“Happiness is having Doug Marshall (1) sign your Caravel (high school yearbook) twice. Doug Marshall (2)”
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In “Black Swan Green,” a year in the life coming of age novel by David Mitchell, Jason Taylor takes us on a journey – the voice of a boy whose perfect pitch, seizing of irony, wins us over at least once, sometimes multiple times a page. Mitchell guides us back to our own times because we all knew a Jason, a boy with inner sight, who if we had the luxury of getting to know him would instruct and delight and amuse us, and whose example even in such a short time as a year would stay with us as an inspiration for a lifetime.
Such were the qualities of Doug Marshall. Or Marsho, as we called him.
Running for Your Life: Why Run II
The life of Kate, my daughter, (the touch in the rain, below right), is a great lesson of love to me. From the beginning, from her first breath, Kate has been her own person, and if we, as parents, see our role as doing the best to guide her from odds-on danger, our utmost to show our love for her so that she is as close to us today, going on a quarter-century, as she has ever been, then there is a better than average chance that she knows what love means.
My parents’ love is enough, too, so that I have felt safe in my choices, in my impulses. So that I’m able to feel, if not know, because that is too much to ask, that I am born to write, to read and to run.
My parents’ love is enough, too, so that I have felt safe in my choices, in my impulses. So that I’m able to feel, if not know, because that is too much to ask, that I am born to write, to read and to run.
Running for Your Life: Why Run?
One of my favorite anecdotes about origins is by Paul Auster in a crystalline personal memoir called “Why Write?” In it, Auster, as a boy, is at the Polo Grounds at a time when Willie Mays was king. Miraculously, Auster and his adult companions find themselves alone with Mays. They have paper, but no pen or pencil, so Auster misses a golden opportunity to get his hero’s autograph: “Sorry, kid. Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph.” Auster says he has never again gone out the door without a pencil in his pocket. And he still doesn’t: “If there is a pencil in your pocket, there is a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”
Running for Your Life: Barbs and Carbs
Okay, so soon it will be a lot easier to qualify for weight-loss surgery in the United States. An advisory panel to the federal Food and Drug Administration, that embodiment of public good and nutritional betterment under whose oversight in the past thirty years the sheer size of the per capita per capita has ballooned to such crisis proportions that no less than Michelle Obama has chosen childhood obesity as her chief First Lady cause to address, into the teeth of opposition from Sarah Palin (Ah ha! A Palin notice; my blog hits are sure to go off the grid!) and assorted tea partiers accusing plans to sweep Coke and Pepsi machines from school cafeterias as unAmerican, but no matter, the FDA weighs in with a vote this month that
Running for Your Life: Question Period
First, a review:
Newcomers: Running for Your Life is a part-inspirational, part-runner’s diary, part-nonfiction draft dedicated to the proposition that in one of these parts that you, the reader, can join me in running for your life, or at the least find a nugget of wisdom or insight to hold and meditate upon.
Casual followers: At 55, I’ve run five marathons (finished three, the latest on 10-10-10, see photo, below right). At 20, I contracted deep vein thrombosis, a pulmonary embolism, lost the equivalent of a small child in weight and very nearly died. Since then, yes, I’ve been running for my life, and in April will be competing in the Boston Marathon, a longtime goal of mine.
Newcomers: Running for Your Life is a part-inspirational, part-runner’s diary, part-nonfiction draft dedicated to the proposition that in one of these parts that you, the reader, can join me in running for your life, or at the least find a nugget of wisdom or insight to hold and meditate upon.
Casual followers: At 55, I’ve run five marathons (finished three, the latest on 10-10-10, see photo, below right). At 20, I contracted deep vein thrombosis, a pulmonary embolism, lost the equivalent of a small child in weight and very nearly died. Since then, yes, I’ve been running for my life, and in April will be competing in the Boston Marathon, a longtime goal of mine.
Running for Your Life: Why in Winter?
I know it’s winter when the water flow is cut off to the public fountains in Prospect Park; it doesn’t happened all at once, more like mail delivery, sometimes you are at the top of the run, sometimes at the bottom (although mail delivery isn’t want it used to be, in terms of being an EVENT, but you get the point) and Wednesday (Dec. 1) in the middle of a summer-like nor’easter, I see a park worker with a long-handled pipe wrench doing the job to the latest drinking fountain, at the interlocking paving stone entrance to what will eventually be the new ice skating rink, and now, or very shortly, you won’t be able to get a drink outdoors in Prospect Park, and I will know that it is winter.
Running for Your Life: Loose Leafs
Surprise! Running figures in my fiction and nonfiction. (And in a new photo, see below right Steamtown Marathon pic ... )
It’s fall, and in my neck of the woods, the leaves are still at it. Falling, that is. It may not motivate every runner, but it does one Ben Starwick, a character in a current novel, a work-in-progress, of mine. Here, he is in conversation with his friend, Luke DeSoto:
“Autumn in the park,” Ben says, “the leaves fall pretty much everywhere. On paths, the roadway, ponds,
It’s fall, and in my neck of the woods, the leaves are still at it. Falling, that is. It may not motivate every runner, but it does one Ben Starwick, a character in a current novel, a work-in-progress, of mine. Here, he is in conversation with his friend, Luke DeSoto:
“Autumn in the park,” Ben says, “the leaves fall pretty much everywhere. On paths, the roadway, ponds,
Running for Your Life: The Tao of Rewards
Thurber is not smart. A pea brain, Rene, the dog whisperer says, and I don’t mean that as a sign of disrespect. Remember, you are not appealing to the brain when you want him to do something. Instead, you find something he likes, say bits of Reggiano block cheese, and with select, simple phrases you shape Thurber’s behavior around the health and welfare of the home to the best advantage of all. “Treat” him well and he will live a long and happy life with you, not the dog, in charge.
Running for Your Life: Boston and NYC
It’s winter and we have to take out the air-conditioners in our windows. M’s office window is broken – and since the summer the top sash has been propped up with a man-hungry-size BBQ fork that we bought at a brownstone block auction a decade ago, but now, with the A-C out, it needs a little help, so I saw up a sturdy piece of cardboard packing and stick the fork side in the cardboard, which pretty much works to keep the heavy sash up and relatively secure, and the cold air outside, that is it does when the cardboard is resting on my hardback copy of “Annals of an Abiding Liberal” by John Kenneth Galbraith.
“There,” I tell M. “We just needed John Kenneth Galbraith to prop up our economy.”
“There,” I tell M. “We just needed John Kenneth Galbraith to prop up our economy.”
Running for Your Life: Food for Thought
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, the food holiday to end all food holidays. For one day in the US calendar (Sure Canadians hold Thanksgiving, but my recollection has it that they doesn’t overly glorify the goodies: squash, brussels sprouts, cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, shoofly pie, every conceivable way of cooking a turkey so that I swear to God one day a book the size of the OED will be published with the complete
Running for Your Life: The Road North
My New York Post colleague is attending a post-marathon party and I’m at work with my pal, Mike. (In New York, there is ONE and only ONE, marathon.)
In an e-mail explaining further, she says it is a marathon/engagement party.
“Sounds like a surprise,” I say in an e-mail reply.
“Yes, he popped the question at the sixteen-mile mark.”
“Ha!” Mike says. “Now the real marathon begins.”
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If a marriage is a conversation that ends too soon, as Andre Malraux says, then like every good conversation, a pause refreshes. That was what I was thinking recently while I was motoring north and west from Brooklyn to near the Canadian border, some 370 miles.
I’ve known B, a TV anchor in Watertown, New York, since grade school, and we’d longtime plans to spend a weekend with a mutual friend, G, an actor and writer from Toronto. M had plans for a conference in Iowa, and to see her mom, a year shy of a century next month, when we’d all be trooping to Milwaukee to see her.
There are times like this that I write in my journal that time stands still. On many previous visits to Watertown, I’ve run the roads. At the end of B’s street and up is the entrance to mild-slope hilltop Olmsted-and-Vaux Thompson Park, with stone walls built by WPA crews sprouting in the green grass and from a secluded lookout, on a day not so unlike the Saturday I’ve visiting, bright and sunny with the Titian sky, a photographer, Willabel Cole Mitchell, took “Entre Nous,” that vintage poster-shot of three girls on
Running for Your Life: Marathon des Sables
They ride camels in Morocco. Or at least in Merzouga. After Fes, we started on our way, driving to the distant village of Merzouga. M and I had for the past few months perused a friend’s guide to quintessential Moroccan riads – guest houses – each, as far as we can tell with an inner courtyard oasis of date palm trees and cacti and grasses, and at our riad in Fes, a banana tree, where we could see because it has been ages since we’ve been in the tropical house at the Central Park Zoo that the fruit that cartoonist Roz Chast felt compelled to write a paen to it in The New Yorker grows upside down, so that when you grab a banana and peel it, you doing it from the bottom (stem) to the top (black hard bit).
But there are no bananas in the Sahara. Mohammed is our camel host and salad chef. The blue woven saddle
But there are no bananas in the Sahara. Mohammed is our camel host and salad chef. The blue woven saddle
Running for Your Life: Question Period
OK, enough about me. (Is that even allowed in a personal blog?!) I know I have some readers, or at least a browser or two – Yes! Bounce Rate – so let’s kick it back to you.
My friend, Jacki, wants to know how to do it. Not just run for her life; she has been doing that, in three-mile bursts four or five times a week for a long time, but she has never run a marathon and is intrigued by the idea of doing so. However a friend and exercise expert tells her to fuhgeddaboudit; try swimming, or cycling or low-impact aerobics (shoot me now), not running; running destroys the joints, it’s an exercise-killer not an exercise-accelerant.
I could – and have done in this blog – cited my experts: the "Born to Run" camp who in my view rightly say that done the right way, as in "sitting" in a mechanically sound pace that fits your body type, you can run, not
My friend, Jacki, wants to know how to do it. Not just run for her life; she has been doing that, in three-mile bursts four or five times a week for a long time, but she has never run a marathon and is intrigued by the idea of doing so. However a friend and exercise expert tells her to fuhgeddaboudit; try swimming, or cycling or low-impact aerobics (shoot me now), not running; running destroys the joints, it’s an exercise-killer not an exercise-accelerant.
I could – and have done in this blog – cited my experts: the "Born to Run" camp who in my view rightly say that done the right way, as in "sitting" in a mechanically sound pace that fits your body type, you can run, not
Running for Your Life: 'IMUS' in Tangier
The truth is I can’t see it. Not on this first run in Morocco. Tangier. Not in the old city, the medina, it’s called, or the Casbah, or citadel, forever changed by a single song by the Clash, “Rock the Casbah,” and now Moroccan houses, really just two bedrooms, a kitchen and a sitting area (what more do you need?) are bought up, walls knocked down, and become home to the third wave of jet setters, at Manhattan prices. Nine hundred and more streets, some the narrowest of passageways but cars and small trucks can bring goods up through the tourist row, the dark rattan chairs of the Café Central that nods to Rick’s Café Americain, and another time, because M and I are here in the morning before the European ferries arrive, and can imagine how foreign the glamour of the likes of a Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman would be in Tangier 2010. Yet Tangier still bears the imprint of its artists and socialites, famously Barbara Hutton, the Poor Little Rich Girl, the Woolworth heiress who died thirty years ago, and in the cobbles, embedded, are
Running for Your Life: Skinny Man
I am wondering about The Path Man as I go. I never know what will come to mind on a long run, but The Path Man often does. Before Brooklyn became SoHo on the Gowanus, The Path Man took up residence along a dirt trail in Prospect Park. I don’t know his given name. He had a washbasin on a stump, shirt and trousers that slung from a rangy bush, a clutch of whittled spears he’d carved from the branches of fallen oaks. In those days just a handful of people would venture deep into the park, and at night only fools because what lamp standards there were had been smashed by vandals, and under trees and weedy bushes crack users nested, rapists and robbers for a score, or so our apartment super said at the time and he was born near the park so he would know. But I never saw a needle or a syringe, or even as much as a cigarette butt near The Path Man’s home. I’m thinking I was his first runner on his path; every other day for years, a
Running for Your Life: After The Race
Now what? It’s two days after Steamtown. Boston is Monday (Monday?), April 18. The earliest I can apply is Monday. And despite my aching feet, I will. Will, it seems, is the operative word.
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K found Thurber (see right!), a mahogany-colored bloodhound mix, on Petfinder.com. For as long as she can remember, she’s wanted a bloodhound. As a child, two of her favorite books were on sharks and “The Right Dog for You: Choosing a Breed That Matches Your Personality, Family and Lifestyle.” Sharks weren’t an option, and a Bichon, Snowball, adopted us at a Manhattan pet store, and he was the sweetest family dog for eighteen years. But the dog book said bloodhounds are loyal but not needy, which is just like me, little K said. I’d love to have a bloodhound.
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K found Thurber (see right!), a mahogany-colored bloodhound mix, on Petfinder.com. For as long as she can remember, she’s wanted a bloodhound. As a child, two of her favorite books were on sharks and “The Right Dog for You: Choosing a Breed That Matches Your Personality, Family and Lifestyle.” Sharks weren’t an option, and a Bichon, Snowball, adopted us at a Manhattan pet store, and he was the sweetest family dog for eighteen years. But the dog book said bloodhounds are loyal but not needy, which is just like me, little K said. I’d love to have a bloodhound.
Running for Your Life: Steamtown: The Race
Can’t remember when I haven’t been able to sleep like this. Sleepless in Scranton. Well, Moosic. Moosic, Pa. In a Courtyard Marriott, a cul de sac mall where that evening’s carb meal choice, Bella Trattoria, settled on K and me like an alien/scene in “Men in Black.” Instead, it’s the larded-up special at a slice palace, 10 p.m. Saturday and we got the place to ourselves.
Which may explain why my first thought when I saw the corpse was to think I'm having a bad-food delusion or sleep-walking. I’m in my gear (new insoles, taped-up right ankle, thanks Dr. Mollica!, but no PAINKILLERS!, damn, I should have insisted), when I walk up to my car at 5 a.m. for the drive into downtown where I’m told I can get a bus to the starting line. In the hollows, it’s gotta be close to freezing, so no way am I asleep, can’t be, so sure enough that’s a spit-polished-shined shoe at the rear of the car parked near mine in the hotel lot. And, yep, a body’s attached.
Which may explain why my first thought when I saw the corpse was to think I'm having a bad-food delusion or sleep-walking. I’m in my gear (new insoles, taped-up right ankle, thanks Dr. Mollica!, but no PAINKILLERS!, damn, I should have insisted), when I walk up to my car at 5 a.m. for the drive into downtown where I’m told I can get a bus to the starting line. In the hollows, it’s gotta be close to freezing, so no way am I asleep, can’t be, so sure enough that’s a spit-polished-shined shoe at the rear of the car parked near mine in the hotel lot. And, yep, a body’s attached.
Psyched!
All right. It's only a little over 24 hours since Steamtown. More later, but I did want to let everyone know that not only did I finish, but I managed a personal best: 3:33:08, on the runner's chip! They tell me I placed 493rd out of 1,952 finishers, and 15th out of 110 in my age group. And Boston! That time qualifies me so that I can run the Boston Marathon. Now I have finished more marathons (3) than those in which I was forced to stop due to injury (2). Woo Hoo!!!
Last Post -- Before 10-10-10
Very briefly, a marathoner-friendly podiatrist, Dr. Ray Mollica in Cobble Hill (PR 3:10, New York City Marathon), carved me an cushiony insole, which he said would work better than the Brooks Defyance paper-thin ones (who knew?) and should provide relief for my forefoot pain, and showed me a basket-weave taping for my the "trauma" spot, as he called it, on the lateral band of my right foot. Alas, though, no PAINKILLERS :(
And now on to Scranton. Thanks so much for all your good wishes. And to my Canadian friends and family, Happy Thanksgiving!
And now on to Scranton. Thanks so much for all your good wishes. And to my Canadian friends and family, Happy Thanksgiving!
Running for Your Life: Week Ten
Tuesday, I turned 55. Funny, back in May, when I was surprised with my 3:47:42 personal best marathon at 54, that for purposes of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, I would be 55, advancing to the 55-59 age category for Boston by five days if I ran in the Steamtown Marathon on Oct. 10. That gives me a reasonable shot of achieving the qualifying time for that group: 3:45. Count those fives (three), my lucky number, along with 10, for October, or two fives.
On my birthday, My mother called 30 minutes to the date 55 years ago that I was born.
“Do you remember what happened just about 55 years ago?” my mother asked.
“No,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say but I don’t remember.”
“Well, I do,” she said.
On my birthday, My mother called 30 minutes to the date 55 years ago that I was born.
“Do you remember what happened just about 55 years ago?” my mother asked.
“No,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say but I don’t remember.”
“Well, I do,” she said.
