearly swept out to sea on their paddle boards. ‘Anything that could float or fly was out there that night,’ a searcher told the media, yet it all came down to a fisherman who knew where to look when nobody else was having any luck. Since this has yet to be pulled all together into a rippin’ yarn, I thought I’d allow myself the pleasure. This is from numerous stories now on the net - with a bit of reckless speculation on my part on some of the conversations along the way.

    Wednesday night the 12th at Furbo Beach was an ever nicer night than two days before, when Sarah and Ellen had last gone paddle boarding. It was so warm that they were hardly wearing anything - only bikinis under their lifejackets, and the water was so glassy and quiet that for the first time Ellen elected not to put her cellphone in a plastic pouch and tuck it in her waistband. They meandered along the beach, socializing with folks on the sand.
    A gradient wind, one that curves over the contours of a landscape, started to blow from the northeast as the day drew to a close. As it comes off the land and slants down to the surface of the water, it makes what are known as ‘cat’s paws,’ which can be deceptively strong puffs in areas of calm. Apparently, a few of these had caught the girls unawares, pushing them away from shore a bit further than they had planned to be. As dusk set in and the land mass cooled faster than the sea, the gradient wind was compounded by wind off the cooling land (since the warm air over the sea was still rising) and wind from thunderstorms brewing in the distance. A powerful nor’easter was forming rapidly.

    Ellen Glynn is the daughter of Johnny Glynn, a famous footballer, legendary for captaining Galway United and scoring the winning goal to capture the 1991 Senior Cup Championship. He’s presently the head of player and team development in the area. As he got home from work, his wife was tearing out of the house without a word, calling his cell phone a short time later to say that the girls were overdue from their paddle boarding trip. He quickly raced to the shore, joining family members who were trying to shout over the water and the roar of the growing storm.

    If you hold your right hand up in the shape of a crab’s claw, though with your fingers and thumb fairly straight, the space between them is the shape of the west-facing Galway Bay. Up in the top right, at the big knuckle where your finger joins your hand, is the city of Galway itself. The Glynn family home and Furbo Beach are down along the underside of your index finger, almost to the next knuckle.

    The force of the nor’easter was slanting down and left from beyond Galway. Sarah and Ellen, when they first realized they couldn’t paddle back in to the beach, called to people on shore but couldn’t be heard. The darkness came frighteningly fast, as a mass of blackness crashing downward from behind the hills, split by terrifying cracks of thunder and lightning, with rain that lashed so hard into them that it hurt. Very intelligently, however, the girls lashed their paddle boards together with their painters (lead lines). The wind was pushing them backwards, they knew, but with an eye on the city lights in the distance, they thought maybe they could paddle hard enough to stay in place.

    At 10:00 pm, the cell phones and pagers belonging to members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution sounded, summoning crewmen, all of them volunteers from the community, to the Galway station. They dressed in helmets and exposure suits, and rescue craft headed into the night. Soon, the Irish Coast Guard launched the first of its helicopters, one of its fleet of massive, 68-foot, 25,000 pound Sikorsky S-92’s.
    Johnny Glynn had been on his phone as he stood on the beach at Furbo. He called a friend with the ferry service, who could see a plot of all the boats on the Bay, and who said the Garda, the police, had already put the word out to residents on the County Clare side (the thumb side of your crab claw) of the Bay to be on the lookout. Johnny worked the phone, contacting friends around the Bay to get out and shine lights on the beaches and see or hear anything they could. As midnight came and went, the wind kept howling from the north, and Johnny decided they had better drive around to the Clare side.

