The Nickly News
“All the Fit that’s Fit to Print.” April 16, 2011
*Text REDCROSS to 90999 to Give $10 Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami*
This Week’s Man In History
Reinhold Messner
The world's greatest mountaineer pushed the limits of human endurance.
By JAMES GRAFF
The peculiar greatness of Reinhold Messner is grounded in a pure form of selfishness. His pas de deux with the world's most inhospitable wildernesses have always been about measuring his own might, skill and especially will. "I am Sisyphus," he has written, "and the stone which I push up the mountain is my own psyche."
He has carried that heavy burden to the literal ends of the earth. Messner, 62, is not only the greatest high-altitude mountaineer the world has ever known; he is probably the best it will ever know. His 1980 solo ascent of Mount Everest by "fair means" — without sherpas, crevasse ladders or supplemental oxygen — remains the most primal test conceivable of man against the earth.
That ascent, and Messner's subsequent conquest of the world's 13 other peaks of 8,000 m or more, set the gold standard for mountaineering. "He had nobody's footsteps to follow," says Ed Viesturs, an American climber who completed the fair-means ascent of all 14 of those peaks in spring 2005. "After Messner, the mystery of possibility was gone; there remained only the mystery of whether you could do it."
Messner's obsession was formed early in the Dolomites and other Alpine ranges — he was born in a narrow German-speaking valley of Italy's South Tyrol. His first venture to the Himalayas in 1970 ended in tragedy when his younger brother Günther died after summiting Nanga Parbat. Several members of that expedition accused Messner of abandoning his brother in an egotistical push to open a new route of descent, but the discovery of Günther's body last year confirmed Messner's contention that he had been killed by an avalanche.
Messner later traversed Greenland and the Gobi Desert, and tackled both poles by fair means. He served a term in the European Parliament for the Italian Green Party, and now heads a range of museums about the lure of mountains and raises a family back in South Tyrol, where it all began. He's been decried as arrogant, defensive and abrasive. But in answering to no one but himself, Messner obeys a higher calling. His achievements will inspire lone wolves and stubborn dreamers for generations to come.*
The Push Up
While fitness fads may come and go as fast as their late-night infomercials, some types of exercise transcend trends. Among them is the push-up, which uses your own body weight along with gravity to tone and condition muscles. Some fitness experts have called the push-up the closest thing there is to a perfect exercise. And with good reason; "The primary movers [the major muscle groups that produce the motion of a push-up] are the chest and triceps. However, if you look at the form your body takes during the perfect push-up, you're typically suspended from your toes all the way to your neck, so in reality, every muscle between your shoulders and your toes is engaged," says Bottesch. **
Nickly New’s Favorite Exercises
1. Pull Up
2. Push Up
3. Olympic Squat
4. Roundhouse Kick
5. DB Curl
6. Right Cross
7. DB Shoulder Press
Quote of the Week
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
-Sir Richard Steele
*http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/messner.html
**http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/doing-the-perfect-push-up