Running for Your Life: Week Nine
Is it just me, or do young people have more middle-aged types of ailments than, say, twenty years ago, or even five years ago. M tells me that I’m a freak of nature, that I’m built like a tree, a red oak, like the one in our backyard that seems pretty much indestructible. I don’t know so much about that. Thing is, I’ve been running for my life, so I’m not sure what is nature or nuture.
What I do know is that a lot of the young people I know have bona fide medical issues. Weak ankles from high school varsity basketball, inexplicable spine pain that is exacerbated by extreme changes of weather. Then, of course, there are the allergies. So many, so intense. Invariably keeping them from getting started in a serious exercise regimen. “I’d loved to run,” they say, “and if not for this cranky knee I got from high school football, I certainly would. Definitely, I’d be out there. I read the news, I know how good it is for you.”
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What I do know is that a lot of the young people I know have bona fide medical issues. Weak ankles from high school varsity basketball, inexplicable spine pain that is exacerbated by extreme changes of weather. Then, of course, there are the allergies. So many, so intense. Invariably keeping them from getting started in a serious exercise regimen. “I’d loved to run,” they say, “and if not for this cranky knee I got from high school football, I certainly would. Definitely, I’d be out there. I read the news, I know how good it is for you.”
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Running for Your Life: Week Eight
At the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue, you can hardly hear yourself think for the sound of the parrots. In the late 1960s, the urban legend goes, a crate of Argentinian long-tailed green parrots, known as Quaker Parrots, cracks open like an egg and the birds escape, eventually to make their way to the 1861 monumental brownstone arch built by Richard Upjohn, the builder of lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.
Here, at the leeward side, because even on the warmest days there is a New York Harbor breeze, and in winter, Arctic at times, the parrots have made their nest out of the wind. In recent years, during renovation, the nests were destroyed and for a season they made do elsewhere before moving back, in exactly the same place they’ve been for decades, out of the wind.
I confess to a touch of Schadenfraude when, during the racket of the birds at 10 a.m. Saturday, the last day of Week Eight, the security guard waves M and I through to join the Sketch Walking Tour. I can’t be sure if he is the same guy who stopped me (See Running for Your Life: Week Four) on my first trip to the entrance. Now, though, I see that there might be a reason for him to be a bit grouchy (if not trigger happy). There must be dozens of birds up there, squawking like there’s no tomorrow.
Here, at the leeward side, because even on the warmest days there is a New York Harbor breeze, and in winter, Arctic at times, the parrots have made their nest out of the wind. In recent years, during renovation, the nests were destroyed and for a season they made do elsewhere before moving back, in exactly the same place they’ve been for decades, out of the wind.
I confess to a touch of Schadenfraude when, during the racket of the birds at 10 a.m. Saturday, the last day of Week Eight, the security guard waves M and I through to join the Sketch Walking Tour. I can’t be sure if he is the same guy who stopped me (See Running for Your Life: Week Four) on my first trip to the entrance. Now, though, I see that there might be a reason for him to be a bit grouchy (if not trigger happy). There must be dozens of birds up there, squawking like there’s no tomorrow.
Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: A Tornado Hits Home
M and I recognized B from our years skate-dancing at Prospect Park’s Wollman Rink the day after the tornado hit. In the old days, she ran the rink, but for the past several years she’s been on grounds, and I often exchange waves with her during my alternate-day runs.
Today, with a push broom half her size, B is vainly trying to clear the park’s north end road of debris.
“Careful, be sure to look up,” she says, pointing to the tree canopy above. “Watch for loose branches.”
We are crossing the road, not fearing the debris, rather the bike racers, who are zipping along the roadway, picking their way through sizable branches, twigs and mounds of leaves. Runners, too, the serious are legging it up the north-end hill. To our left is a giant uprooted tree, drawing rubber neckers to its underside like a Mayan calendar.
Today, with a push broom half her size, B is vainly trying to clear the park’s north end road of debris.
“Careful, be sure to look up,” she says, pointing to the tree canopy above. “Watch for loose branches.”
We are crossing the road, not fearing the debris, rather the bike racers, who are zipping along the roadway, picking their way through sizable branches, twigs and mounds of leaves. Runners, too, the serious are legging it up the north-end hill. To our left is a giant uprooted tree, drawing rubber neckers to its underside like a Mayan calendar.
Running for Your Life: Week Seven
Catching up to real time; Week Seven is September 12-18. Note to self: When climbing the Prospect Park stone staircase to the manmade lake overlook the second and third weeks in September, wear a sturdy hat, if not a helmet. Squirrel-bomb acorns threaten serious head-beaning. No joke.
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My foot hurts like hell. On Saturday, the end of Week Six, I bought a new pair of Brooks Defyance at JackRabbit in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When I examined the old pair, the sole seemed to be holding up well, except for a spot on the left shoe, which had worn down to a thinnish layer where on the ball of my foot a callus had hardened. I’d been wearing the Brooks brand for years, usually for over a year before replacing them. But these I’d just purchased in April, a few weeks before the Pittsburgh Marathon. Perhaps, I thought, there was something wrong.
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My foot hurts like hell. On Saturday, the end of Week Six, I bought a new pair of Brooks Defyance at JackRabbit in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When I examined the old pair, the sole seemed to be holding up well, except for a spot on the left shoe, which had worn down to a thinnish layer where on the ball of my foot a callus had hardened. I’d been wearing the Brooks brand for years, usually for over a year before replacing them. But these I’d just purchased in April, a few weeks before the Pittsburgh Marathon. Perhaps, I thought, there was something wrong.
Running for Your Life: Week Six
Finally, temps are in the 70s. Payback for those punishing August runs. The first day, Sunday, before my shift at the New York Post, I shoot for an hour, five minutes: 1:05. My lucky number, and a seven interval up and down the stone step stairway to the overlook of the manmade lake in Prospect Park. When I catch my second wind, halfway through the staircase interval, I’m Cameron’s Avatar, on Labor Day weekend 2010, and I feel my leg like it was before my blood clot. Like a 20-year-old, with a memory of one.
*
The bellmen had the best jobs and the hearts of the prettiest maids. Front line with the tips, big-forehead handsome and beefy. Career hotel keepers held the manager posts at Chateau Lake Louise, an historic Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel, a mansion on a glacial blue lake, during the summer of 1976, but college students flocked there to fill the menial ones.
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The bellmen had the best jobs and the hearts of the prettiest maids. Front line with the tips, big-forehead handsome and beefy. Career hotel keepers held the manager posts at Chateau Lake Louise, an historic Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel, a mansion on a glacial blue lake, during the summer of 1976, but college students flocked there to fill the menial ones.
Running for Your Life: Week Five
It’s ghastly hot and humid, the forecast is calling for a brutal week, when I have the dream:
I’m at a place of supreme importance, although I’m not sure exactly where. I’ve set aside an ice-cold bottle of Champagne for toasting the event in which high performance is required. I’m sitting in what must be a dressing room next to a famous person (athlete?) who also has a bottle of Champagne. Both bottles are morphed into the shape of a leg and a foot; large, magnum-size.
I put on socks and lace up my skates. I have packed very carefully for the journey to this place, but have forgotten, inexplicably, to pack my hockey gear. I think to put on my hockey pants, but then see that I’ve left them at home. Briefly, I think I can dash to Brooklyn and get them, or wing it in some other fashion, but immediately reject the idea as absurd.
Then, in a panic, I wake up. It is 8:15, on Sunday, Week Five, half-way to the marathon.
I’m at a place of supreme importance, although I’m not sure exactly where. I’ve set aside an ice-cold bottle of Champagne for toasting the event in which high performance is required. I’m sitting in what must be a dressing room next to a famous person (athlete?) who also has a bottle of Champagne. Both bottles are morphed into the shape of a leg and a foot; large, magnum-size.
I put on socks and lace up my skates. I have packed very carefully for the journey to this place, but have forgotten, inexplicably, to pack my hockey gear. I think to put on my hockey pants, but then see that I’ve left them at home. Briefly, I think I can dash to Brooklyn and get them, or wing it in some other fashion, but immediately reject the idea as absurd.
Then, in a panic, I wake up. It is 8:15, on Sunday, Week Five, half-way to the marathon.
Running for Your Life: Week Four
We don’t really know why Don Draper starts keeping a journal. He’s gotta be in his early 40s now, and as a typical guy in the Sixties, particularly THAT type of guy, the “Mad Men” star would never do such a thing. No, Draper’s journal-keeping is a story-driven anachronism for sophisticated watchers in late 2010 so that their hero will give voice to his innermost thoughts. He says, “I feel like a girl” keeping a diary. But serious watchers of the best show on TV don’t judge it for taking such an historical license; rather, we are ready to learn, not only what we see from the behavior of this complicated, creative survivor, but from his deepest thoughts, which can best come from keeping a journal.
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I’ve been keeping a regular journal since 1983. Seven years after I started running. In the past year, I’ve given a lot of thought to the years that I was running when I wasn’t keeping a journal. Like Draper’s journal, the practice serves as a critical first draft of understanding – and dipping into it, you can best connect the dots to earlier times. As I said earlier in this blog, in a long life we think of ourselves as many distinct people as we pass through our various changes. And as poet Stanley Kunitz, who died at 101 in 2006, said in a poem late in his life, “I am not yet done with my changes.”
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I was in Nicaragua in 1985 when I wrote: “Running is not an excuse for abject solitariness – but for real enjoyment. The sweat pours down my forehead. My left leg, of course, throbs with the pain of too much pounding. But the second wind comes along, and the leg . . . almost in concert . . . begins to loosen, the pace is now regular and forever does not seem such a long time. Home and the final stretch. I’ve managed to run another 10 miles.”
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Runners don’t need to start a journal. But I find journal-keeping helps. Especially on long runs.
For Week Four I need to do a long run. On Tuesday, the forecast is for a break in the heat and humidity, cool, a bit of rain. The day before I’m in the park for a typical one-hour training run, up the steps of the stone staircase to amp up the cardio. Once again, I don’t pay attention to how many miles I’m doing, rather it is all about the pace. If I can keep my ’thon pace, which is in the 8 minute, 30 second range, I’m pushing myself hard enough to reach my goal: a 3:45 marathon in October and a shot at Boston in April.
People ask me what I think about when I’m running. For me, since June 1983, when I left for a year’s trip across America, and on to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, running and writing have been intimately linked. I don’t stop to take notes, but I keep my mind active, I think of stories that I want to tell, details I have to write down when I get home.
On Tuesday of Week Four, I decide to run to Green-Wood Cemetery. M told me she’d read somewhere that at one time Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was the number two tourist attraction in the state behind Niagara Falls. Bigger than the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Realtors are taking to calling the district Greenwood Heights. Still, although I’ve lived in the borough for almost twenty years, I’ve never gone to the cemetery.
Soon, I’m making my way toward the Gothic entrance. Somewhere a sign reads: Established 1838. And another one: K9 Patrol and 24-hour armed guard, who must be the guy who is getting up and out of his seat as I approach. I’ve run in cemeteries: a namesake one in my hometown of Owen Sound, Ontario, and Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va., where I met my wife (in the city, not the cemetery!), and in Ireland, on two separate trips. The guard is shooing me away, looking like he could go for his gun, but I keep coming, indicate with my hands that I want to talk.
“Can’t I go inside,” I say.
The guard shakes his head. “No. This is a cemetery, not a park.”
That seems the final word, so onward. Finally, a bit of cool rain. I’m sure, I think, my spirits picking up, I can get in a two-hour run.
But sadly, not inside. A notice board by the entrance seems to suggest you have to arrange for a tour to see the rolling hills, the botanic garden-like plantings and myriad monuments.
Outside, though, are urban treasures to be seen in the hourlong run skirting the perimeter, with few views of names of the headstones themselves (except for a patch along 20th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues): the Jackie Gleason depot that I imagine is little changed from “The Honeymooners” and Dodgers time, a burned out car along Gautier Way, Shannon Florist along Fort Hamilton Parkway, where Spanish-speaking workers huddle, waiting for a work truck.
Then, the pleasures of Windsor Terrace, before I get to Prospect Park and, yes, manage twice around, even getting into the woods, and its ground-worn trails. And when I arrive at home, after gobbling down a sheath of electrolyte cubes, and downing a bottle of cold tap water, I take out my journal and write: Jackie Gleason depot, the Green-Wood security standoff, a thread of a park off Sixth Avenue and the Prospect Expressway, named after Detective Joseph Mayrose (1949-1989), a beloved Bay Ridge cop. And I make special note of Our Lady’s Field, the smallest baseball diamond I have ever seen, a field of dreams wedged in the center of a borough that I’m seeing in a way I never have before.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Five
*
I’ve been keeping a regular journal since 1983. Seven years after I started running. In the past year, I’ve given a lot of thought to the years that I was running when I wasn’t keeping a journal. Like Draper’s journal, the practice serves as a critical first draft of understanding – and dipping into it, you can best connect the dots to earlier times. As I said earlier in this blog, in a long life we think of ourselves as many distinct people as we pass through our various changes. And as poet Stanley Kunitz, who died at 101 in 2006, said in a poem late in his life, “I am not yet done with my changes.”
*
I was in Nicaragua in 1985 when I wrote: “Running is not an excuse for abject solitariness – but for real enjoyment. The sweat pours down my forehead. My left leg, of course, throbs with the pain of too much pounding. But the second wind comes along, and the leg . . . almost in concert . . . begins to loosen, the pace is now regular and forever does not seem such a long time. Home and the final stretch. I’ve managed to run another 10 miles.”
*
Runners don’t need to start a journal. But I find journal-keeping helps. Especially on long runs.
For Week Four I need to do a long run. On Tuesday, the forecast is for a break in the heat and humidity, cool, a bit of rain. The day before I’m in the park for a typical one-hour training run, up the steps of the stone staircase to amp up the cardio. Once again, I don’t pay attention to how many miles I’m doing, rather it is all about the pace. If I can keep my ’thon pace, which is in the 8 minute, 30 second range, I’m pushing myself hard enough to reach my goal: a 3:45 marathon in October and a shot at Boston in April.
People ask me what I think about when I’m running. For me, since June 1983, when I left for a year’s trip across America, and on to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, running and writing have been intimately linked. I don’t stop to take notes, but I keep my mind active, I think of stories that I want to tell, details I have to write down when I get home.
On Tuesday of Week Four, I decide to run to Green-Wood Cemetery. M told me she’d read somewhere that at one time Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was the number two tourist attraction in the state behind Niagara Falls. Bigger than the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Realtors are taking to calling the district Greenwood Heights. Still, although I’ve lived in the borough for almost twenty years, I’ve never gone to the cemetery.
Soon, I’m making my way toward the Gothic entrance. Somewhere a sign reads: Established 1838. And another one: K9 Patrol and 24-hour armed guard, who must be the guy who is getting up and out of his seat as I approach. I’ve run in cemeteries: a namesake one in my hometown of Owen Sound, Ontario, and Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Va., where I met my wife (in the city, not the cemetery!), and in Ireland, on two separate trips. The guard is shooing me away, looking like he could go for his gun, but I keep coming, indicate with my hands that I want to talk.
“Can’t I go inside,” I say.
The guard shakes his head. “No. This is a cemetery, not a park.”
That seems the final word, so onward. Finally, a bit of cool rain. I’m sure, I think, my spirits picking up, I can get in a two-hour run.
But sadly, not inside. A notice board by the entrance seems to suggest you have to arrange for a tour to see the rolling hills, the botanic garden-like plantings and myriad monuments.
Outside, though, are urban treasures to be seen in the hourlong run skirting the perimeter, with few views of names of the headstones themselves (except for a patch along 20th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues): the Jackie Gleason depot that I imagine is little changed from “The Honeymooners” and Dodgers time, a burned out car along Gautier Way, Shannon Florist along Fort Hamilton Parkway, where Spanish-speaking workers huddle, waiting for a work truck.
Then, the pleasures of Windsor Terrace, before I get to Prospect Park and, yes, manage twice around, even getting into the woods, and its ground-worn trails. And when I arrive at home, after gobbling down a sheath of electrolyte cubes, and downing a bottle of cold tap water, I take out my journal and write: Jackie Gleason depot, the Green-Wood security standoff, a thread of a park off Sixth Avenue and the Prospect Expressway, named after Detective Joseph Mayrose (1949-1989), a beloved Bay Ridge cop. And I make special note of Our Lady’s Field, the smallest baseball diamond I have ever seen, a field of dreams wedged in the center of a borough that I’m seeing in a way I never have before.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Five
Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: Say No to Jobs
“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in newspapers – and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic . . . . In America, cinema is true because it is the whole of space. The break between the two, the abstraction we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema.”
– Jean Baudrillard, “America,” 1989
Dear Steve Jobs:
I can anticipate your response to the Baudrillard. Point to the global sales of your iPods, and iPhones, and iTunes, and iTouches, and iPads, and soon to come, iTVs. When did Baudrillard publish “America” in America? 1989? In the digital age, that’s ancient history. If there is a “sacramental mental space” in Europe, then I’m not convinced – you’d say – that it subscribes to Apple Inc. What we couldn’t bring about with military or trade agreements, we’ve managed through technology and style. Indeed, space, speed, cinema and technology is culture. But not just in America. Everywhere.