    This is the part in the story where you might picture an old salt: white bearded, in a knit sweater and oilskins, smoking a pipe. In reality, Patrick Oliver is a perfectly ordinary looking 40-year-old who strolled up to the TV cameras in front of a cheering crowd Thursday afternoon in shorts and a North Face jacket. His son, 18 year old Morgan, who had gone out with him, is a nice looking kid with the 165-pound build of a soccer or basketball player.
    Late Wednesday night, however, he stared at a computer and spoke on his cell to a cousin standing watch at the Galway Lifeboat station. As ordinary as Patrick might look, he’s part of a family that’s been considered ‘Fishing Royalty’ for generations. They have a fleet of their own boats and live deep in the Claddagh, once an ancient fishing village, now the heart of the city and home to some of its oldest families.
    Patrick has been part of a number of rescues in his day. Once a member of an RNLI boat crew, he’s been scaling back his commitment. Some years ago, a fishing colleague had gone missing. Patrick, on the search, had gone in one direction as far as a given set of coordinates and turned back. The body of that friend was later found a mile beyond where Patrick turned - an event that haunts him still.
    ‘Where are they searching?’ he said into his cell phone.
    The answer didn’t make sense. ‘No - listen: With every squall line, they are flying, absolutely flying, offshore. Those boards are like rocks skipping across a pond. The girls are way past your search zone already. The boats all have to shift to the south and maybe even out.’
    By ‘out’ he meant out into the ocean, by way of the South Sound. Beyond the tips of your finger and thumb in that crab’s claw, the three Aran Islands stand at the mouth of Galway Bay. The largest is up to the left, and then following in a slant down to the right come medium and then small. That last island, Inish Oirr (pronounced and often spelled Inisheer) is five miles off the coast of County Clare. Below the end of your thumb, the Clare coastline falls off to the south.
    That gap, between Inish Oirr and Clare is the South Sound and runs to the open Atlantic.
    Morgan sat at the kitchen table across from his father.
    ‘Where’s the wind?’ Patrick said into the phone.
    ‘Zero-Five Zero.’
    ‘Then everybody should run - RUN - after them, to Two-Three-Zero.’
    He was slightly incredulous at what he heard. His voice quieted. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
    Morgan watched as his father set the phone aside and picked up a set of parallel rulers. He lined them up on the compass rose of a chart on the table. A wind blowing from 50 degrees magnetic would be blowing toward 230. Patrick lined up that bearing, walked the rulers over so that one corner was at Furbo Beach, and drew a long pencil line along the edge of the clear plastic. It headed right out the South Sound.
    Morgan raised his eyebrows.
    ‘No. You think it’d be easy,’ Patrick said. ‘They’ll find them. The helicopters must be the ones going out farthest.’ Still, he brooded over the chart. In addition to Morgan, Patrick was the father of six daughters. After some further thought, he added, ‘Get some rest while you can.’

    Sarah and Ellen had given up trying to paddle, and as they shivered, they sat huddled together to try to stay warm. To their great credit, they never panicked - though at one point one of them must have remarked, ‘Holy Shit. We are totally screwed,’ whereupon they began belting out Taylor Swift’s ‘You Need To Calm Down,’ to boost their spirts.
    “You are somebody that I don't know
    But you're takin' shots at me like it's Patrón
    And I'm just like, damn, it's 7 AM
    Say it in the street, that's a knock-out
    But you say it in a Tweet, that's a cop-out
    And I'm just like, "Hey, are you okay?"
    Above them, they could see shooting stars, the final flickers of August’s Perseid meteor shower. Other sections of sky were utterly black but laced with lightning in storms that flew past on either side or right over them. This was a reminder of the sheer scale of trouble they were in.
    “So oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh
    You need to calm down, you're being too loud”

    Johnny and Deirdre Glynn arrived on the Clare side of the Bay at 3:30 am, gladdened to see lights on in houses and a great number of flashlights in the distance, where people clambered over rocks as they canvassed the shore line. The rain and wind continued. ‘Please, let them be together,’ he prayed.
    (Continued below)

