Social Workout

Believe It

On Being Your Best

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Presidential Fitness

Barack's Basketball Birthday

You could just eat cake for your birthday. Or, if you're the president, you could do something much cooler. On Sunday, Barack Obama threw together a pretty decent basketball team, including folks like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, and Bill Russell, to put on an exhibition game to boost morale among injured soldiers at Fort McNair. Follow that up with a little White House barbecue, and you've got a rather nice celebration. No comment from Barack himself, but basketball buddy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, "We had a heckuva lot of fun. It was an amazing day." "Heckuva lot of fun" is politician-speak for "f-ing awesome." 

Intramural Sports

Find a Pick Up Game Near You

This year marks the first in my entire life where I have lived by a park. And while this may not seem too interesting to you, as a homegrown Texan, parks populated by people are still pretty new and exciting to me, even if said people are lovely, dirty, tattooed hipsters. In honor of parks in general, and my wiffle ball pickup game midnight last Friday, I’ve got an exciting list of intramural pickup sites — from basketball to ultimate frisbee — you can use to rack up some intramural minutes this month, no long-term commitment required.

Poet Laureate

My 100 Word Summary of the NBA Playoffs

Just as I felt it was my duty as a man, to write about March Madness, my Y chromosome again compels me to tell you it's NBA playoff season (This happens every year after March Madness. Strange, I know.) And with Kevin Garnett of the Celtics already throwing elbows, it looks like it's going to be a fiery run, to say the least. Here, in less than 100 words, is basically everything you need to know: 

Wake Up Call

Of Basketball and Opposition

You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents.

~ Wynton Marsalis

Image: Gerald Ford Playing Basketball on the USS Monterey. June, 1944.

Workout

Rooftop Basketball

Sunday was tough for me.  I was hungover from the previous evening.  Reason?  They made me pay $20 bucks to get into the club when I was on the guest list, then the manager came and profusely apologized to me and bought me drinks on the house to make up for it.  So I switched alcohols every drink (Champagne, Vodka/Soda with lime, Rum/Coke).

Poet Laureate

As A Dude, It's My Duty to Cover March Madness

Every year, a bunch of college teams travel all over the country and play a lot of basketball, hoping to earn bids to be in the final four and snag a national championship. Why should you care? Probably because every guy you know has money invested in some sort of basketball bracket. No, really, why should you care? Well, to be honest, after Northern Iowa’s upset over Kansas, roughly 98 percent of all brackets were debunked. So you shouldn’t care. Except maybe about the cake vs. pie bracket.

BUT if you want to impress a sports bloke at your next bar-and-basketball outing, here’s a handy crib sheet summary of the three ho-hum underdogs + Duke that make up the Final Four. 

Workout

Massive Saturdays

At 8AM, I was frustrated and impatient in the subway. By 8:45AM I was in sitting cross-legged and chanting OM in th MoMa, or should I say M-OM-a. It was wonderful, especially being in a bound twist and looking up, out the giant skylight four stories up, and then up another 20 or so stories at the glass tower next door. Amazing.

My Body

Larry Smith on Workplace Martyrs and Yoga in Park Slope

Larry Smith is a writer, editor, and publisher of Smith Magazine. He's also the creator of the six-word memoir. 

Health means to me feeling comfortable in my body and my mind. I feel unhealthy when I can’t calm my mind, when I’m agitated and sleepless and restless, when I feel like shit because I didn’t need that last beer and those fries. I have a delicate ecosystem. But I adjust quickly. If I get to yoga, I can go from terrible to great in a couple days. If I just eat vegetables and turkey sandwiches, I feel great. I can do a couple things and right my course. I don’t need a trainer or Canyon Ranch.

I wake up thinking about coffee. Only when I got to be in my mid-thirties did I figure out how to do breakfast correctly. It used to be a mediocre bagel with bad cream cheese. Now I eat cereal and fruit or yogurt and fruit and the occasional egg sandwich. In New York, by the time you get to work, and you’ve spent six dollars on a bagel and coffee, you’re doing something wrong. I pay too much at lunch for a turkey sandwich and soup. If I’m eating out I pay too much. There’s usually almonds or a shortbread cookie later in the day. Dinner is cooking at home or drinks in a bar or a takeout Thai.

I’m the first person to walk three blocks to get a better sandwich and better coffee. That whole garbage about “I have no time to eat" is garbage. You can be a better worker if you walk outside for ten minutes and eat with your magazine. I have no patience for people who say they can’t leave the keyboard, and they just sit there and drip dressing on it. The martyrdom of eating at your desk — unless your Anna Wintour’s assistant — is ridiculous. At lunch I try to sit somewhere that’s not my desk and eat it like a human being.

My Body

Bryan Mealer on Running, the Congo, and Wild Turkey Bourbon

Texas-born, Brooklyn-based writer Bryan Mealer is the author of two books, including All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo. Formerly an Associated Press staff writer based in Kinshasa, Congo, Mealer's work has appeared in Esquire and Harper’s, among other publications.

When I was in the Congo doing my Africa work for the A.P. covering the war, I lived terribly. I drank too much, and I smoked a pack a day, and I didn’t get any exercise. I was under so much stress. I got grey hair. I could have been more sharp if I had slept better and didn’t drink as much. We were also smoking a lot of weed. It was the only thing that could mellow me out. I made the decision to change my health and life when we were going up the Congo River, and we got stuck, and we had to ride bikes three hundred miles through the jungle. I realized how out of shape I was. We were riding through sand and the sun. It was the hardest thing I’ve done. That’s when I made the decision to get healthy.