Written by Lars Hancock

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Last Saturday, my wife competed in a competition to determine who the most fit people were in Austin. If you recall, I was helping to train her, mainly by throwing a medicine ball into her face for toughness, but also by doing more constructive things such as building upper body strength and helping with her mechanics.

Well, we get to the event and I’ve never before seen a more intimidating group of humanity assembled in one place. The aggregate body fat of the group doubled when I got there – everyone looked like Greek gods and goddesses with musculature that was just insane. My wife steps right into the event and starts kicking ass right off the bat. It was a decathlon-type format with ten different speed, strength, and endurance events designed to measure aggregate fitness, and nearest I could figure, she won her age group in the first five events.

“Nearest I could figure” is the operative term. There was a website setup to do live score updates, but it was only updated way after the event was finished, and even then the data was specious and changed occasionally. Scores and standings evolved throughout the day, and at various times my wife was winning the overall, winning her age group, or in third place in her age group, depending on which math errors were being presented at the given moment. At some point on Saturday the event organizers gave up trying to declare any sort of winner and sent everyone home to wait for details.

It is to be noted that there were strange judging decisions afoot throughout the event as well. Though the criteria for each event were clearly stated, the interpretation of said rules presented a surprisingly large grey area. For example, there was a pull-up event (where guys were cranking out 25+ with ease, and women were doing 15+, and that, folks, is just insane), and you couldn’t use any lower body motion to get you over the bar. Yet you’d occasionally see people kick their way over the bar, and have a good rep counted. Consistency was not a hallmark in any event to be sure, but all in all, the judges tried their best, even if they were failed by their humanity on occasion.

Being a nerd, I went to my computer and figured out in the standings all the flaws, and what the judges incorrectly scored, and what was incorrectly recorded. By my math, I had it that my wife should have won her age group by 3-5 points, but was likely going to lose it by 2. There was definitely some strange data in the site, as evident by them having some random guy running a 4.06 40-yard dash. On grass. All the bad data and scoring seemed to work against her, and we celebrated that night knowing she won, and knowing that she wouldn’t be awarded the victory.

Long story short, Saturday becomes Thursday and nobody is still awarded the win. Numbers and math keep changing, and we’re prepared to be screwed. Hey, I’m from Cleveland, I’m used to this - don’t screw me and I’ll be stunned. Well, stunner of all stunners, they actually take the five days to get it right and announce she won her age group! A mountain of incompetence gets resolved in the name of justice for the first time in recorded history. I was amazed and proud.

The same thing can’t be said for the joke of a decision in the Manny Pacquiao vs. Timothy Bradley fight later that night, however.

Boxing has always been on the edge of legitimacy to be sure, and is starting to lose its popular appeal to the more consistently officiated, and more exciting, sport of mixed martial arts. Numerous fights in the past have been very questionable in the judging, which have always raised the eyebrows of the causal onlooker (although not of the ruling bodies, curiously enough). I remember watching Evander Holyfield get absolutely brutalized by Lennox Lewis on a PPV fight, and somehow a tie was declared. Controversy ensued, but no corrective action was taken.

Boxing has always been ripe for fraud within its scoring system. The winner of the round is awarded to… well, whoever the fuck the judges think won the round. “Judges” by the way are not professionally trained, scrutinized, or anyone special, and have no unique tools or metrics at their disposal with which to make their decision. No, like Nero in the Coliseum, they simply give the thumbs up or thumbs down every round based on their capricious whim, or on (shall we say) whatever “external motivation” they may have. Should such “external motivation” be present, hypothetically.

If you buy a judge, nobody cares, heck, people almost expect it. Boxing has always had a dirty feel to it, and the screwing Pacquiao received Saturday night confirmed that it is as fixed as a Chicago election. And the promoters, obviously, don’t care if you know it. You’re giving them your money regardless to see the charade they put in front of you, and they flaunt their controversy in a way that makes Vince McMahon blush. You know you’ve lost control and hope when the corruption is so brazen and obvious they don’t even try to camouflage it. That is the state of boxing today.

I stopped following it as a sport after the Holyfield-Lewis fight. Boxing clearly has ceased to be a sport, and should not be treated as such anymore until there is a method of objectively determining the outcome of a fight, holding those responsible for a decision to be accountable, selecting and certifying judges to ensure they are impartial, educated, and clean, and, oh yeah, ensuring the right guys fight each other in order to determine a true champion. Until then, you can take your $50 Pay Per View BCS-WWE mashup, Mr. Bob Arum and stuff it in your trunks– I’m not going to fund your corruption and greed any more. I suggest you all do the same.

Anyway, off to the questions.