Full disclosure: While an American citizen, I am culturally a Canadian. Not that makes me any way superior. I think the social philosopher George Grant has it right. Canadians live next to a society that is the very heart of modernity, and, given that nearly all have shown they think modernity is good ( ie, you, Steve Jobs, are god. Not God but small “g” god), then nothing essential distinguishes them from Americans, Grant wrote.
Suffice to say that I agree with you, Steve. And Baudrillard. And Grant. Where I part ways is the reaction to these truths. I wouldn’t be writing to you if I didn’t feel that we each had an epiphany as young men when we saw in use our first Walkmans. I admit I come to this conclusion in an unscientific way. But we are the same age: you turned 55 in February, I’ll be 55 in October. I’ll hazard a guess that your first glimpse of a Walkman – mine happened when I was 19 in 1975 (see Running Without Headphones) – was an important memory for you. But while my gut reaction was opposition, yours, undoubtedly, was opportunity.
Which is not to say that my reaction is any better than your reaction. And, as they say, money is a damn poor measure of success, but in America – and yes, Steve, in Europe and Canada too – it’s all we’ve got.
You’ve certainly got me there. What has my savage eye brought me? A lifetime of running, reading and writing. In your case, chasing those opportunities has led you to become an obscenely rich man, a god of our times.
Me, I put my inside out. You, you keep your inside in. Your mystique, your genius is in keeping us guessing as to what is coming next. Your eye’s on the prize: being the world’s social director. Leisure time is Jobs time. What did Curt Schilling say about aura and mystique? That “those are dancers in a nightclub.”
Steve, like Curt, I’m not buying it. The ear buds, the iFocus. It may not happen right away, but there’s a backlash brewing. Think Carthage, Rome, England. Empires don’t last forever. Discover slowness, choose analog, try technology-free weekends.
Steve, I know you will not answer me. But others will. That’s how it starts.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Four
– Jean Baudrillard, “America,” 1989
Dear Steve Jobs:
I can anticipate your response to the Baudrillard. Point to the global sales of your iPods, and iPhones, and iTunes, and iTouches, and iPads, and soon to come, iTVs. When did Baudrillard publish “America” in America? 1989? In the digital age, that’s ancient history. If there is a “sacramental mental space” in Europe, then I’m not convinced – you’d say – that it subscribes to Apple Inc. What we couldn’t bring about with military or trade agreements, we’ve managed through technology and style. Indeed, space, speed, cinema and technology is culture. But not just in America. Everywhere.
Full disclosure: While an American citizen, I am culturally a Canadian. Not that makes me any way superior. I think the social philosopher George Grant has it right. Canadians live next to a society that is the very heart of modernity, and, given that nearly all have shown they think modernity is good ( ie, you, Steve Jobs, are god. Not God but small “g” god), then nothing essential distinguishes them from Americans, Grant wrote.
Suffice to say that I agree with you, Steve. And Baudrillard. And Grant. Where I part ways is the reaction to these truths. I wouldn’t be writing to you if I didn’t feel that we each had an epiphany as young men when we saw in use our first Walkmans. I admit I come to this conclusion in an unscientific way. But we are the same age: you turned 55 in February, I’ll be 55 in October. I’ll hazard a guess that your first glimpse of a Walkman – mine happened when I was 19 in 1975 (see Running Without Headphones) – was an important memory for you. But while my gut reaction was opposition, yours, undoubtedly, was opportunity.
Which is not to say that my reaction is any better than your reaction. And, as they say, money is a damn poor measure of success, but in America – and yes, Steve, in Europe and Canada too – it’s all we’ve got.
You’ve certainly got me there. What has my savage eye brought me? A lifetime of running, reading and writing. In your case, chasing those opportunities has led you to become an obscenely rich man, a god of our times.
Me, I put my inside out. You, you keep your inside in. Your mystique, your genius is in keeping us guessing as to what is coming next. Your eye’s on the prize: being the world’s social director. Leisure time is Jobs time. What did Curt Schilling say about aura and mystique? That “those are dancers in a nightclub.”
Steve, like Curt, I’m not buying it. The ear buds, the iFocus. It may not happen right away, but there’s a backlash brewing. Think Carthage, Rome, England. Empires don’t last forever. Discover slowness, choose analog, try technology-free weekends.
Steve, I know you will not answer me. But others will. That’s how it starts.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Four
Running for Your Life: Week Three
Week Two ends in Millbrook, New York, with a six-miler along a gully and into sloping farmland, with the inevitable pop-pop-pop of a firing range. It’s hot, with a breeze, and rolling hills to keep me honest, but enough trees, towering oak and maple, to throw shade on the road at 10 a.m. that the sun is not beating down on me.
I wrote about my first race on a summer run: an international 10K in 1979, where for a year I wrote Corner Sports, a column that in July, when my race column ran, covered the girls’ softball team, the Prescott Angels and boys’ baseball, the Pirates. We ran across the bridge at Prescott, Ontario, to Ogdensburg, New York, where hundreds lined the streets to watch. “They had you,” I wrote in the Aug. 1 Journal, “with their smiles and clapping hands. For the first time, my bodily control had transferred into the hands of people who were completely foreign to me. Those people with garden hoses, cups of water and fruit drinks owned me.”
My placement: 136th out of 232, with a time of 50:31. Converted to miles, that’s a pace of about 8:10 per mile, pretty much what I’m doing on the road this summer.
*
I was 23 then; at 20, my bedmate Sam sat up all night beside me to alert the nurse when I stopped breathing. Sam never let on, but Ben, the orderly, who was firing me up with a painkiller into the intervenous bottle that was connected to my arm told me what he did. For a week of nights, Sam didn’t sleep.
Ben is standing by the window, a cobalt blue sky. Sam, a heart patient, has left that day. Ben tells me about Sam, about how he had saved my life, how he willed himself to stay up night after night. Like an angel or something, Ben says. He tells me I am lucky to be indoors; it is the coldest winter in Ottawa in fifty years.
A homeless man who is scheduled for surgery to remove some frostbitten toes, and whose face is disfigured by the cold, moves into Sam’s bed. A man younger than me, who had had a drug overdose and whose lower body was now paralyzed, occupies the third bed that up to now had been vacant. He is receiving his first visit from a speech therapist today.
Sam and I did not even exchange addresses.
*
Is a patient patient? I was, I suppose. I’m still very much that young man in the bed. As a writer, I go back to what Poets and Writers says about stamina and patience: that it's the right stuff for writers and marathoners. The last novel I read was “Salammbo” by Gustave Flaubert: if Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” doesn’t have a hero, than Salammbo doesn’t have a human being, the forward says in the edition I finished. It’s not that I will read everything, but I like to think that I focus into the heart of a writer’s intentions. Salammbo is painstakingly researched, a masterpiece of detail that takes the reader away to Carthage and its pagan rituals, a panoramic sweep of sights and sounds in North Africa that, if you read the history of the book’s publication, stirred only scholars nitpicking the historical accuracy of his account. Not every read is a classic, a first. But, with writing, you can tell from the first page. Like the first step of a run.
*
Week Three I’d like to up the ante a bit. Run thirty miles, with a game of tennis with my neighbor, Gerry. Monday, it’s hot. Train for an early October marathon in New York City and August is the cruelest month. Temp: 91 on Monday, 93, Tuesday . Thankfully, though, there’s a little breeze, especially when I make my way down the hill stone-step staircase that leads to the manmade lake.
About halfway down, a female cardinal swoops down from an oak tree, squawking and surprisingly alone, definitely exercised over what it is impossible to say, flash of wings like close-up magic; who wouldn’t like to be on an updraft. Up, up and away.
On the 19th, I’m off for my second long run: again to the Christopher Street pier, the Brooklyn Bridge Watchtower clock and the mosque site. (See The Mosque on Thursdays.) The polls are showing an increasing number of Americans would like to see the mosque moved so that it is not so close to Ground Zero. Is it a mosque or a prayer center? Is there a difference?
Two days, later, Saturday, Aug. 21, we visit our friends Mark and Marilyn in Bridgewater, Conn. There is no bridge and no water, as far as I can see, but a long-gone town was flooded as part of a hydro development project so maybe that’s the connection. In the morning, we visit the county fair. Savory pulled pork, corn on the cob and birch beer.
A woman my age next to me near the grandstands at the tractor pull suddenly falls to the ground. At first I think she must have had a little something in her birch beer, but she doesn’t get up, and I see that she has stepped into a nasty hole. A moment later, we help her to her feet and someone who knows her calls to her daughter in the bleachers. The daughter hurries to her as Mom’s ankle turns purple-blue. I start to get light-headed, which I always do when I see a lot of blood or a personal injury like this, turn my head and move away. “Can we get medical staff to the edge of the grandstands,” the tractor pull announcer says. “We’ve a lady with a twisted ankle who’d like a little help.”
My ankle often feels a twinge. From when I badly strained my ankle, during my first summer of running. I feel it today, going downhill. From our friends’ house, it is either downhill or uphill. Very steep. It is hot, of course, and in my training so far I’ve not done heavy climbing, so I don’t want to overdo it. I’m extra careful, think Tai Chi as I run.
No trespassing signs, warnings to hunters. But, hell, there’s that pop-pop-pop again. Mark didn’t mention a firing range. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a lake and a lookout, called Lover’s Leap, and I wonder if anyone has, but then think not, if the town has no bridge and no water, then Lover’s Leap has to be metaphorical. Wishful thinking, maybe?
I’m guessing 20 minutes in, and my ankle feels normal again, as I run next to what I think is the manmade lake that flooded the town. At the end of the road is Mia Farrow’s house, where I imagine she gardens in a frontier-brimmed hat. I look toward the grounds, but there’s no sign of life.
The return road is steep, and for the first time in I don't know long my bad leg swells to twice the size of my healthy one. I think to stop, but I don’t. I slow to a light jog and like a cross-country skier scaling a mountain, crisscross my way up as best I can.
Next: Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: Say No to Jobs
I wrote about my first race on a summer run: an international 10K in 1979, where for a year I wrote Corner Sports, a column that in July, when my race column ran, covered the girls’ softball team, the Prescott Angels and boys’ baseball, the Pirates. We ran across the bridge at Prescott, Ontario, to Ogdensburg, New York, where hundreds lined the streets to watch. “They had you,” I wrote in the Aug. 1 Journal, “with their smiles and clapping hands. For the first time, my bodily control had transferred into the hands of people who were completely foreign to me. Those people with garden hoses, cups of water and fruit drinks owned me.”
My placement: 136th out of 232, with a time of 50:31. Converted to miles, that’s a pace of about 8:10 per mile, pretty much what I’m doing on the road this summer.
*
I was 23 then; at 20, my bedmate Sam sat up all night beside me to alert the nurse when I stopped breathing. Sam never let on, but Ben, the orderly, who was firing me up with a painkiller into the intervenous bottle that was connected to my arm told me what he did. For a week of nights, Sam didn’t sleep.
Ben is standing by the window, a cobalt blue sky. Sam, a heart patient, has left that day. Ben tells me about Sam, about how he had saved my life, how he willed himself to stay up night after night. Like an angel or something, Ben says. He tells me I am lucky to be indoors; it is the coldest winter in Ottawa in fifty years.
A homeless man who is scheduled for surgery to remove some frostbitten toes, and whose face is disfigured by the cold, moves into Sam’s bed. A man younger than me, who had had a drug overdose and whose lower body was now paralyzed, occupies the third bed that up to now had been vacant. He is receiving his first visit from a speech therapist today.
Sam and I did not even exchange addresses.
*
Is a patient patient? I was, I suppose. I’m still very much that young man in the bed. As a writer, I go back to what Poets and Writers says about stamina and patience: that it's the right stuff for writers and marathoners. The last novel I read was “Salammbo” by Gustave Flaubert: if Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” doesn’t have a hero, than Salammbo doesn’t have a human being, the forward says in the edition I finished. It’s not that I will read everything, but I like to think that I focus into the heart of a writer’s intentions. Salammbo is painstakingly researched, a masterpiece of detail that takes the reader away to Carthage and its pagan rituals, a panoramic sweep of sights and sounds in North Africa that, if you read the history of the book’s publication, stirred only scholars nitpicking the historical accuracy of his account. Not every read is a classic, a first. But, with writing, you can tell from the first page. Like the first step of a run.
*
Week Three I’d like to up the ante a bit. Run thirty miles, with a game of tennis with my neighbor, Gerry. Monday, it’s hot. Train for an early October marathon in New York City and August is the cruelest month. Temp: 91 on Monday, 93, Tuesday . Thankfully, though, there’s a little breeze, especially when I make my way down the hill stone-step staircase that leads to the manmade lake.
About halfway down, a female cardinal swoops down from an oak tree, squawking and surprisingly alone, definitely exercised over what it is impossible to say, flash of wings like close-up magic; who wouldn’t like to be on an updraft. Up, up and away.
On the 19th, I’m off for my second long run: again to the Christopher Street pier, the Brooklyn Bridge Watchtower clock and the mosque site. (See The Mosque on Thursdays.) The polls are showing an increasing number of Americans would like to see the mosque moved so that it is not so close to Ground Zero. Is it a mosque or a prayer center? Is there a difference?
Two days, later, Saturday, Aug. 21, we visit our friends Mark and Marilyn in Bridgewater, Conn. There is no bridge and no water, as far as I can see, but a long-gone town was flooded as part of a hydro development project so maybe that’s the connection. In the morning, we visit the county fair. Savory pulled pork, corn on the cob and birch beer.
A woman my age next to me near the grandstands at the tractor pull suddenly falls to the ground. At first I think she must have had a little something in her birch beer, but she doesn’t get up, and I see that she has stepped into a nasty hole. A moment later, we help her to her feet and someone who knows her calls to her daughter in the bleachers. The daughter hurries to her as Mom’s ankle turns purple-blue. I start to get light-headed, which I always do when I see a lot of blood or a personal injury like this, turn my head and move away. “Can we get medical staff to the edge of the grandstands,” the tractor pull announcer says. “We’ve a lady with a twisted ankle who’d like a little help.”
My ankle often feels a twinge. From when I badly strained my ankle, during my first summer of running. I feel it today, going downhill. From our friends’ house, it is either downhill or uphill. Very steep. It is hot, of course, and in my training so far I’ve not done heavy climbing, so I don’t want to overdo it. I’m extra careful, think Tai Chi as I run.
No trespassing signs, warnings to hunters. But, hell, there’s that pop-pop-pop again. Mark didn’t mention a firing range. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a lake and a lookout, called Lover’s Leap, and I wonder if anyone has, but then think not, if the town has no bridge and no water, then Lover’s Leap has to be metaphorical. Wishful thinking, maybe?
I’m guessing 20 minutes in, and my ankle feels normal again, as I run next to what I think is the manmade lake that flooded the town. At the end of the road is Mia Farrow’s house, where I imagine she gardens in a frontier-brimmed hat. I look toward the grounds, but there’s no sign of life.
The return road is steep, and for the first time in I don't know long my bad leg swells to twice the size of my healthy one. I think to stop, but I don’t. I slow to a light jog and like a cross-country skier scaling a mountain, crisscross my way up as best I can.
Next: Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: Say No to Jobs
Running for Your Life: Week Two
In one of my first memories, I’m standing over our cracked poured concrete laneway. Because of a gully water underground pipeline, my childhood home, which consequently was set back about thirty yards from the street, was connected to the outside world by this narrow gray ribbon. As a boy, about six, that old lane seemed an endless stretch, a journey itself.
After a rain the snails would come out of the grass and dry off there, and I’d stand over them and watch, bending to my haunches, studying, particularly the way they stretch their heads, the antennae arching out, taking in, what? So much is going on, or so it seems, and all at what is no speed at all, as close to reverse as possible.
Can time go backward? I could learn more from the snails if I could join them, and I lean in even closer, almost touch them, am as close as I can be, so that will have to do, that is enough, to see, almost feel, these animals that barely move yet convey so much in their stretching, head, little nodules and neck, on their way, coming from places where it isn’t out of the question that they were a moment before moving backward through time.
Isn’t that why I watched? Isn’t that part of the reason to be child-thrilled by the idea of something that could show so much energy and purpose at the fraction of the speed of a human heartbeat?
*
Week Two begins hot, mid- to high 80s and low 90s. Humid. We’ve a plan to see friends in Millbrook, New York, up the Hudson River on Saturday, Aug. 14, and Thursday, I’m set on a roundtrip 1 hour-30 minute run, without hills, to a water station at the Christopher Street Pier, which at my marathon pace, about 8:40 per mile, will be my long run: a little over 10 miles.
