Is it just me or did we tire in finding an agreeable term to describe the decade(s) since 2000? A lot can be put down to synchronicity, as in 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and 12-12-12, and, yeah, that according to the Mayan calendar all will snuff out next year, in 2012, anyway (12-21-12, for the record). As if the past twelve years have all been part of a Beckett-inspired inside joke – with the important caveat that Beckett is all about going on: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Running for Your Life: Christmas Week
“Who are those guys?”
K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.
K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.
Running for Your Life: Repetition Rant
“I’d run, but .¤.¤. it’s so boring.”
If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.
If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.
Running for Your Life: December Highs
As my wife M put it this week: garden trowel or snow shovel, what’s it going to be?
Almost three weeks into December, the fastest month of the year. In Canada, when I was a boy and a young man, it was the shortest month. In the US, it’s only amplified by the super-late Thanksgiving, with December days filling up with parties and family gatherings and charity events and food-buying and gift-selecting, never enough hours in the day so that about now, Dec. 20, it’s understandable that reasonable people begin to long for January, when time slows, days lengthen, and you can actually get some writing done!
Almost three weeks into December, the fastest month of the year. In Canada, when I was a boy and a young man, it was the shortest month. In the US, it’s only amplified by the super-late Thanksgiving, with December days filling up with parties and family gatherings and charity events and food-buying and gift-selecting, never enough hours in the day so that about now, Dec. 20, it’s understandable that reasonable people begin to long for January, when time slows, days lengthen, and you can actually get some writing done!
Running for Your Life: Road Home
In Washington, DC, Vincent, the store manager of the K Street U-Haul, doesn’t seem to tire telling renters not be alarmed in the event that the police around the Capitol Building stop you and ask for your documents and to check inside the truck.
Early Saturday morning (Dec. 10) I’m riding K’s bike to K Street to pick up the truck. I’m here to help move K's stuff back to Brooklyn. She’ll sift through the lot and take some of it to Los Angeles, where she is living now. The rest M and I will keep in Brooklyn.
Early Saturday morning (Dec. 10) I’m riding K’s bike to K Street to pick up the truck. I’m here to help move K's stuff back to Brooklyn. She’ll sift through the lot and take some of it to Los Angeles, where she is living now. The rest M and I will keep in Brooklyn.
Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance II
I dodged a bullet. Or at least that’s how it feels. Last Wednesday (Dec. 7) I was heartsick, certain that I’d set myself back in my training by a month, maybe longer. Today, though, I’m hopeful. Only three days off and I loped my way through a five-miler on Sunday. Barely feeling the muscle pull, tear in the upper thigh of my left leg, the bad one, the one inflicted with DVT, the one that swells up in the calf when I run because the vein valves are shot, the oxygen-rich blood feeds the muscles on a run, but they’re slow to return to the heart, causing swelling, no pain to speak of but an injury with this leg is especially concerning.
Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance
I should have known better. It’s against my better judgment to train with the dog. As a puppy maybe. Or when I wasn’t in training. Perhaps that was what was working in the back of my mind when I set up this 19-week Boston Marathon training regimen, that sure enough I’d do something stupid, hard-run with Thurb in the cold, pouring rain without limbering up, tense in my body over the first quarter-mile, because during that part of the run all pretense of me being in charge of Thurber is cast off, as he howls and howls and charges off like a wild horse, me holding on to the leash for dear life, and on this day (Dec. 7), as I’m yanked along, big heavy strides, about a dozen of them, before I feel something like needles digging just below the surface, upper outside thigh of my left leg, where the hamstring attaches, first thinking what the hell else do I have in my pocket besides the Snoop Loop halter and retractable nylon leash, what could be causing this sharp pain, but then I think shit, it’s a muscle tear, hard to know just how serious, but something not good, and I’m thinking that if I stop now in the cold and wet and walk home it will only seize up and get worse, if only I’d warmed up before this wouldn’t be happening now, I’m only in a T-shirt and baggy shorts, freezing, the rain really coming down, and damn, Thurb isn’t easing up one bit, this might not be such a good idea, trying to slow him down so that the pain is just a dull throb, eventually though he does as he always does, levels off into a trot, stops the incessant howling so that I too can relax, feel looser, which helps, and, yeah, keep going, convincing myself that if I get home in time before I have to gather up my stuff and head off to the newsroom that I’ll find the heating pad and apply some HIGH heat before my sedentary day gets in full swing, and worst case, ties up the muscle so badly that I’ll be taking a week of rest days, heat and cold and light stretching before I’ll be able to get back to training for the marathon; maybe I’ll be looking at a 100-day marathon training regimen after all.