Top 5 Most Attractive Female Athletes. Should be an overflow of potentials. Saw a bunch of candidates today at Roland Garros. -Hikohadon

In no particular order, because ordering would be completely impossible as the pros and cons of each are incomparable.

5. Hope Solo. Something about her eyes is so alluring, and the way she takes command on a soccer field is very cool. She’s a strong smart woman who has great leadership skills and a wonderful personality, and she shares a name with everyone's favorite Star Wars character. But she had me with her eyes.

4. Dara Torres. At 41 she won three solver medals in the Olympics, which is absolutely incredible. She’s tall, strong, and inspirational, and has about one tenth of a percent body fat. All good in my book.

3. Linsdey Vonn. Sure, she’s a stunning blonde, but there’s something about an alpine skier that is so very hot. The mentality needed to slide 80 mph on a giant sheet of ice on two fiberglass sticks is somewhat crazy – good crazy. If you’ve ever partied with the ski team, you know that it is all out all night with that crew, and I imagine Vonn to be a ton of fun, adventurous, outgoing, and exciting, as well as beautiful.

2. Maria Sharapova. Six foot two, blonde, ridiculously fit, Russian. Please, there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s strong, and she’s pretty good at her art as well.

1. Alicia Sacramone. A muscular gymnast who competed with strength and as an adult vs. the tiny exploited malnourished little girls so prevalent in the sport. I hate watching the little girls compete – sure, they do amazing things, but the way they are treated to get to that point, Nike may as well have them making shoes in a third world country. Sacrammone was different – strong, confident, and capable. Major deduction for dating Brady Quinn almost knocks her off the list, but you have to have a gymnast on the list, and she fits the bill nicely.

I fancy myself to be a pretty descent home cook, and while I use good ingredients, I don't pay as much attention to the nutritional side of things as I should. I recently signed up for a three series cooking class on the "Paleo Diet," without knowing much about it, and now that I've read the fine print I don't know if I could ever stick to such a rigorous protocol, i.e. completely forsake grains/dairy/booze. So, based on your culinary pedigree and athletic prowess, what is the best diet for optimal health and muscle maintenance (growth)? Paleo? Primal? The Zone? Atkins? Nutritional Supplements? Etc. -Special Agent Brett

The first thing you need to do is to eliminate the concept of a “diet” and introduce yourself to the concept of a “lifestyle change”. If you go on some sort of fad diet, you may have some success, but with rigorous and ill-defined rules that aren’t consistent with the way you live normally, you’re eventually going to give up on the whole concept of a diet and go back to what you’re comfortable eating. That is a recipe for failure.

Most of the fad diets require you to eat weird things, or weird combinations, or eliminate generally good things from your diet. Consider this: for the rest of your life, are you going to be the asshole that asks if his beef was grass-fed with organic alfalfa? Are you going to be telling the waiter to hold the sauce because it may contain glucose? No, that gets old fast, and when you put stupid rules around your diet, you will fail.

I lost 40 pounds two years ago making a lifestyle change, and I’ve kept it all off, even building lean muscle in its place. My diet is based on something more simple, yet more a fundamental truth: the First Law of Thermodynamics. Essentially, if you put more energy into a system than it uses, it by definition gains energy, i.e. you get fat. It will balance eventually, so if you eat to support a 300 pound frame, you’ll eventually become 300 pounds, and there’s little you can do about that.

Multiply your desired weight by 12, subtract 300 from that, and divide that by 3. That is how many calories you need to eat at each meal. Don’t eat more or less than that – eating more obviously puts on weight, and eating less turns your metabolism down, which screws up the 12x math. Maintaining consistent energy throughout the day is the key to an active metabolism and successfully maintaining your weight. The extra 300 you deducted was for two 150-calorie snacks between breakfast and lunch, and between lunch and dinner.

Here’s the good news: eat whatever you want within that framework. Protein keeps you from getting hungry, so the more protein you eat, the more success you will have fighting cravings. Vegetables fill you up with few calories, so putting piles of them on the plate means you eat less real calories. But if you want to have a Burger King bacon sundae at 510 calories for lunch tomorrow, heck, go for it.

The other beauty of the program is that exercise earns you bonus food. This does two things: 1) sets up a reward system for exercising, and 2) allows you to keep booze in your diet. Burning 300 calories is trivially easy, and that earns you two glasses of wine, or two full beers, or three light beers. Awesome! Run for booze, because running sucks otherwise.

There are plenty of apps and websites that can help you track intake, and I suggest you do it obsessive compulsively until you know the caloric contents of things off hand, and can self-monitor. Keep it simple, eat good food, eat normally, but watch portion sizes and overall intake. Nothing hard about that.

