Surprise! Running figures in my fiction and nonfiction. (And in a new photo, see below right Steamtown Marathon pic ... )
It’s fall, and in my neck of the woods, the leaves are still at it. Falling, that is. It may not motivate every runner, but it does one Ben Starwick, a character in a current novel, a work-in-progress, of mine. Here, he is in conversation with his friend, Luke DeSoto:
“Autumn in the park,” Ben says, “the leaves fall pretty much everywhere. On paths, the roadway, ponds,
Running for Your Life: The Tao of Rewards
Thurber is not smart. A pea brain, Rene, the dog whisperer says, and I don’t mean that as a sign of disrespect. Remember, you are not appealing to the brain when you want him to do something. Instead, you find something he likes, say bits of Reggiano block cheese, and with select, simple phrases you shape Thurber’s behavior around the health and welfare of the home to the best advantage of all. “Treat” him well and he will live a long and happy life with you, not the dog, in charge.
Running for Your Life: Boston and NYC
It’s winter and we have to take out the air-conditioners in our windows. M’s office window is broken – and since the summer the top sash has been propped up with a man-hungry-size BBQ fork that we bought at a brownstone block auction a decade ago, but now, with the A-C out, it needs a little help, so I saw up a sturdy piece of cardboard packing and stick the fork side in the cardboard, which pretty much works to keep the heavy sash up and relatively secure, and the cold air outside, that is it does when the cardboard is resting on my hardback copy of “Annals of an Abiding Liberal” by John Kenneth Galbraith.
“There,” I tell M. “We just needed John Kenneth Galbraith to prop up our economy.”
“There,” I tell M. “We just needed John Kenneth Galbraith to prop up our economy.”
Running for Your Life: Food for Thought
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, the food holiday to end all food holidays. For one day in the US calendar (Sure Canadians hold Thanksgiving, but my recollection has it that they doesn’t overly glorify the goodies: squash, brussels sprouts, cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, shoofly pie, every conceivable way of cooking a turkey so that I swear to God one day a book the size of the OED will be published with the complete
Running for Your Life: The Road North
My New York Post colleague is attending a post-marathon party and I’m at work with my pal, Mike. (In New York, there is ONE and only ONE, marathon.)
In an e-mail explaining further, she says it is a marathon/engagement party.
“Sounds like a surprise,” I say in an e-mail reply.
“Yes, he popped the question at the sixteen-mile mark.”
“Ha!” Mike says. “Now the real marathon begins.”
*
If a marriage is a conversation that ends too soon, as Andre Malraux says, then like every good conversation, a pause refreshes. That was what I was thinking recently while I was motoring north and west from Brooklyn to near the Canadian border, some 370 miles.
I’ve known B, a TV anchor in Watertown, New York, since grade school, and we’d longtime plans to spend a weekend with a mutual friend, G, an actor and writer from Toronto. M had plans for a conference in Iowa, and to see her mom, a year shy of a century next month, when we’d all be trooping to Milwaukee to see her.
There are times like this that I write in my journal that time stands still. On many previous visits to Watertown, I’ve run the roads. At the end of B’s street and up is the entrance to mild-slope hilltop Olmsted-and-Vaux Thompson Park, with stone walls built by WPA crews sprouting in the green grass and from a secluded lookout, on a day not so unlike the Saturday I’ve visiting, bright and sunny with the Titian sky, a photographer, Willabel Cole Mitchell, took “Entre Nous,” that vintage poster-shot of three girls on
Running for Your Life: Marathon des Sables
They ride camels in Morocco. Or at least in Merzouga. After Fes, we started on our way, driving to the distant village of Merzouga. M and I had for the past few months perused a friend’s guide to quintessential Moroccan riads – guest houses – each, as far as we can tell with an inner courtyard oasis of date palm trees and cacti and grasses, and at our riad in Fes, a banana tree, where we could see because it has been ages since we’ve been in the tropical house at the Central Park Zoo that the fruit that cartoonist Roz Chast felt compelled to write a paen to it in The New Yorker grows upside down, so that when you grab a banana and peel it, you doing it from the bottom (stem) to the top (black hard bit).
But there are no bananas in the Sahara. Mohammed is our camel host and salad chef. The blue woven saddle
But there are no bananas in the Sahara. Mohammed is our camel host and salad chef. The blue woven saddle
Running for Your Life: Question Period
OK, enough about me. (Is that even allowed in a personal blog?!) I know I have some readers, or at least a browser or two – Yes! Bounce Rate – so let’s kick it back to you.
My friend, Jacki, wants to know how to do it. Not just run for her life; she has been doing that, in three-mile bursts four or five times a week for a long time, but she has never run a marathon and is intrigued by the idea of doing so. However a friend and exercise expert tells her to fuhgeddaboudit; try swimming, or cycling or low-impact aerobics (shoot me now), not running; running destroys the joints, it’s an exercise-killer not an exercise-accelerant.
I could – and have done in this blog – cited my experts: the "Born to Run" camp who in my view rightly say that done the right way, as in "sitting" in a mechanically sound pace that fits your body type, you can run, not
My friend, Jacki, wants to know how to do it. Not just run for her life; she has been doing that, in three-mile bursts four or five times a week for a long time, but she has never run a marathon and is intrigued by the idea of doing so. However a friend and exercise expert tells her to fuhgeddaboudit; try swimming, or cycling or low-impact aerobics (shoot me now), not running; running destroys the joints, it’s an exercise-killer not an exercise-accelerant.
I could – and have done in this blog – cited my experts: the "Born to Run" camp who in my view rightly say that done the right way, as in "sitting" in a mechanically sound pace that fits your body type, you can run, not
Running for Your Life: 'IMUS' in Tangier
The truth is I can’t see it. Not on this first run in Morocco. Tangier. Not in the old city, the medina, it’s called, or the Casbah, or citadel, forever changed by a single song by the Clash, “Rock the Casbah,” and now Moroccan houses, really just two bedrooms, a kitchen and a sitting area (what more do you need?) are bought up, walls knocked down, and become home to the third wave of jet setters, at Manhattan prices. Nine hundred and more streets, some the narrowest of passageways but cars and small trucks can bring goods up through the tourist row, the dark rattan chairs of the Café Central that nods to Rick’s Café Americain, and another time, because M and I are here in the morning before the European ferries arrive, and can imagine how foreign the glamour of the likes of a Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman would be in Tangier 2010. Yet Tangier still bears the imprint of its artists and socialites, famously Barbara Hutton, the Poor Little Rich Girl, the Woolworth heiress who died thirty years ago, and in the cobbles, embedded, are
Running for Your Life: Skinny Man
I am wondering about The Path Man as I go. I never know what will come to mind on a long run, but The Path Man often does. Before Brooklyn became SoHo on the Gowanus, The Path Man took up residence along a dirt trail in Prospect Park. I don’t know his given name. He had a washbasin on a stump, shirt and trousers that slung from a rangy bush, a clutch of whittled spears he’d carved from the branches of fallen oaks. In those days just a handful of people would venture deep into the park, and at night only fools because what lamp standards there were had been smashed by vandals, and under trees and weedy bushes crack users nested, rapists and robbers for a score, or so our apartment super said at the time and he was born near the park so he would know. But I never saw a needle or a syringe, or even as much as a cigarette butt near The Path Man’s home. I’m thinking I was his first runner on his path; every other day for years, a
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