Running for Your Life: Mind Matters
So here’s the first week’s totals: Exactly thirty miles, the long run, 11 miles on Day 6, moderate hills and hard to moderate pace. No pain, although after Day 7, an ill-thought-out cross-training/treadmill with only hamstring strengthening and 6:30 per minute pace, with not enough time to stretch afterward; hamstring and groin muscle tightening to tension. A little scare. But Monday (Dec.5, Week Two, Day One), after a easy to moderate five-miler, there is no aftereffect, only tiniest of feelings in the butt-hamstring, even the forefoot feels fly. Note to self: Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! After cross-training, treadmill or running.
Running for Your Life: Your Immune System
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.
A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.
Running for Your Life: After Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is here and gone. Is there any month that goes faster, than U.S. Thanksgiving to Christmas? Well, perhaps, not so much in my case because now the sidewalks and the intersections and the plazas in the vicinity of my near-Times Square office building are shoulder to shoulder with people, the majority of whom are out-of-towners, not in any kind of hurray to go anywhere, so each day from the first workday after Thanksgiving the odds of me getting to work precisely on time rise because now between subway exit to office desk lies a route with late-minute factor of three or four or five depending on the sedimentary – no, not sedentary, I’m thinking more like a river that fills with sediment so that it no longer flows – quality from subway to office chair. Keep pouring in the sediment and the river can slow to a stop.
Running for Your Life: Our Pack
At Milwaukee airport early on Packer GameDay, the Air Trans staff manning the gates is wearing the home green of his favorite player, No. 30, fullback John Kuhn. I’ve boneheaded my way to another travel mishap, somehow managing to mislay my driver’s license so I have no official photo ID to travel with on Sunday morning (Nov. 20), hours before Aaron Rodgers will again helm his Concussionites to victory, this time over the Tampa Bay Bucs, 35-26.
I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.
(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)
I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.
(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)
Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel
Subway Moment, midafternoon, Wed., Nov. 16:
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.
Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”
*
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.
Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”
*
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
Running for Your Life: Runners’ Journals
It’s too patently obvious to remark that this blog is no ordinary runners’ journal. Suffice to say it is not a place to go (although in the beginning I had a sense it might be but it has evolved in its own way, a little of this, a little of that, and all me) for info on carbo-loading and shoe choice and sock preference, and interval training and I don’t know what all.
Which is not to say that Running for Your Life isn’t a runner’s journal. Rather it is a journal of a runner who also happens to be a writer. If suddenly I were no longer running I would probalby keep up the blog because the running I’ve done in the past thirty-six years would find a way into this space. It would be hard not running. But not writing? Hardest. Because I would most certainly be dead.
Which is not to say that Running for Your Life isn’t a runner’s journal. Rather it is a journal of a runner who also happens to be a writer. If suddenly I were no longer running I would probalby keep up the blog because the running I’ve done in the past thirty-six years would find a way into this space. It would be hard not running. But not writing? Hardest. Because I would most certainly be dead.
Running for Your Life: Feeling “Occupied”
So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Trussed up with a bungee cord around a twenty-year-old street tree in Center Slope, laser-printed loose leaf sheet in a Ziploc clear-plastic envelope with a harsh message to an offending dog walker. Attached to the bungee cord slightly above the message lettering is a thin plastic sandwich bag of what looks like the hard black day-old scat of a lapdog.
*
You can’t get into a conversation in New York City today and not talk about the occupying force downtown. The protesters in Zuccotti Park. Not a single Z word that comes close. And before early October only the folks on the local community board knew that’s what that spot of green space just east of Ground Zero is called, now home to Occupy Wall Street.
OWS is a devilish venture. Before this one, the only ventures taken up in this neighborhood were real estate and financial ones. Like the spoof written by comedian Andrew Borowitz about Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs: “As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Blankfein, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain — but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.” As of this date (Nov. 10), the venture is 54 days old, and counting.
Trussed up with a bungee cord around a twenty-year-old street tree in Center Slope, laser-printed loose leaf sheet in a Ziploc clear-plastic envelope with a harsh message to an offending dog walker. Attached to the bungee cord slightly above the message lettering is a thin plastic sandwich bag of what looks like the hard black day-old scat of a lapdog.
*
You can’t get into a conversation in New York City today and not talk about the occupying force downtown. The protesters in Zuccotti Park. Not a single Z word that comes close. And before early October only the folks on the local community board knew that’s what that spot of green space just east of Ground Zero is called, now home to Occupy Wall Street.
OWS is a devilish venture. Before this one, the only ventures taken up in this neighborhood were real estate and financial ones. Like the spoof written by comedian Andrew Borowitz about Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs: “As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Blankfein, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain — but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.” As of this date (Nov. 10), the venture is 54 days old, and counting.
