Back Porch Outdoor Sports

When I think of athletes who have to endure incomprehensible physical pain to achieve success in their sport, runners don't immediately come to mind.

That's not to say they don't have to overcome grueling obstacles, just that it's hard to think of rail-thin dudes in gym clothes as anything other than, well, rail-thin dudes in gym clothes.

My prejudice would be misguided, however. The NFL and NHL are more controlled car crashes than sports, and MMA or boxing are just as bad. But don't underestimate ultramarathoners. No, seriously. Via the New York Times:

Elie Seckbach, the Embedded Correspondent, brings his exclusive video reporting to FanHouse. Check back regularly for more videos.

Actor and comedian Cedric the Entertainer is a huge sports fan who tells us that he use to be a boxer and these days he enjoys golf. In this FanHouse exclusive we talk to Cedric at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California (not to be confused with the Sherwood Forest -- home of Robin Hood). Cedric who hangs out with lots of top athletes tells us about the time he was doing Vegas with Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Charles Barkley.

Check out the video after the jump.

I have no idea who invented kickball. I'm guessing it was a teacher who thought that dodgeball was too violent, but couldn't convince anybody that soccer was actually fun to play. And now an activity once reserved for middle schoolers and band campers is a popular pastime with fully functioning adults.

Anytime I see somebody wearing a helmet cam while attempting something dangerous -- whether it be bungee jumping, sky-diving or, in this case, snow skiing -- I just expect the worse. I liken it to the guy who's hanging out near the river unaware of the alligator a few feet away right as the Faces of Death camera truck pulls up. You can pretty much guarantee something bad is about to take place.

With that in mind, here you go: helmet cam video of one poor skier who is buried under an avalanche as he tries to make his way down the mountain.

HOMOSASSA, Fla. -- Fishermen come once for the novelty, a floating bait store in the bay, a lonely-looking, old pontoon boat with a hard-to-miss, five-foot-long, bright-white shrimp sculpture on the top.

They come back to see Bonnie.

Even when the fish aren't biting, fishermen still come to buy bait, stopping their boats like men dropping by the small-town barbershop when they don't need a haircut, coming just to hear the local chatter.

She makes everyone feel better.

Bonnie Van Allen, who turns 70 next month, has spent most of her daylight hours here the past 15 years, pulling her traps, catching her shrimp or anchored and rocking gently in her usual spot near channel marker 26, pointing the way to deeper waters into the Gulf of Mexico.

In retrospect, I suppose it seems like a bad idea -- chewing a mouthful of gum while head-butting things -- but since people have been playing soccer for centuries without incident, maybe we took for granted Bubblicious' hidden dangers.

In any event, Vasco da Gama strike Aloisio almost died after choking on gum during a recent match. And I don't mean "almost died" in a "I coughed a lot and threw up!" sorta way. I mean it in a "I quit breathing and turned purple."

The plan was for Ben Roethlisberger to ride the pine as a rookie. That changed when Tommy Maddox went down two weeks into the 2004 season. Five years, two Super Bowl championships and one helmetless asphalt head-butt later, it's all worked out.

The Northern League is an independent minor league that has been around off and on for decades. Its most recent revival came in 1992, and the league has existed since then.

One of its teams is based in Fargo, N.D. The club -- known as the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks -- has been managed for 14 years by Doug Simunic. In becoming the winningest manager in league history, Simunic has also drawn controversy many times for his on-field antics. The latest incident happened Monday.

Not a year goes by that we don't hear about some poor sap who got the great idea to intentionally jump out of a perfectly functioning aircraft only to suffer the misfortune of not having their parachute open.

Miraculously, a good number of them walk away (or limp ... OK, are transported via emergency vehicle) virtually intact and unscathed. The latest almost-statistic: Paul Lewis, who fell 10,000 feet and crashed onto a hangar roof after his main parachute failed to open and his reserve chute malfunctioned. (Upside: he was 9,000 feet into his jump before he realized he was in serious trouble.)

Poor France. It's bad enough that they're still living down the 1940 German takeover, which turned out to be more of an understanding than an invasion. Now they have again suffered an international embarrassment, although that may be overselling it a tad.

Whatever, the French fell to the Americans in the inaugural Football Junior World Championship yesterday in Canton, Ohio. The final, 78-0, was slightly less surprising than getting run out of their own country by the Germans during World War II. Primarily because unlike the French army, considered the most powerful in Europe at the time, there wasn't much in the way of expectations for the French Junior National Team.