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.
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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
*
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
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