• Home
  • SOCRATES’ THINKING
    • News and comment
    • Editorial
  • About
  • US
    • Sportsocratic team
    • Contributors
  • Reviews
    • Adventures
    • Books
    • Places
  • Contributions
  • Advertise
  • Contact

Sportsocratic

Thoughts, ideas, opinions and postulations on sport and adventuring

  • Sport & society
    • Ethics & Values
    • History
    • Favourite photos
    • Cultural and social issues
    • Politics
    • Big questions
    • Sport fashion
      • Sartorialism and style
  • Wild sports
  • Silly stuff
  • Sports science
    • Research
    • Coaching
    • Innovation
    • HEALTH
  • The things that made me
  • Stories
    • General sporting stories
    • Waves of Pain
      • No Respect!
      • Death Wish at Fairy Bower
      • Fried nuts
      • The ocean is a trickster… especially Hawaii’s North Shore – Gas chambers bites the unwary!
      • Titus Kinimaka’s nightmare Christmas
      • Dix dumped – the trials of a self-confessed elite body surfer
      • The little surf that nearly ruined a promising career…
      • Rabbit killer – a master takes a caning at pipeline!
      • Death Wish at Fairy Bower
      • Easternmost memory – surfing in the wild at the end of the continent
      • Nothing ruins a good surf like a couple of blokes with automatic assault rifles…
      • Agony for Miki Dora
      • Smashed at Gas Chambers
      • Who was Europe’s first surfing woman? Introducing the wonderful Witch of Newbury.
      • A bad day at Palmy – surfies and clubbies at war!
      • When being a proven waterman is not enough!
      • The highs and lows of surfing Sunset Beach while competing at the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational
      • An American midnight surf – that goes very wrong!
  • What does it mean?
    • What is a snake?
    • What does “shag” mean?
    • What does “Freddy Jones” mean?
    • What does “hook and ladder” mean?
    • What does back walk-over mean?
  • Philosophers Sport Bar
    • Socrates and Aristotle debate football defence
    • Michel de Montaigne on coaching sports
    • Ancient philosophers discuss what makes the beautiful game beautiful! Laozi and Socrates get technical.
  • Travel

Charles Darwin and walking – the unique value of exercise-induced reverie in the life of a scholar and thinker

September 20, 2016 By Damon Young Leave a Comment Filed Under: Cultural and social issues, History, Sport and society, Uncategorized

Thinker and daily exerciser, Charles Darwin.
Thinker and daily exerciser, Charles Darwin.

Excerpt from “How to think about exercise” by Damon Young

Charles Darwin. The world’s greatest naturalist. Collector of barnacles, orchids and beetles. Jane Austen fan. Stalker of foxes. And a dogged walker.

Darwin’s daily strolls played an important role in his life, but also in the development of his ideas. They reveal the unique intellectual value of reverie in exercise: reorganizing concepts and revitalizing perception.

Sandwalk

We find Darwin on an ordinary day at Down House, in Kent. He is walking on a sandy path, fidgeting with his fingers. His stick beats a slow rhythm on the stones. His company: a white fox terrier, Polly. She pants a little, as does he. The path is edged with oaks, many covered with moss. They creak a little, as does he. The stooping stroller is enjoying his ‘thinking path’: the Sandwalk, a wonky rectangular track around a copse of hazel, birch, dogwood, privet and holly. Every now and then, he kicks one of the flint pebbles piled by the path: a record of another turn.

Charles Darwin was not a Romantic prophet or visionary, knocking back higher truths with absinthe. He was an inspired workhorse: curious, lucid, patient. And, just as importantly, Darwin was a man of unchanging routines. ‘My life goes on like clockwork,’ he wrote in 1846 to Robert FitzRoy, captain of the famous HMS Beagle, ‘and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.’ Every day, the Darwin household saw the same rhythms of work, recreation and correspondence. And every day, between his tens of thousands of barnacles (‘I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before’) and even more letters, Darwin walked. He rose early, and took a turn around the Sandwalk. And he did the same at noon, enjoying ‘a very little walk in an idle frame of mind’, then returning for lunch and study.