Running for Your Life: NYC Marathon
A beautiful day (Sunday, Nov. 6). Just shorts and a top is all you need, even in the morning on the Verrazano. Hockey great Mark Messier, in the crowd, the running crowd, that is. Any bold predictions, Mark? His first marathon, just finishing it is enough (Official Time: 4:14:21). And then, maybe a word with Tortorella, the coach of the New York Rangers, the kind of shape he’s in, and the gutsy determination of him, and he’d be a better bet than say, Wolski, or yeah, Avery.
Running for Your Life: Changes
So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
A sixty-ish owner-occupier of an antique shop on Fifth Avenue pokes his head out of his front door minutes before a weekday opening. He is greeting an eager shopper. Looking at his red face, I’m thinking of the spirit of a newborn, fresh out of the womb.
*
I don’t know if I’m having a midlife crisis exactly. Novelist Douglas Coupland in his predictable “Player One” writes that once a person has reached thirty-five she’s pretty much done, as in going to have the life that’s been circumscribed over those previous three and a half decades. What’s more, he says, echoing Schopenhauer (“The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary”), what in the world were you thinking. At twenty-five, that you could be a rock star, or a power forward for the Leafs? Ha! Might as well settle in to the role of consuming our limited natural resources to negative sum game and abandon the idea that you are providing the planet any quantifiable benefits.
A sixty-ish owner-occupier of an antique shop on Fifth Avenue pokes his head out of his front door minutes before a weekday opening. He is greeting an eager shopper. Looking at his red face, I’m thinking of the spirit of a newborn, fresh out of the womb.
*
I don’t know if I’m having a midlife crisis exactly. Novelist Douglas Coupland in his predictable “Player One” writes that once a person has reached thirty-five she’s pretty much done, as in going to have the life that’s been circumscribed over those previous three and a half decades. What’s more, he says, echoing Schopenhauer (“The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary”), what in the world were you thinking. At twenty-five, that you could be a rock star, or a power forward for the Leafs? Ha! Might as well settle in to the role of consuming our limited natural resources to negative sum game and abandon the idea that you are providing the planet any quantifiable benefits.
Running for Your Life: Sleeping Is Overrated
I’ve been sleeping less. I wonder if it’s jet lag. Or stress. I had been thinking that it had to do with Thurber, our new housemate. It’ll be two months next weekend that Thurb has been with us. And I can’t help but think having a 16-month-old redbone coonhound in the house, who for the first few months as a puppy had us near-tearing our hair out, might have something to do with it. But now he’s sleeping through the night, peacefully for hours on end so there’s little merit in that explanation.
No, it could be a change of life. Earlier this month, when my brother T came to visit, he said that he gets, on average, six hours sleep a night during non-vacation time. He’s a diligent one, my younger brother, who doesn’t get up to write the great Canadian novel before work; rather he’s working out, playing squash. He plays softball in summer, ice hockey in winter. He, too, has fallen to the DVT darkside and must monitor his blood circulation so he’s gotten even a bit more serious about staying fit. Curious bloodlines, ours.
No, it could be a change of life. Earlier this month, when my brother T came to visit, he said that he gets, on average, six hours sleep a night during non-vacation time. He’s a diligent one, my younger brother, who doesn’t get up to write the great Canadian novel before work; rather he’s working out, playing squash. He plays softball in summer, ice hockey in winter. He, too, has fallen to the DVT darkside and must monitor his blood circulation so he’s gotten even a bit more serious about staying fit. Curious bloodlines, ours.
Running for Your Life: J’ai Perdu Mon Clef!
PARIS, WEDNESDAY, OCT. 19
It’s 5:30 in the afternoon when we were shopping in the Lower Marais Farmers’ Market, and through the day, M and I have been close, taking pictures and for long hours, 11:30 a.m. jusqu’a 3:30 p.m. we’re writing, eating French onion soup, two coffees for me, Coca Light, coffee for M, bread/butter and jam, mostly working by la fenetre: two tables, four chairs. I’m on a high; M too – “Pooch” and “Centipede” – very far along in the latter. Encounter with an American woman married to a Frenchman at Café Panis, near Shakespeare & Co. (it’s still there!) along the Seine, and further south, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where M will buy her waterproof pens, Faber Castell, although before that she will pick up a red wool hat for 10 euros, ridges and daisy decoration, and gloves too, a little Eiffel Tower for our pal at the neighborhood gym, then on to tourist row, a crepe beurre et sucre.
