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This Is What It’s Like … to Land a Good Body Check
By Ryan Johnson, 31, center, St. Louis BluesAs told to Matthew Halverson
There’s so many different areas of the ice that you can deliver a check. My favorite—and I think a lot of guys would agree—is an open-ice hit, where you catch a guy coming through the middle with his head down or looking back. And it doesn’t always happen suddenly. Sometimes you can see where the puck is going and the position of certain guys, and if you get in the right area, it’s like, “Ooh, it’s going to happen.” You see a guy put himself in a bad position, and you know you’re going to be able to get a good pop on him.
Being able to catch a guy in that position is just as good as scoring a goal because it’s such a momentum turner in the game, and the crowd loves it. You see that, and your eyes light up and you’re like, “I got this guy right where I want him.”
You don’t necessarily have to knock him flying, but you want to finish him to the point where he’s not in the play anymore. But you have to be careful because sometimes, you can get a little overzealous and get too wound up, and you end up taking yourself out of the play or putting yourself into a bad position.
A lot of it is timing, a lot of it is your balance and positioning yourself. You definitely want to hit him with your shoulder, which is going to carry all of your momentum. It’s just like a football player with a tackle: You go to hit a guy standing up, and you’re going to go flying yourself. You get low and explode up. If I’m skating at a guy and I’m able to get low and get my shoulder right into his sternum, he’s going to have to be a pretty solid guy to not really feel that check and to not go down.
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When you do it right, it just feels so smooth, and you feel the force of laying that shoulder and feeling the guy crumble. And sometimes, you don’t even have to put a lot of effort into exploding into them because you just catch them in the right situation where they go flying. It’s a great feeling. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s exhilarating.
This Is What It’s Like … to Lead a Blind Man Up Mount Everest
By Luis Benitez, 35, mountain climberAs told to Shera Dalin
I grew up with asthma, and until I was 7, I was on every drug imaginable. I started rock climbing when we would visit my dad’s family in Ecuador because the doctors said it would help. As an adult, getting an invitation to climb Mount Everest was living the dream. But it wasn’t going to be just my first time climbing Everest; I would be guiding a blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer.
Everest gets a really bad rap in the media: “Oh, it’s been done every which way.” But it’s still the largest mountain on earth. It is 29,038 feet. The first leg of the climb should take five hours. With Erik, it took 11.
Before we could begin our summit push, a snowstorm hit. Then Erik got food poisoning. We were pulling our hair out. Because of the weather, you only get one shot at this. If the jet stream is over the mountain, the winds can get to 150 miles per hour.
At 26,000 feet, we entered the death zone. At this point you are on oxygen, and your body can’t recover at that altitude. You are fighting against the clock. I had set up my tent next to what I thought was a ripped-up tent, but it was one of two dead bodies there.
On the summit push, we were supposed to climb through the night, but the storm that we thought had passed hit us again. We reached The Balcony, which is at 27,000 feet, and we were getting hammered by the storm. It was about 20 degrees below zero, the snow was blowing sideways and we couldn’t see anything. We agreed to wait a half hour. If it didn’t clear, we were done. This is the way people die; they just sit there. We told base camp we would wait another 60 seconds. Then the base camp manager starts screaming into the radio, “It’s clearing, it’s clearing! Don’t come down!” Forty-five seconds later, it cleared.
As we got to Hillary’s Step at 28,500 feet, I started to lead Erik. It was the final, most difficult part of the trip—a 40-foot rock and ice climb. As we began to climb, I had to take off my oxygen mask so that Erik could hear my directions. I didn’t know what it was going to do to me. All I could think about was the breathing exercises that the doctors at Barnes taught me as a child.
When we got right below the summit, I told Erik, “We are here because of you. Stay on the rope, and walk in front of me.” But he refused. We walked arm-and-arm to the top. I was bawling like a baby.
I had spent 10 years working toward that goal. Not only had I just done it, but sitting right next to me was a blind guy.
This Is What It’s Like … to Eat 22 Pounds of Pizza in One Week (and Win $1,500)
By Brian Tournier, 37, bond analyst, and Adam Tournier, 34, physics professorAs told to Margaret Bauer
In 1995, these brothers took on two pizza joints in one week. Their foes: Pointer’s 28-inch, 10-pound Pointersaurus (reward: $500) and Talayna’s 30-inch, 12-pound Monster pizza (reward: $1,000). The brothers remain the only team to complete Talayna’s challenge.
BT: The idea was that we would do the Pointersaurus, then use that as sort of a training run for the Talayna’s pizza. We had this elaborate game plan: “You gotta go eat really big meals and get your stomach used to having really big meals,” we’d say. But when it came down to it, it was like, “Hey you wanna go do that?” “Yeah, let’s go.”