Even with Darwin’s sedentary career of crustaceans and correspondence, he walked far more than many today. And he did so despite regular ill health, sometimes ending in violent nausea – the symptoms, perhaps, of a parasite infection from an assassin-bug bite in Argentina, or a less exotic (but more common) digestive illness, like diverticulitis. Trekking abroad and, later, researching with equal drive, Darwin was hardly a retiring consumptive. But his health was poor, and often worsened by stress. Yet even in his sixties, Darwin kept walking every day, in sunshine or ‘heavy rain’, as he put it, with some understatement.

 

Darwin would count laps of the Sandwalk by kicking a pebble each lap into a pile
Darwin would count laps of the Sandwalk by kicking a pebble each lap into a pile

Walking was, for Darwin, a lifelong exercise – somewhere between a hobby and a mania. In his autobiography, he noted that he was known for his long strolls, even as a child. ‘I had, as a very young boy,’ he wrote, ‘a strong taste for solitary walks.’ For the budding naturalist, the point was not simply to get from home to school, but to reflect without interruption. One afternoon, returning along Shrewsbury’s old fortifications, he fell seven or eight feet – he had not seen that the parapet was gone. ‘I often became quite absorbed,’ he wrote simply. Later, as a young man in 1826, Darwin went on a walking tour of North Wales with friends, hiking some thirty miles a day with knapsacks on their backs.

Darwin’s health eventually stopped him climbing mountains – his last geological trip, to observe glacial landscapes in Wales, was when he was in his early thirties. But he kept walking right until the end. His son Francis recalled his father in the last weeks of his life, suffering a painful seizure: the old man was walking at the time. Note Francis’s emphasis: ‘he got home with difficulty, and this was the last time that he was able to reach his favourite “Sand-walk”.’ For Darwin, to forgo his stroll around the copse was no trivial thing.

Question: Darwin often walked a mile or two every day, not including stairs and pacing from nerves. How far did you walk today?

Walker’s Reverie

Why was walking so important for Darwin? It was not simply for fitness, though he shared the Victorian enthusiasm for a ‘constitutional’. It was not out of paternal contempt for the noise of family life – on the contrary, he was a warm and playful father. It was not just Darwin’s love of nature, though this was clearly an ongoing passion – witness his disdain for London, a ‘vile, smoky place, where a man loses a great part of the best enjoyments of life.’ And it was not simply to burn off the snuff he sniffed daily. (Without the drug, he was ‘lethargic, stupid, and melancholy,’ he complained to his friend, the botanist J. D. Hooker.)

Darwin’s walks were also an exercise in reflection – a kind of moving meditation. This enriched his scientific work, and gratified his constant curiosity. Walks, wrote his plain-speaking son, were for Darwin’s ‘hard thinking’.

Kent countryside walks
Kent countryside walks

Francis’s phrasing gives the impression of plodding abstraction, but Darwin’s description of ‘an idle frame of mind’ on walks suggests something more creative. Neuroscientists have argued that exercise can encourage innovation and problem solving. Not because it helps us study more rigorously, but because it allows our intellect to relax a little; to digest our meal of facts and arguments. Researchers describe it as ‘transient hypofrontality’: the prefrontal cortex, which helps to make general concepts and rules, is turned down, while the motor and sensory parts of the brain are turned up. It’s what might be called ‘walker’s reverie’. Busy with pounding legs and pumping arms, the intellect’s walls come down, and previously parted ideas and impressions can freely mingle – what neuropsychologist and novelist Kylie Ladd calls ‘the free flow of novel, unfiltered ideas and impulses.’ Exactly what a trailblazing scientist needed in order to develop a new theory of species marked by constant, purposeless change.

