Bellevue's role as a growing center for the sport of squash was enhanced last weekend as the quest of the best players in the world for a share of the most lucrative 16-man squash tournament purse ever had the attention of the squash-world, but with unfortunately little local attention or support.

Frenchman Gregory Gaultier, currently World Number 1 in the sport, won the title and accompanying $25,000, defeating Egyptian Ali Farag in a tournament that added to the image of Shabana Khan as one of the sport's emerging star promoters. Her YSK Events put on the tournament.

With $150,000 in prize money on the table, the PMI Bellevue Squash Classic was appropriately staged as a sort of coming-out party for the Boys & Girls Club Hidden Valley Field House just north of Downtown Bellevue.

When she put on the Men's World Squash Championship in late 2015, first time ever for the event on U.S. soil, Shabana charted new territory for prize money, which totaled $325,000 for the event that was held at Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center. That amount became the threshold going forward with the U.S. Open in Philadelphia next fall boasting a $350,000 purse.

I was struck by the fact that when you watch the speed, agility and athleticism of the top squash ccompetitor and reflect on the comparative talents needed for other racket sports, it's hard not to ask "why is tennis played everywhere and squash isn't?"

I posed that question to Shabana's older brother, Azam, four times a member of the U.S. Open team, and he said: "Tennis courts are everywhere and available to all while squash courts are in clubs and available only to the elite, but we intend to change that and it's one of Shabana's goals."

In fact, statistics on the sport indicate it is growing faster in this country than anywhere in the world, with the U.K. and Egypt following close behind.

For those on hand for the 2015 Men's World Championships, there was a bit of déjà vu since Gaultier defeated an Egyptian in that year's final to win his first World title after losing the in the final match three previous years.

Only a few in the inner circle of those helping Shabana with the event were aware that had it not been for the assist from Robert Greczanik, whom Asam Khan describes as "specializing in restoring injured athletes to full enhanced function," to help overcome an ankle injury that Gaultier feared would keep him out of the finals.

As an aside, Gaultier had turned to Greczanik, who runs Energetic Sports Lab in Bellevue, prior to the 2015 finals to address the fact he simply felt "all beat up with numerous injuries."

Squash players from around the world who were on hand for both events praised the Boys & Girls Club as far more appealing for players and fans, particularly for the interaction between them, than Meydenbauer, which incidentally had rejected her effort to hold this year's event there, telling her to look elsewhere.

And the community supporters of the Hidden Valley club must have been pleased to see its visibility on the global squash stage with thousands subscribing to the television coverage.

Players from 17 nations were on hand, but Shabana made it 18, using what's called a "wild card" for promoters of squash events, to let a young player from Connecticut compete to make sure the U.S. was represented.

Leading the as-yet small group of believers in what Shabana's squash initiatives are intended to mean for the Bellevue community's image and the opportunity she seeks to bring to the city's and region's young people was Dave Cutler. He is not only universally acclaimed as the key technical brain behind the Microsoft Windows NT and all the subsequent windows versions. A decade ago he was recognized as a National Medal of Technology and Innovation laureate, perhaps the most prestigious honor in the country for developers of new technology.

His support, and the fact that dozens, if not hundreds, of Microsofties who cross the street from the company's Redmond campus to play at the Pro Sports Club where Shabana, Asam and Latasha are instructors helped guide Microsoft into the Presenting sponsorship with Pro Sports as the Official sponsor.

Pacific Market International, a Seattle-based brand and product-marketing company with offices in seven cities around the world, has been a strong supporter of both this five-day event and of the 2015 Men's Championship as title sponsor.

Richard and Jackie Lange, Woodinville residents, stepped up as a family after Shabana created a national tournament for young squash players called the National Gold Tournament that attracted 175 young people from around the country to compete in groups broken down as under 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19. Shabana notes that 20 college coaches looked on for the older players' matches at the event held earlier this spring, also at the Boys & Girls Club.

The Langes, whose daughter, Kristin, played squash at Penn and was a three-time intercollegiate finalist, put up the money for five years of having the youth competition be "The Lange Showcase," sharing Shabana's vision of making squash available to young people of all ages and means.

Khan is the most famous last name in squash. Distant cousins Hasim and his son Sharif, and cousin Jahangir, dominated world squash for decades. 

Yusuf Khan 10-time all-India champion, emigrated to the U.S. in 1968 to teach tennis at the Seattle Tennis Club, bringing with him his family that then included children Asam and Shabana. Khan soon after arrival in Seattle created the Seattle Athletic Club and made it a focal point for squash in Seattle.

Shabana's younger sister, Latasha, was several time national women's champion before losing the title to Shabana, providing me the opportunity to joke in an earlier column, "best in the family is best in the county."

The looming reality for this unique local event is that Shabana and her supporting family have basically given themselves only a couple of months to decide whether it's worth the struggle (the event basically broke even this year) to attract thus-far absent support from either the City of Bellevue or local businesses.

15.00

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

	Monica McWilliams

"Compromise is a weak word," she told me in an interview recently in Seattle, where she was visiting for the first time to appear at a fundraising event for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Fund.

	RoseMarie FitzSimons

The Seattle visit was arranged by Microsoft alum RoseMarie FitzSimons, now an Irish filmmaker who still retains a home in Seattle, which she visits from Ireland several times a year. But she has mostly been on the road for months, following McWilliams on her travels to countries in turmoil around the world.

It's been five years this coming Memorial Day since the formal launch of the 50^th Anniversary Vietnam War Commemoration to honor those who fought in that war but were never thanked when they returned to a divided nation. And for four of those years, Joseph L. (Joe) Galloway, one of the best-known correspondents of that war, has been on the road doing interviews with veterans of that conflict to preserve their memories.

Galloway's travels to do the interviews, mostly about two hours in length and which he told me last week now number about 350, embody his commitment to produce the "the body of material for future generations who want to know what this war was all about."

Galloway, a UPI reporter decorated for battlefield heroism at the battle of Ia Drang 50 years ago last November, spent a week doing interviews in Seattle two years ago. Now he is returning to the Seattle area next month to do another round of interviews with Vietnam veterans.

I've written several columns on Galloway and his role in the 50^th Anniversary Commemoration, partly because we were UPI colleagues (he in war zones and I as a political writer and later a Pacific Coast executive for the company). But more important in a broader sense because of a fascination with his perspectives on the war in articles and speeches, and the import of the battle in the Ia Drang Valley that Galloway and the late Gen. Hal Moore, then a lieutenant colonel in command of the U.S. army forces in that battle, made famous in their book and a subsequent movie.

