Snake America Eighty Six
Snake is a bi-weekly newsletter covering vintage clothing, wild-ass furniture, etc., usually on eBay, with Leg Day Observer covering Leg Sports (weightlifting, powerlifting, yoga, etc.) Subscribe.
eBay: Nike boxing shoes, 1980s, $150: Boxing Nikes from 1984! These have a flexible sole and provided ankle support while you punched shirtless fools in the face. They also look to be made from the same space-age shiny satin material Nike used on its Vandals ... the same material that went into John Glenn's spacesuit. Turns out that spacesuit has a name? The Navy Mark IV. Who knew. Cursory searching reveals that the outside is aluminized nylon ... you put a windbreaker through a Pittsburgh steel mill and end up with a spacesuit. It always looked like those Mercury 7 astronauts were wearing insulation on the outside when they went into their ships. Very brutalist. Some of this flawless aesthetic appears in Tom Sachs' stuff ... his A Space Program book is all-time. Sachs also made some runners that deserve their own entry. But even without deference to past product these Nikes are better. You can't find Glenn's spacesuit on the black market ... I have to imagine there's one framed in a private Manhattan residence as I type ...
I reached out to my friend Chris Hall who is a legendary vintage head for more info on the boxing sneakers. He says he saw the boxing shows hunting for vintage in the 1980s but not on a boxer's feet. Though a breakdancer "may have worn them" in a Nike TV advertisement. I searched for ads and only thing I found were some with a young Kevin Garnett ... There's a thread on the inthe00s.com forum trying to get to the bottom of it. The original poster writes that he had "a pair of soft leather shoes that looked like boxing sneakers except they didn't go up the leg as high. ... Does that sound familiar to anyone??? Zed." One guy responds:
In the Terminator, Michael Bienne(1) put on these black Nike high top sneakers with a big silver Nike slash and velcro strap. Those were the most excellent shoes in the mid 80s, American made, lightweight durable canvas material, supportive of the ankle, new wave-ish, and gone forever. ...
Which is wrong -- he's talking about the black Vandals, which are not made out of spacesuit material. The discussion then diverts into Terminator (USA 1984) plot points, until another poster mentions a best-of Spandau Ballet CD, on which a band member wears similar-looking shoes to the abovementioned on the cover. They're too high, though.
My friend Bryan, a Jordan head and boxing expert, refers me to these Roy Jones Jr. boxing shoes, Brand Jordan, from the Bush admin. I concur. The new Nike Vandals retroed with depressed aluminized nylon look good. Nike retroed them in 2008 but they are impossible to find in respectable sizes. My friend Jay, who just released his book Record Aficionado, which is the definitive book on pressing info for early 1980s American hardcore singles, is also looking for a pair. The worst part about boxing is that they wear boots, not shoes, so these are nice to come across. Recommended.
eBay: first marine aircraft wing orange jumpsuit, eBay, $60: One of the great reasons to keep a news beat is so that you address all the aspects of a story as opposed to digging in on the ones that only you find interesting. I bet there is some guy out there who's covering the oil beat in Japan and is super up on one oil-making (or oil-refining) concern, maybe because the oil-makers (or oil-refiners) at that one concern who he has sourced up are funniest, or buy him the most drinks, or are the stupidest, or have the most skeletons in their closet, etc ... I'd read an escalating series of deep worthless dives into one unrepresentative part of a real market if it was done either correctly or ineptly... but I bet most of an Acela car wouldn't.