On Monday, I run at 10:30 a.m. in the park: midday temp 91. I’ve not a lot of time before work at the New York Post, where I design graphics and write headlines for a living. (No, I did not write the FREAKIN’ FLIER! headline that day for the wingnut JetBlue attendant Steven Slater, a 20-year vet of the airline industry who quit his job in gonzo style and was tab fodder for a week.) Still, though, I keep to my plan of running for an hour, with a set of six up-and-down intervals on the stone-step staircase that overlooks the park’s manmade lake.
On long runs, I run my 8:40 pace, with the view to bank the miles. That’s essential now, with only nine weeks to go before the marathon, to have trained A LOT of miles. (The books get precise, but enough to say here; if you think you’ve banked enough miles with nine weeks to go, you probably haven’t if you want to be a 53 percenter; See previous post.)
I’ve visual goals on the Week Two long run on Thursday. The Jehovah’s Witness Watertower clock at the Brooklyn Bridge, a half-hour door to door. From my home, I run along Third Street, down the Gowanus valley, a gradual rise, one of only two “climbs” on this run, up from the canal – pretty ripe in the August humidity – on the upside of the gully the row houses of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. At Carroll and Hoyt a sign for Duvel, the Belgian beer. They carry it at the gourmet deli, but I’ve never seen anyone enter. Just the guy who runs the cash, on the street, staring.
Across Atlantic Avenue and into Brooklyn Heights, where M and I will meet at a winebar tonight – one that I spot on Henry Street, just down the road from the movie we want to see, “Winter’s Bone,” based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, close to the Clark Street subway station for her, the High Street one for me. M will like that; a little different, out of our comfort zone.
Up and over the Bridge, the second "climb," careful with the “deaf” ones – runners and walkers, oblivious in headphones. I run at the edge of the bike lane, watchful that no one is zooming up behind, and of the lovers and families who stop suddenly to admire a view. Soon I am on the street, feeling strong, crossing through City Hall park, where at this hour, about 10 a.m., all the park benches are taken, the splash of the water fountain refreshes. Next, I check out the proposed home for the mosque on Park Place, not far from the World Trade Center site.
The sour faces don’t present themselves until I’m on the Hudson River Parkway itself. Runners in headphones, grim-looking, some actually talking as they run. Multi-tasking. By the time I get to Pier 40, the sour faces turn to appraisals, the gay couples camped out in the free tennis courts, chewed-up surface at the service line, never a true bounce. Basketball court, empty.
The man at the Christopher Street pier snack bar tells me it’s 10:26. Perfect, that’s 45 minutes, halfway. I feel a blister forming on the ball of my left foot, so I begin to alter my pace a bit, run more flat-footed, ease into the Tai Chi horse position as I go. In Tai Chi, the idea is to feel the gentle pull of a puppet master, lifting your head, centering your body, lightening the foot strikes.
I’m on my way back now, in Cobble Hill, maybe Carroll Gardens, and the blister feels like it will need some treatment. It’s a long straight stretch and, despite the break in the weather, low-80s when I started, the humidity is getting to me. I drop down to what must be a 9-minute mile.
A woman is pushing an wire grocery cart. A rust-colored ’do, sweet mother-type in a sensible dress, sensible shoes. She smiles and stops as I approach her at a place where the sidewalk is narrowing as so often happens running on urban streets, with their fire hydrants and street trees, barrels of all types, workmen tearing up the sidewalks, holes in the asphalt.
She stops in what seems a long distance from me, watching. I’m gassed. And only 8.5 miles in.
The lady nods and smiles. “Let the runner pass,” she says. I manage a smile and put on a bit of a kick. Take it home.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Three
After a rain the snails would come out of the grass and dry off there, and I’d stand over them and watch, bending to my haunches, studying, particularly the way they stretch their heads, the antennae arching out, taking in, what? So much is going on, or so it seems, and all at what is no speed at all, as close to reverse as possible.
Can time go backward? I could learn more from the snails if I could join them, and I lean in even closer, almost touch them, am as close as I can be, so that will have to do, that is enough, to see, almost feel, these animals that barely move yet convey so much in their stretching, head, little nodules and neck, on their way, coming from places where it isn’t out of the question that they were a moment before moving backward through time.
Isn’t that why I watched? Isn’t that part of the reason to be child-thrilled by the idea of something that could show so much energy and purpose at the fraction of the speed of a human heartbeat?
*
Week Two begins hot, mid- to high 80s and low 90s. Humid. We’ve a plan to see friends in Millbrook, New York, up the Hudson River on Saturday, Aug. 14, and Thursday, I’m set on a roundtrip 1 hour-30 minute run, without hills, to a water station at the Christopher Street Pier, which at my marathon pace, about 8:40 per mile, will be my long run: a little over 10 miles.
On Monday, I run at 10:30 a.m. in the park: midday temp 91. I’ve not a lot of time before work at the New York Post, where I design graphics and write headlines for a living. (No, I did not write the FREAKIN’ FLIER! headline that day for the wingnut JetBlue attendant Steven Slater, a 20-year vet of the airline industry who quit his job in gonzo style and was tab fodder for a week.) Still, though, I keep to my plan of running for an hour, with a set of six up-and-down intervals on the stone-step staircase that overlooks the park’s manmade lake.
On long runs, I run my 8:40 pace, with the view to bank the miles. That’s essential now, with only nine weeks to go before the marathon, to have trained A LOT of miles. (The books get precise, but enough to say here; if you think you’ve banked enough miles with nine weeks to go, you probably haven’t if you want to be a 53 percenter; See previous post.)
I’ve visual goals on the Week Two long run on Thursday. The Jehovah’s Witness Watertower clock at the Brooklyn Bridge, a half-hour door to door. From my home, I run along Third Street, down the Gowanus valley, a gradual rise, one of only two “climbs” on this run, up from the canal – pretty ripe in the August humidity – on the upside of the gully the row houses of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. At Carroll and Hoyt a sign for Duvel, the Belgian beer. They carry it at the gourmet deli, but I’ve never seen anyone enter. Just the guy who runs the cash, on the street, staring.
Across Atlantic Avenue and into Brooklyn Heights, where M and I will meet at a winebar tonight – one that I spot on Henry Street, just down the road from the movie we want to see, “Winter’s Bone,” based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, close to the Clark Street subway station for her, the High Street one for me. M will like that; a little different, out of our comfort zone.
Up and over the Bridge, the second "climb," careful with the “deaf” ones – runners and walkers, oblivious in headphones. I run at the edge of the bike lane, watchful that no one is zooming up behind, and of the lovers and families who stop suddenly to admire a view. Soon I am on the street, feeling strong, crossing through City Hall park, where at this hour, about 10 a.m., all the park benches are taken, the splash of the water fountain refreshes. Next, I check out the proposed home for the mosque on Park Place, not far from the World Trade Center site.
The sour faces don’t present themselves until I’m on the Hudson River Parkway itself. Runners in headphones, grim-looking, some actually talking as they run. Multi-tasking. By the time I get to Pier 40, the sour faces turn to appraisals, the gay couples camped out in the free tennis courts, chewed-up surface at the service line, never a true bounce. Basketball court, empty.
The man at the Christopher Street pier snack bar tells me it’s 10:26. Perfect, that’s 45 minutes, halfway. I feel a blister forming on the ball of my left foot, so I begin to alter my pace a bit, run more flat-footed, ease into the Tai Chi horse position as I go. In Tai Chi, the idea is to feel the gentle pull of a puppet master, lifting your head, centering your body, lightening the foot strikes.
I’m on my way back now, in Cobble Hill, maybe Carroll Gardens, and the blister feels like it will need some treatment. It’s a long straight stretch and, despite the break in the weather, low-80s when I started, the humidity is getting to me. I drop down to what must be a 9-minute mile.
A woman is pushing an wire grocery cart. A rust-colored ’do, sweet mother-type in a sensible dress, sensible shoes. She smiles and stops as I approach her at a place where the sidewalk is narrowing as so often happens running on urban streets, with their fire hydrants and street trees, barrels of all types, workmen tearing up the sidewalks, holes in the asphalt.
She stops in what seems a long distance from me, watching. I’m gassed. And only 8.5 miles in.
The lady nods and smiles. “Let the runner pass,” she says. I manage a smile and put on a bit of a kick. Take it home.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Three
Running for Your Life: Week One of Ten
So I’m cheating a bit. That’s the first thing. What I’m doing here is writing my personal marathon training regimen, not laying this out as a model for getting started. (See my earlier posts on this subject.) Suffice to say that – unless you are Superman or Superwoman – a person cannot reasonably expect to finish without breakdown (physical and mental!) a marathon in 10 weeks by starting training as if this were Day One for a non-runner.
There are plenty of places to go, to find a program that works if you are someone who ran track, say, twenty-plus years ago and now wants to take up running for health reasons, or someone who has been light jogging or speed-walking on a twice-weekly basis as part of a glossy-magazine-accredited good health program. There’s no single formula, a how-to book that will work for everyone. (Although Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success” is a pretty good one.)
Rather, RFYL: Week One parachutes the reader into the training regime of one runner, a 54-year-old man, gearing up to compete in his fifth marathon. For the next five weeks, I will be posting thoughts, advice, running facts and personal memories of 34 years of road running, leading up to the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., on Sunday, Oct. 10. My goal: to trim 2:48 from my Pittsburgh Marathon pace in May, or run a personal best 3:45 marathon, and in so doing qualify in my age class for the Boston Marathon next April.
For those keeping score, Week One is Aug 1 through 7, when I ran 2 hours and 30 minutes. In my case – and everyone is different – I train by keeping track of my hours on the road. Since my early 20s, I have been long-distance running at pretty much the same pace, at somewhere between 7:45 and 8 minutes per mile. (Remember, even now, my left leg swells uncomfortably during each and every run, so trying to maintain faster times is beyond me.) So in Week One, I ran about twenty miles.
I know what the books say, that between the ages of 25 and 30, your body stops laying down more bone.* But maybe there is something about starting running at an early age, in terms of being able to not only stay fit but strengthen your bones, which theoretically, could lead to even faster marathon times as you age, not to mention the invaluable added benefit of being able to maintain a training program without losing a lot of time to injury. As a serious runner since my early 20s, I have – knock on wood – been remarkably injury- and pain-free.
Consider this post a primer. Those 2.5 hours were pretty uneventful. I ran at home, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. On my long run, a 1:30 effort on Wednesday, Aug. 4, a hot and humid day in which I did “two” interval vertical climbs, I had my encounter with the girl playing with the ladybug toy. The gently loved toy had fallen out of her hands, and into the middle of a desire path under an oak tree. Her mom was sitting beside her on the grass. Breaking stride, I stooped to pick it up and gave it to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said in a soft voice of gratitude.
Given this is Week One, let’s end this post with some Running for Your Life basics. Because when it comes to running, it’s as important to bank words of inspiration as it is to bank hill climbs and long runs:
1. Whether you are training or not, get out the door and speed-walk, jog or run. If not every day, every other day.
2. Why? Because the secret to Running for Your Life – if there is a secret – is that you want to get to a place in your life where you can reasonably train to start and finish a marathon. (This does not mean that you have to do it; but more that you feel that you could do it. It’s a mental thing. I’ve not always been in marathon running shape, rather I’ve maintained a level of fitness that in 100 days, say, I COULD be ready.)
3. So you want to run a marathon? Train. At the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, 7,620 runners started and 4,011 marathoners finished, or 53% of the total. We’re all citizens, but in any given election only about 53% vote. Be a voter.
4. “I can’t run today. It’s too hot (or cold or wet).” Get over it, get out there. Invest in and wear gear you need to stay as comfortable as possible.
5. Hot weather running: Drink A LOT of water; plan a run with frequent water stations, and on long runs, take and eat energy bars.
6. Push yourself. Trust your body, of course, and stop when it tells you to stop. But don’t be afraid to gradually increase the degree of difficulty. When you’re ready, add hills, or do staircases (inside and out).
7. Vary your regimen. We’ll talk about interval training a bit in Week Two. Simply said, don’t always run the same route at the same speed.
8. Be patient. The Rome Marathon wasn’t built in a day. The current Poets & Writers magazine tells it like it is: A successful writer needs to be more than a sprinter, which requires stamina, she needs to be a marathoner, with equal parts stamina and patience.
9. Pay attention to what works for you. The idea is not to blindly follow Henderson’s prescriptions, or mine, or what the columnists say in “Runner’s World.” Own your run, own your body.
10. Give yourself six months, of every day, or every other day running. You’ll recognize the changes in you. You will be Running for Your Life.
* “At this stage – and if you, or someone you know is this age, by all means run out and tell them! LOC – a weight-bearing sport like running (along with ingesting sufficient calories and calcium) will actually reduce the rate at which your bones weaken and the rate at which you lose bone mass,” The Runner’s Body by Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Two
There are plenty of places to go, to find a program that works if you are someone who ran track, say, twenty-plus years ago and now wants to take up running for health reasons, or someone who has been light jogging or speed-walking on a twice-weekly basis as part of a glossy-magazine-accredited good health program. There’s no single formula, a how-to book that will work for everyone. (Although Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success” is a pretty good one.)
Rather, RFYL: Week One parachutes the reader into the training regime of one runner, a 54-year-old man, gearing up to compete in his fifth marathon. For the next five weeks, I will be posting thoughts, advice, running facts and personal memories of 34 years of road running, leading up to the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., on Sunday, Oct. 10. My goal: to trim 2:48 from my Pittsburgh Marathon pace in May, or run a personal best 3:45 marathon, and in so doing qualify in my age class for the Boston Marathon next April.
For those keeping score, Week One is Aug 1 through 7, when I ran 2 hours and 30 minutes. In my case – and everyone is different – I train by keeping track of my hours on the road. Since my early 20s, I have been long-distance running at pretty much the same pace, at somewhere between 7:45 and 8 minutes per mile. (Remember, even now, my left leg swells uncomfortably during each and every run, so trying to maintain faster times is beyond me.) So in Week One, I ran about twenty miles.
I know what the books say, that between the ages of 25 and 30, your body stops laying down more bone.* But maybe there is something about starting running at an early age, in terms of being able to not only stay fit but strengthen your bones, which theoretically, could lead to even faster marathon times as you age, not to mention the invaluable added benefit of being able to maintain a training program without losing a lot of time to injury. As a serious runner since my early 20s, I have – knock on wood – been remarkably injury- and pain-free.
Consider this post a primer. Those 2.5 hours were pretty uneventful. I ran at home, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. On my long run, a 1:30 effort on Wednesday, Aug. 4, a hot and humid day in which I did “two” interval vertical climbs, I had my encounter with the girl playing with the ladybug toy. The gently loved toy had fallen out of her hands, and into the middle of a desire path under an oak tree. Her mom was sitting beside her on the grass. Breaking stride, I stooped to pick it up and gave it to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said in a soft voice of gratitude.
Given this is Week One, let’s end this post with some Running for Your Life basics. Because when it comes to running, it’s as important to bank words of inspiration as it is to bank hill climbs and long runs:
1. Whether you are training or not, get out the door and speed-walk, jog or run. If not every day, every other day.
2. Why? Because the secret to Running for Your Life – if there is a secret – is that you want to get to a place in your life where you can reasonably train to start and finish a marathon. (This does not mean that you have to do it; but more that you feel that you could do it. It’s a mental thing. I’ve not always been in marathon running shape, rather I’ve maintained a level of fitness that in 100 days, say, I COULD be ready.)
3. So you want to run a marathon? Train. At the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, 7,620 runners started and 4,011 marathoners finished, or 53% of the total. We’re all citizens, but in any given election only about 53% vote. Be a voter.
4. “I can’t run today. It’s too hot (or cold or wet).” Get over it, get out there. Invest in and wear gear you need to stay as comfortable as possible.
5. Hot weather running: Drink A LOT of water; plan a run with frequent water stations, and on long runs, take and eat energy bars.
6. Push yourself. Trust your body, of course, and stop when it tells you to stop. But don’t be afraid to gradually increase the degree of difficulty. When you’re ready, add hills, or do staircases (inside and out).
7. Vary your regimen. We’ll talk about interval training a bit in Week Two. Simply said, don’t always run the same route at the same speed.
8. Be patient. The Rome Marathon wasn’t built in a day. The current Poets & Writers magazine tells it like it is: A successful writer needs to be more than a sprinter, which requires stamina, she needs to be a marathoner, with equal parts stamina and patience.
9. Pay attention to what works for you. The idea is not to blindly follow Henderson’s prescriptions, or mine, or what the columnists say in “Runner’s World.” Own your run, own your body.
10. Give yourself six months, of every day, or every other day running. You’ll recognize the changes in you. You will be Running for Your Life.