It’s 5:30 in the afternoon when we were shopping in the Lower Marais Farmers’ Market, and through the day, M and I have been close, taking pictures and for long hours, 11:30 a.m. jusqu’a 3:30 p.m. we’re writing, eating French onion soup, two coffees for me, Coca Light, coffee for M, bread/butter and jam, mostly working by la fenetre: two tables, four chairs. I’m on a high; M too – “Pooch” and “Centipede” – very far along in the latter. Encounter with an American woman married to a Frenchman at Café Panis, near Shakespeare & Co. (it’s still there!) along the Seine, and further south, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where M will buy her waterproof pens, Faber Castell, although before that she will pick up a red wool hat for 10 euros, ridges and daisy decoration, and gloves too, a little Eiffel Tower for our pal at the neighborhood gym, then on to tourist row, a crepe beurre et sucre.
Running for Your Life: Training for Boston
So back at it. Blogging and marathon training. Not the New York City Marathon, which is only days away. (Don’t miss the excitement if you’re in the city. Last year I came home from an old boys’ reunion weekend to find a rockabilly street band still! playing at the ten-mile mark at Fourth Avenue and Center Slope three hours after the start for the walkers and the stragglers and the sheer gut-priders who were ambling past.) No, I’m up for Boston, my second attempt after coming up lame in 2011.
Running for Your Life: A Week’s Pause
For M, it’s October study days; for me time to be with her – and myself.
To recharge, begin new work, and finish old.
At times like this I think about a little boy whose longing for travel and adventure was represented by a boy’s palm-size stone that I collected from the laneway of a favorite uncle who lived eighty miles from my hometown of Owen Sound in a splendid place called Guelph.* I put that stone atop the bureau I shared with my brother T, and more than occasionally would pick it up and rub it, thinking about travel to not only Guelph but to other places that I could only hope would be as splendid.
To recharge, begin new work, and finish old.
At times like this I think about a little boy whose longing for travel and adventure was represented by a boy’s palm-size stone that I collected from the laneway of a favorite uncle who lived eighty miles from my hometown of Owen Sound in a splendid place called Guelph.* I put that stone atop the bureau I shared with my brother T, and more than occasionally would pick it up and rub it, thinking about travel to not only Guelph but to other places that I could only hope would be as splendid.
Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.
I’d like to think that after what happened to me earlier this year that I’ve learned my lesson. In March, only a month before my first Boston Marathon, I’m laid up with the Mother-Of-All torn hamstrings. The rip’s the size of a quarter just south of the right butt-bone. Today, a half-year later and I feel only the faintest of tugs back there; my range of motion as normal as it’s ever been.
Since then, getting back on my feet and on the road in June (a year after Thurb! came into our lives), I’ve been pretty much pain-free – outside of a sizzlingly hot July day on Fire Island when after about a nine-miler the forefoot pain returned, like what I suffered at the 10-10-10 Steamtown Marathon. But months later even that pain has eased and not because I have done anything different. Rather, I’m just staying to a steady pre-marathon training regimen, running a 1:05 with Thurb and without, depending more on his schedule than mine. (We both need to run, to shake out the cobwebs; I wouldn’t be keeping this blog, prepping a book proposal, preparing for travel, if I didn’t keep up with my running. Mind and body in sync. Keeping age at bay. At this point, almost effortlessly. What I see every morning in the hound. He’s raring to go. Start the day. Get up and run. Anything’s possible. Show me.)
Since then, getting back on my feet and on the road in June (a year after Thurb! came into our lives), I’ve been pretty much pain-free – outside of a sizzlingly hot July day on Fire Island when after about a nine-miler the forefoot pain returned, like what I suffered at the 10-10-10 Steamtown Marathon. But months later even that pain has eased and not because I have done anything different. Rather, I’m just staying to a steady pre-marathon training regimen, running a 1:05 with Thurb and without, depending more on his schedule than mine. (We both need to run, to shake out the cobwebs; I wouldn’t be keeping this blog, prepping a book proposal, preparing for travel, if I didn’t keep up with my running. Mind and body in sync. Keeping age at bay. At this point, almost effortlessly. What I see every morning in the hound. He’s raring to go. Start the day. Get up and run. Anything’s possible. Show me.)
