High-altitude walks help Carlsen persist
Saturday March 10, 2012 7:30 AM
Like Bobby Fischer, Magnus Carlsen — the world’s highest-rated player — stresses the importance of physical conditioning.
He particularly likes high-altitude walking in his native Norway or more recently in Switzerland, where he won the Biel International tournament.
“Some of the days I was walking, you know, real fast for a long time, and I could feel it afterward and that it was good for me,” he recounted to Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam of the Dutch magazine New in Chess.
He also welcomes opportunities to play soccer between rounds of tournaments such as Biel.
Magnus is a maximalist. Like Fischer, he tries to win with both the white and black pieces and is willing to continue, often for hours, in theoretically equal but challenging positions in which his opponent might falter.
Physical fitness and an eagerness to fight are therefore essential for his success. If he fulfills those conditions, he said, he expects to win.
Long, fatiguing games are, of course, risky even to a well-conditioned 21-year-old.
“If you are going to play long games,” he said, “you are going to make mistakes.”
Source: http://www.dispatch.com
Cheeseburger and hot dogs are good.