  10. #270
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    starting strength coach development program
    In the morning, Patrick gave a loud knock and walked into Morgan’s room. ‘Let’s go. They’re not looking far enough.’
    A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, or 1/60th of a degree of latitude. That’s 1.15 times a regular mile, about 6076 feet instead of 5280. A knot a measure of speed, one nautical mile per hour.
    Father and son stopped at the kitchen table. ‘The girls are being pushed at an average of at least two knots along this line,’ Patrick said, pointing at the 230 degree bearing. ‘At 12 hours, they’re 24 nautical miles out. At 15, they’ll be 30. Nobody is anywhere near that.’
    At the quay, they chose their little speedboat, a 7-meter Cheetah class catamaran. It has a snub-nosed bow, since the little cabin and steering console is far forward, leaving a large, open working cockpit. On the stern corners were racks for lobster traps. Most importantly, the boat was powered by two aggressively sized outboards.
    They shot out of the Galway Channel at over 20 knots, passing loads of Good Samaritan boaters searching the Bay, as well as beaches and rocky shorelines swarming with volunteers combing the water’s edge. The Olivers, on the tiny JOHNNY O, steered 250, slanting down toward Inish Oirr. In 10 miles, once they cleared the far corner of Clare, the end of your thumb, and the Blackhead Lighthouse on that point was at a 090 bearing, they turned down to 230 - right onto the line on which the girls had traveled.
    ‘This is it,’ Patrick said. ‘They came through right here a little after midnight.’
    The horizon ahead of them was empty. ‘It’s still a little early, but now we’re on the hunt.’

    It was a rainy, lousy morning, but as the light grew, Sarah and Ellen realized they were on the doorstep of the open Atlantic. To one side were the massive Cliffs of Moher. Back in the direction from which they came and off to the other side was Inish Oirr. ‘We have to get back to that island!’ they cried as they began paddling madly. Soon, they were exhausted and still drifting backward. When they dared to look behind them, they spotted the first miracle of their ordeal - a set of buoys attached to a lobster pot below. They paddled so their boards would drift right over them, and then grabbing the buoys, they wrapped the line in the board’s webbing. Going nowhere was a big improvement over the wrong way.

    When Johnny and Deirdre Glynn stood on the Furbo shore until well past midnight and then drove to the Clare side, their three younger daughters, along with the grandparents, had gone to bed without knowing how grim the situation had become. Now, driving back at dawn, they would have to wake the girls and explain things to them. This was a brutal scene, Johnny later told a sports radio interviewer. The girls were silent, shocked at first, but then very, very upset. Deirdre was the one who was resolute, explaining calmly all the things being done to find them. Johnny found himself standing in Ellen’s bedroom, thinking, She’ll never be in the house again.
    The doorbell rang. It was their parish priest, Johnny could see through the window. He went to the door.
    ‘Hiya, Johnny.’
    ‘Good morning, Father.’
    An awkward pause followed.
    ‘You’re not bearing any news, are you?’ Johnny asked.
    ‘No, no. I just came by in case you needed to talk.’
    ‘Oh. You scared me to death. Sure, come on in.’
    Inside, things were not getting any better. The girls were still beside themselves. The Glynns decided to conduct another little search party of their own at Furbo.

    Since the VHF marine radio in the overhead console was just a mash of searchers chattering all over the Bay, Patrick found it easiest just to call the guys he knew on his cell phone. He leaned with his back against the console, looking at the mass of boats to the north and west, inside the Aran Islands. Morgan was at the wheel.
    When he was done, he chucked the phone on the dash in much the same manner as the previous night.
    ‘How do we know they’re wrong?’ Morgan asked.
    ‘Because they haven’t found the boards. The boards will float no matter what. The girls -‘ he paused to choose his words - ‘are a different question.’
    They kept driving. ‘They’re down here.’

    ‘OK, think for a second,’ Deirdre said as they walked on the sand at Furbo. She had been saying this for much of the night. ‘Ellen is a smart, strong, resourceful girl. The two of them would think of something. They wouldn’t just give up - and they had lifejackets on. They couldn’t just disappear.’ Her tone was urgent, as if daring someone to challenge her logic.
    Johnny couldn’t answer.

    As hypothermia progresses, the symptoms include a sort of drunken weakness verging on sleepiness. As Sarah and Ellen sat huddled on the boards, they took turns drifting off as one of them tried to remain alert. As Ellen dozed, Sarah too could see all the boats in the distance. They’re all so far away, she thought dreamily. A pod of dolphins swam by, which was nice. She watched one boat, which she could see more clearly than the others. You can even see the white splashes as it hits the waves, she thought.
    She snapped alert. Wait a second! That boat’s little, but it’s close. They’re coming right toward us.
    ‘Hey!’ she shouted, jarring Ellen awake as she rose to her knees, waving her paddle overhead.