How long can the Indians continue to play without a leftfielder? -pod

Baseball is not an easy game to score runs. You’ve got nine guys that fail to reach base 7 out of 10 times they try, and if you fail three times, the inning ends. Mathematically, it isn’t a great proposition. But take that failure rate up to 8 of 10 with the likes of Aaron “Joanie” Cunningham and Johnny “Caveman” Damon (he was actually a caveman, that’s how old he is) plugging up the 6, 7, 8, and 9 holes in the lineup, and runs become hen’s teeth.

Not being able to score runs is a terrible way to try to make up ground in a divisional race, especially with every starting pitcher now being somewhat shaky. You’re bringing a knife to a gunfight. Something has to change.

The Damon experiment is clearly over, and the Cunningham freak show needs to end too. We have to have someone in the minors ready to step up, don’t we? Let’s look at the Columbus roster, shall we? There’s this guy who is tearing up pitching with 14 HRs Matt La…GAAAAAA no, not Laporta potty! Well, we’ve got, um Trevor Crowe, and…. you know what, maybe we should have addressed this in the offseason. But we didn’t, so now we need to trade something to get someone if there’s any hope at all.

The Tribe needs at least two more bats to even kid themselves that they can contend. And they’re nowhere to be seen. We’d have to give up some of our future, like we did to get Ubaldo Jiminez and GAAAAAAA, that didn’t work either. I think we’re pretty screwed on this one.

Um, well, wait until next year? (pours stiff drink).

Lars, using your unrivaled wisdom, what age is the best age of one's life. I'm not talking Lower Paleolithic, the Bronze, nor Reconstuction or Gilded...I'm talking in terms of how old a person is, 10, 18, 30, 50 etc? -FUDU

Your thirties are the optimal age in your life. This isn’t even close.

Sure, life is actually pretty good as a pre-teen, but really you don’t even know what life is at that point. If ignorance is bliss, you’re blissful beyond words, but you’re ignorant of how good you have it as well. Not being able to control your own life kind of sucks and it grates at you, forming into teen angst later. Plus, you’re all about mac n cheese and chicken nuggets. And that’s just sad.

Teenagers, yeah, do I really need to go here? Being a teenager sucks. Your life has changed in ways you’re too stupid to understand, but all you know is you’re confused and driven differently than you once were. You want to be independent but have no ability to do such, which grates at your soul like sandpaper underwear. Plus all your friends are teenagers, and teenagers suck. Not a chance anyone in their right mind relives their teenage years given the chance.

In your 20s you’ve got independence, which is awesome, but you’re too poor to do anything useful with it. You’re unleashed in the world, and you’re going to tear it up with all that wonderful youthful energy you have. Problem is, you have no experience, and you wind up fucking up everything because you just don’t know better. But none of this is even relevant because you’re working too hard as the low man on the totem pole to even care.

By the time you hit your thirties, life is starting to become good. You are experienced in wine, relationships, food, and work. You’ve calmed down a bit, yet maintain a youthful vivacity that allows you the energy to do whatever you please. Your responsibilities are low, probably not having kids yet in the early part of your 30s, meaning you can be more free and adventurous. You’re now low to middle management at work, meaning there’s a slope down which you can send shit that comes to you. The world is yours, and you can truly understand how to reap its fruits.

Once you hit your 40s responsibility hits you. If you go out boozing, your kids are getting you up at 6 AM the next morning regardless, so how much fun can you really have that night? No, your life is now in the hands of others, for better or for worse. Sure, there’s this inconceivable and unmatchable joy that being a parent affords you, but the burden of responsibility chases you like a Terminator, unstoppable, relentless, constant. Eventually, you hit 50 and 60, and you don’t need to be as responsible, but by then, you’re old. You have money, freedom, and grandkids, which rocks, but your body doesn’t allow you to experience life as you should, plus, you’re banging a 60 year old on the rare occasions you do have sex. And that’s nasty.

So enjoy your 30s while you have them, because those are the time of your life.

My son (12) was called upon to sacrifice bunt in a baseball tourney game last week while his team was up 10-0. Was I wrong to join the other team in disparaging remarks against his coach? –pod

Your son’s coach is a horrible human being that deserves fire ants down his pants.

There is so much wrong with that I hardly know where to begin. First and foremost, there’s this thing called sportsmanship. You don’t manufacture runs when you’re up 10, that’s just rubbing it in and a douche move all around. What are you teaching the kids by doing that?

