The human body is engineered for strength, power and endurance. Bone is sturdy as concrete but flexible enough to resist breaking and light enough to allow us to be quicker off the mark than a racehorse. Our muscles, ligaments and joints have far greater strength and endurance than we know. In this episode, we feature extraordinary tales of human strength told with stunning see-through "anatomy in motion." • A young man is sucked up into a tornado, only to be spat out a quarter of a mile away, unharmed. • Pinned by a massive boulder, a climber finds the strength to lift it off in a seemingly impossible muscular feat. • A college football player sustains what would normally be unbearable injury and pain, yet has the mental stamina to continue playing at full output. Plus, how does a swimmer tap the remnants of our distant ancestors' extraordinary stamina to swim across the English Channel in 14 hours? How do marathon runners keep the pace on their grueling 26-mile run?
A chronicle of the innermost thoughts of Adrian Shephard, a 22-year-old Marine Corporal and cowardly individual. In this episode, Shephard gets concrete in all the places that one would not reasonably expect or desire to have concrete.
The strongest portion of the line was the segment constructed in 1936 along the Saar River between the Moselle and the Rhine. Lying mainly in the zone of the Third US Army, this portion would be spared until December because of the fighting in Lorraine. The next strongest portion was a double band of defenses protecting the Aachen Gap. Here the First US Army already had reached the very gates. The extreme northern segment of the West Wall—from Geilenkirchen, about fifteen miles north of Aachen, to Kleve—consisted only of a thin, single belt of scattered pillboxes backing up natural obstacles. South of Geilenkirchen, the pillboxes began to appear in a definite pattern of clusters on a forward line backed up by occasional clusters a few hundred yards to the rear. At a point about halfway between Geilenkirchen and Aachen, the density of the pillboxes increased markedly and the line split into two bands about five miles apart. Aachen lay between the two. Though two bands still were in evidence in the forest south and southeast of Aachen, the pillboxes were in less density. At a point near the northern end of the Schnee Eifel, the two bands merged, to continue all the way south to Trier as a single line with pillboxes in medium to heavy density. The greatest concentration in the Eifel was near the southern end of the Schnee Eifel where the terrain is relatively open. In many places the West Wall depended for passive antitank protection upon natural obstacles like rivers, lakes ...