http://chimprefuge.com/2007/03/05/we_dare_you_to_read_it_with_th_1/

Meb wins in New York City

Speculation
In 1973, a familiar thoroughbred horse named Secretariat, encumbered by a 126-pound jockey, ran 1 1/2 miles on a dirt track to win the Belmont Stakes in 2:24.00. Earlier that year, he had won the 1 1/2-mile Kentucky Derby in 1:59.4. Those remain records for these events, and coupled to Secretariat’s victory at the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, made him the first U. S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. (There have only been two since–Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978–and only eleven in all.) Secretariat’s Derby record works out to an average of 37.6 miles per hour, and his even bette

Just stare at my back
At our low-key family gathering today, I was encouraged by my mother to send the ten-year-old essay below to a couple of siblings of my brother-in-law, emerging runners both. She says that among every running-related thing I have ever written (and she faithfully reads a lot of them despite having little actual interest in running herself). It’s not on the Web anywhere (it was once posted on the old Cool Running site), so I thought I would post it here. “Just stare at my back!” That phrase, tossed in mid-race over the knobby shoulder of a sixteen-year-old kid, stands as the greatest piece of racing advice I have heard, outlasting fif

The elusive end of the dotted line
Four years ago today, I ran a four-mile road race (the Run 4 The Pies) in Tequesta Trace, Florida. Coming off limited training in the wake of a summer and fall marred by a sports hernia, booze, and the effects of Hurricane Wilma, I ran a ramshackle 21:32 for fourth place. Three days later I won the Space Coast Half-Marathon in Titusville, and a week after that I finished fourth in the Half-Marathon of the Palm Beaches in West Palm Beach. I was rounding into form faster than anticipated, but little did I know at the time that this triad of races would serve as the final spate of serious racing in my so-called running career. Recreational distance runners are

More lies and hilarity from Granite Grok
After former NH Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen, whom I happened to run against in high school and who was later a Central Mass Striders teammate for several years, wrote an editorial deriding GraniteGrok.com in the wake of the Doug Lambert debacle, sole remaining Grokster Skip Murphy came out with guns blazing, or more accurately, popguns popping and squirt-guns dribbling. This crew has had a hard-on for Fergus for years because he, like eve

How’re they hangin’, guys?
While in the throes of working on my first investigational new drug (IND) application with its sketchy preclinical studies (and under a tight deadline), I happily distracted myself this evening with Jesse Bering’s Why do human testicles hang like that? Granted, Gordon Gallup et al.’s research at face value seems anthropocentric as noted by a commenter, and evolutionary psychology is a highly speculative kind of science, but it’s an engaging article thanks to Bering’s (a columnist for Scientific American) sense of h