Ia Drang was the first clash of American troops with North Vietnamese regular army and involved heavy fighting in two main engagements that claimed casualties in the hundreds on the U.S. side and several thousand on the North Vietnam side.

Galloway later described it as "The battle that convinced North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minhhe could win," a conclusion that it turns out was shared by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he assessed details and the import of the Ia Drang battle. But McNamara's conclusion, shared with President Lyndon Johnson, never saw the light of day until years later.

The battle became the subject of Galloway's and Moore's book, "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young," and the resulting movie, "We Were Soldiers," as well as a second book, "We are Still Soldiers... A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam" when the two returned to the battlefield years later.

Galloway continued his correspondent role on into war in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who admired his work included the late General Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who referred to him as "the finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a Soldier's reporter and a Soldier's friend." 

And of his time on the battlefield, particularly at Ia Drang, Galloway said: "The men I met and the time we spent together fighting for one another was a life-changing experience that transcends the bonds of friendship and brotherhood."

One of my first columns on Galloway dealt with my urging him to come to Seattle after I first learned, in October of 2014, about the commemoration and his role in it.

He told me he'd need a place to do the interviews so KCPQ-13 offered its studios for the week and Galloway became briefly a high-visibility figure in the area, including an interview at Seattle Rotary, as he helped the group of veterans who each spent an hour or more with him have the opportunity to share their memories. And also to accept the belated thank you that the attention represented.

Galloway's comments during his stay here and with the interviews themselves have also been Galloway's revisiting of his own memories of Vietnam.

During one of our interviews, Galloway said of the veterans: "They are not bitter but I am bitter in their behalf. It make me angry that those who came to hate the war came to hate the warriors who were their sons and daughters."

He's also shared his own emotions that accompanied other activities related to this trail through the commemoration events.

He told me of one occasion a couple of years ago where he and the governor of Kentucky shared the podium at an event for Vietnam veterans that was at the state capital at the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he described as "one of the most spectacular in our country."

"It is in the form of a giant sundial," he said. "Incredible work was done so that when the tip of the shadow from the sundial pointer hits the memorial floor it points to that day's list of Kentucky soldiers who were killed in action on that date in Vietnam."

"It brought tears to my eyes to see the pointer land on those KIA in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965," he said.

The recent retirement of Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza as commanding officer of Joint Base Lewis McChord was a reminder of Galloway's last visit, and the coming one, since a commemoration Lanza put on as only the second such event at one of the nation's military bases preceded the Galloway visit by four months.

That high-visibility JBLM event in early October of 2014 was a Commemoration tribute that attracted more than 2,500 Vietnam veterans from around the Northwest onto the parade field for a salute ceremony, massing of the colors and Keynote speech by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Lanza had said he noticed that Vietnam Era veterans were among those enthusiastically welcoming soldiers home from deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he realized of the Vietnam veterans: "they had never had that" welcome-home reception so he helped create a thank you opportunity.

Galloway's visit May 22-25 for interviews with the veterans will include a Vietnam War panel discussion at Shoreline College with Bruce Crandall, the helicopter pilot and Medal of Honor recipient from the Ia Drang battle whose exploits were detailed in the book and the movie, and former POW Joe Crecca, along with Galloway himself.

96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

My most recent column on Galloway was in mid-February, the outgrowth of an email from him about the "hard duty" he had of delivering a eulogy for General Moore, the Ia Drang commander and his friend of 50 years, who had died that week two days before his 95^th birthday.

John Buller, whose senior executive roles have ranged from higher education to sports to retailing to non-profits to community organizations, has experienced and helped reshape an array of cultures over the years since he arrived in Seattle to play basketball for the University of Washington.

And the immersion in those disparate cultures has led him to publish his second book, "Can You Survive the Age of Disruption," more than two decades and numerous disruptive involvements since his first book. "Survival Guide for Bureaucratic Warriors."

Buller prefers to describe his latest book as "a resource guide to creating the all-in culture," which he sums up as "all about outcomes that bring interpersonal skills that are collaborative in nature," although in his book he details elements needed to bring about an all-in culture.

"I have always been interested in leadership and culture building," Buller told me. "But I believe we are now experiencing a rate of change that demands a new way to look at how organizations manage the pace of this change."

"We are at a point where there are three generations in the work force at the same time," said Buller. "And within a few years we'll have four generations, and technology has now outpaced our ability to manage the rate of change."

Buller's first cultural "all-in" was college basketball, having been recruited in 1965 to come to UW. He led the freshman team in scoring and was sixth man, starting 10 games, in his sophomore year. But a viral inflamation in the heart lining impacted the rest of his playing career.

He spent two years as a graduate assistant for the Huskies while getting his MBA, then went to work for what was the Bon Marche, later Macy's,

Over the next two years and three promotions, he became divisional merchandise manager and eventually senior advertising and brand development executive. It was at The Bon where, he says, he had his favorite job.

"I was responsible for changing the 4,000 employees from a clerk mentality to a customer service mentality and I also got to do more than 40 two day team building workshops to support this cultural transformation.," Buller recalls. 

The Bon experience led him to write "Survival Guide."

"Changing the culture at The Bon was an effort to focus on service, both to our customers and our internal attitudes toward our fellow employees," Buller explained.  "The book was about my learning the difference between a 'Soldier,' someone who takes orders, and a 'Warrior,' one who has a mission or a cause. I learned how to be a Warrior."

He took the warrior attitude, and the details of building survival skills, to roles as co-chair and director of the organizing committee for the NCAA Final Four in Seattle in 1995, executive director of the UW Alumni Association, CEO of Tully's Coffee and CEO of the Seattle Police Foundation.

His non-profit leadership roles included chairing the board of Seattle Seafair and a dozen years on both the Seattle Center Board and the board of the Washington Athletic Club, where he currently serves as executive director of the 101 Club.

Buller chuckles as he explains his often used process of creating All-In by having the marketing and the accounting teams each put together a business plan for the company.

"As you might guess, there wasn't a lot of similarity between the two plans. So I'd leave the room and say 'I'll be back in 20 minutes. Fix it while I'm gone."

Buller suggests "organizational leaders seeking to create new cultures "are tasked with an almost impossible amount of required intelligences."

"Today's Leadership needs to be proficient in understanding the 'Meyers Briggs Profile' - knowing yourself and understanding others that was the intelligence lesson of the 1980s and early 90s - then, along came 'Emotional Intelligence,' which focused on street smarts vs. book smarts," Buller explained.