* “At this stage – and if you, or someone you know is this age, by all means run out and tell them! LOC – a weight-bearing sport like running (along with ingesting sufficient calories and calcium) will actually reduce the rate at which your bones weaken and the rate at which you lose bone mass,” The Runner’s Body by Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Two
Running for Your Life: Running Without Headphones
I ran to a payphone and called my girlfriend when I saw my first one. I’d read about it in the newspapers, seen the television advertising. For a time, there was nothing else on the air or in print. As a college sophomore, studying to be a newsman, I read four papers every day, and no matter how I strained to keep my focus on the news – the consequences of the wind-down of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the fiscal crisis in New York and the headline on Oct. 30, 1975, that cinched my destiny in papers, “Ford to New York: DROP DEAD” – the ads for it drenched me like tropical rain. But I’d not seen a single one on the street until that day at Ottawa’s Byward Market in 1975.
“A Walkman!” I cried. “I saw one, on this girl. The vacant eyes. Like a zombie. How can we do this? . . . No, I wasn’t flirting with her. That’s just the point, if she wasn’t using the Walkman maybe I would have. But it wasn’t possible not even remotely. Why? Because she wasn’t there. She was absent.”
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“ . . .”
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“. . .”
She listened a little longer, but like an animal in a trap. Free only a moment before and now, Wham!, painfully stuck, imprisoned.
“Cut the crap. You were flirting with her, weren’t you?’
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“I’m sure. You’re a man for a figure, L.”
“ . . .”
*
Eight years later, I took a portable cassette player on what was going to be a yearlong trip to the South Pacific and Oceania. (Yeah, I’m almost 55 all right.) I was running at the time, of course; in Papeete, Tahiti, Auckland, New Zealand, Hobart, Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne. But not with the cassette player. I wanted music with me, but not while I was on the road. I close my eyes and I can hear the music I took with me that year: Laurie Anderson’s “America,” Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Bruce Cockburn’s “Joy Will Find a Way,” Theodorakis’s “Zorba the Greek,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Greetings from Asbury Park.” But when I revisit my journal, my writings during that time, I take away, the landscape, the people, the jumbled makings of a writer in progress.
I firmly believe that part of what made that trip such a wellspring of inspiration for me as a writer, as a runner, and a reader – remember, my three Rs: Running, Reading and (W)Riting – was that I gave myself over to an experience that was as unfiltered by technology as I could manage. Similarly, I am writing – have always written – first with a typewriter and now on a computer without distractions: No music plays, no Internet. Here, I concur with novelist Jonathan Franzen: “You plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.” *
In “Clouds,” the comedy by Aristophanes, Socrates is at one point suspended from the stage, staring into the heavens. An acolyte approaches, asks what he is doing. From this height, I am contemplating the sun, Socrates replies. “Why not do it from the ground, if at all?” the acolyte says.
“The earth sucks the thought-juice down,” Socrates says.
To me, headphones suck the thought-juice down. What would be more unthinkable than Socrates in headphones staring into the heavens?
My parents didn’t own much of lasting value, except for the Sklar lake-blue print sofa and our Grundig stereo. The Grundig didn’t get a whale of a workout. There was a Dean Martin album that my mother loved, with the song “Houston” that I’m sure had a lot to do with her visiting Houston once, her only trip deep inside the U.S. (Florida and Myrtle Beach don’t count), a Perry Como, and my first album, “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” by Elton John.
When I think of music, I think of the Grundig. Or of tunes like Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” a personal reward after a long run in the '80s. I feel the same way about music-listening headphone use as I do about people walking and talking on cellphones, or BlackBerry “thumbers,” or iPhone fanatics. Music is beautiful and transporting but personal and social. It is something to be celebrated, but when it comes to the public sphere, not alone, from ear plugs that speak only to the brain in a way that can’t enhance the outdoor experience and rather too often defines it.
In India, motorists in urban areas take their life in their hands if they drive wearing headphones. Because traffic is so chaotic, hearing, rather than sight, is more essential to staying alive. Usually, in America, the stakes aren’t as high. But motorists, pedestrians and runners alike paying more attention to what’s coming out of their earbuds then what’s around them, can court disaster.
Even at the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, during the first two or so miles of congested running, I found myself dodging around joggers wearing earbuds who were oblivious to the sounds of hundreds of runners around them. You’d think that in a race of this type that athletes wouldn’t be wearing headphones. In the materials for the Steamtown Marathon, for example, the restriction has to be expressly noted, as in, “Runners are respectful asked not to wear iPods, MP3 players or any other devices over their ears.” You’d think it would be self-evident, but there you go.
Dear runner and reader, consider these past blog posts a primer. Next Tuesday, we’ve training notes to discuss, what I learned in Week One of Ten in preparation for the marathon on Oct. 10.
* Time magazine, Aug. 23, 2010
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part Two
When your eyes blink open you can’t see yourself. Before sleep, a cripple, you are told that you will wake up in a different body. To not be alarmed, and to ease into your changes. Whatever you do, don’t rise, take it slow. But you wake and you can’t believe anything is different. That is until you bring your blue hand in front of your face. Now, for the first time in I don’t know how long, you feel your legs. And before you know it, you are running. For the sheer glee of it, the warnings gone in the rush of movement, as you dash off, away, letting your new legs take you in what can only be described as a runner’s high.
I didn’t expect to like "Avatar." But that scene in which the actor Sam Worthington first is transformed from cripple to avatar stays with me. When I saw it at the theater, it sent shivers up my spine. Yes, I thought, they got it. That’s what it feels like. Through the magic of Hollywood, my thirty-plus years of running for my life was boiled down to one unforgettable twenty-second scene. At that moment, director James Cameron has you. Here is your hero, Jake Sully, the Avatar, running for his life.
I return to this often so that it seems like a tic. The business about not running in headphones. Where I run, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – in all kinds of weather: cold, heat, rain, snow – since 1976, if I could count the number of times I have run on treadmills it wouldn’t be any more than a few dozen – there are birds in all seasons. My favorites are the cardinals, but to see them you have to pay attention.
It’s their cheep you hear first, when they are in a pair. To see that flash of red in the gray urban bush trumps whatever I would hear in headphones. I can also almost sense the red tail hawks, too. As they circle high above me, watching. At times like this, I really think I could fly. Like a country song.
I promised practical suggestions in this post. And marathon trainers, have patience. Next week, I will be starting with Running for Your Life: Week One, leading to RFYL: Week Ten (The posts will not conform to real time; for example, expect Week One and Week Two next Tuesday and Thursday), which takes us to the Oct. 10 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Remember, too, go elsewhere for a nuts-and-bolts training manual: a 100-day program for success. Rather I see this as part-memoir, inspirational guide AND training log.
And when it comes to motivation, practical suggestions involve mental commitment. The stories I tell are rooted in the hope that I can reach someone, as I said in my first post, in hospital, or facing a personal crisis, and find some strength here to lace up your new running shoes and get out the door. It’s not that I won’t address questions about stretching, rest days, interval training. And if you have questions, please include them in the comment section. I will be happy to address your own specific concerns about a running regimen, or persistent leg or knee pain. But I’m a writer first, and believe that motivation comes from within.
Earlier this year, M and I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Modern Museum of Art. In one photo, elderly Chinese men pose like water birds in a marsh. In the accompanying magazine article, Western readers are introduced to the practice of Chinese boxing. In the script I see, the words tai chi don’t even appear. Rather, the magazine copy says groups of Chinese box without hitting each other every morning.
Tai chi has helped me stay motivated. For two months in the mid-1980s, I took a tai chi class. Although I don’t do the short form – what Cartier-Bresson saw – anymore, from those days and years afterward of tai chi training, I can intuit when my body and mind are moving out of alignment during a run. When it comes to mental preparation, I can’t say enough about tai chi as a discipline that can form the foundation upon which you can soon find yourself running for your life.
Staying motivated is about rewards, too. Non-runners often tell me the runners they see in public are a miserable-looking, unsmiling lot. The runners I know are not in clubs, doing a 5K after work, then going to a pub for some beers. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, runners are typically alone. And yes, usually with a sour look on their face.
There are times I look like that, but mostly not. To me, that is the secret of staying motivated. To bring to the road what the Buddhists call the beginner's mind, an attitude of openness and eagerness. I remember days in Windsor, Canada’s Motor City, training for the Windsor-Detroit Marathon. For my twenty-miler, I ran the leafy streets, long stretches of Riverside Drive to Tecumseh, the namesake of the great native warrior instrumental in the surrender of Fort Detroit, during the War of 1812, almost two hundred years ago. Bend in the river, meditative quiet. As I gaze across the St. Clair River to Belle Isle, I think about my rewards at home: A quart of cold water, a beer on ice, and while I’m drinking the beer, a whirly dance to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” from Songs in the Key Life, the volume thrown up on my stereo.
When it comes to the mind, there are other rewards, of course. New research shows people with weakly pumping hearts have decreased brain volume – a marker of brain aging – compared with those with more vigorous hearts. * After thirty-plus years of running, my resting pulse is 46 beats per minute. Elsewhere, a study by scientists at the University of Illinois found that three, vigorous 40-minute walks a week over six months will improve memory and reasoning. ** Call it, running for your brain.
There is nothing that says a runner in headphones would not – with only slightly breaking stride – pick up from the ground a gently loved lady bug stuffed toy that had fallen out of the hands of toddler sitting with her mom on the summer grass. But it’s likely you wouldn’t hear her soft voice of gratitude, “Thank you, sir.”
* Time magazine, Aug. 16, 2010
** Newsweek, June 28-July 5, 2010
Next: Running Without Headphones
I didn’t expect to like "Avatar." But that scene in which the actor Sam Worthington first is transformed from cripple to avatar stays with me. When I saw it at the theater, it sent shivers up my spine. Yes, I thought, they got it. That’s what it feels like. Through the magic of Hollywood, my thirty-plus years of running for my life was boiled down to one unforgettable twenty-second scene. At that moment, director James Cameron has you. Here is your hero, Jake Sully, the Avatar, running for his life.
I return to this often so that it seems like a tic. The business about not running in headphones. Where I run, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – in all kinds of weather: cold, heat, rain, snow – since 1976, if I could count the number of times I have run on treadmills it wouldn’t be any more than a few dozen – there are birds in all seasons. My favorites are the cardinals, but to see them you have to pay attention.
It’s their cheep you hear first, when they are in a pair. To see that flash of red in the gray urban bush trumps whatever I would hear in headphones. I can also almost sense the red tail hawks, too. As they circle high above me, watching. At times like this, I really think I could fly. Like a country song.
I promised practical suggestions in this post. And marathon trainers, have patience. Next week, I will be starting with Running for Your Life: Week One, leading to RFYL: Week Ten (The posts will not conform to real time; for example, expect Week One and Week Two next Tuesday and Thursday), which takes us to the Oct. 10 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Remember, too, go elsewhere for a nuts-and-bolts training manual: a 100-day program for success. Rather I see this as part-memoir, inspirational guide AND training log.
And when it comes to motivation, practical suggestions involve mental commitment. The stories I tell are rooted in the hope that I can reach someone, as I said in my first post, in hospital, or facing a personal crisis, and find some strength here to lace up your new running shoes and get out the door. It’s not that I won’t address questions about stretching, rest days, interval training. And if you have questions, please include them in the comment section. I will be happy to address your own specific concerns about a running regimen, or persistent leg or knee pain. But I’m a writer first, and believe that motivation comes from within.
Earlier this year, M and I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Modern Museum of Art. In one photo, elderly Chinese men pose like water birds in a marsh. In the accompanying magazine article, Western readers are introduced to the practice of Chinese boxing. In the script I see, the words tai chi don’t even appear. Rather, the magazine copy says groups of Chinese box without hitting each other every morning.
Tai chi has helped me stay motivated. For two months in the mid-1980s, I took a tai chi class. Although I don’t do the short form – what Cartier-Bresson saw – anymore, from those days and years afterward of tai chi training, I can intuit when my body and mind are moving out of alignment during a run. When it comes to mental preparation, I can’t say enough about tai chi as a discipline that can form the foundation upon which you can soon find yourself running for your life.
Staying motivated is about rewards, too. Non-runners often tell me the runners they see in public are a miserable-looking, unsmiling lot. The runners I know are not in clubs, doing a 5K after work, then going to a pub for some beers. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, runners are typically alone. And yes, usually with a sour look on their face.
There are times I look like that, but mostly not. To me, that is the secret of staying motivated. To bring to the road what the Buddhists call the beginner's mind, an attitude of openness and eagerness. I remember days in Windsor, Canada’s Motor City, training for the Windsor-Detroit Marathon. For my twenty-miler, I ran the leafy streets, long stretches of Riverside Drive to Tecumseh, the namesake of the great native warrior instrumental in the surrender of Fort Detroit, during the War of 1812, almost two hundred years ago. Bend in the river, meditative quiet. As I gaze across the St. Clair River to Belle Isle, I think about my rewards at home: A quart of cold water, a beer on ice, and while I’m drinking the beer, a whirly dance to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” from Songs in the Key Life, the volume thrown up on my stereo.
When it comes to the mind, there are other rewards, of course. New research shows people with weakly pumping hearts have decreased brain volume – a marker of brain aging – compared with those with more vigorous hearts. * After thirty-plus years of running, my resting pulse is 46 beats per minute. Elsewhere, a study by scientists at the University of Illinois found that three, vigorous 40-minute walks a week over six months will improve memory and reasoning. ** Call it, running for your brain.
There is nothing that says a runner in headphones would not – with only slightly breaking stride – pick up from the ground a gently loved lady bug stuffed toy that had fallen out of the hands of toddler sitting with her mom on the summer grass. But it’s likely you wouldn’t hear her soft voice of gratitude, “Thank you, sir.”
* Time magazine, Aug. 16, 2010
** Newsweek, June 28-July 5, 2010
Next: Running Without Headphones
Running for Your Life: The Mosque on Thursdays
The past two Thursdays I’ve started putting in my long runs. For me, that means at minimum a two-hour commitment of time. Usually, I run along the paths and roadways in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, but for these weekly training runs, I instead cross the Gowanus Canal and make my way through Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Summer mornings the Bridge boardwalk is chock-a-block with tourists. These Thursdays it’s French I hear as much as English. Cyclists, some meandering but most hell-bent on aerobic exercise, bell-tinkling only as necessary to avoid collision in the narrowing spaces. Water peddlers , camera-toting families, graybeards pointing out something or other to a nodding spouse. There are thousands on the Bridge at any one time.
Then off and down the other side, through City Hall Park and criss-cross the streets, near Ground Zero, shirt sleeves and ties, perky summer dresses, office wear. Next, out across the West Side Highway to my destination, Hudson River Park, an asphalt ribbon that takes me through parkland grasses, that remind of Fire Island dunes, and the end of the Christopher Street pier, with a clock tower on the Jersey shore, a man resting on the flank of his dog, both asleep on a park bench.
Once around the pier and I start to head back. I’ve a blister forming on the ball of my left foot. I adjust my gait, weight off the front foot, more central, think tai chi and the horse position, flatten my stride, heel strike, and the pain subsides a little. Stop for water. If only I had an exercise bar. Next time.
Enough left, though, for my return to Brooklyn. Like the previous Thursday, I weave through traffic to that address downtown, 45-51 Park Place. Where plans to build a mosque within a community center project have inflamed the land. I know the area well. Before 9/11 I worked three blocks away at the World Financial Center. On 9/11, I came out of the Park Place subway station to the sound of the second plane hitting the South Tower. Now, though, this strip of anonymous urban space is in every headline.
When I Google “Mosque at Ground Zero,” I get 120 million search results in 0.27 seconds. But these Thursdays I run by the mosque-to-be and there is nary a placard, not a single sign to suggest that this issue has Obama by the throat, as the right would have you believe, or, if the left guides your worldview, that the fervor of the protest is the most convincing symbol yet of our own emerging theocracy. But here it is as empty as a Vermont field. A story, like most in today's world, crafted from 30,000 feet in the air.
It is quiet, sunny but not humid for a Manhattan August. No tourists, or even commuters. Two blocks away are the throngs on the Brooklyn Bridge, toward which I run, picking up my pace, finally catching that second wind.
Next: Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part Two
Summer mornings the Bridge boardwalk is chock-a-block with tourists. These Thursdays it’s French I hear as much as English. Cyclists, some meandering but most hell-bent on aerobic exercise, bell-tinkling only as necessary to avoid collision in the narrowing spaces. Water peddlers , camera-toting families, graybeards pointing out something or other to a nodding spouse. There are thousands on the Bridge at any one time.
Then off and down the other side, through City Hall Park and criss-cross the streets, near Ground Zero, shirt sleeves and ties, perky summer dresses, office wear. Next, out across the West Side Highway to my destination, Hudson River Park, an asphalt ribbon that takes me through parkland grasses, that remind of Fire Island dunes, and the end of the Christopher Street pier, with a clock tower on the Jersey shore, a man resting on the flank of his dog, both asleep on a park bench.