Second, you have to let kids hit. That’s why they play the game. It is absolutely no fun for a kid to bunt, and almost insulting to ask them to do such, insinuating they don’t know how to handle a bat. Up ten, you need to let the kid build confidence and take rips at the ball. He should be up there mauling at every pitch he sees, if for no other reason to expedite the game out of sportsmanship. One of the best memories of my youth was when I mashed a monster triple in little league, me a career .100 hitter at that level. That one hit built all kinds of confidence in me, and every kid deserves a shot to have their signature hit.

Third, it’s dangerous to do something that stupid. If I’m the opposing pitcher, the next guy after the bunter gets a four seamer right in the back. That’s the unwritten rule of the game, and if the opposing coach and pitcher follow it, they are blameless.

Your kid’s coach is a terrible human being for doing that, and you were right to disparage him.

I've slept with three married girls in the last month and I am currently repairing the marriage of the one of them I actually like (only one I didn't "really" sleep with). When you can figure out what the deal with me and Eastern Europe is…

Why is marriage a reality? Fucking kids right? Dumbassesssss, I told every married bitch that I am divorcing them as friends once they pop one out. –e0y2e3

And on the topic of terrible human beings…

The institution of marriage is about stability and peace in society. When you marry, you commit to a person that you are there with them for the rest of their life, regardless of what life throws at you. This is a tremendously important thing in order to allow people to pursue their dreams – life is better as a team sport than as an individual sport.

Imagine a world without marriage. Every man and woman must live in constant fear that their partner will wander off with someone else once they get bored, or if they have a bad day, or if they come across some predatory hipster in a bar. That’s a terrible way to live. Your whole life is consumed with distrust, and you waste precious energy fighting other guys for the affection of a woman, energy which should be spent evolving society and humanity. We devolve to apes should the institution of marriage dissolve.

Sure, kids are a huge part of that too, but then again, kids are a huge part of life. As you mature as a human, you slow down and you want kids, and they need a good stable home life in order to be everything they can be. The institution of marriage protects them to be sure, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Here’s your deal: you’re afraid of commitment. You use these rules to prevent you from getting attached to someone, instead, you just pluck your fruits from whatever vine you come across regardless of who owns it. A fundamental lack of trust, probably driven from some serious breach of it in your past (breaches you encourage in these married women, thereby “paying forward” the harm done to you), forbids you from entering into a healthy trusting relationship, and so you hide behind this unhealthy lifestyle you’ve chosen for yourself.

You need to look inside yourself and find what it is that prevents you from forming a trusting bond with a partner, and get rid of it. Because your life is a mess right now, and it will never get better until you fix it. A stable and trusted partner can take you through a lot of dark places when you need her, and will make your life better. Instead, you just create darker and deeper places for yourself, which is fundamentally self-destructive.

On my educational travels back in the day I spent a semester with students from each of the following: Thailand, Israel, Algeria, Iran,& Columbia. They loved the American people but hated our Government. What gives because I was taught in school we build schools, hospitals, and feed the poor abroad? -pod

Funny timing on this question. I’m actually leaving the country to go to Haiti on Sunday, spending a week there helping to build an orphanage (you will get a guest author answering your questions in Out of Bounds next week). There is a successful complex there that has created hope for kids that would ordinarily be cast aside and die – one such story relates to a kid that they literally thought was a dog lying in a pile of dust before they saved him in the orphanage. We will also be going into Cite Soleil in an attempt to feed some of the gravely impoverished 400,000 people that live in that shanty town. Works like that happen all across the world all the time, both government supported and privately supported, and there is indeed a lot of good exported from the US.

The problem is that the hope that can be created by such an effort is miniscule compared to the destruction that supporting corrupt governments for the exploitation of resources can cause. And the citizens of those countries know exactly that the US has backed their corrupt puppet dictators who exploit and abuse their people, which is why they hate us. And rightfully so.

We as Americans view our country in a similar way that Jeff Van Gundy views Lebron James, namely, that we naively don’t understand why anyone would hate us. The USA is the Lebron James of nations, as a matter of fact (except we’re two-time defending world war champions, of course, and we always produce in the clutch). We’re the best there is, but we’re so arrogant that we think every foreign policy misstep we make will be lauded by the world, instead of condemned by it. We can’t continue to support evil around the world, and allow the subjugation of the rights of the masses in “friendly” nations just because they don’t live in the US.

The American people are good in heart and deed, and commit vast acts of charity worldwide. American soldiers fighting to stabilize and bring democracy to places in the world are incredible people and amazingly brave in their sacrifices, and generally give Americans a good name. But decades of LRMResque foreign policy has created an indelible stigma on our government all across the planet, and sadly, has allowed people who mean to do wrong to succeed in their missions.

Please email questions to lars.hancock@yahoo.com, tweet them to @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.