 "Over the last 10 years you would have also needed to be competent in understanding the 'Social Media' explosion. Then, it helps if you have 'Ethnic Intelligence,' as well as 'Religious Intelligence', and 'Immigration Intelligence' - and now, the biggest new understanding is 'Generational Intelligence.'"

Discussion of changing culture in the workplace automatically includes focus on millennials, those in their twenties and early thirties. In addition to that generation's obviously adaptability to technology, 

Buller suggests "they have a social consciousness and they don't want to work somewhere that doesn't fit that. They think broad workplace experience, meaning horizontal movement, is better. They are looking for the perfect culture and perfect outcome."

"If you don't believe the statement that if you can't change you're dead, look at what's occurred with the Fortune 500 over four decades," Buller says. "In 1975 the average age of the companies in that index was 68, now the average age is eight." 

From her window in the Oregon Supreme Court Building, the state’s newest Supreme Court justice can look across State Street in Salem to the Willamette University campus where her higher-education journey began 31 years ago.

Meagan Flynn, already Judge Flynn as an Oregon appellate court judge since October of 2014, was sworn in last week by Chief Justice Thomas Balmer after being named by Gov. Kate Brown to the state’s highest court. She’ll have a new office but the surroundings will be familiar since both the supreme and appellate courts share the same courtroom.

The governor said in a statement that “Flynn has earned a reputation as a smart and thoughtful judge while serving on the Oregon Court of Appeals and is regarded as fair-minded and compassionate.”

Indeed those who know her would echo that, particularly her parents who left her standing on the sidewalk in front of Willamette waving goodbye 31 years ago. And as Betsy and I drove away then and headed back to Seattle, past the Supreme Court building, Oregon’s oldest government building, we had no way of imagining it would be where she would eventually office.

As readers of The Harp have guessed by now, this is a personal column, a reflection on our daughter, mother of two of our grandchildren, who wears the judge’s robe.

Meagan had a goal of being an attorney from early on because her role model was her cousin, Sheila McKinnon, who was then a successful Seattle attorney.

Some of the following is reflections about Meagan from an earlier column I did when she was appointed to the Court of Appeals judgeship.

I recalled that as she prepared to graduate from Holy Names Academy in Seattle, where she was salutatorian of her class, I urged her to apply to Stanford because her friend, who was valedictorian, was applying there.  

"It would be cool if you could say you were accepted to Stanford," I told her, even though I knew she had already decided she wanted to attend Willamette.

To my surprise, though likely not hers, she was accepted to Stanford and I feared she would decide she wanted to go there since it would have been a financial challenge for us at that time.

But the ducks on the stream at Willamette, which were the initial attraction the day she first visited the school (although its academic reputation and its law school had roles in the final decision), had already drawn her interest to Willamette.

Good thing, since that's where she met her husband to be, Dan Keppler, who was also intent on become an attorney, though eventually Gonzaga law school won out for both of them and after graduating they built partner-role practices at separate small firms in Portland. Along the way also came two daughters.

Meagan always had a competitive bent, which she usually did a good job of hiding, except as a seventh grader in Piedmont, CA, when she found that a male student was challenging her for top student. Her jaw always locked a bit when the male student’s name came up in conversations. The two of them ran for 8th grade class president (except the title was commissioner general) in a hotly contested race that she won, expressing smug pleasure at coming out on top.

The call from Governor Brown was the second from an Oregon governor for Meagan since then-Gov. John Kitzhauber was on the line one evening when she answered the phone. The story comes from her husband, Dan, since Meagan is not one to talk much about herself.

As Dan related of the telephone conversation: “’Hi, Meagan, this is John Kitzhauber.’ ‘Hi, Governor.’ ‘So do you want to be on the appellate court?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Congratulations, Judge.’”

Of course, due diligence had preceded the call, as it did with the appointment to the highest court late last month.

When she was sworn in to her Court of Appeals post in 2014, the judge administering the oath was the same judge whom she had gone to work for as a clerk 20 years earlier, soon after he had taken his oath as a then-new appeals court judge himself. He brought to her swearing-in session a picture of that first clerk-judge meeting in 1994.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Meagan is taking her place on the state’s highest court as its youngest, as well as newest, member.

One of the most noteworthy accomplishments of Gonzaga coach Mark Few in his team's inexorable march toward the NCAA National Championship game, despite falling short in the finale, may have been the destruction of the oft-quoted axiom that "nice guys finish last."

That "nice guys" comment obviously isn't a reference to the angry Bulldog mascot, Spike. But it is the agreed-on description of Few, who grew up in a small Oregon town, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and who didn't leave behind the lessons of his youth.

Despite the fierce competitiveness    of his players that has been on display for the nation to see during the past few weeks, they are described by a GU trustee who has spent an extensive amount of time with them as "selfless, disciplined, family."

Gonzaga and Few fell short of their quest for college basketball's pinnacle in their Mondaynight loss to North Carolina in the NCAA championship game and the pain will burn for a time for the coach, his players and fans.

But his nice-guy trait was on display, despite the pain of the loss, in the post-game nationally televised interview when Few declined the opportunity to blame the referees for the loss with a couple of calls generally viewed as in error, saying instead "the referees were excellent."

And as Jack McCann, a longtime GU trustee who offered me the above characteristics of the team, said to me in a phone conversation before the final game, "nothing should diminish the joy of the journey that this season represented." He meant not just for Few and his team but also for the family of supporters, fans and boosters.

Indeed McCann, a GU trustee since 1997 and founder of the prominent South King County land-development firm, the Jack McCann Co, and other trustees and close supporters have proven themselves part of the GU family over the years.

That includes hosting the coaches and players at their vacation homes, including getaways to Cabo to McCann's beach home and the neighboring Cabo home of Mike Patterson, prominent Seattle attorney and also a trustee. But Few doesn't use Cabo trips as a recruiting tool!

And McCann was quick to sign off in the early 2000s on the idea the players should travel on charter rather than commercial flights before that idea was on the radar screen of most schools.

As John Stone, a successful Spokane developer who came up with the idea of offering his private plane and convinced two others to offer theirs on away-game trips, explained to me in our phone conversation "it became a way to make sure the players were back home in their beds that night and in their classrooms the next day. They are student athletes of course, not just athletes."

McCann was among the trustees and friends who over the years that followed that first private-plane travel year put up the $100,000 apiece to both pay for the flights and allow the supporters to travel on the plane with the team and have seats near the bench for those away games. By the mid-2000s, that was the routine for travel.