AT: We went down there and did it and then went to Ted Drewes for custard. The fastest anyone had done it was 54 minutes, and we did it in 35 or 36 minutes. We were halfway done in 15 minutes. They were standing there with their mouths open.
BT: I think that maybe made us a bit cocky about doing the second one. But it was more just kind of brute force: Eat it as fast as you can before your stomach realizes what you’re doing to it.
AT: The Talayna’s one was oppressive. It was painful. We had an hour, and we did it in 59 minutes and 30 seconds. The owner frisked us, he checked our pockets to make sure we didn’t hide any ’cause he did not want to give us that check. He was like, “What do I need to do so that no one would ever be able to do this again?”
BT: That was a gut-buster in every sense of the word. There was no laughing, no joking, no ice cream when we were done, just discomfort. The Talayna’s is whole-milk cheese—a lot greasier, more difficult to keep down. It got to the point where you had to wash it down, just to be able to get it down.
AT: But the thing was to drink as little fluid as possible, ’cause when the pizza hits your stomach, it’s just going to swell, swell, swell. When we did it, the requirement was just the pizza, and now it’s like a pitcher of beer or soda and the pizza.
This Is What It’s Like … to Survive Two Aneurysms
By Mary Jo Frain, 43, project managerAs told to Matthew Halverson
If someone has to die, and they don’t want it to hurt, go stroke. It does not hurt. Everybody says, “Oh, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” Don’t knock it—if you got to do it, do a stroke. It’s a hell of a lot easier than some of these car wrecks where you see a bunch of blood. I didn’t see one drop of blood.
Back up a couple weeks. I’d been having headaches. The doctor said they were migraines. They were bad. I thought maybe it was just that time of the month. I had them all over. But when it was sharp, it was right where the ol’ temples are. In the two weeks between the first “migraine” and the stroke, I was taking 10 or 12 Motrin a day.
I was going to school in Belleville for accounting classes. I went on Tuesday, 9/8/98, and that’s when it started. Our teacher brought his television because he wanted to catch Mark McGwire get his home run, 62. We were sitting in our seats, and then my mind was like a tunnel. I could see that people were moving, but it seemed really far away. Their tone of voice was real low. They turned and looked at me because I wasn’t watching the TV. Then they started calling 911.
It was like I was moving in slow motion. They came in with a stretcher. I don’t remember anything else, except once I was in the ambulance, they poked me or something and got me to open my eyes. I was on the gurney, but I wasn’t sure what they were doing. And then I was out again, and that’s it.
I’d had a stroke. Then I was diagnosed with having two aneurysms that night. The next night, they performed emergency surgery because they burst. From 9/8/98, I don’t remember anything until September 29.
I don’t really know if I died. I guess the only thing that I had was a dream. I was living underwater. I had a dream that I was living down there with the fishes. It was pleasant. I think I died—I was on life support. And it’s been a long nine years since then.
This Is What It’s Like … to Run to Mexico City
By Dan O’Brien, 33, sheet-metal workerAs told to Stefene Russell
It was a transcontinental run to raise awareness of indigenous issues throughout the Americas. One part came down through Alaska, one came down through Massachusetts, and one came from Tennessee—they all met up in St. Louis.
My mom took me to Payless shoes and bought me a $17 pair of running shoes because I’d never, outside of high school gym, run at all. They were so cheap, they actually ended up doing a lot of damage to my knees and my hip. The shoes made it to Greely, Colo. There were some massage therapists who donated their time there. And they were like, “Oooh. Those shoes are … horrible.” They were pretty well beat because we ran in the rain—it didn’t matter what the weather was, we still ran.
The first day I ran from St. Charles to Booneville. I got to three-quarters of a mile, and I thought I was going to die. My legs were burning. But within a week, I was able to do 10 miles. And then the next week, I was doing 20.
There were a lot of times when you’re running down a mountain pass into a valley and there’s not much to look at. You would just clear your mind. There used to be trade routes and communication routes throughout the indigenous communities, and they used runners. They would pray as they ran. It was something that I was taught to do. There was a lot of time to contemplate where you are and where you’re going. It was like meditating.
One of the things the runners would do is take coca leaves and chew them into a mash and put them under their tongue and run. I only did that a couple of times. I don’t know if there was even really all that noticeable an effect—you’re running for quite a while, it’s hard to tell what’s helping you sustain that. At that point in time, you feel like you could run forever.
We went down through Taos, to Las Cruces, and the last part was just very crazy. I ran into Mexico City, and we were staying with a guy who was actually from Mexico City, in the projects. Have you seen Baraka? You know that scene when they’re in South America and they show a high-rise? It was kind of like that.
