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
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
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