And it was Stone who pointed out the importance of the "family" role played by the Greater Spokane community in chipping in $6 million of the $26 million it took to build McCarthey Athletic Center, the 6,000-seat facility on the campus, competed in 2004, that opposing teams dread visiting. 

The community involvement was in the form of a "seat license" plan where members of the Spokane community committed to $4,000 to $5,000 a year to license certain seats in "the kennel" where the seats come right down to the floor.

Few's Oregon upbringing in Creswell a stone's throw from Eugene and the fact he graduated from the University of Oregon created one of the untold human-interest stories that media usually thrive on but someone missed this time.

With Gonzaga and Oregon in the Final Four, I was surprised there wasn't a lot of focus, at least some focus, on the possibility that if the Bulldogs and Ducks each won the first game, Few would have been trying to beat his alma mater.

In fact, another story is the possibility that Few might have been coaching Oregon rather than Gonzaga in this Final Four, but that story is known only in a close circle.

The conversation in basketball circles, and among Gonzaga supporters, over the years of NCAA tournament appearances, has been when would Few be attracted to a bigger opportunity.

After all, having been at Gonzaga since joining the coaching staff as a graduate assistant in 1989, becoming full-time assistant a year later and becoming head coach after the school's Cinderella 1999 drive to the Elite Eight, Few's tenure has been an unprecedented loyalty to what has been viewed as a mid-level program.

The fact is that McCann, sharing the story with surprising candor, was personally aware of a full-court press Oregon's athletic director and famous alum Phil Knight put on Few several years ago to return to his alma mater. But the effort was unsuccessful in attracting him away from Gonzaga.

Supporters are aware the time may come when Few is attracted to a new challenge at another university, but everyone now knows it won't be the lure of a more respected basketball program.

Only nine schools have matched Gonzaga's 2017 record of 37 victories in a season. And Few is one of a handful of coaches to achieve 500 victories, all at the once lightly regarded Spokane school.

Few and his wife, Marcy, have three boys and a girl and in perhaps the most significant example of the importance of family to him is the story of when Few was once asked by a sports writer if the start and end of each basketball season represented the most exciting and most downer times each year.

He replied that the most exciting time each year was when his kids got out of school and he had a whole summer to spend with them and the most disappointing time was when they returned to school in the fall. So much for the appeal of fame and glory.

Gonzaga's desire for sports recognition actually dates back almost a century to 1920 when the Spokane school, with fewer than 200 students, embarked on a quixotic quest for football fame by hiring a big-time coach, Gus Dorais, who had teamed with Knute Rockne at Notre Dame to perfect the forward pass.

It was a quest, I once referred to it in a Harp some years ago, as an "Ozymandian delusion," that brought Gonzaga an improbable post-season appearance two years later against West Virginia in a 21-13 Christmas Day 1922 loss that earned Gonzaga top visibility in the next day's New York Times sports section.

That was the only moment of national football glory for Gonzaga, though the program continued until the outbreak of World War II in 1941 when it was discontinued and never brought back. During its 20-year run, Gonzaga football produced some players who became nationally prominent and one, Ray Flaherty, went on to become, for a time, the most successful coach in the National Football League in the late '30s with the Washington Redskins.

Gonzaga basketball, however, is secure now as a program nationally respected. And the "Nice Guy" and "family" characteristics engendered by Few, the school and the supporters may well become the most envied part of what Gonzaga has brought to college basketball.

McCann refers to it as "a magic carpet ride" for all the segments of the "family."
                            ----------- 

 (The above column is a personal column since my wife and I are graduates of Gonzaga and some of those I quote, Stone and Patterson, are not only friends but attended the same high school, Gonzaga Prep, and same grade school, St. Aloysius, where Few's sister is law is now principal. It doesn't get any more incestuous than that!) 

When the Seattle Mariners take the field for their home opener April 10, there will be at least some in the crowd who will recall that it was opening day 25 years ago when there was finally a cautious optimism that the uncertainty about the future of the franchise had been resolved. A team of local owners had been assembled, buttressed by a Japanese businessman devoted to Seattle, awaiting hoped-for approval from Major League Baseball.

And it's on occasions like a quarter-century anniversary of a major event that those involved in creating outcomes like the saving of a major league franchise for Seattle find that little-known facts of the story come to the forefront of memory for sharing.

Thus this Harp will be dedicated to a collection of several such stories related to that Mariners' accomplishment that made opening day 1992 special for not just the 56,000 fans on hand but also for supporters across the region.

There was an appropriate major celebration at Safeco Field last May to recognize Slade Gorton for his essential role as a U.S, Senator in finding local buyers for the Mariners in 1991 after then-owner Jeff Smulyan announced he was planning to sell the team, triggering a clause giving 120 days to find local owners.

It was in December of 1991 that Gorton learned that his effort to convince Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi to invest, not as a baseball fan but to repay the community that he felt had helped his company become successful, had paid off.

And it was January 23 of 1992 that the announcement of the group of local investors to be named the Baseball Club of Seattle and led by the Japanese billionaire would buy the team to keep it in Seattle.

But it would be two months beyond opening day in 1992 before The MLB ownership committee would recommend approval of the purchase of the team by the Baseball Club of Seattle. So, as Randy Adamack, Mariner Senior Vice President for Communications, noted to me "While there was more optimism that April about the franchise staying here, the approval issue still had people holding their collective breath."

The 120-day clause and the local-owners search provide interesting memories for those most closely involved, and retired Mariners president Chuck Armstrong shared a couple of them in a telephone conversation this week.

Armstrong was attorney and advisor for George Argyros, the Southern California businessman who had purchased the Mariners in 1981 from the original ownership team, and Armstrong served his first stint as president of the Mariners when Argyros sent him up from Southern California a couple of years later.

The 120-day provision had actually been inserted in 1985 when Argyros and King County Executive Randy Revelle were negotiating a change in the Kingdome lease and Argyros suggested it as a "closer" to get county council approval.

Armstrong recalls that the reason for suggesting the provision was that Argyros "didn't want to go down in history as the guy who sold to a distant owner and thus let the Mariners leave town without providing time to find local owners."

"He was okay with a new owner living elsewhere, as long as he didn't move the team," he added.

Armstrong recalls "George never gets credit for that 120-day clause, but he had learned that nothing happens in Seattle, because of the endless focus on process, until things are in extremis and when something reaches that point the community would respond."