I wrote an affiliate-listing sneaker site about a decade ago, where my editor, AJ, didn't keep me on beat and I ended up writing about the same Rasheed Wallace Air Force 1 every week for a year and a half. Its income was much lower than our sister blog that covered many collectible vinyl records. My site was a noble enterprise but pretty worthless to a reader without an academic knowledge in Wallace's shoes. Our editorial board here zeroes in on Nikes ... and Champion stuff and furniture, but I only run auction subjects by three people and don't keep an excel file on what I've been beating into the ground. All people only have about three ideas anyways, so it's no big thing to run one into the ground ... this is all a way of saying I have thought long and hard about our editorial mission and am confident in my decision to go ahead with highlighting the incredible orange on this US Marines gym clothes suit that's made for either a midget or a midget's baby. I guess the chest measures at 36", a true men's size small, which is probably a large in pre-Vietnam America ... but who wore these? I believe I have kept banding on about how different orange looks on an old shirt than a new shirt. But it's not any more faded on the old shirt. It's the exact same color as a Carhartt orange tee. So where's the difference come from? If my mom was a scientist she'd say it's either proximity or confirmation bias. But I think it's the softer fabric. There's this lore that there's an all-orange Leeway "Born to Perspire" 1989 tour shirt .. I think it was Dan To Care who either sold it or bought it on eBay in 2001 from or to either a European or an old man ... the orange stood alone and looked like this. No one confirms that shirt existing. I always wondered why Marines were stationed permanently outside the United States, like the main guy's older brother in Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (USA 2006). Turns out the First Marine Aircraft Wing was based out of there. It's crazy a chunk of the Marines is in Japan forever, but who says it's not America? You can stay out all night drifting Hondas, wear orange gym clothes, and they have McDonald's at the base.
Shirtless Muscovite and Olympian Dmitri Klokov details dairy-heavy night diet.
Leg Day Observer Issue 3:
Leg Nutrition News: Ginger to relieve DOMS. Nice story here on jpain.org, website of the indomitably-named The Journal of Pain, which is the official journal of the American Pain Society, which itself does not describe the mission of that society. The story study is about how eating ginger reduces DOMS -- delayed onset muscle soreness. DOMS happens when you push your legs or other, less important muscles too hard in a workout. And then they hurt really bad, not right away, but two or three days later. It happens if you're not "adapted" to training ... the pain occurs because you are either unathletic, very weak, or if you just haven't worked out in a while. Literature aimed at new lifters concedes both DOMS and immediate soreness are not things to be ashamed of ... and that if you start a squat regimen and take the rest of that week off because your legs hurt so much, that's normal. I don't think pain is anything to be ashamed of, and in a free country you can do whatever you want. Why would you feel ashamed of how your legs feel? But you can and should work out while sore. Or at least try it(2).
It's either a Russian(3) coach or a fat guy that said there's no such thing as overtraining, just under-recovery. I think that's true. If you start working out and your legs hurt, or you know they will hurt later, you should immediately work to beat back that muscle soreness as soon as you leave the gym. That means eating a lot of ginger -- and all the other healthy foods associated with ginger that I'm sure make a non-zero effect on inflammation and were a confounding variable in this study. But it also means getting enough sleep, food, water, some protein, a massage and whatever those electric things Russian lifters put on their legs between workouts. I think sauna therapy is also a good idea. I like how fitness sites tell people to sleep nine hours a night. It seems doable. The Polish weightlifting team lives in a hotel and the power goes off at 10:30 so the team can get nine or whatever hours of sleep every night. Or else. That's not the case here. And it takes a lot of healthy food to put on muscle mass ... but I bet if you eat ginger a lot you have a number of healthy habits and eat other low-inflammation food. Maybe mix it in pudding? Name me a mess who eats a lot of ginger? The study here .., the key isn't taking more ginger but taking more ginger and good stuff as well. And I bt being obese. Note that supplementing overtraining with over-recovery is a bad way to prepare for competition. You should taper the heavy weight before a meet, and should only squat heavy right before a meet if the meet isn't a squat meet. IE if it's a race or something.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Pizza Rolex, Mac Attacks, Beams Champion (relisted, ended, for sale).
Snake Before That: Break in Programming (Trump can suck it).
(1) wrong
(2) stay rigid or stay home ...
(3) For the record ... not into Russia anymore.