Walking the Dogma

The word ‘species’, now so tied to Darwin’s name, is itself a clue to the intellectual importance of reverie. For most Victorians, the word suggested something perfect and eternal. It was a Latin translation of the Greek eidos: idea, pattern, form. For Plato, forms were the true reality, more real than physical stuff. Like Plato, Aristotle saw the forms as unchanging, unmoving: what continued amongst the world’s flux and diversity. The species of life were the ultimate proof of this: generations were born and died, but the forms of molluscs, foxes and men stayed the same.

N070844
Down House in Kent… where Darwin had his own walking track

The species also had what the Greeks called a telos: a final end. Every eidos had some ultimate goal, aim, purpose. These ideas were taken up by Christian thinkers, and influenced many in the West right up to the nineteenth century. American philosopher John Dewey, in a 1909 talk on Darwin, described this common outlook:

From the casual drift of daily weather, through the uneven recurrence of seasons and unequal return of seed time and harvest, up to the majestic sweep of the heavens … and from this to the unchanging pure and contemplative intelligence beyond nature lies one unbroken fulfilment of ends.

Put simply, before Darwin, to say ‘species’ was to name something obvious, pure, perfect and eternal. This was taken for granted in school textbooks, church sermons and polite conversation. Over the centuries, the idea of unchanging nature had itself become unchanging: a legacy of habit, institutions including the Vatican and the Church of England, and the dogma of revealed truth.

The Sandwalk.... where reverie was achieved
The Sandwalk…. where reverie was achieved

Like a handful of thinkers before and alongside him, Darwin gradually began to believe otherwise. He was by no means absolutely certain of his theory – his confidence grew slowly. Witness his quietly doubting note in July 1837, above his sketch of an evolutionary tree: ‘I think’. Anxious about his radical ideas, Darwin began to suffer heart palpitations around this time – the theory was a challenge, not only to the public, but to Darwin himself. He was ‘almost convinced’ of evolution, he wrote to a friend in 1844, but it was ‘like confessing to a murder,’ he added. Part of Darwin had not given up on the old worldview.

Reverie during exercise allowed Darwin to shake up these received ideas, to undo the false certainty of perfection, which had held on for over twenty centuries. Obviously this required painstaking research and careful argument – one cannot simply take a turn and overthrow two millennia of doctrine. But, in combination with intellectual rigour and curiosity, Darwin’s Sandwalk stroll was an opportunity to resist mental rigidity – to stretch and make supple his psychological muscles. His biographer Janet Browne wrote that this walk was ‘the private source of his conviction that his theory was true.’

Not everyone has Darwin’s fondness for rain-drenched meandering; not everyone has a rambling rural path to comfortably stroll on – snow and gales or midsummer heat can rule out reverie. But, as with jogging, a spell on the treadmill is certainly better than nothing. Poet David Morley, whose poems often arise from hikes, strolls, swims and climbs, puts it neatly. ‘William Wordsworth composed poems while pacing the metres of his garden’s gravel path,’ he writes. ‘Solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking.’ If Wordsworth can poeticize while walking to and fro in a yard, we can certainly enjoy reverie on a treadmill or footpath. The important thing is to work the hypofrontality into professional and domestic timetables: better a stationary stroll in a nearby gymnasium or your own garage than more sitting. Those in the city can also take stairs instead of lifts: not only a harder workout, but also a good opportunity for undistracted solitude.

Tip: If you are stuck on a problem, try a walk instead of a coffee or tea break. A stroll can be more relaxing, and more helpful, than sitting still.

Animal Alertness

Why walking and not another exercise? With the exception of jogging, most sports require too much tactical calculation. Reverie arises partly because the exertion is dull, requiring a little sweat but no brains. Darwin recognized this himself. Horse riding, which he adored, was not quite banal enough to augment his mood. ‘He would say that riding prevented him thinking much more effectually than walking,’ wrote Francis, ‘that having to attend to the horse gave him occupation sufficient to prevent any really hard thinking.’ Darwin’s placid gelding, Tommy, was an antidote to thinking, full stop. Whereas walking around his Sandwalk was a way of thinking things anew.