Bur Argyros did become basically loathed in Seattle in 1987 when he sought to buy the San Diego Padres to be closer to his Southern California home after the death of owner Ray Kroc. armstrong notes that it was the suggestion of Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth's, who said he would find someone to buy the Mariners.

Then in 1989 came the offer from Smulyan that set in motion everything that followed.

Armstrong was also involved in trying to help sell the Japanese ownership to MLB, remembering that he called his friend, George W.Bush, then managing partner of the Texas Rangers, explained the challenge and asked if his father, President Bush, might be interested in helping with the issue.

"One day the phone rang and a woman said 'the president is calling.' I asked 'President of what?' and she said a little icily, how about President of the United States.'"

Armstrong said it turned out that Baseball Commissioner Faye Vincent had worked for the elder Bush in the oil fields and they had remained friends.

"I can't honestly tell you what, if any, role the president took in our issue, though both Bushes indicated they had no problem with a Japanese owner" chuckled Armstrong, who as the only one of the new local ownership who knew anything about running a baseball team was brought back as president on July 1, 1992. He retired three years ago.

One of the most interesting stories and one that I've felt should be shared ever since I first heard it, is how new CEO and majority owner John Stanton had wished with all his might to be part of the ownership team in 1992, but told me some years ago "I didn't have the money."

For those who might find that startling or amusing, remember that wireless pioneer Stanton had recently departed McCaw Cellular with Craig McCaw's blessing to launch Stanton Communications with his wife, Theresa Gillespie, and they had sunk all their capital into that venture. The company would in 1994 become Western Wireless, which went public in1996 and spun off VoiceStream Wireless in 1999.

"We had the opportunity to invest in 1992 and passed because we were funding payroll for about 100 employees out of our personal checking account," Stanton emailed me this week.  "In 2000 we had the opportunity to buy John McCaw's interest in the team. And we have been involved since then."

McCaw's 1992 investment had represented a substantial piece of the original commitment by the 17 owners and it wasn't until he decided to sell that he shared the fact he had only invested for the sake of community and that he hadn't really been a baseball fan.

The final recollection truly little known, except for those closely involved with the effort to save the Mariners, is of the legal battle in which Seattle attorney Arthur Harrigan won the right for local ownership to be sought.

I wrote last year, as Gorton's key contribution 25 years earlier was being celebrated, about the role played by Harrigan, whose firm of Calfo Harrigan Leyh and Eakes got into the battle because it represented King County and Smulyan was seeking to abandon the county-owned Kingdome.

The venue for resolving the future of the Seattle Mariners franchise was what amounted to an arbitration hearing before Arthur Andersen, the national accounting firm agreed to by both sides to decide some key issues relating to the lease and the team.

Since it wasn't a court process, which would have gotten large visibility for the battle between attorneys, Harrigan's maneuvering over the meaning of wording in Smulyan's contract regarding an attendance provision and whether it triggered the 120-day clause got little visibility, and is thus little remembered.

Harrigan's argued interpretation of the lease-requirement wording was accepted by the Andersen firm, so Smulyan was required to give the four-month opportunity for a local buyer to be sought.

Brian Snoddy's lifetime focus on Samurai weaponry, which has led to a collection large enough that he is now looking for a museum to display it all, sprang from a second-grade project to create Japanese armor out of paper mache.

Along the way since then, Snoddy became immersed in the Samurai culture that dominated Japan for hundreds of years until the mid-1800s while he also successfully pursued his career as an illustrator.

In the early '90s, Snoddy worked as a comic book artist and on prominent Saturday morning cartoons like Conan the Barbarian, Disney's Gargoyles, Garfield and Friends, X-men, Jim Lee's Wildcats, and Exo-squad.

Thereafter, was also a partner in a successful game company called Privateer Press, which he co-founded and co-guided until selling his share in the game company to help provide the money to build his collection.

He recalls that he bought his first Samurai weapon at the age of 19, a short sword that cost him $350 "at a time when I had $700 to my name." He noted when we visited that Samurai warriors always carried a short and long swo

"I want to start a real museum that is dedicated to the kind of stuff I have, which is a collection that is like nothing in the U.S, that I am aware of," Snoddy said. "There are some very impressive private collections in this country but nothing that is open to the public."

He estimated that his collection, which is stored in his apartment except for a suit of armor that stands beside his desk in his Lynnwood office, is worth about $120,000.

While Snoddy is intent on finding a place for public display of his weaponry, he is also intent on helping attract interest to the time when the Samurai dominated Japanese culture.

"This was an ancient, sophisticated culture that dates back more than 700 years," he said. "It came from the warrior culture of Japan but basically ended in 1876 when Japan decided to modernize, realizing it was out of touch with other countries and cultures, but that also meant modernizing its military."

"It was development that had to happen at some point since Japan had cut itself off from the rest of the world, until Commodore Perry sailed his ships into Tokyo Bay and forced Japan to open itself to the outside world," Snoddy explained, sharing a bit of history.

Snoddy noted that the Samurai made an attempt to come back a few years after they were banned in what is known as the Satsuma Rebellion, a revolt against the imperial government, "but they got annihilated," he said.

He recalled that he bought his first suit of Samurai armor, "probably dating from the 1700s," when he was 25, adding that by then he was also buying sword fittings, such as handles.

"I now have nine suits of armor, five helmets but only two swords, plus a "naginata," which he explained was a pole with a long sword-like curved blade on the end, and I was intrigued to learn when I did a search on "naginata" that it was primarily a weapon of female warriors of the Japanese nobility.

That caused me to chuckle, frankly, as I thought "Ah, a society ahead of its time in some respects."

Snoddy said the place he'd like to find to display his Samurai weaponry "would ideally be a working museum that would include people who could identify artifacts, publish books as well as provide audio and video products and have guest speakers from around the world."

Snoddy is not alone in his interest in the Samurai weaponry. California has two large Japanese sword-owner gatherings: the Northern California Token Kai (Kai means club, Snoddy said) and the Nanka Token Kai, Southern California Japanese Sword Society. Plus, he said, there is a convention in Florida each year.

But those are gatherings of sword owners, not collectors of the full array of weapons.

Snoddy laughed when he shared that his interest in Japanese culture isn't limited to medieval times, since he met his wife, Makiko, there when they were introduced after, as he put it, he was dumped by his Japanese girl friend at the same time she was bemoaning the loss of her U.S. pen pal from whom she was learning English. 

They were married soon after.

With a backdrop of the movie "Patriots Day," described by its director as "unapologetic in support of law enforcement," a special gathering took place in Seattle last week to honor First Responders, the police and firefighters who are asked to come through in time of crisis. It may have been the first event of its kind and certainly was a first in Seattle.

