Archive: April, 2019 - Gary Borders

Big Red Now Steers Like a Dream

Tater stretched, yawned and meowed when I went outside, safe in his perch on top of our 1965 Ford F100 truck. I keep the truck covered when not in use, and Tater has decided it makes a nice spot for surveying his domain. There’s no doubt that our little piece of this cul-de-sac is his empire. The only cat that ever messes with him is his brother, Tot, and that usually doesn’t end well. Tater has a few pounds on his brother; his gut is close to dragging the floor. Since Tater and Tot have become adult cats, the intrusion of neighborhood cats seeking dominance has ended. Tater is fearless, ready...

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Why This Dreaded Move Is Called A Burpee

The other day, in the CrossFit gym where I willingly pay good money to be tortured on a regular basis, the workout started with 70 Burpees, followed by other cardio exercises in descending order — 60 sit-ups, 50 pull-ups, and so forth. I won’t go into detail about the workout. One of the standing jokes about CrossFit athletes goes like this. First rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit. Second rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit. So I don’t want to do that. But Burpees are on my mind. Because after doing 70 Burpees the other day followed by all that other stuff, I wanted...

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He Is Dialed In To Run

Dave Dial was born to run. Barring injury, about this time next year he will have logged 200,000 miles running. He started logging his miles at 15 while growing up in Groveton in Deep East Texas. Dial has logged 194,000 miles to date. That is roughly equivalent to running from Boston to San Diego more than 67 times. The mind boggles. “Running is in my DNA,” Dial said in a phone interview recently. “When I was a little boy, when we came to town, I insisted on running home.” Dial recently increased his daily pace from 15 miles to 18 miles daily, broken up in two workouts — at 6 a.m....

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Still Waiting, Semi-Patiently, For Final Volume

In 1982, I bought and devoured The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro. It was the first volume of a planned trilogy profiling the large-than-life Texan who became the 36th president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Caro’s previous work was The Power Broker, an epic account of the life of Robert Moses, the New York titan of development. No one will ever accuse Caro of not being thorough. The original draft of The Power Broker weighed in at one million words and had to be cut by a third. Eight years later, in 1990, the second volume of Caro’s trilogy was published:...

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