Likewise, for running. While jogging was not, for Victorians like Darwin, a familiar exercise, it is now a regular source of reverie for millions. For example, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, author and regular marathon runner Haruki Murakami (whom we will meet later) describes his psychological ‘void’:

I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, the occasional stray thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that void.

This is a classic description of transient hyperfrontality: a private, moving daydream, which keeps Murakami calmer, and more creative.

Younger Charles Darwin... in pursuit of animal alertness
Younger Charles Darwin… in pursuit of animal alertness

Walking and jogging also work at a more contemplative speed, and allow us to meditate on our surroundings. Horse riding let Darwin get quickly from place to place: from the anchored HMS Beagle to an inland jungle, or (not quite so quickly, on Tommy) from Down House to nearby Kentish valley views. And, just like a bike or car, it was exhilarating or calming, depending on the mount. But when Darwin wanted to stop and take notice, he walked. Witness his boffin’s joy on the island of Santiago, off the coast of Africa:

Nobody but a person fond of Natural History can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts in a thicket of bananas and coffee-plants, and an endless number of wild flowers. And this island, that has given me so much instruction and delight, is reckoned the most uninteresting place that we perhaps shall touch.

As this suggests, reverie can have an immediacy to it, which is rewarding. This too is a Darwinian point: we are creatures evolved in and with environments, and our senses and motor skills are most alive in interplay with a tactile, vibrant world. We act upon this world, and it upon us; we seek and find fulfilment in these rhythms of to and fro. To involve ourselves, bodily, in a varied and varying situation is to augment our existence a little. In this way, wrote Dewey, ‘the designs of living are widened and enriched. Fulfillment is more massive and more subtly shaded.’

This animal alertness was something Darwin had in common with the life he famously studied. ‘I remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in,’ wrote Francis, ‘it was the same simple admiration a child might have.’ On the Sandwalk, young squirrels ran up his back, their mum yelping from a tree. He picked up beetles (another favourite) crawling across the path; saw a sleeping fox in the ‘Big-Woods’, which stared at Darwin, baffled, before it ran off. This was more than entertainment for the naturalist: it was intimate familiarity with a varied and changing world, what Dewey called ‘the multiplicity of doings and undergoings’. Reverie thrives in a dynamic environment, slowly appreciated.

The point is not that every exercise must be a bucolic adventure – we city sorts, in ‘vile, smoky places’, have feet too. The point is that exercise can do more than encourage a mood of creativity. It can also give us something to be creative about. It combines reverie with intimate stimulation, and the pace to best savour it.

Tramadol is the only medication that helps me soothe my lower back pain. I take it in courses, lasting about three weeks each, repeating them every third month. Usually, I start with 25 mg a day and increase the dose to https://www.wallerwellness.com/functional-medicine/tramadol/ 100 mg daily. I take this dose for about a week and then start reducing it gradually to withdraw from the drug safely. Works great.

For example, anyone taking a long walk around their neighbourhood, after years behind the wheel, will be surprised by the quirks normally missed at rush hour. From today’s school drop-off and pickup: a still dragonfly, sunning itself on a pear tree; lines of ants, marching along a suburban curb and massing on a cherry tree outside a wool shop; the rounded geometry of a spider’s web, putting a clothesline to shame.

We cannot enjoy this reverie properly if we are hunched over the handlebars, let alone travelling at fifty miles an hour behind safety glass, fiddling with the climate control. Better to savour the opportunity for gentle congress with a surprising world.

Tip: Take a walk around your neighbourhood, school or workplace, and try to find at least three surprising features. For example: novel architecture, botanical oddities or geographical puzzles.

Solitude

Do we have to exercise alone for reverie? Darwin was certainly no misanthrope – witness his pleasure in strolls with Emma, when her ‘strength and weather allowed’. He also combined walking with scientific conversation. Some of the dons at Cambridge called him ‘the man who walks with Henslow’, after the professor with whom he strolled. Exercise, in other words, need not be antisocial.