The event, without advance media hype and with no speeches and no elected officials present to distract from the "thank you" for the honorees, was the idea of Greg Steinhauer, president of American Life, with key support from the Seattle Police Foundation and a few local corporations who put up the money to make the event possible.

The event began at the Cinerama theater, where the movie "Patriots Day," the film about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent manhunt for the terrorist brothers, was playing. It a wound up with a social gathering at the Westin downtown.

The importance of the movie to Seattle and the First Responders gathering is that Robert Merner, now an assistant police chief in Seattle, is a featured figure in the movie, being the basis for the lead character played by producer and actor Mark Wahlberg as a leader in the effort to find the brothers following the bombing.

Peter Berg, director and one of the writers, said of the film that it was "unapologetic in support of law enforcement," which to some observers accounted for the fact that Patriots Day surprisingly failed to be nominated for Best Picture for the recent Academy Awards.

One writer, discussing the Academy Awards nominations, observed that Patriots Day "Was exactly the movie that America needs right now."

That sense certainly came out when the Boston police officers, following the end of the hunt for the terrorist brothers, were on hand for a Red Sox baseball game and the game was stopped by the Red Sox so those in the stands could say "thank you."

Hard to imagine something like that happening in Seattle, where a police pushback is almost a required reaction in some circles of Seattleites and there is still lingering agitation about accusations of excessive force and abuse prior to a 2012 consent decree that followed Justice Department mandated reforms.

The idea for the gathering of police and firefighters to get to know each other came about at a social gathering where Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, Merner, Avalara CEO Scott McFarland and Wells Fargo's Senior Vice President Tim Brown were visiting.

It came up in conversation that Merner's role in the pursuit of the Boston bombers was being played by Wahlberg. Following that conversation, Debbie Peppa, charged by Steinhauer with putting on last week's event. 

She recalled for me what happened next.

"It didn't take long before the idea was hatched that we should do an event to honor first responder and that the movie would be a great platform to do it, so Scott McFarland and Tim Brown quickly said they would support the event and I was tasked to make it happen," Peppa explained.

"Police Chief (Kathleen) O'Toole was supportive of it immediately as well," she added. "It's my understanding that it's the first time that an event like this was held, just an event to honor the officers and firefighters who risk their lives every day in a political climate that isn't really supportive of what they do so we wanted to send a message that people do recognize what they do."

"But it wouldn't have come about if Mark Pinkowski, chairman of the board for the Police Foundation, hadn't been instrumental in supporting the event, even though he was in Wisconsin dealing with the death of his father," Peppa said. 

Mark Sundberg, president of International Parking Management (IPM), who was one of the sponsors of the gathering, said "It was a phenomenal event and it would be awesome if we could do it again next year and have the general public get the chance to be involved."

In fact a number of the firefighters and officers asked if this could become a yearly event to allow the two departments to mingle and build relationships.

Sundberg made a point of praising what has happened in the department under O'Toole's leadership.

O'Toole, who had headed the Boston police department as well as the Irish national police, was tapped just under three years ago by Mayor Ed Murray after a national search to take over what was a beleaguered department operating under the consent decree that required stiff reforms to combat excessive force and biased policing.

"The police chief is the best thing that has happened in Seattle for a long time," Sundberg told me.

As a bit of background on Assistant Chief Robert Merner, who was the catalyst for the event, he joined the Seattle Police Department two years ago this week from Boston, where he was chief of detectives in the Boston Police Department. In that role he oversaw 800 employees as superintendent of the Bureau of Investigative Services.

Merner, who joined the Boston Police Department in 1986, worked under O'Toole when she served as Boston police commissioner from 2004 to 2006.

O'Toole said at the time of his selection she was unaware that he had applied for the Seattle job until he became a finalist. He told her he didn't alert her of his interest because that would have been inappropriate, she said.

Dear Joe,

Joseph L. Galloway's Seattle interviews with Vietnam veterans from this state two years ago made them part of a 50-year commemoration of those who fought in that war but were never thanked. I was reminded of Galloway's time here when I received the email this week that he has the "hard duty" of a eulogy Friday for the man who for half a century had been his partner in keeping alive the memory of the "defining battle" of that war.

Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. "Hal" Moore, who as a lieutenant colonel led units of the 7thCavalry Regiment in the first major battle against the North Vietnamese army at a place called the Ia Drang Valley, died this week, two days before his 95th birthday.

Joe Galloway 1969Joe Galloway was a UPI reporter who traded his camera for a machine gun as the battle swirled around him with Moore's unit confronted by a superior force of North Vietnamese regulars.

Galloway proceeded to rescue two wounded soldiers under fire during that climactic four-day battle, fighting that claimed 234 Americans, but was estimated to have cost the lives of several thousand North Vietnamese in two landing zones in November of 1965.

Joe Galloway in Seattle"Those of us who survived Landing Zone X-Ray survived because of his brilliance of command. I think every one of us thought we were going to die at that place except Hal Moore. He was certain we were going to win that fight and he was right," Galloway was quoted in a national news story this week.

Galloway's email to me and a group of former UPI colleagues read:

"I will do the eulogy, as I promised Hal more than 20 years ago that I would. But it's hard duty. "He was my best friend for more than half a century." The memorial for Moore will be at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning Army Base in Columbus, GA.

Ia Drang began a relationship between Galloway and Moore that extended over more than five decades and involved co-authoring two books, including We Were Soldiers Once...and Young and the movie made from it, We Were Soldiers.  

I write about Galloway in this Harp because he had an impact on many people in the Seattle area during a key stop here on his travels around the country as he was, in essence, revisiting that war in memory and emotion, interviewing veterans of that conflict. The 100 or so interviews prior to his Seattle visit, and the more than 300 total, have been part of the 50-year Vietnam Commemoration initiated by the Defense Department, not to celebrate the war but those who fought there.

Galloway's impact was not just with those he interviewed or the several interviews that Q13 Fox did with him as well as those he interviewed. I had the opportunity for question-and-answer sessions with him at Seattle Rotary and at a special breakfast session at the Columbia Tower Club.

Q13 Fox made its facilities available for the interviews, 60- to 90-minute videos that Galloway hopes will be "the body of material for future generations who want to know what this war was all about."

Among the interviewees was Bruce Crandall, made famous by the book and the movie as the helicopter pilot who, with his wingman Ed "Too Tall" Freeman, made as many as 20 trips to a landing zone that was constantly under withering enemy fire to bring in supplies and remove the wounded.