Running for Your Life: Canada: A Visit
My brother T and my sister-in-law L are visiting from Canada (Sept. 29-Oct. 2). It’s been awhile since they’ve been in Brooklyn. Certainly more than a decade, but for busy-ness, this period of time has few parallels in life. Now, though, all our kids are grown, and needing us in different ways, so during our visit to Canada in the summer (See Running for Your Life: Canada!, posted July 28) T asked what weekend would work best for them to come visit in the fall, which turned out to be the one in brackets above, a week before my birthday (Oct. 5) when the tourist buzz at Brooklyn’s TKTS is down to a dull roar so that reasonably priced seats can be had for even high demand shows like “Billy Elliot” and “Anything Goes,” L is fine to go along with whatever during the weekend, enjoying everything in equal measure but she’s the one who picks Billy Elliot, so on Saturday morning T and I do the hunting and gathering, snagging a couple pair in the mezzanine, which for a dance extravaganza like BE was just the ticket, because it was an amazing show.
Running for Your Life: Relativity of Size
A lifetime ago, in January 1985, I'm standing among a large group of young Cuban students. The woman I was seeing at the time, a Yugoslav translator for Cuban authorities and a student of social revolutions, is running her hand casually through the locks of one particularly handsome boy in a way that seemed timelesss, without a tincture of self-satisfaction on her part, rather that it was the most natural gesture in the world.
It also was a time, the only moment in my life, in that sunny day crowd, when my less than normal North American size, 5’11” and low-150s, is well above the norm. Not just my height but my girth. I’m young myself, 29, but in this company like post-steroid Barry Bonds among his SF Giants teammates. My shoulders, hips and legs much bigger and thicker than the youngsters I see. They are skinny but healthy- and athletic-looking, slender reeds to a Louisville Slugger.
It also was a time, the only moment in my life, in that sunny day crowd, when my less than normal North American size, 5’11” and low-150s, is well above the norm. Not just my height but my girth. I’m young myself, 29, but in this company like post-steroid Barry Bonds among his SF Giants teammates. My shoulders, hips and legs much bigger and thicker than the youngsters I see. They are skinny but healthy- and athletic-looking, slender reeds to a Louisville Slugger.
Running for Your Life: Curse-Mudgeon
Rain, sleep-inducing humidity, Thurb! training imperatives combined to keep us off the country road this past weekend. We’d planned a ride north with the hound for apple-picking and cider-sampling, the wide-open spaces of upstate New York. (Why do I keep thinking Fresh Kills but it’s Something-Kills or –Kill, not a landfill site, but maybe that partially explains why we stayed put. Inertia, ironically enough, is a powerful force, isn’t it?)
Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.
Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.
Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast
On the Manhattan-bound R Train, Union Station, Brooklyn, two elderly bookish white New Yorker women are loudly comparing the merits of two prominent Malcolm X life story accounts, the Marable http://amzn.to/dry2Jz and the Haley http://bit.ly/68w4Ha, the morning of the planned execution of accused Georgian cop killer Troy Davis, a black man widely believe to be innocent.
“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.
“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.
Running for Your Life: Birds (and 105!)
I’m on a 1:05-long run when I hear the baby bird’s distress call. (First a bit about 1:05. Be patient, I’ll get to the wee bird.)
I’m in the Boston Marathon 2012. I received an email confirmation on Sept. 15th. A runner’s (in my case, since 1976) lifelong dream. And I’m determined not to do what I did last year: overtrain and injure myself. This time I’m not going to go into body-punishing training until 105 days before the race.
That means I’ve got about 105 days that, every other day, I’ll be doing my 1:05 tone-up run. In order to be strong, have a good physical base from which to ramp up in those final, critical 105 days before the marathon on Monday, April 16.
I’m in the Boston Marathon 2012. I received an email confirmation on Sept. 15th. A runner’s (in my case, since 1976) lifelong dream. And I’m determined not to do what I did last year: overtrain and injure myself. This time I’m not going to go into body-punishing training until 105 days before the race.
That means I’ve got about 105 days that, every other day, I’ll be doing my 1:05 tone-up run. In order to be strong, have a good physical base from which to ramp up in those final, critical 105 days before the marathon on Monday, April 16.
Running for Your Life: Elevators, Bathrooms, Fountains
A, A young man I know confined to a wheelchair who doesn’t miss a beat in his courageous life, knows how to get to every elevator in the Manhattan section of the New York Subway system.
M will chart every urban journey across Manhattan and a big chunk of Brooklyn keeping in mind the location of every public bathroom.
I won’t begin a long run without having a mental picture of where I will find public drinking fountains, and how much I will need to drink from them, as I go on my way.
Author Paul Theroux once said urban neighborhoods are like a small section of a jungle that natives know and exploit to their needs and fashion. Beyond that section they are uneasy, out of place. Because that land is another group’s territory.
M will chart every urban journey across Manhattan and a big chunk of Brooklyn keeping in mind the location of every public bathroom.
I won’t begin a long run without having a mental picture of where I will find public drinking fountains, and how much I will need to drink from them, as I go on my way.