Still, solitude is a vital part of reverie, at least when walking or jogging outdoors. To really savour the combination of reverie and stimulation, we have to avoid distractions: even those of good company.

The greenhouse in at Down House where Darwin carried out many experiments
The greenhouse in at Down House where Darwin carried out many experiments

And far more disrupting than face-to-face sociability is something foreign to Darwin: modern telecommunications and entertainment technology. Nowadays, many pedestrians are struck by what researchers call ‘inattentional blindness’. Plugged into iPods, or pecking phones and tablets, our eyes and ears are working perfectly, but we do not necessarily see and hear what is right in front of us. Inattentional blindness can be dangerous: witness the rapid increase of pedestrian deaths recently documented in the United States. Of those victims wearing headphones, most were hit by trains. The mechanisms are not yet fully understood by neuroscientists, but distraction is certainly central to this myopia: the stimuli are received and processed by the brain, yet the conscious mind is busy with Twitter or Kanye.

This is not a cause for moral panic or Luddite lamentation, but for a certain mindfulness. However regularly we glance up the footpath and road, divided attention has large holes in it: big enough for a train to slip through. Spider webs, blue lobelia and other quotidian curiosities do not stand a chance.

Tip: Try walking without headphones, and with your phone off, or at least in your bag or pocket. If you unwittingly fiddle and paw at your phone, as I do, resist the reflex to take it out.

Having said this, treadmill walkers, snatching a stroll during lunch or after the kids are in bed, might actually benefit from headphones. While it can be rewarding to meditate quietly, reverie thrives on a little stimulation. Tactile feedback is obviously minimal on a treadmill, but music, audiobooks and podcasts can make the session more evocative and provocative. (And there are no trains to worry about.)

A Holiday on Foot

The point is to be mindful of the benefits of gentle exercise; to remember that we are doing more than tightening our thighs and calves. We are also loosening our minds, and giving them interesting things to contemplate in this state. In this, exercise can be a break from our customary narrowness. If we are not all Charles Darwin, we still have our own barnacles: duties that require ongoing, rigid thought and planning. Spreadsheet calculations, examination cramming, sales targets or the logistics of household management. What we are often lacking is not focus, but the mental ease that reverie provides: the chance to undo our usual intellectual rigidity, and allow our minds to seek novelty. In other words, exercise can be a habit that undoes habit: a way to regularly shake up our intellectual routines.

So Darwin’s walks are a reminder of the joy of exercises like walking and jogging, but also of the discipline and effort required to do them well; to allow these commonplace exertions to do their psychological work. Reverie, in other words, is an achievement, not a gift. Undertaken without distraction, these ordinary exercises can actually be exceptional: daily holidays from false certainty and anaesthesia.

damon-cover

 

Reproduced with permission.

Copyright © 2014 by Damon Young

‘HOW TO THINK ABOUT EXERCISE: THE SCHOOL OF LIFE by Damon Young is published by Macmillan

RRP – $19.99’

Highly recommended by Socrates.

Damon Young

Damon Young is a philosopher and writer. He is the author and editor of nine books, most published internationally in English and translation. He's written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines, including The Age, The Australian, The Guardian, the ABC and BBC. He speaks regularly on ABC radio.
In 2013 he was awarded the AAP's Media Prize for my work in public philosophy.
He's an Associate in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and Founding Faculty at the School of Life, Melbourne.
He lives in Melbourne's eastern suburbs with his wife, sociologist and writer Ruth Quibell, and their son and daughter.

Support Sportsocratic

Thanks for reading this story! We appreciate your visit to Sportsocratic… and love providing alternative information, opinions and angles from the sporting world. The world of sport is so full of the same old stuff from the same old sources that it drives us nuts… and it makes our day giving voice to less orthodox views. If you appreciate our free service, give some thought to helping us out. It costs us big bucks to keep Sportsocratic going but, if our readers support us, our future is much more secure.

