[SB 217] A rising reminder on the "why" of fitness

I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats. If you like to walk for a better life, and also like Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life,” you just might like this newsletter.

Should I eat this?

Big shoutout to friend and Write of Passage Editor extraordinaire Latham Turner for sharing his fitness journey, and how he went from obsessively measuring all the macros to making bread (and eating it!) with his daughter.

Since I’ve started living this way, my waist isn’t quite as flat. I no longer marvel at my pecs in the mirror, and the scale isn’t going down at the same half pound a week. But I do have these memories with my daughter. I feel well enough to enjoy life again.

I yammer on every week about how much fitness matters, especially at midlife.

Because it does matter. The stakes of ignoring fitness at midlife are much more serious.

But, we need to remember why it matters.

Fitness matters because it allows us to better enjoy moments like Latham described. And maybe fitness allows us to enjoy more of those moments for more years, also. With the grandkids. Maybe the great-grandkids.

Twisting yourself in knots over how you look in the mirror or the bad meal you ate ain’t it.

Thanks for the reminder,

Latham Turner

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The absolute mess of modern sportswriting

Warning: old man yelling at a cloud incoming.

I miss old-timey sportswriting. Columns in the Detroit Free Press and the avalanche of words each week when The Sporting News arrived in the mailbox. When sportswriting stoked the emotion of fans, drew out the artistry of sports, or poked humorously at the sports figures who took themselves too seriously.

The game of covering the game has changed. Now, it seems what matters most is being first to a scoop by five seconds.

The Intelligencer wrote a feature on Shams Charania, an NBA reporter who is second only to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski when it comes to breaking news:

In the first sentence of an article describing Kyrie Irving’s demand for a trade from the Brooklyn Nets, Charania unleashed a cascade of metaphors: “A league-altering domino fell and shook up the marketplace, causing a shockwave across the league and an arms race to get underway.” Last year, he wrote that another player’s skill set “has become incredibly valued toward winning.” Readers and other journalists noticed that Charania’s stories were often written in an oddly passive voice that seemed to value protecting his sources over projecting clarity. In a controversial story from 2021, Charania cited anonymous sources to explain Irving’s decision not to get a COVID vaccination, writing that “those who know Irving understand he is not driven right now by money, nor cares for inheriting more, but rather the stand for larger issues in his mind that need his support.”

Shams works for the New York Times via The Athletic, doesn’t seem interested in writing well, and no one cares. He has 2.2 million Twitter followers and is a marketing machine for the news organization.

And by the way, unlike the old-time sportswriters who were famous for knocking off work and knocking down cold ones, Shams says he averages 18 hours of phone screen time each day, scouring for scoops.

What a life. I’d love sportswriting to find its way back to some of the art and poetry of the past, with a little less emphasis on the Never-Ending Now.

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Thank you for reading.

Let’s keep the Steady Beats going. 💚

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