Once around the pier and I start to head back. I’ve a blister forming on the ball of my left foot. I adjust my gait, weight off the front foot, more central, think tai chi and the horse position, flatten my stride, heel strike, and the pain subsides a little. Stop for water. If only I had an exercise bar. Next time.
Enough left, though, for my return to Brooklyn. Like the previous Thursday, I weave through traffic to that address downtown, 45-51 Park Place. Where plans to build a mosque within a community center project have inflamed the land. I know the area well. Before 9/11 I worked three blocks away at the World Financial Center. On 9/11, I came out of the Park Place subway station to the sound of the second plane hitting the South Tower. Now, though, this strip of anonymous urban space is in every headline.
When I Google “Mosque at Ground Zero,” I get 120 million search results in 0.27 seconds. But these Thursdays I run by the mosque-to-be and there is nary a placard, not a single sign to suggest that this issue has Obama by the throat, as the right would have you believe, or, if the left guides your worldview, that the fervor of the protest is the most convincing symbol yet of our own emerging theocracy. But here it is as empty as a Vermont field. A story, like most in today's world, crafted from 30,000 feet in the air.
It is quiet, sunny but not humid for a Manhattan August. No tourists, or even commuters. Two blocks away are the throngs on the Brooklyn Bridge, toward which I run, picking up my pace, finally catching that second wind.
Next: Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part Two
Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part One
After leaving the hospital, I took some time off my studies at college and landed a job at a mall drugstore in a town far from home. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, which is convenient because the room I rent from a retired Italian woman doesn’t have one. Cheap ties hang around my collar like misbegotten chromosones. The room is big enough for a double bed and an oversized bureau. Floral wallpaper. The day before my first shift I buy a can of tobacco and cigarette papers and smoke rollie after rollie until with each breath I feel sharp pains where the clot had been in my lung, the smoke so thick that I couldn’t see the wooden crucifix tacked above the door.
My phone won’t be in for a week so I go to a street booth a couple of blocks away. “Will you accept a collect call?” the operator asks.
“Sure will,” Mum says .... “How are you, son? We’ve been worried sick about you. Wondering when you’d call.”
“I dunno,” I says, tapping ash from the cigarette. “I’m just getting myself sorted out down here.”
“So, how’s it going?”
“Goin’? It’s goin’.”
“No, really.”
“I don’t know, it’s a little too early to say.”
“Well, y’know, it’s new, son. Give yourself some time. How was the weather? Today was a little wet but tonight the sun came out and gave us a lovely sunset. It is a little cooler too.” “Uh huh.”
“Next time you’re up, I’ll tell you some TALL TALES. Tuesday Afternoon Ladies League and Thursday Afternoon Ladies Euchre Series. That’s the new name for our alley bowling and card-playing groups. Whaddya think? Can you believe it, they made me the secretary? Your sister’s fine, don’t see her as often as we’d like. Here’s your father. Now, call again soon, promise?”
Working-class dates cruise by in pickups and low-riding Chevies. Tires squeal. The pale roof lamp flickers, threatens to go out.
“You’re all right?” Father asks. He’s sitting in the LazyBoy, watching Jewish comics, scanning TV Guide.
I don’t say I’m as sad as I’ve ever been. It’s his view that retail life is in my cards. That college is unnecessary. “Yup, I’m OK,” I say in my practiced manner. With Dad, it’s all about the physical state. I’m not under heavy mortar fire in a foreign city, a war reporter under siege. No broken bones, gushing blood vessels. My head isn’t severed, lying in the middle of the road. “Yup. OK.”
“Now’s not the time to talk, then; I’ll check with your mother for the details. Call when you have your own phone, okay? Home for Christmas? Fine. Good luck on the job.” And then we hang up.
I go to my room and put on my running clothes. I’m not skin and bones any more, but straggly-looking. That summer (see Getting Started: Part One) I’d begun my practice, running every other day. It takes me awhile, but finally I’m in a bit of a rhythm. Maybe a quarter-mile, I think, maybe I go as long as that today.
I haven’t gone a few hundred yards, my left leg heavy as a post, lame as Chester on “Gunsmoke.” A red GTO rumbles beside me, the window powers down. Run a mile for me!” A girl in a cocktail dress and ponytail, both hands gripping the car door. “Keep your legs up!” she says, as her boyfriend guns the beast, burning rubber. I feel like a husk, as though the wind could blow me away.
Before entering my room that night, I hear the faint sound of voices on the second floor of my rooming house. It appears to be coming from behind a door at the end of the hall, and walking closer, I hear a man’s voice. “Go ahead. I’ve got you. Over.” The next voice is Eastern European, I think, civil yet insistent. “Please. Speak to my brother in Thunder Bay. I can’t get through. Mama dreamed of him last night. She wants to hear his voice. Over.” The man behind the closed door asks for the call numbers, says he will do the best he can. He is hailing Thunder Bay as I creep away.
Recently, M and I were in Spain. Cadiz Province, in a place called Zahara de los Atunes. In Zahara aging bulls and their cows will wander to the beach, and on long runs, miles from other bathers, I ran past them. They give a funny look. Later, a young man sunning with his girlfriend props himself up on his elbow and yells at me, “Ole!”, his right hand cutting the air.
I’ve put in a lot of miles between those two cat calls. And these days, of course, running in New York, where I live and have put most of my time, the looks and acknowledgments I get as I pass (if I get any at all) are more in the admiring category, the thumbs up, a slow, approving nod, than the disrespectful ones. As any half-marathoner or marathoner will tell you, the shouts and cheers of support we get on the street from onlookers keep us going, are a big part of what makes running a marathon unforgettable.
But that’s the big race. How about those long training days? The book guides will tell you that to best finish the 26.2 miles of a marathon that you should, over a one-hundred day training period, put in a minimum of three hundred and sixty miles. No matter how fast you run, that’s a lot of quiet time. A long time to be alone on the road.
There is something my father-in-law said to M around his eightieth birthday. Sol lived to be nearly one hundred and three, and he never thought he had twenty-plus years to live when he told M about a dream he had. I won’t go into the specifics of the dream here, but he had this profound feeling: My whole life lives inside me, he told her.
I will have more to say about motivation in the next post. More practical suggestions. Staying motivated, not just finding that route to a healthy addiction, but sticking to it, is arguably the most critical lesson to be learned. Believe in the Seven S’s: Some will, some won’t, so what?, stop whining, someone’s waiting, so stick to it, start now.
But what Sol told M gets to the heart of how I stay motivated. My injury, my left leg that will never be okay, will always swell to an uncomfortable size when I run, brought me to a running life. My health has been in the hands of doctors, but it is running that has been my route to healing. I like to think the every-other day running I’ve done for more than thirty years is more of a want than a need. I’d be kidding myself if I said it was a balance, although it is what I’d like it to be.
That is why I began talking about motivation from a memory during my early running life. From one of the lives that lives inside me. I don’t, as a rule, think about those days. Many are painful memories – in more ways than one. But they taught me something. Sol had twenty-three more years to live when he told M of his dream.
Another life, if you will. Me, I am running for my life. I can’t write about motivation and not start at the beginning. From the physical state, but more important for me, the mental one. Because it is the mind that will keep us going. Be in balance: train the mind and the body.
Next: Staying Motivated: Part Two
My phone won’t be in for a week so I go to a street booth a couple of blocks away. “Will you accept a collect call?” the operator asks.
“Sure will,” Mum says .... “How are you, son? We’ve been worried sick about you. Wondering when you’d call.”
“I dunno,” I says, tapping ash from the cigarette. “I’m just getting myself sorted out down here.”
“So, how’s it going?”
“Goin’? It’s goin’.”
“No, really.”
“I don’t know, it’s a little too early to say.”
“Well, y’know, it’s new, son. Give yourself some time. How was the weather? Today was a little wet but tonight the sun came out and gave us a lovely sunset. It is a little cooler too.” “Uh huh.”
“Next time you’re up, I’ll tell you some TALL TALES. Tuesday Afternoon Ladies League and Thursday Afternoon Ladies Euchre Series. That’s the new name for our alley bowling and card-playing groups. Whaddya think? Can you believe it, they made me the secretary? Your sister’s fine, don’t see her as often as we’d like. Here’s your father. Now, call again soon, promise?”
Working-class dates cruise by in pickups and low-riding Chevies. Tires squeal. The pale roof lamp flickers, threatens to go out.
“You’re all right?” Father asks. He’s sitting in the LazyBoy, watching Jewish comics, scanning TV Guide.
I don’t say I’m as sad as I’ve ever been. It’s his view that retail life is in my cards. That college is unnecessary. “Yup, I’m OK,” I say in my practiced manner. With Dad, it’s all about the physical state. I’m not under heavy mortar fire in a foreign city, a war reporter under siege. No broken bones, gushing blood vessels. My head isn’t severed, lying in the middle of the road. “Yup. OK.”
“Now’s not the time to talk, then; I’ll check with your mother for the details. Call when you have your own phone, okay? Home for Christmas? Fine. Good luck on the job.” And then we hang up.
I go to my room and put on my running clothes. I’m not skin and bones any more, but straggly-looking. That summer (see Getting Started: Part One) I’d begun my practice, running every other day. It takes me awhile, but finally I’m in a bit of a rhythm. Maybe a quarter-mile, I think, maybe I go as long as that today.
I haven’t gone a few hundred yards, my left leg heavy as a post, lame as Chester on “Gunsmoke.” A red GTO rumbles beside me, the window powers down. Run a mile for me!” A girl in a cocktail dress and ponytail, both hands gripping the car door. “Keep your legs up!” she says, as her boyfriend guns the beast, burning rubber. I feel like a husk, as though the wind could blow me away.
Before entering my room that night, I hear the faint sound of voices on the second floor of my rooming house. It appears to be coming from behind a door at the end of the hall, and walking closer, I hear a man’s voice. “Go ahead. I’ve got you. Over.” The next voice is Eastern European, I think, civil yet insistent. “Please. Speak to my brother in Thunder Bay. I can’t get through. Mama dreamed of him last night. She wants to hear his voice. Over.” The man behind the closed door asks for the call numbers, says he will do the best he can. He is hailing Thunder Bay as I creep away.
Recently, M and I were in Spain. Cadiz Province, in a place called Zahara de los Atunes. In Zahara aging bulls and their cows will wander to the beach, and on long runs, miles from other bathers, I ran past them. They give a funny look. Later, a young man sunning with his girlfriend props himself up on his elbow and yells at me, “Ole!”, his right hand cutting the air.
I’ve put in a lot of miles between those two cat calls. And these days, of course, running in New York, where I live and have put most of my time, the looks and acknowledgments I get as I pass (if I get any at all) are more in the admiring category, the thumbs up, a slow, approving nod, than the disrespectful ones. As any half-marathoner or marathoner will tell you, the shouts and cheers of support we get on the street from onlookers keep us going, are a big part of what makes running a marathon unforgettable.
But that’s the big race. How about those long training days? The book guides will tell you that to best finish the 26.2 miles of a marathon that you should, over a one-hundred day training period, put in a minimum of three hundred and sixty miles. No matter how fast you run, that’s a lot of quiet time. A long time to be alone on the road.
There is something my father-in-law said to M around his eightieth birthday. Sol lived to be nearly one hundred and three, and he never thought he had twenty-plus years to live when he told M about a dream he had. I won’t go into the specifics of the dream here, but he had this profound feeling: My whole life lives inside me, he told her.
I will have more to say about motivation in the next post. More practical suggestions. Staying motivated, not just finding that route to a healthy addiction, but sticking to it, is arguably the most critical lesson to be learned. Believe in the Seven S’s: Some will, some won’t, so what?, stop whining, someone’s waiting, so stick to it, start now.
But what Sol told M gets to the heart of how I stay motivated. My injury, my left leg that will never be okay, will always swell to an uncomfortable size when I run, brought me to a running life. My health has been in the hands of doctors, but it is running that has been my route to healing. I like to think the every-other day running I’ve done for more than thirty years is more of a want than a need. I’d be kidding myself if I said it was a balance, although it is what I’d like it to be.
That is why I began talking about motivation from a memory during my early running life. From one of the lives that lives inside me. I don’t, as a rule, think about those days. Many are painful memories – in more ways than one. But they taught me something. Sol had twenty-three more years to live when he told M of his dream.
Another life, if you will. Me, I am running for my life. I can’t write about motivation and not start at the beginning. From the physical state, but more important for me, the mental one. Because it is the mind that will keep us going. Be in balance: train the mind and the body.
Next: Staying Motivated: Part Two
Running for Your Life: The Hospital Story
If I could sit up I would rip out the IV. My parents are coming, but they have yet to arrive. It’s the middle of the night and except for my hospital bedmate Sam, I am alone. I’ve only myself to blame. In phone conversations with my parents, I’ve been less than forthright about the killer, the blood clot that has lodged in my lung. Why Sam is standing guard, because the next clot could shoot to the heart or the brain and kill me.
I’ve always been a slender man, but this night I am down fifty pounds from my regular weight. Barely one hundred. Despite blood as thin as water, the clots keep coming. First there were two big ones in my groin that is tender beyond belief and then the pulmonary embolism. Since the first blood clot more than a month ago, my left leg is useless to me, incapable of bearing any weight without mind-blanking pain. It is elevated before me swathed in lard-like goop and tensor bandage that is supposed to keep the swelling down to the girth of a twenty-year oak. There is no one I want to see me like this. Certainly not my parents. Maybe my dead grandfather, who I’d be joining soon.
Where are they? Shouldn’t they have come anyway, despite what I, their misguided college boy son, might tell them. My father certainly was at work, at home, hundreds of miles from Ottawa. Probably on the road, where he plied his trade, sales in every conceivable digestible, inedible and combustible, from Bic pens to Double Bubble to my personal favorite in fireworks season, the burning schoolhouse, what if I were capable in my delirium of having a dream to remember would take me back to the acrid smell and the red and orange and yellow licking flames of a schoolhouse in culture-consented arson. Burn, baby, burn. What, if I knew what I know now, would have made a point to bring to mind every detail of the schoolhouse rent to ashes.
“I want my parents to be here. Now! Someone should tell them the truth. I should tell them the truth.”
I want my mother. She is never comfortable outside Owen Sound. She will come into the room and not know where to sit. Will someone bring up a chair for my mother? She will not stay long unless I ask her to, but I wasn’t raised to ask for things. Instead, I can tell in a flash what it is that people want, and then I ask if I can bring them that: a glass of water, a hug, an overcoat, which I promptly do. But me? I want of nothing – and I will sense that a minute after my mother sits on the chair at my bedside that she will want to leave.
To confront death is to be outside yourself. When I was little, only two years old, I ate candy aspirin after candy aspirin. Rushed to the hospital, I barely survived. Struck by the illusion of being conscious outside my body, gagging on whatever is being inserted down my throat and into my stomach to pump out the poison that an hour before was the sweet candy in my sister’s hand. I told this to my father, whose face immediately paled. “You don’t remember that, do you?” he said. “You can’t have.” Later, he would tell me it was the worst day of his life. Me, the jury's out.
Sam presses the buzzer and the nurse comes. She clucks, taking my pulse. Soon there are others around the bed. In the weeks I have been in the hospital, I’ve grown used to this. But usually the groups come during the day, not in the middle of the night. The place is a teaching hospital and many times students in white coats have gathered around me like budding auctioneers before a prize found in a barn. Once, I watched through slitted eyes to hear what the teacher might say, if he thought I were unconscious. There are reasons we are called “patients.” Always the last to know.
“An extremely rare case: deep-vein thrombosis in a young man. Twenty-one in October. An athlete, a hockey player, very active, in robust health. We usually see this in the elderly, of course. When the veins are compromised by age, the stresses of living. He first contracted mononucleosis, very high temperatures, bed-ridden in a college infirmary. Diagnosed next with pneumonia, which is not uncommon. Then . . .”
“Blood clot in the leg, brought on by the sudden inactivity. Perhaps an undiagnosed predisposition?” said a female voice.
“Very good. Yes. None of that surprises. But the patient has since not responded to treatment. The initial clot in the left leg groin area is massive now. Note the irregular swelling of that area,” he said, pulling back the bedding. “And the leg itself. Uncommonly large. Last week, another clot, possibly splitting off from the groin, lodged in a lung. Same side of the body, so likely a “family” member. Breathing compromised, body weakened. We’ve …”
“Adjusted the IV meds, increased blood thinners?” a male voice.
“Yes. If there is some improvement it doesn’t show in the data.” There is a pause and I imagine he nods to indicate not in the patient either. No wonder he had to tell them that I was an athlete. To look at me: hollow cheeks, straggly beard, eyes black like piss holes in the snow, you’d never know. Also in silence he points to the heart and the brain. The next likely destinations for these clots that are killing me. “Puzzling, no? Think about it.”
