Running for Your Life: More Attack, Please !

Alas, the Attack has come to the end of the road.  My hometown team, the junior hockey Owen Sound Attack, came up against the powerhouse Erie Otters, the onetime club of  phenom Connor McDavid, and couldn’t find an answer to get past them. The Otters will now play in the OHL Finals against the Mississauga Steelheads (yep, that’s their name).

The winner of the Otters-Steelheads series will move on to play for the right to win the Memorial Cup. That was what the Attack was gunning for, after defeating both the Kitchener Rangers and the Soo Greyhounds. No Owen Sound team has won the Memorial Cup since a team called the Mercurys did so in 1927.

So, that Cup destiny will just have wait for another year. Owen Sound Attack, Memorial Cup winners of 2027, 100 years later? That has a nice ring to it!

One more hockey thought before I go. About the two-hundred-foot game.

This year’s Stanley Cup playoffs have been notable for this development. As if hockey weren’t the fastest, most skilled game on the planet, teams with professional players who have mastered the two-hundred-foot game are proving to be the jewels of the current tournament.

Back in the day (not 1927, but 1967), only Bobby Orr played a two-hundred-foot game (or the full length of a professional hockey rink). Shining in his ability to not just start in his own end and rush down the ice and score in a solo effort, but to dictate play from behind the goal line, through the middle of the ice to below the opposition goal line.

Now contrast Sidney Crosby’s game with Alex Ovechkin’s. Crosby, a recent master of the two-hundred-foot game, often will be winning battles for loose pucks, then start plays from his own end. Ovechkin usually lets his defense do that heavy lifting. He is an old school forward, and by and large, the Caps are an old school team in the way they defend and attack.

Others who are excelling at the two-hundred-foot game include Ryan McDonagh and Brady Skjei with the Rangers, the Senators’ Erik Karlsson and all the D players from the Nashville Predators who are burning up the Western Conference playoffs, having dispatched the Chicago Blackhawks and now are thoroughly outplaying the St. Louis Blues.

This is not exactly a foolproof measure of who will win and who will lose these Stanley Cup playoffs. But when it comes to reaching the full potential of this amazing sport, give me players and teams that excel at the two-hundred-foot game any day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Through a Glass, Darkly

Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

When it comes to still running for your life, as in the past 40-plus years, the idea of balance is one of the first things that comes to mind.

Balance in all things. What my father-in-law, who lived in a healthy fashion for more than century, and worked the room like a Hollywood A-lister during his posh 100^th birthday party, called everything in moderation.

That’s not to say boring. Lots of folks will equate balance with boredom. Fatal mistake. Well, maybe not fatal, but you get my drift.

Balance in food and nutrition. Stay away from white sugar, if you are doing high-energy exercise, be sure to keep up your carbs. Have a few drinks, sure, but don't overindulge, make it a habit. Eat and drink smart.

When it comes to the exercise itself, vary your runs. Don’t always do the same 5 kilometer route, spare the treadmill in fine weather, choose a hill instead of a straightaway if you feel that you aren’t pushing yourself enough.

I like to think of it in terms of the balance beam. Not the gymnastics apparatus, but the light that shines on that message. That in all things in life – love, friendship, work, writing, painting, running, whatever your passion – follow the light of the balance beam.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Attack, Please !

Running for Your Life: Townies vs. College Kids

Pardon the hockey head. It’s going on late April. I could fight it, but what’s the use?

My team is in it, the Pittsburgh Penguins. They are playing the Columbus Blue Jackets.

If you’ve watched this series at any length, the comparison above is apt. The Jackets are the townies; the Pens, the college kids.

It starts with the coaches, Sully, the good, and Torts, the bad (he famously says he prefers the company of dogs to people).

Downstate Ohio is Trump country to such a degree it helped swing the vote to The Donald’s favor in the US presidential election. Well, the counties surrounding Pittsburgh are equally for The Donald … And yeah, Pennsylvania went for Trump. For the record, both Columbus and Pittsburgh, as urban entities, went equally strong for Clinton.

Still, I would hazard to say the Jackets play the kind of he-man, hit-him-hard,    -harder, -hardest and often that would satisfy Trump’s notion of what to expect from a Rambo-style warrior. Pittsburgh, not so much.

What Pittsburgh does is play an “elite” style game. (Consider this akin to the word “liberal” in Trump country). The players they’ve been recruiting in the past few years predominantly come from American college ranks. Smaller, faster, and, dare I say it?, capable of smarter plays, than the townies.

What’s more, for Sully and the Pens, it doesn’t matter what the score is: up two goals or down two goals, they continue to push a college-style game, which is exciting to watch because it’s based on risky, offensive, what we used to call firewagon hockey, compared to the game preferred by the townies (ie, methodical, board-focused, grinding, with charging-through-the-walls heavy hits).

Here’s another comparison worthy of note. Trump was famously an underdog well into the late stages of the presidential election. As are the townies, the Jackets. They are down in the best of four Stanley Cup series, 3-1.

Can the Trump style pull off the upset in ice hockey that it did in the Electoral College? Can the townies repeat their role model’s feat and pummel the college kids into submission and ride to caveman victory? It will be telling to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

Running for Your Life: Go, Leafs, Go

Here’s a birthright moment for you.

I’ve identified the bonfire smell on the northern breeze as the uncommon but unmistakable odor of Maple Leafs on fire.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, that is.

In the US where I now live, NBC cable channels carry all the Stanley Cup playoff games. And if you happened to land on one of them last night (April 17), say about 10 p.m., all hell was breaking out on Yonge Street in Toronto.

The Maple Leafs had just won an overtime game against the powerhouse Washington Capitals. Its second overtime triumph over the Caps in as many games. They could have a stranglehold on the series had they managed to win the first overtime game. Instead, they are up 2-1, and have the Caps on their heels.

Maple Leafs haven’t been burning this hot since 1967. When they last won the Cup. That’s a lot of Don Cherry jackets and ties.

Who knows where this will lead? Who cares? But if you’re looking for something to do on Wednesday night, track down Game 4 of the Leafs-Caps series on NBC in the US, and see what all the fuss up north is about. You won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

Running for Your Life: This Hour Has Seven Hours

You might have to be Canadian-born (and a reporter) of a certain age to get this reference. But if there was a single TV show influence that drew me to work in public affairs it is the CBC news show called:

“This Hour Has Seven Days.”

I have to admit that I was too young to enjoy the short-run show (from 1964-66, only 50 episodes), but while a student at the Carleton University School of Journalism I studied it. Man, was it ahead of its time (and still is)!

Imagine this, cribbed from a Canadian Press review:

“The final segment featured unflappable Robert Hoyt interviewing two Georgia-based Grand Dragons of the Ku Klux Klan. Wearing hoods, the two elders had no idea Hoyt was going to invite a black civil rights leader onto the panel. By the end of the tense segment, you could barely see any of them through the thick haze of cigarette smoke.”

Which brings me the latest running-longevity study. So a new survey widely published says that one hour of running equates to an additional seven hours in the life department …

Let’s do the gazintas … Beginning in 1976, I started running every other day (as has been the subject of this blog since 2010). Let’s say the early, not-too-strenuous jogging years cancel out the marathon training years (eight), leaving, conservatively, 2.5 hours per week X 52 weeks, or 130 hours per year, X 41 years = 5,330 hours of running, X 7, or 37,310 additional hours, or expressed in days, 1,555, for a grand total of 4.3 additional years.

All this for a measly 4.3 years … ? Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that J

Next: Running for Your Life: Go, Leafs, Go !