Help us to keep you entertained and informed… and enable Socrates to keep asking those big philosophical sporting questions.

Support Sportsocratic for as little as a $1 and we would love you to bits. It only takes a few seconds!

Support Us

Tagged With: brain, Charles Darwin, Damon Young, exercise, thinking, walking

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

travel

Dar Es Salaam to Zanzibar – reviewing a short (but lonely) journey

February 20, 2024 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

Socrates takes us back in time when he spins a travel yarn about his journey from Tanzania capital Dar Es Salaam to the beautiful island of Zanzibar. As an Aussie expat with years of living in cushy Europe he initially finds his destination intimidating. Find out whether things got better for the intrepid sissy adventurer as he settles into his guest house in the ancient and exotic “old town” of the city of Zanzibar.

To Jambiani – Exploring Zanzibar (travel destination review)

February 18, 2024 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

Shy and nervous Aussie Socrates doesn’t know what to make of unfamiliar and intimidating Zanzibar old town. The absence of the woman he is starting to fall for doesn’t help. Things make an unexpected turn for the better when the Netherlander heartthrob arrives at his hotel door and lets him know that she will be joining him on his exploration of the beautiful East African island after all. Join them in their journey from the bustling and eye-catching, ancient old town to the simple fishing villages of the Jambiani coast. Will the adventuring pair become an adventuring couple?

SOCRATES’ RECENT TWEETS

Tweets by Sportsocratic

Ethics and fairplay

When is cheating okay?

July 4, 2024 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

When Socrates found out that Rugby League legend Wally Lewis had pulled off an outrageous State of Origin scam without a soul even realizing, it occurred to him that sometimes pulling a swifty should be tolerated. Here Socrates explores the history of sport and tries to establish the circumstances under which a little bit of rule book stretching is okay. Click the pic and see if you agree with him.

Wallaby v France test – the moment that soared above all the others

July 20, 2021 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

There were many great moments in the final Wallabies versus France rugby test last week but according to Socrates, one stood our far above all the others. Was it a great try? A brilliant tackle? A perfect scrum or line-out? A fantastic bit of work at the break-down? According to the rotund Greek hooker it was none of those things. He reckons that the highlight of the game was a much quieter, simpler and more subdued moment. A moment that might have escaped the attention of millions of spectators. Find out about Socrates favorite moment of the test. Click the pic.

matildas

Just six words…

May 20, 2021 By TIMOTHY EDWARDS 1 Comment

Have you ever wished that you could meet and have a conversation with someone you idolize? What would you say to your idol to convince them to want to stay in the conversation? What would they say in response to your brilliant social skills? How would the conversation go? How would it leave you feeling? An Australian ex-professional athlete who had played with and against some of the greatest basketball talent that this country has ever seen (Andrew Gaze, Ricky Grace, Shane Heal, Phil Smythe) once, by chance, had a meeting with possibly the greatest and most famous professional sports person that has ever lived. The superstar he bumped into, in a New York elevator, just happened to be the Aussie basketballer’s idol. How did the meeting turn out? Click the pic and discover the six most memorable words in this Australian point guard’s life.

Outstanding achievement

Team Names on Sports Uniforms? Why?

May 23, 2024 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

Socrates has been playing and watching sport for decades and one of the (many) things that has mystified and annoyed him from a young age is the way that some teams (usually basketball teams) emblazon their uniforms with their team name in text. He doesn’t get it. And he worries about where this tradition might be heading!