Yes, think hard, I imagine, as I open my eyes. One student is lingering. I can’t see his face for the clipboard. He will ask me a question. Want to know something about me, about my story. But no, he doesn’t. He takes a notation from the IV, the one that is inserted in my breastplate, scribbles something and then leaves with the research he is collecting for the article I imagine he is writing about my strange case.
But these aren’t doctors gathered around me. They are nurses, four of them. Reading dials, finger-flicking the IV drip. I wonder as I feel the touch of the slender fingers of the nurse taking my pulse if I will ever stir to love again.
“It’s not fair, is it, Sam?”
“You’ll get through it,” I imagine Sam saying.
I can see through the tears, as I think, “Yeah, I’ll get through it.”
Next: Staying Motivated: Part One
I’ve always been a slender man, but this night I am down fifty pounds from my regular weight. Barely one hundred. Despite blood as thin as water, the clots keep coming. First there were two big ones in my groin that is tender beyond belief and then the pulmonary embolism. Since the first blood clot more than a month ago, my left leg is useless to me, incapable of bearing any weight without mind-blanking pain. It is elevated before me swathed in lard-like goop and tensor bandage that is supposed to keep the swelling down to the girth of a twenty-year oak. There is no one I want to see me like this. Certainly not my parents. Maybe my dead grandfather, who I’d be joining soon.
Where are they? Shouldn’t they have come anyway, despite what I, their misguided college boy son, might tell them. My father certainly was at work, at home, hundreds of miles from Ottawa. Probably on the road, where he plied his trade, sales in every conceivable digestible, inedible and combustible, from Bic pens to Double Bubble to my personal favorite in fireworks season, the burning schoolhouse, what if I were capable in my delirium of having a dream to remember would take me back to the acrid smell and the red and orange and yellow licking flames of a schoolhouse in culture-consented arson. Burn, baby, burn. What, if I knew what I know now, would have made a point to bring to mind every detail of the schoolhouse rent to ashes.
“I want my parents to be here. Now! Someone should tell them the truth. I should tell them the truth.”
I want my mother. She is never comfortable outside Owen Sound. She will come into the room and not know where to sit. Will someone bring up a chair for my mother? She will not stay long unless I ask her to, but I wasn’t raised to ask for things. Instead, I can tell in a flash what it is that people want, and then I ask if I can bring them that: a glass of water, a hug, an overcoat, which I promptly do. But me? I want of nothing – and I will sense that a minute after my mother sits on the chair at my bedside that she will want to leave.
To confront death is to be outside yourself. When I was little, only two years old, I ate candy aspirin after candy aspirin. Rushed to the hospital, I barely survived. Struck by the illusion of being conscious outside my body, gagging on whatever is being inserted down my throat and into my stomach to pump out the poison that an hour before was the sweet candy in my sister’s hand. I told this to my father, whose face immediately paled. “You don’t remember that, do you?” he said. “You can’t have.” Later, he would tell me it was the worst day of his life. Me, the jury's out.
Sam presses the buzzer and the nurse comes. She clucks, taking my pulse. Soon there are others around the bed. In the weeks I have been in the hospital, I’ve grown used to this. But usually the groups come during the day, not in the middle of the night. The place is a teaching hospital and many times students in white coats have gathered around me like budding auctioneers before a prize found in a barn. Once, I watched through slitted eyes to hear what the teacher might say, if he thought I were unconscious. There are reasons we are called “patients.” Always the last to know.
“An extremely rare case: deep-vein thrombosis in a young man. Twenty-one in October. An athlete, a hockey player, very active, in robust health. We usually see this in the elderly, of course. When the veins are compromised by age, the stresses of living. He first contracted mononucleosis, very high temperatures, bed-ridden in a college infirmary. Diagnosed next with pneumonia, which is not uncommon. Then . . .”
“Blood clot in the leg, brought on by the sudden inactivity. Perhaps an undiagnosed predisposition?” said a female voice.
“Very good. Yes. None of that surprises. But the patient has since not responded to treatment. The initial clot in the left leg groin area is massive now. Note the irregular swelling of that area,” he said, pulling back the bedding. “And the leg itself. Uncommonly large. Last week, another clot, possibly splitting off from the groin, lodged in a lung. Same side of the body, so likely a “family” member. Breathing compromised, body weakened. We’ve …”
“Adjusted the IV meds, increased blood thinners?” a male voice.
“Yes. If there is some improvement it doesn’t show in the data.” There is a pause and I imagine he nods to indicate not in the patient either. No wonder he had to tell them that I was an athlete. To look at me: hollow cheeks, straggly beard, eyes black like piss holes in the snow, you’d never know. Also in silence he points to the heart and the brain. The next likely destinations for these clots that are killing me. “Puzzling, no? Think about it.”
Yes, think hard, I imagine, as I open my eyes. One student is lingering. I can’t see his face for the clipboard. He will ask me a question. Want to know something about me, about my story. But no, he doesn’t. He takes a notation from the IV, the one that is inserted in my breastplate, scribbles something and then leaves with the research he is collecting for the article I imagine he is writing about my strange case.
But these aren’t doctors gathered around me. They are nurses, four of them. Reading dials, finger-flicking the IV drip. I wonder as I feel the touch of the slender fingers of the nurse taking my pulse if I will ever stir to love again.
“It’s not fair, is it, Sam?”
“You’ll get through it,” I imagine Sam saying.
I can see through the tears, as I think, “Yeah, I’ll get through it.”
Next: Staying Motivated: Part One
Running for Your Life: Getting Started: Part Two
I’d been running for about five years when Leonard surprised us by singing a ballad at a housewarming party I was having after moving into a new apartment. At dusk, my friend Sue read a couple of her poems, and Rob, who edited my first stories, played guitar and led us in folk songs in the waning light. There’s a pause in Rob’s playing. Rob is sitting on the only armchair while the rest of our small group sit cross-legged on a rug I had bought for the occasion. Suddenly, Leonard's bass voice fills the room, leaving us speechless. “That’s a song by Jim Reeves,” Leonard explains after the final verse. “At home in Nigeria, Jim Reeves is very big.”
Leonard, an exchange student from Africa, and I met when I was doing a newspaper article on the local college’s international outreach program. It was 1981, and the previous year I had won my first and only runner’s trophy, in the 20-29 age group of a sparsely attended race.
“C’mon,” I tell Leonard one day. “Let’s go out on a run together.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard says. “I don’t run.”
“That’s okay. No pressure. It’ll be fun.”
It’s a hot day, in the low-90s, when we start. We’re slow at first, but then I kick it up a little. Leonard does too. I don’t remember what we are talking about, but like me, Leonard is a dreamer. I’m going to write a great novel; Leonard, be president of Nigeria. At this pace, faster than I’m used to, I’m struggling for breath, so as the conversation wanes, Leonard, with a sly smile, sprints the final leg of our five-mile run. When I finally arrive at his side, he is standing arms akimbo, only a shimmer of sweat on him, breathing normally. I am drenched, gasping for air, as I clomp up to him.
“I thought you said you don’t run, Leonard,” I say.
“I don’t,” Leonard says. “But I do play a little football.”
I haven’t seen Leonard since those days, but I often think of him. Sometimes, when I’m running, I’ll whisper his name. And remember that line: “I do play a little football.”
When I bring Leonard to mind, I think of the lesson I learned on that hot day almost thirty years ago. That running is not racing. Particularly when you are getting started. If you have to walk before you can run, you have to run before you can race. Running is not tennis, or golf, or baseball. It is less a sport than a way of being.
It is about harnessing the outside in. About inner strength. A place where you sing the ballad of your life.
I’m not one for checklists. For do’s and don’t’s. (But most Getting Started columns have them. And, yes, these may not work for everyone. I’m a firm believer, as this blog emphasizes, of hard-won personal choice. Consider these more as guidelines, than a literal to-do list. A considered second opinion, because I believe the first opinion should be your own. But I’ve been running for my life for over thirty years, and, today I’ve never been in better shape. That counts for something.)
1. Do see your doctor. Don’t be like me (See The Introduction). Do a full checkup and then discuss what you are planning to do. Does your doctor have to be an athlete? No, but at the very least, she should be basing her diagnosis on how best to keep you active, to stay on the road. More on this later.
2. Do get good shoes and socks. Fuhgeddabout the rest of your clothes. (I like to wear T-shirts and caps that have a special meaning for me, my daughter’s college, a CANADA 2000 cap a childhood friend gave me. Whatever feels in keeping with easing into a gentle meditative state.) On the purely physical side, running IS footwear, so take time and get the right shoes and socks. Find an independent running store – in my neighborhood, there is a place called Jack Rabbit – and get to know the sales staff. Walk and run on their video-treadmill, and, after looking at your personal “footage,” discuss with them the mechanics of your style of walking and running. Talk to them about your goals: How much time you are setting aside for running, what the terrain is like (asphalt, cement, woodland path), what, if any, experience you’ve had with other shoes, particularly in terms of tendencies for some part of the sole to wear out faster than others. This can suggest a pattern of movement that may not be readily apparent from the video. They may suggest a different shoe for walking and running. Do yourself a favor, buy them both. If you were taking up tennis or golf, think of the expense. For runners, this is your ONE expense. Don’t skimp on it. The same goes for socks. I’m like poet Matthea Harvey’s “Straightforward Mermaid.” * I hate wearing socks, but when it comes to running, let the experts put you into some good ones.
3. Don’t start running right away. Whether you are brand-new to the life, or haven’t run since doing a little cross-country in high school, or did a marathon twenty years ago but haven’t laced up your sneakers for a run in a decade, it’s not a good idea to race out the door. Walk. Everyone has their own pace. Listen to your body as you walk, keeping in mind what the runners in the shoe store told you about your walking style. The first week, do this alone, and don’t walk as fast as you can without getting winded. Don’t sweat it.
4. Don’t wear earphones. (More later on this.) You are singing the ballad of your life. That’s your soundtrack. Whether I am running at home in Brooklyn, at my childhood home in Canada, or in Spain, Tokyo, France or Istanbul, I don’t enclose myself off in words and music that are not of my own making. The life of the road is inspiring enough.
5. Do be consistent. Don’t let your other lives get in the way of your walking, running life. Start the first half-year of your walk/run by keeping an every other day regimen. (I’ve stayed true to that pattern since I left hospital in 1976; in my case, my left leg swells up so uncomfortably – even now – that I’ve never run more than four times a week, even during marathon training.) You can’t run for your life between the cracks of your life. Done right, running will be your healthy addiction. You will simply have to do it.
6. Do wear a watch, but not to time your pace. (“Leonard,” I think to myself.) The type of running I advocate is not for those of a competitive streak. Time is something you set aside. In my case, I run for 45 minutes and up. Soon, you will learn, settle in, to your natural pace. It is simply not important, especially in the beginning when you are building up your strength and stamina, to try to trim seconds off your time so that in six months time, say, you are nearing a sub-8-minute mile. It may be counter-intuitive, but when it comes to running, think the discovery of slowness. (See Getting Started: Part One.) You are running for your life and, trust me, it will be a long one. Take your time, look around, slow down.
7. Do listen to your body. Long-distance running at an easy natural pace can be for everyone. We are built for it. William Jungers, an anatomical specialist at Stony Brook University, says, “it’s no coincidence that in chimpanzees, the muscle is called gluteus superficialis, and in humans, gluteus maximus.” Truth is, it’s not a good idea to run your butt off. (Or dance you’re a** off, as the reality TV folks would lead you to believe.) Instead, when we are running at our best, those elegantly designed asses of ours provide the perfect counterbalance to our chest and head, leaning forward in harmony with the running phenomena we all can be. Believe it or not, it’s possible to just keep going and going.
8. Don’t stop believing. Imagine yourself running 10 years from now: 20, 30, 50. Do it. Run for your life.
Next: The Hospital Story
* The New Yorker, Aug. 16-23
Leonard, an exchange student from Africa, and I met when I was doing a newspaper article on the local college’s international outreach program. It was 1981, and the previous year I had won my first and only runner’s trophy, in the 20-29 age group of a sparsely attended race.
“C’mon,” I tell Leonard one day. “Let’s go out on a run together.”
“I don’t know,” Leonard says. “I don’t run.”
“That’s okay. No pressure. It’ll be fun.”
It’s a hot day, in the low-90s, when we start. We’re slow at first, but then I kick it up a little. Leonard does too. I don’t remember what we are talking about, but like me, Leonard is a dreamer. I’m going to write a great novel; Leonard, be president of Nigeria. At this pace, faster than I’m used to, I’m struggling for breath, so as the conversation wanes, Leonard, with a sly smile, sprints the final leg of our five-mile run. When I finally arrive at his side, he is standing arms akimbo, only a shimmer of sweat on him, breathing normally. I am drenched, gasping for air, as I clomp up to him.
“I thought you said you don’t run, Leonard,” I say.
“I don’t,” Leonard says. “But I do play a little football.”
I haven’t seen Leonard since those days, but I often think of him. Sometimes, when I’m running, I’ll whisper his name. And remember that line: “I do play a little football.”
When I bring Leonard to mind, I think of the lesson I learned on that hot day almost thirty years ago. That running is not racing. Particularly when you are getting started. If you have to walk before you can run, you have to run before you can race. Running is not tennis, or golf, or baseball. It is less a sport than a way of being.
It is about harnessing the outside in. About inner strength. A place where you sing the ballad of your life.
I’m not one for checklists. For do’s and don’t’s. (But most Getting Started columns have them. And, yes, these may not work for everyone. I’m a firm believer, as this blog emphasizes, of hard-won personal choice. Consider these more as guidelines, than a literal to-do list. A considered second opinion, because I believe the first opinion should be your own. But I’ve been running for my life for over thirty years, and, today I’ve never been in better shape. That counts for something.)
1. Do see your doctor. Don’t be like me (See The Introduction). Do a full checkup and then discuss what you are planning to do. Does your doctor have to be an athlete? No, but at the very least, she should be basing her diagnosis on how best to keep you active, to stay on the road. More on this later.
2. Do get good shoes and socks. Fuhgeddabout the rest of your clothes. (I like to wear T-shirts and caps that have a special meaning for me, my daughter’s college, a CANADA 2000 cap a childhood friend gave me. Whatever feels in keeping with easing into a gentle meditative state.) On the purely physical side, running IS footwear, so take time and get the right shoes and socks. Find an independent running store – in my neighborhood, there is a place called Jack Rabbit – and get to know the sales staff. Walk and run on their video-treadmill, and, after looking at your personal “footage,” discuss with them the mechanics of your style of walking and running. Talk to them about your goals: How much time you are setting aside for running, what the terrain is like (asphalt, cement, woodland path), what, if any, experience you’ve had with other shoes, particularly in terms of tendencies for some part of the sole to wear out faster than others. This can suggest a pattern of movement that may not be readily apparent from the video. They may suggest a different shoe for walking and running. Do yourself a favor, buy them both. If you were taking up tennis or golf, think of the expense. For runners, this is your ONE expense. Don’t skimp on it. The same goes for socks. I’m like poet Matthea Harvey’s “Straightforward Mermaid.” * I hate wearing socks, but when it comes to running, let the experts put you into some good ones.
3. Don’t start running right away. Whether you are brand-new to the life, or haven’t run since doing a little cross-country in high school, or did a marathon twenty years ago but haven’t laced up your sneakers for a run in a decade, it’s not a good idea to race out the door. Walk. Everyone has their own pace. Listen to your body as you walk, keeping in mind what the runners in the shoe store told you about your walking style. The first week, do this alone, and don’t walk as fast as you can without getting winded. Don’t sweat it.
4. Don’t wear earphones. (More later on this.) You are singing the ballad of your life. That’s your soundtrack. Whether I am running at home in Brooklyn, at my childhood home in Canada, or in Spain, Tokyo, France or Istanbul, I don’t enclose myself off in words and music that are not of my own making. The life of the road is inspiring enough.
5. Do be consistent. Don’t let your other lives get in the way of your walking, running life. Start the first half-year of your walk/run by keeping an every other day regimen. (I’ve stayed true to that pattern since I left hospital in 1976; in my case, my left leg swells up so uncomfortably – even now – that I’ve never run more than four times a week, even during marathon training.) You can’t run for your life between the cracks of your life. Done right, running will be your healthy addiction. You will simply have to do it.
6. Do wear a watch, but not to time your pace. (“Leonard,” I think to myself.) The type of running I advocate is not for those of a competitive streak. Time is something you set aside. In my case, I run for 45 minutes and up. Soon, you will learn, settle in, to your natural pace. It is simply not important, especially in the beginning when you are building up your strength and stamina, to try to trim seconds off your time so that in six months time, say, you are nearing a sub-8-minute mile. It may be counter-intuitive, but when it comes to running, think the discovery of slowness. (See Getting Started: Part One.) You are running for your life and, trust me, it will be a long one. Take your time, look around, slow down.
