[Today’s run: rest day]
In November of 1982 I was a college student. I lived with a roommate in student housing at Iowa State University. The 13th was a Sunday and don’t remember exactly how the day went.
But I do remember watching a boxing match on television. A guy named Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini was going to fight against a Korean guy named Duk Koo Kim. Mancini was a popular fighter. I was not really into boxing other than having seen a few rounds of Muhammad Ali, Norton, Fraiser, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler. Maybe I was more into it than I remembered.
The fight was a long one, Wikipedia says it went into the 15th round. Kim did well against Mancini and would not give up. He was the epitome of tenacity. But in the 15th round he was knocked down and the fight was called in favor of Mancini.
I remember that Kim was not expected to do well but he really hung on.
I don’t remember how I heard later that Kim lapsed into a coma after the fight. Later that week he died.
So I actually saw on television a man take part in a sporting event and die because of it. Maybe it’s not the same as the racehorses who run until their lungs fill with blood. It may be somewhat like the mountain climbers who go up and up until they can no longer breathe. Kim kept standing up and Mancini kept knocking him down.
Mancini was ruined as a boxer, or so says the Wikipedia article. And the referee of that fight committed suicide less than a year later (someone should have helped that man).
My sport is running. I am not very good at it. Sometimes I try to run fast but I don’t intend to cause myself an injury, or at least nothing that will keep me from going to work the next day. I think somewhere inside I have the tenacity to keep going until the very end. But I don’t spend that on running.
If I happen to keel over after a 10 K someday it won’t be because of planned overexertion on my part. But then, maybe Kim wasn’t planning to go that far either. He just kept getting up.