    ‘Got ‘em!’ Morgan said as he looked through the binoculars. ‘Come to the left a bit.’ He leaned toward his father at the wheel and extended his arm, pointing with the blade of his hand.
    Patrick put the hammer down on the throttle, but he knew to swing wide, even past the girls a bit, and arc around to approach with his bow into the wind.
    As soon as the girls were on board, the Olivers wrapped them in the heavy foul weather gear they had been wearing. They untied the boards and heaved them into the long cockpit.
    The girls could barely handle the warm drinks the Olivers produced from a thermos, and they weren’t entirely coherent. ‘Was somebody looking for us?’ one of them inquired.
    ‘There are lots and lots of people looking for you,’ Morgan assured them.
    Sarah and Ellen’s brains were sufficiently foggy that even a day or two later in the hospital when they were interviewed, they hadn’t really grasped the story. They were dimly aware that somewhere far away people were looking for them, but so far as they knew, these two guys happened to cruise by and ask if they needed a ride.
    Morgan knelt in front of one and then the other as they sat hunched, rubbing their hands in his sweatshirt to restore circulation. Patrick drove and reached for his cell phone to call the Galway station watchstander.

    Johnny Glynn’s cell phone rang. It was one of his football buddies who had rallied a bunch of players to help in the search the night before. ‘Johnny, the girls are safe.’
    ‘Jesus God,’ Johnny sobbed. His eyes watered. He lifted his chin above the phone. ‘They’re safe,’ he said to Deirdre. ‘How? Where?’
    ‘A fisherman got them. We don’t really know. It was just a few minutes ago.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘The Cliffs of Bloody Moher.’
    The Glynn girls were now screaming and jumping around the beach for joy. A soccer player to the end, Johnny sank to his knees in the sand, his eyes closed, fists clenched overhead, exulting.
    In the distance, one of the massive Sikorskys banked toward Inish Oirr.

    The Glynns made a mad dash for their car and sped home. They all panted in front of the TV set, where the latest bulletins interrupted programming. A fisherman was bringing the girls to Inish Oirr, where a helicopter would then take them to Galway University Hospital. The Glynns - and their cousins, Sarah’s family - all barreled back out the door and drove to the edge of campus, by the helo pad, just in time to see the great beast touch down on the paint in a roar of wind and flashing strobe lights.

    As they slowly motored up the Galway Channel, the Olivers could see a crowd gathered on the quay - and TV cameras. It’s quite possible that Patrick said to his son, ‘Don’t get caught up in all this. That could be us someday, so we were just doing our part.’
    The rest of Ireland did not get that memo. The press hailed it ‘The Miracle of Galway Bay,’ a story that ‘lifts us all.’ Social media exploded in excitement, calling them heroes. It was exactly the victory the nation needed at a tough time, everyone agreed. The Olivers have been given a Seamanship award by a national foundation, and they’re due for another from the President of Ireland.
    MMA fighter Conor McGregor tweeted the ‘GREAT NEWS!’ as he no doubt jumped up and down in front of his television set that morning. He has since pledged to support a public campaign on water safety.
    ‘That Morgan Oliver,’ a pair of lady newscasters gushed. ‘If he’s single, he won’t be for long.’

    Not in the press, or squelched since I saw the article fly by, are questions about the search effort. Coast Guards have computer programs that take into account the conditions and display ‘drift particles’ predicting where victims should be. Sarah and Ellen say that at one point a helicopter flew within 50 meters of them. They screamed and screamed, hoping that if they weren’t heard, a light would catch the reflective strips on their lifejackets, but it was not to be. None of this is good, wrote a former pilot. Those helicopters have infrared sensors which should have picked up their body heat - but did not work. The girls also said that a boat came close but did not hear them screaming then, either.
    This would appear to be a failure on the part of people who rely on technology, which Ireland will review once the celebration has died down. This is probably what made Patrick Oliver chuck his phone aside in disgust, but it’s also good to know that there are folks who can operate like it’s still 1920, with a set of parallel rules and a chart, who will grab a jacket and roll out when the knock comes: ‘Let’s go. They’re not looking far enough.’

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