Author Paul Theroux once said urban neighborhoods are like a small section of a jungle that natives know and exploit to their needs and fashion. Beyond that section they are uneasy, out of place. Because that land is another group’s territory.
Running for Your Life: When the Impossible Becomes Possible
On 9/11/11, a Sunday, M and I, en route to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, are stopped by a German-speaking couple who ask for the closest subway. Eastern Parkway, we tell them, straight ahead. We are going in that direction, too, but somewhat slower, in deep conversation. They thank us and hurry along the sidewalk.
September 11 is always a bit hard for me, but this one, ten years after, despite the onslaught of media remembrances, has snuck up on me. The garden is our preferred public sanctuary, where we like to walk and talk about our feelings, and on 9/11/11, with no sign to indicate why, it is open free for non-members. One of the first groups we see in the garden are the Germans who stop and give us a wide smile. Hmm, it looks like they are going to spending time in the garden instead of the subway. We see them a couple of times later, each time exchanging smiles, until it is time for me to go to work where I edit stories, manage graphics and write headlines for a living.
September 11 is always a bit hard for me, but this one, ten years after, despite the onslaught of media remembrances, has snuck up on me. The garden is our preferred public sanctuary, where we like to walk and talk about our feelings, and on 9/11/11, with no sign to indicate why, it is open free for non-members. One of the first groups we see in the garden are the Germans who stop and give us a wide smile. Hmm, it looks like they are going to spending time in the garden instead of the subway. We see them a couple of times later, each time exchanging smiles, until it is time for me to go to work where I edit stories, manage graphics and write headlines for a living.
Running for Your Life: Thinking Marathon and, Yes, 9-11
One week from Boston registration. Through the summer more than intact. Since this time last year, my longest training run: one hour, thirty minutes. And today (Wed., Sept. 7) I neared that, 1:25, and plenty of gas left in the tank. Months since I’ve felt even a twinge in the torn upper right hamstring, my dreaded forefoot pain has flared up only once this summer, and I’ve done nothing to medicate it, just stayed true to a regimen, using weight machines at the gym, focusing on calves, hamstrings, butt and hip muscles, a lateral/shoulder workout, elliptical, nightly pushups (one set, sixty per), the latter of which helps in balance of thrust. Feel that my strides are softer, so that aches and pains after a run are minimal. I must and will get in the habit of stretching after long runs, which really help to relieve muscle strain and ward off injury.
Running for Your Life: Back to the Fire
Love the run (Sept. 2) to the phallic spear, west Fire Island, a herd of deer graze on the lawn oval, from my starting place from Dunewood, probably three miles, am thinking that I can run much farther, amazed at the lack of Irene damage, some salt water, diseased-looking trees, toppled over, some dead, undergrowth, except it seems for a tiny oasis, mosquitoes at night but not now in the breeze, nip in the air, which also helps.
Elsewhere, the breeding grounds for the Minnesota state bird expand under near-compromised homes on stilts. Remember nowhere can a basement flood here. The depth of the land itself no great shakes, literally a spit of sand in the ocean, laugh riot of a reality TV show, Survivor: Fire Island. Look for it.
Elsewhere, the breeding grounds for the Minnesota state bird expand under near-compromised homes on stilts. Remember nowhere can a basement flood here. The depth of the land itself no great shakes, literally a spit of sand in the ocean, laugh riot of a reality TV show, Survivor: Fire Island. Look for it.
Running for Your Life: Discovering Derek Parfit
It’s been a long, long time since I got so much out of a single New Yorker http://nyr.kr/otYONF. (Talking magazines, not my daughter, she of the powerful intellect http://nyp.st/ielb6l and perfect-pitch loyalty, that’s her. In case you’re wondering my wife M lives in New York but is as Midwestern as Fitzgerald; and yeah, nods to Paul Simms and “God’s Blog” http://nyr.kr/oAzqQX)
Back-to-back wonders, the undressed-down, let-his-story-tell-the-story style of Larissa Macfarquhar’s “How to Be Good” profile of the heretofore unknown to me philosopher Derek Parfit, and the crystalline father and son story, “Town of Cats,” by Haruki Murakami. Seems the work of a single mind. Our heroes, Parfit and Tengo, find joy and passion in both science and literature. This from “TOC”: especially in “TOC”: science on the one hand and literature on the other:
Back-to-back wonders, the undressed-down, let-his-story-tell-the-story style of Larissa Macfarquhar’s “How to Be Good” profile of the heretofore unknown to me philosopher Derek Parfit, and the crystalline father and son story, “Town of Cats,” by Haruki Murakami. Seems the work of a single mind. Our heroes, Parfit and Tengo, find joy and passion in both science and literature. This from “TOC”: especially in “TOC”: science on the one hand and literature on the other:
Running for Your Life: Raining Cats & Dogs
What is it about a dog? What New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik found http://nyr.kr/n2ITT7, that dogs are man’s best friend in large part because life on the farm is better than life in the woods.