New surfing podcast

One of Australia’s greatest ever surfers – one of surfing’s greatest story tellers – “Rabbit” Bartholomew – talks to award winning journalist Tim Baker about life, surfing and stuff. Perfect listening for lockdown entertainment.

professionalism

So Easy To Make Hasty Judgements – Angel Reese vs Catilin Clark

December 12, 2023 By SOCRATES NEWS DESK Leave a Comment

Is the behavior of some elite athletes judged more harshly than others because of their make-up, their nails, their eyelashes, and their personal style? My own reaction to the most recent NCAA women’s basketball tournament final and the shenanigans of one LSU star player in the final moments of the game had me wondering. At the very least the public reaction to these few seconds of hard-core “trash-talking” should remind us that we should not make hasty judgements about individuals on flimsy information. Always consider the full context.

wisdom

Its just a job. Grass grows. Birds fly. Waves pound the sand. I beat people up. – Muhammad Ali

sport at mardi gras

Rusty and an ice cold beer – Photo 4.

November 7, 2024 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

When it comes to best Australian sporting photographs with a killer back story, this one is hard to beat. What a beautiful image of a champion surfer and his mate at the infamous Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Think it looks good now? Wait until you see what the editors at an American advertising agency did to it. Ouch. Click the pic and read the full story!

A life with horses

Surfers and melanoma – how great is the risk?

November 21, 2024 By TIMOTHY EDWARDS Leave a Comment

We all know that surfers are at greater risk of skin cancer than the average non-surfer. It’s obvious. They spend more time in the sun. Should that be of real concern to surfer? Is it really that big a risk? Recent research from Southern Cross University indicates that it is a way bigger risk than most surfers… and people… imagine. Going through treatment for skin cancer lesions, even when the treatment is successful, is not fun. Surfers should be aware of the risks and take precautions. Click the pic to get the full story.

wisdom

“Pressure? Pressure is a Messerschmidt up your arse. Playing cricket is not!”

Keith Miller

One of the greatest cricket “all-rounders” of all time, Keith Miller was not only an exceptional performer in multiple elements of test cricketing (batting, bowling and fielding) but he was also gifted in numerous other aspects of his life. Witty, entertaining, handsome, a renowned war time pilot and gifted Australian Rules Footballer, Miller was famed for calling a spade a spade and acknowledging that there was much more to life than elite sports. Having flown fighter bombers in the Second World War under life threatening circumstances he was not one to take the “pressure” of high level sport too seriously!

trivia

Here is a cracker of a trivia question.

Who was the college recruiting scout talking about when he said the following to his head coach.

“I’ve just seen a fat guy… who can play like the wind!”

Yup. The same guy who told people that just because they had shoes like his, it didn’t make them like him in any other way. Charles Wade Barkley.

Etymology

Postecoglou coaching pointers

March 8, 2023 By SOCRATES Leave a Comment

Celtic football coach Ange Postecoglou’s post League Cup interview avoided the normal “we knew we had to…”, “full credit to the boys…” and “we talked about blah blah blah during the week…” bollocks that is so common in post-match player and coach chats with the media. The coach actually revealed important insights into the way great coaches think and how they seek to get the best out of their players. Any coach aspiring to become a great coach, no matter what sport they teach should listen to this interview. Postecoglou is the real deal. There are few coaches better at getting the most out of their team.

What does it mean?

What is Elvis leg?

Admit it. You’ve never heard of “Elvis leg,” have you? What the blazes is “Elvis leg?” As is the case with every other “What does it mean…” story we have ever posted, the answer is not directly related to the name itself. It is indirectly related to Elvis, though. Have a guess what the relationship is… then click here and check out whether your were correct. Find out for certain which sport uses this term and what it means.

What is a liberator?

Of course most you aviation buffs will think that a liberator is an American WW2 heavy bomber. Fair enough. But in a sporting context does it have a completely different meaning? Indeed it does. You are going to have to click here to find out what a liberator is and does in the world of sport.

Aphorisms, insights and wisdom

“The thing that’s depressing about tennis is that no matter how good I get I will never be as good as a wall.”

More perceptive sporting analysis from Mitch Hedberg, comic genius.

 

ebook

Phillip has returned to the south of India after eighteen years. But who is the young girl staying in his hotel? And what will he learn about his estranged brother through Inez, the Spanish backpacker?

To buy The Bangalore Test, John Campbell’s new ebook novella, just click the link.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

©2019 Sportsocratic