Crandall, who lives in Kitsap County, was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2007 for his exploits, as was Freeman in 2001. Freeman died in 2008. Crandall will also be at the memorial service for Moore in Georgia this week.

Galloway and Moore wrote a second book, We Are Soldiers Still, which he said grew out of a journey back to the battlefields of Vietnam 25 years later. "We went back and walked those old battlefields. At the end of the day, Hal Moore and Col. Nguyen Huu An, the North Vietnamese commander, stood in a circle in the clearing and prayed for the souls of every man who died on both sides."

Galloway, and historians after him, described the battle of the Ia Drang Valley as defining, even though the war dragged on for another eight years before the end of U.S. involvement, and 10 years until the actual fall of Saigon.

It was defining, Galloway wrote, because it "convinced Ho (Chi Minh), (General) Giap and (Defense Secretary Robert S.) McNamara the U.S. could never win." The realization of both sides was that the American citizenry would not accept for a long period the pace of casualties that the companion battles in the Ia Drang Valley produced. 

In his ultimate rejection of LBJ, Galloway wrote: "Although President Johnson, having listened to McNamara's sense that we couldn't win in Viet Nam, no matter how many men we sent there, huddled with his key Advisors and they determined: 'send the soldiers anyway.'"

During one of the interviews while he was in Seattle, Galloway said of the veterans he was interviewing: "They are not bitter but I am bitter in their behalf. It make me angry that those who came to hate the war came to hate the warriors who were their sons and daughters."

One of the more emotional moments for Galloway came during our interview at the Tower Club when someone in the audience asked about Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had once described Galloway as "the soldier's reporter" because of his caring and regard for those he wrote about in battle.

Galloway recalled the time he had gotten a call from Schwarzkopf, who over the course of Galloway's coverage of wars extending through Afghanistan had become his close friend. The general wanted to know how Moore, who had been Schwarzkopf's tactical officer at West Point when he was a cadet, was doing.

"I told him Hal was having trouble with his memory," Galloway recalled. "So am I Joe," he quoted Schwarzkopf as replying. "So you better get down to here to Tampa so I can buy you a beer before I forget who you are.'"

It was a tearful moment not just for Galloway but for some of the military people in the audience as Galloway noted that Schwarzkopf, who had commanded all coalition forces in the gulf war, was suffering from both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and died not long after the 2012 telephone conversation.

When I took Galloway back to head for the airport, he promised to return to Seattle for more interviews, a promise I am pressing to hold him to.  

Two men who teamed with close business partners to build companies that became national leaders in their industries, a member of one of Seattle's most prominent families, and a woman who guided one of the region's best-known law firms will be the 2017 honorees of the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame. The event celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

The four whose lifetime of contributions to business will be celebrated at the Business Hall of Fame banquet on May 4 at the Seattle Waterfront Marriott are: Judith (Judy) Runstad, Carl Behnke, Artie Buerk and Don Nielsen.

Judy Runstad 

--Runstad, an attorney who became the first female managing partner of a major Seattle law as co-managing partner of Foster Pepper and went on to chair the Federal Reserve Board as well as serve two governors by chairing special commissions and serve on the boards of three public companies.

Carl Behnke  

--Carl Behnke built the second largest Pepsi dealership in North America. Then he subsequently partnered with his wife, Renee, to create Sur La Table, which bills itself the ultimate place for kitchen exploration and discovery and had grown to one of the nation's largest specialty cookware companies by the time they sold it in 2011 to an international investment bank. Behnke's late uncle, David (Ned) Skinner, is a Hall of Fame laureate.
          
                                               

Artie Buerk 

--Buerk, who became known as the "catalyst of ventures and connector of people," had many high points in his career. But a key one was when he partnered in the late '70s with old friend Chuck Barbo to build Shurgard into a nationwide storage company. Barbo was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2014.

Donald Nielsen 

--Nielsen, who teamed with Kirby Cramer to co-found what became the world's largest contract biological and chemical research and testing company, Hazleton Laboratories Corp. Nielsen joins Cramer, his frequent business
partner over the years, in the Hall of Fame. Cramer was inducted in 2009. 

The Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame was launched in 1987 by Puget Sound Business Journal and Junior Achievement of Greater Puget Sound to be patterned after the National Business Hall of fame that had been created a decade earlier by Junior Achievement and Fortune Magazine.

After the first Seattle event, where eight honorees included four who had been inducted into the national Business Hall of Fame so were automatic inclusions in the local Hall of Fame, I was asked by several business leaders who wondered if we would have enough prospects to carry on for very many years.

The question has been answered many times over in the three decades since then and the induction of the 2017 foursome will bring to 122 the number of business leaders who have been singled out for the honor. Past honorees have represented virtually every business sector, and while many were lawyers by profession who moved into the top ranks of business and made their impacts, Runstad is the first laureate to be honored for her contributions as an attorney.

Thus the vignettes of each of the laureates that are the feature of the banquet have, because of the extensive research that goes into each of the videos produced by KCPQ-13 as a key partner with JA and PSBJ, have contributed to an understanding of the business history of this region.

And the Q-13 videos, as well as the profiles contained each year in the Business Journal'sspecial editorial section focusing on the Hall of Fame event, represent the history of the Puget Sound business community through the collective stories of the laureates.

The laureates are chosen by a selection committee chaired by Business Journal Publisher Emory Thomas and includes JA Washington President David Moore, Q-13 Vice President Pam Pearson, as well as Neil McReynolds, John Fluke, past laureates Herb Bridge, Woody Howse and the undersigned.

Runstad served on corporate boards, a variety of gubernatorial commissions and, perhaps most prominently, was on the board, and in 1997 chaired, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was chair of the conference of chairs that year.

She was on the board of directors of Wells Fargo & Co., Potlatch Corp. and Safeco Corp.

She chaired two gubernatorial boards, serving as co-chair of Gov. Gary Locke's Washington Competitiveness Council, and Gov. Christine Gregoire's Global Competitiveness Council, and served as a board member of a half dozen other gubernatorial councils.  

Buerk teamed with Barbo to take a self-storage business they had, renamed it Shurgard, and built a nationwide brand, raising $750 million for expansion through what was described as "a vast constellation of brokered deals." 

He helped take the company public in 1994 then moved on, three years later co-founding the private equity firm, Buerk Craig Victor, which became Buerk Dale Victor and is now Montlake Capital. 