Think pioneer days – Kansas, Missouri, Manitoba – scads more wolves than dogs. What was to stop them (the dogs) from running off and joining a pack of wolves? What Farley Mowat, the beloved Canadian writer and conservationist, author of “Never Cry Wolf” http://amzn.to/ofrush (it may not be “true,” exactly, the wolf experts say, but what the hey, it’s a great yarn) brings alive.
Catch a glimpse into the eyes of the stubborn breeds, top of the list, Redbone Coonhounds, that’s right, Thurb, and see into a wolf’s soul. Send a shiver down your spine.
Think pioneer days – Kansas, Missouri, Manitoba – scads more wolves than dogs. What was to stop them (the dogs) from running off and joining a pack of wolves? What Farley Mowat, the beloved Canadian writer and conservationist, author of “Never Cry Wolf” http://amzn.to/ofrush (it may not be “true,” exactly, the wolf experts say, but what the hey, it’s a great yarn) brings alive.
Catch a glimpse into the eyes of the stubborn breeds, top of the list, Redbone Coonhounds, that’s right, Thurb, and see into a wolf’s soul. Send a shiver down your spine.
Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Walking Prospect Park’s Picnic House path at the Nethermead corridor, arrayed along the northern side, through chain links of the unscaleable fence are a queue of mothers pulling like galley slaves at rower rings attached to high tension rubber bands affixed to the fence, their respective babies (I’m guessing here) in strollers facing them, leaving just enough room for an elder women walking group to march through, heading toward to M and me, clapping and urging on the mothers: “Go! Girls, go! Keep it up!” One mother smiles. Not ironically.
Walking Prospect Park’s Picnic House path at the Nethermead corridor, arrayed along the northern side, through chain links of the unscaleable fence are a queue of mothers pulling like galley slaves at rower rings attached to high tension rubber bands affixed to the fence, their respective babies (I’m guessing here) in strollers facing them, leaving just enough room for an elder women walking group to march through, heading toward to M and me, clapping and urging on the mothers: “Go! Girls, go! Keep it up!” One mother smiles. Not ironically.
Running for Your Life: Fire Island, Late Summer
Last weekend in Dunewood, Fire Island, C, who I never did see so I have come to think of her as Goldilocks, slept in G’s bed; G doing her first shift as hostess at Le Dock in Fair Harbor, FI, the next town over, the place with the grocery that sells a boxlet of dryish blueberries for the equivalent of a quarter apiece, G (our host’s daughter) not getting home until sixish in the morning because she too had slept over at a friend’s, Goldilocks gone in the morning before M and I get ourselves together after having tied one on (What I say to M as we make our way to FH from D when we arrived by ferry on the bay side where the waters are receding, “Let’s tide one on!”); Goldilocks is off to the wedding, what I first hear as her uncle getting married that I later learn is less wrong than incomplete, the reason she couldn’t sleep in her own bed the previous night because her uncle’s family and friends had taken up residence there for the weekend, but then, much later, when we are sunbathing on the ocean side, I learn that it’s G’s (Goldilocks’) uncles who are getting married. Her uncles taking advangage of the Great Cuomo Summer Triumph, getting gay married.
Running for Your Life: The Movie, Continued
We pick up in hospital, with establishing shot: L is feeble, his leg raised high and strapped in some contraption so that it doesn’t rest on bed, or even have sheets drape on it. It just hangs there in air, lathered in white goop, monstrously big thing. He is surrounded by medicine drip bags of many types that are needle-syringed in multiple places on his body.
Closeup. He is with the nurse, but we can’t hear, with benefit of subtitles, we read, “Where’s Sam?” Nurse touches him in a motherly way. “He’s gone. This morning.” L exhales, head back heavily on pillow. “Gone. Where?” We see a touch more of the hardened look that we saw at the opening.
Closeup. He is with the nurse, but we can’t hear, with benefit of subtitles, we read, “Where’s Sam?” Nurse touches him in a motherly way. “He’s gone. This morning.” L exhales, head back heavily on pillow. “Gone. Where?” We see a touch more of the hardened look that we saw at the opening.