7. Do listen to your body. Long-distance running at an easy natural pace can be for everyone. We are built for it. William Jungers, an anatomical specialist at Stony Brook University, says, “it’s no coincidence that in chimpanzees, the muscle is called gluteus superficialis, and in humans, gluteus maximus.” Truth is, it’s not a good idea to run your butt off. (Or dance you’re a** off, as the reality TV folks would lead you to believe.) Instead, when we are running at our best, those elegantly designed asses of ours provide the perfect counterbalance to our chest and head, leaning forward in harmony with the running phenomena we all can be. Believe it or not, it’s possible to just keep going and going.
8. Don’t stop believing. Imagine yourself running 10 years from now: 20, 30, 50. Do it. Run for your life.
Next: The Hospital Story
* The New Yorker, Aug. 16-23
Running for Your Life: Getting Started: Part One
Except for an old man, Sam, I am alone in the hospital room, a twenty-year-old college student. My grandfather’s name was Sam. But in 1976, he'd been dead a few years. But he wouldn’t be in the hospital room with me, not if I think about it.
Grandfather and I spent a lot of time together during the last decade of his life. He was not one to put himself out. We were not close so much as he had slowed from age, me by instinct.
As a boy, like young John Franklin in Sten Nadolny’s “Discovery of Slowness,” I would happily spend hours doing nothing but sitting in the fork of a tree, thinking. Except for the sports field, I felt odd whenever I did anything in a hurry. Grandfather and I would sit in silence, listening through the static, a weak signal from Illinois, to the Chicago Cubs (Fergie Jenkins, working on a one-hitter, eleven strikeouts and counting; only run a solo homer, his in the fifth) on the portable radio that Grampa kept on the arm of the LazyBoy. Me, "Just fine, Grampa," in his hardback kitchen one.
I’m company. My mother’s father – an English warrior, Yanks in his sights, the march on Washington, burning the White House to the ground – is never happier but when Fergie, the great Canuck, is putting down one Yank after another. Grampa was home guard to King Teddy in London, the image on a coin he kept in his pocket. Once, I touched the hard-packed muscle where a bullet entered his arm below the elbow. Fragments of bone. “Press hard,” he said, and when I did he threw up his arm in mock salute.
If I’m to die tonight, let Grampa be the one who guides my first steps. “Keep your nose clean, boy.” In his gray cardigan with fuzz balls, flannel slacks and ruff-rimmed slippers. Dressed for eternity.
“But what am I going to wear?” I say it out loud. Hospital Sam doesn’t reply but to hit the buzzer. Again. Good old Sam.
“What is it this time?” the nurse asks Sam.
“I heard him. He was trying to say something. Real words. Could make something out; definitely a question. And the word, ‘Where.’ ”
“L,” she turns to me. “You are in hospital. In good hands.” She touches me somewhere. My arm? “Get me out of here! Home. I want to go home.”
She still has her hand on me. “You’ll be better if you don’t fight rest.” She hasn’t heard me; they can’t hear me. “Don’t try to talk.”
Okay. I’m back in the fork of the tree. Trying, and failing, to make sense of what is happening to me.
My wife M and I are close to ditching TV, basic cable and an ancient set. We need HD, flat screens for a mindless crime show, the occasional movie, the World Cup every four years? Recently though, with M out of town, I land on the reality show, “The Biggest Losers.” A contestant is jogging alone on a highway. “To finish this marathon is one thing,” the man says. He crosses the line, with a time readout that shows just over four hours. Respectable for a first marathon. “But to keep it up, to call myself a marathoner. That is really my goal. That would really be something.”
In my first post, I mention rose, the mystery of identity. When I’m running I don't wear headphones; rather songs often come to me. One is “Shining Star” by Earth, Wind and Fire. “Shining star for you to be, what your life can truly be.” The mystic rose teaches us that beginnings, as in the simple seed, can lead to vastly different endings, the glorious and various beauty of its bloom. The rose – from the seed to the bloom – signifies a search for identity, one that is constantly shifting and eluding us. If we trust in the mystic rose, we have faith in the star, one that will help guide us. “You’re a shining star, no matter who you are.”
Earlier identities are equally mysterious as the ones we are living now. Funny, but I don’t even know now if I would call myself a marathoner. Perhaps I will if I qualify for Boston. But for this blog – and for a memoir I am starting under the working title “The Inside Track: Running for Your Life” – I’ve been giving a lot of thought back to that time when I started to run.
In my first days out of hospital, I remember mostly the shame. I have never considered myself a vain person, but my change in appearance was so drastic that I literally looked like a stranger, even to myself. Our college journalism department was relatively small, so there was no place to hide for a painfully limping young man in clothes that didn’t come close to fitting. Only my beard was full. I remember standing in the cafeteria holding my tray before the checkout girl who a semester ago I had had a mild flirtation. She drops coins in my hand, careful not to brush her fingers with mine.
That summer I took a job in the linen department of the Chateau Lake Louise in the Alberta Rockies. With my friend from Toronto, we leave by car from Ontario for the long drive out West. I am in the back seat of my car, lying down, my leg elevated to keep the swelling down. The clots had diminished, but I was still on heavy blood-thinning meds, which guarded against a recurrence, odds of which, I was warned by doctors before I left the hospital, were higher if I were sitting down or lying without keeping my injured leg at least as high as my heart. We drive for at most an hour before we stop at the side of the road, where I hobble painfully around the car, once, twice, three times, before I get back in and resume the position. Doctors, of course, wouldn’t have advised me to take this job in my condition. Not to be so far away from home, to travel hundreds of miles in this way only weeks after leaving hospital. But I was twenty years old and done with doctors. I had a month’s supply of blood-thinning meds, and then I would be on my own. I would walk and then run myself back to health.
So I took my first step on a Rocky Mountain trail. I don’t remember what brand the sneaker was, or anything about what I was wearing. Each step, I do remember, hurt like hell. And the more vertical the path, the harder it was for me because, the doctors explained, the vein valves in my calf had been permanently damaged. In a steep climb, the blood would rush down the leg but, because of the valve damage, would be slow to return, which caused my leg to swell. That first few months in the Rockies, my leg was more stump than flesh and bone. I was slow, would stop, sometime for minutes at a time because of the pain and to catch my breath. But I kept going. Walking the trails above the Chateau Lake Louise. By myself because mine was a single-minded, maybe even obsessive, path.
I do know I wasn’t thinking about mystic roses or shining stars in those days. I ran a little cross country in high school, but primarily was drawn to team sports, ice hockey, of course, and the spotter in Varsity Volleyball, the Varsity Soccer goalie. I’d seen the movie “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” which hardly encouraged me to take up running before my health crisis. Solitude I could handle, but loneliness, that frightened me. Running, I thought before I was sick, wasn’t for me.
But getting started, I suppose I was mentally tough. That is, if you want to cut to the chase, all that is required. Be smarter than me, though, and talk to you doctor, or someone with medical training, to work out a plan. Then just stick to it. Listen to your body. It won’t be easy, but nothing in this world that is worth it ever is.
Next: Getting Started: Part Two
Running for Your Life: Introduction
There are many places to begin a story. Ask someone how they would begin to tell theirs, and, nine times out of ten, they would say, “I was born …” The story of my life as a runner and how running saved – is saving – my life starts, instead, when I took my first steps from hospital. That was many years and thousands of miles ago. In that time and over those long distances, I have learned some important lessons that I’d like to share in my new blog, “Running For Your Life: Healing, Health and Travel on the Open Road.”
“Running For Your Life” is, as advertised, a personal tale. It is also an inspirational guide to a fuller and healthier life. And for marathoners, and would-be marathoners, the blog will be a place to discuss training concerns and questions. I have recently returned to marathon running. In May, with a personal best time of 3:47:42, I placed 35th among 757 men runners in the 50-54 age category of the Pittsburgh Marathon.
I am now training for the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., in October, with the view that in my new category (I turn 55 years old five days before the race) I will be able to trim 2:42 from that time in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon in April 2011. If all goes well, in my blog posts through April, I will not only write about the lessons of a life enriched by running, but one that will include training tips and helpful suggestions in my race toward Boston, the crowning glory for runners everywhere.
As a memoirist and novelist, I am drawn to the personal, to what motivates behavior. Since leaving hospital, I’ve tried to live a life balanced on the three “Rs”: Running, Reading and (W)Riting. I am not one given to preaching – I usually find the prescriptions in self-help books to be a clumsy exercise in restating the tenets of common sense. As a runner, reader and writer, I am quite comfortable in my own skin, don’t feel the pull of the podium, bright lights, for people to know my name. Rather, after being encouraged to do so by family and friends, I have come to believe that the lessons I have learned on the road could help other people help themselves.
So how would I start? I close my eyes and it’s the sounds that come back to me. Beep, beep, beep. Whoosh, a pouring liquid. I sense a nurse. Her hands by my head. Adjusting the IV, turning a dial, allowing less fluid to drip through, then more, pressing a needle into the rubber nub of the plastic bladder filling with blood thinners that turn my blood the color of a daughter’s frosting. Rose, the mystery of identity. To hell with that. At least now I can breathe a little. Not without a wracking pain in my chest. But I’m alive.
I’m a few months short of 21 and very sick. It’s odd as we age, think back through time and write about our experiences. If we live long enough, we actually take on many identities. In my first memoir, “Tip of the Iceberg,” I recalled a family secret as I thought and wrote about my father’s flooding of the backyard rink. “I came to believe that the flooder of the rink was not my father,” I wrote. “The man who spread water every night when the weather turned cold became Lord Dufferin, a gray eminence, the namesake of my public school. Sometimes, an old-time hockey player, a Bruin, a Blackhawk. At others an Eskimo, a man of the north.”
As a young man though, my dreams were being cut short. My blog will talk of those days in greater detail, but suffice to say here, I contracted two very painful blood clots – one in my groin, the other in my left leg – and afterward, a pulmonary embolism that very nearly killed me. When I left hospital in a wheelchair, I weighed barely one hundred pounds. My left leg was three times the size of my right, and felt more like a stump than a leg.
In December of 1975, I was an avid sportsman: in ice hockey, baseball and tennis. That March, though, I was literally a stick man: my clothes just hanging off me. When I went back to college in Ottawa to finish my semester, some of my classmates didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t take a step without terrible pain, much less step onto a tennis court.
A word of caution: “Running For Your Life” is not a prescription. I am not a doctor. Far from it. A few years after falling sick, I read “The Complete Book on Running,” a doctor’s best seller. Jim Fixx was his name. In the public mind, Fixx famously ran to an early death and in so doing planted a flag for all those who would say that running for your life will not end well. In many ways, “Running For Your Life” is my testament to how wrong those early critics were about the healing and health benefits of being an avid runner.
So, for a doctor’s point of view, go elsewhere. After all, I was a mere boy when – under doctor’s and hospital care – I got sicker and sicker. It wasn’t a doctor who told me to take up running. When I left hospital in Ottawa all those years ago, I felt like nothing more than subject matter for the advancement of geriatric ailments in a perfectly healthy – even athletic – young man. I don’t remember much about those awful days, except that I was many times surrounded by medical students and once told that my rapid decline was quite rare. Usually people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, would blood-clot as I did – and then die right away or, later, after a few weeks or perhaps months as a bed-sit invalid. Then the student scratched at a clipboard and went on. For reasons that I won’t go into here, for most of that time, I was alone in the hospital. Alone to make up my mind that if I ever got out alive I would never be in hospital again. Instead, I would listen to my body; I would trust myself. I would run for my life. Or as ultramarathoner Scott Jurek says, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”
In these posts, that will include such topic areas as “Getting Started,” “Motivation,” and “Running Without Headphones,” I will discuss mechanics of running as well as my personal philosophy of running and healing. I also have done research in areas that deserve a wider understanding. The research shows that, if done in a sensible way, running can be a part of people’s lives, not just in their youth, their pre-family years, but throughout their whole lives. “Running For Your Life” is not your typical marathon training blog. I would like to think there will be something here for my fellow marathoners, and for those who are contemplating beginning to train for one. Rather, though, it’s young people in hospital, those in need of a little inspiration, who I have in mind as I start this blog. I know just what they are thinking. I hope they find this and get something out of it.
Next: Getting Started: Part One
“Running For Your Life” is, as advertised, a personal tale. It is also an inspirational guide to a fuller and healthier life. And for marathoners, and would-be marathoners, the blog will be a place to discuss training concerns and questions. I have recently returned to marathon running. In May, with a personal best time of 3:47:42, I placed 35th among 757 men runners in the 50-54 age category of the Pittsburgh Marathon.
I am now training for the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., in October, with the view that in my new category (I turn 55 years old five days before the race) I will be able to trim 2:42 from that time in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon in April 2011. If all goes well, in my blog posts through April, I will not only write about the lessons of a life enriched by running, but one that will include training tips and helpful suggestions in my race toward Boston, the crowning glory for runners everywhere.
As a memoirist and novelist, I am drawn to the personal, to what motivates behavior. Since leaving hospital, I’ve tried to live a life balanced on the three “Rs”: Running, Reading and (W)Riting. I am not one given to preaching – I usually find the prescriptions in self-help books to be a clumsy exercise in restating the tenets of common sense. As a runner, reader and writer, I am quite comfortable in my own skin, don’t feel the pull of the podium, bright lights, for people to know my name. Rather, after being encouraged to do so by family and friends, I have come to believe that the lessons I have learned on the road could help other people help themselves.
So how would I start? I close my eyes and it’s the sounds that come back to me. Beep, beep, beep. Whoosh, a pouring liquid. I sense a nurse. Her hands by my head. Adjusting the IV, turning a dial, allowing less fluid to drip through, then more, pressing a needle into the rubber nub of the plastic bladder filling with blood thinners that turn my blood the color of a daughter’s frosting. Rose, the mystery of identity. To hell with that. At least now I can breathe a little. Not without a wracking pain in my chest. But I’m alive.
I’m a few months short of 21 and very sick. It’s odd as we age, think back through time and write about our experiences. If we live long enough, we actually take on many identities. In my first memoir, “Tip of the Iceberg,” I recalled a family secret as I thought and wrote about my father’s flooding of the backyard rink. “I came to believe that the flooder of the rink was not my father,” I wrote. “The man who spread water every night when the weather turned cold became Lord Dufferin, a gray eminence, the namesake of my public school. Sometimes, an old-time hockey player, a Bruin, a Blackhawk. At others an Eskimo, a man of the north.”
As a young man though, my dreams were being cut short. My blog will talk of those days in greater detail, but suffice to say here, I contracted two very painful blood clots – one in my groin, the other in my left leg – and afterward, a pulmonary embolism that very nearly killed me. When I left hospital in a wheelchair, I weighed barely one hundred pounds. My left leg was three times the size of my right, and felt more like a stump than a leg.
In December of 1975, I was an avid sportsman: in ice hockey, baseball and tennis. That March, though, I was literally a stick man: my clothes just hanging off me. When I went back to college in Ottawa to finish my semester, some of my classmates didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t take a step without terrible pain, much less step onto a tennis court.
A word of caution: “Running For Your Life” is not a prescription. I am not a doctor. Far from it. A few years after falling sick, I read “The Complete Book on Running,” a doctor’s best seller. Jim Fixx was his name. In the public mind, Fixx famously ran to an early death and in so doing planted a flag for all those who would say that running for your life will not end well. In many ways, “Running For Your Life” is my testament to how wrong those early critics were about the healing and health benefits of being an avid runner.
So, for a doctor’s point of view, go elsewhere. After all, I was a mere boy when – under doctor’s and hospital care – I got sicker and sicker. It wasn’t a doctor who told me to take up running. When I left hospital in Ottawa all those years ago, I felt like nothing more than subject matter for the advancement of geriatric ailments in a perfectly healthy – even athletic – young man. I don’t remember much about those awful days, except that I was many times surrounded by medical students and once told that my rapid decline was quite rare. Usually people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, would blood-clot as I did – and then die right away or, later, after a few weeks or perhaps months as a bed-sit invalid. Then the student scratched at a clipboard and went on. For reasons that I won’t go into here, for most of that time, I was alone in the hospital. Alone to make up my mind that if I ever got out alive I would never be in hospital again. Instead, I would listen to my body; I would trust myself. I would run for my life. Or as ultramarathoner Scott Jurek says, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”
In these posts, that will include such topic areas as “Getting Started,” “Motivation,” and “Running Without Headphones,” I will discuss mechanics of running as well as my personal philosophy of running and healing. I also have done research in areas that deserve a wider understanding. The research shows that, if done in a sensible way, running can be a part of people’s lives, not just in their youth, their pre-family years, but throughout their whole lives. “Running For Your Life” is not your typical marathon training blog. I would like to think there will be something here for my fellow marathoners, and for those who are contemplating beginning to train for one. Rather, though, it’s young people in hospital, those in need of a little inspiration, who I have in mind as I start this blog. I know just what they are thinking. I hope they find this and get something out of it.
Next: Getting Started: Part One
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