Despite his successes in the corporate world, many will say Buerk will be best remembered for his support of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurism. His own view is that "My whole life has revolved around startups and small businesses, the engines of the Northwest economy." 

That lifelong involvement eventually led to the entrepreneurial center at the University of Washington being named the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship in honor of both his involvement and of the $5.2 million gift from the Buerks to finance its future.

Nielsen partnered with Kirby Cramer in 1969 to launch Environmental Sciences Corp., a $200,000 startup in a garage. Over the following 14 years, after moving the company to Vienna, VA., the two built what they renamed Hazleton Laboratories Corp., into the world's largest contract biological and chemical research and testing company.

They took Hazleton public in 1983 and it was purchased in 1987 by Corning, which kept Nielsen on as president until 1992, when he retired and turned his focus to education reform, which has remained his focus as he has become a sought-after opinion leader and author on education change.

Behnke, as CEO, guided ALPAC as a Pepsi dealership that, but the time it was purchased by Pepsi, had become the second largest dealership in the nation with revenue in excess of $130 million annually. Then he teamed with his wife, Renee, to build Sur La Table into a national company. He sits on various corporate boards, as well as chairing the Skinner Corporation. The names Behnke and Skinner being among the best-known business and philanthropic families in the region.

Behnke's resume is filled with community and philanthropic involvements, as is the case with the other laureates. It's important to note that laureate selections are based solely on contributions to business and the economy, since other organizations and events focus on philanthropic contributions, although community involvement is part of the life commitment of most laureates chosen over the years.

Despite the fact it's now possible to find a book, online promotion or latest expert touting the value of virtually every form of exercise or workout regimen, the routine known as "super slow" has stood the test of time, gathering evangelical adherents across the country though being only vaguely familiar to many people.

Ann-Marie Garrett-Anderson chuckles at that reality as she talks about her quarter century experience guiding clients through the few-minutes-a-week routine called High Intensity Training that is taken from the "SuperSlow" process devised more than 40-plus years ago by high-intensity guru Ken Hutchins.

Hutchins defined and popularized his trademarked SuperSlow form of resistance training exercise and developed methodology, trainer certifications and exercise equipment working specifically with Nautilus, the exercise-equipment manufacturer that had developed :"strength training principles."

The bible of the high-intensity disciples is Body by Science, co-authored by Doug McGuff, M.D., who throughout his medical career has maintained a focus on high-intensity exercises culminating in the late '90s with his opening Ultimate Exercise, his own high-intensity gym.

Ann-Marie's late husband, Greg, was in the forefront of the nationally recognized evangelists of the high-intensity regimen and she is now on the list of most recognized practitioners.

It was with the guidance of friends that I discovered Ann-Marie, and her Ideal Exercise gym, first facility west of the Mississippi to employ the SuperSlow approach, as I sought ways to treat my body in a manner that hopefully maintains its performance despite advancing age.

But as I came to learn about SuperSlow, I have been surprised that it has gained so little visibility if for no other reason than its role as a process proven to combat osteoporosis in the elderly.

A key challenge for higher visibility for Super Slow, the High Intensity Training routine as applied in the Seattle and Bellevue gyms that Anderson and her late husband Greg founded 23 years ago, is that the 10- to 12-minutes a week approach isn't likely to be promoted by conventional gyms or fitness clubs. The goal of such facilities, obviously, is to build clientele who maximize rather than minimize use.

Another is the challenge of a counterintuitive idea that a few minutes a week can keep the body highly fit.

"When a wife or husband comes in, the spouse almost routinely teases about 'you can't do anything in 10 minutes a week," Anderson says with a laugh. "But eventually the spouse sees the results and comes in themselves."

But once attracted, the staying power of the workout routine on the array of Nautilus devices is dramatic.

"I have eight clients who've done the whole 23 years and most clients have been with us for more than 10 years," Anderson says. "For some families, where children as young as 12 and the parents train with us, we're kind of their primary health care."

SuperSlow workouts, which are actually high-intensity, slow-motion strength training, typically consist of one set on each of five or six Nautilus units, each set carried out to complete muscle fatigue. Hutchins recommends performing each set for between 100 and 240 seconds, depending on the exercise and the subject's capability.

Obviously, the weight on my sets is well below the weight on the units for the high school and college athletes training there.

Interestingly, It's probably the only activity where the point is to fail, no matter what your performance capabilities.

Take the example of the leg press, doing six to nine repetitions over a couple of minutes, until your leg muscles are burning and you want to quit, but you have to continue until you physically can't complete another, and that's the point where you fail. Your legs feel like noodles. Then on to the next machine, until a full body workout of repeated "failures" is achieved.

As Anderson explained to me prior on my first visit: since the body is being stressed to the max, rest and recovery are essential. She recommends almost a week for recovery, explaining that when the body is rested, it adapts to the overload and is able to do more the next time. Thus a few more pounds for each machine and an additional repetition await on the next visit to her gym.

The way osteoporosis came into the equation is when Hutchins and his wife, in 1982, conducted the "Nautilus osteoporosis study" at the University of Florida Medical School and found that the slow-moving, controlled-exercise approach was effective in building bone density in elderly women with osteoporosis.

Entrepreneur Sandy Wheeler, the founder of equipment maker BowFlex, which owned Nautilus for a number of years, recalled in a telephone conversation that the company did a project with Tufts University to measure how use of the equipment improved the bone density of people in their 80s and 90s.

As I was researching the whole high-intensity thing, I ran across an interesting explanation from one expert: "there's an inverse relationship between exercise duration and intensity. Meaning, if you run for a long time, it must be low intensity--you can't sprint for miles. If you do sprint--which is high intensity--it must be a short distance. It's the same with high-intensity strength training."

Or as Anderson put it:" You can train hard or you can train long. It's physically impossible to do both. When you move slowly, your muscles can't rely on momentum, so they are forced to work harder through the entire range of motion."

Early on, I questioned Anderson about how focus on muscle-strengthening exercises benefitted cardio maintenance, to which she replied: "the muscular system is the only path into all the other systems from respiratory to cardio-vascular to endocrine and skeletal.

"When you work the muscular system to capacity and get as strong as you can, all the other systems up-regulate to support that muscular system," she added.

There has apparently been a resurgence of interest in the "SuperSlow" approach, not surprising with people facing busier schedules and retirees living longer and seeking to stay fit into older age.

Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE As a result, Anderson is creating a certification program for employees that could allow her to expand beyond her two Seattle-area gyms as well as focus on outreach to specific audiences and age groups.