Running for Your Life: The Movie
On black screen the sound of hospital machinery, beeps and whooshes and splunks. As if from a deep murky well, a face appears. An old man staring down, noise of a buzzer, then immediately a female voice, “Yes, Sam?” “Get in here quick; he’s stopped breathing.” Then, a young woman in nurse cap replaces old man’s face, she too staring down, noisily fiddles with something and then as loud as anything yet we hear the sound of a heartbeat, then the gasp of a single breath. Then another.
Fade. Slowly developing image of young man in ill-fitting hospital gown. Scraggly beard. He is at the window and places hand on glass, makes for a palm print on the icy pane. Nurse comes in and calls his name. “Larry, over here, time to take your pills.” L looks up and into the glass, starts a bit, as if for the first time he sees himself as he is, wasting away, as if he has been a POW in the South Pacific, hint of being hardened to his fate but then something sad comes to mind, and he bows his head, body shuddering, weeping.
Fade. Slowly developing image of young man in ill-fitting hospital gown. Scraggly beard. He is at the window and places hand on glass, makes for a palm print on the icy pane. Nurse comes in and calls his name. “Larry, over here, time to take your pills.” L looks up and into the glass, starts a bit, as if for the first time he sees himself as he is, wasting away, as if he has been a POW in the South Pacific, hint of being hardened to his fate but then something sad comes to mind, and he bows his head, body shuddering, weeping.
Running for Your Life: Balance Beam
I’d like to think that I’m keeping this blog in balance: reading, writing, running and yeah, riding (subway). Because five days a week I ride to work; that is when I write, often about running, but equally about my other practices. Because my message is embedded there, in these ways of being.
Recently, I received the official publication of the Boston Marathon 2011: Racer’s Record Book. The race that I’d trained for but didn’t run. I was a little surprised to see that of the 26,907 runners who entered, only 1,719 were men in my age group, 55-59. That’s 6.4 percent. And of those men who but did not race I was joined by 156 others, or 9.1 percent, of the group members who made it there for the 115th running of the world’s most famous race. Certainly it is a young person’s game. It’s not as though a 56-year-old man is going to win. As if winning counted.
Recently, I received the official publication of the Boston Marathon 2011: Racer’s Record Book. The race that I’d trained for but didn’t run. I was a little surprised to see that of the 26,907 runners who entered, only 1,719 were men in my age group, 55-59. That’s 6.4 percent. And of those men who but did not race I was joined by 156 others, or 9.1 percent, of the group members who made it there for the 115th running of the world’s most famous race. Certainly it is a young person’s game. It’s not as though a 56-year-old man is going to win. As if winning counted.
Running for Your Life: The Play’s The Thing
Four shorts, loosely classified one acts, heavy and dark and deep and funny, hilarious, East Side but the bearable type with an after-theater bar where the cast will stop by for a drink, well at least some did on Friday night (Aug. 5), except for the underage girl actors (Avid Theatergoer and Family Friend: “Has anyone told you, well, I’m sure they do, but has anyone told you that you look just like Faye Dunaway? UGA: “Who’s Faye Dunaway?”) in “Carrie and Francine” http://bit.ly/p4LWwv, the winning playwright of this summer production, 17-year-old Ruby Rae Spiegel, chosen from an open competition against young and experienced alike, trenchant and wise beyond her years, and introducing Lydia Weintraub (she of the Faye Dunaway line and the delightful, talented daughter of good friends of ours) and equally gifted pal Louise Sullivan to audiences everywhere, see it if you can, it rhymes: Series A through Labor Day, you won’t be sorry, and you may even be inspired to write, because these plays are being staged as part of a one-act competition: an East Side Manhattan Fringe, Check out “Summer Shorts 5” at 59E59 Theaters http://bit.ly/dblPp5.
Running for Your Life: Summer Reading, Part II
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Today (Aug. 3) I am interrupted on my final kick of a 7-miler, forced to stop at an intersection in Central Slope. In 85-degree heat a man in a heavy orange vest (sensible shoes, shorts and sandals) is walking ahead of a young woman pushing a cart full of food from the Park Slope Food Co-op http://bit.ly/rfTUOX, both of them blocking a turning Crate & Barrel delivery truck, the target of disapproving glares from some patrons at the outdoor seating area of Connecticut Muffin.
Today (Aug. 3) I am interrupted on my final kick of a 7-miler, forced to stop at an intersection in Central Slope. In 85-degree heat a man in a heavy orange vest (sensible shoes, shorts and sandals) is walking ahead of a young woman pushing a cart full of food from the Park Slope Food Co-op http://bit.ly/rfTUOX, both of them blocking a turning Crate & Barrel delivery truck, the target of disapproving glares from some patrons at the outdoor seating area of Connecticut Muffin.
Running for Your Life: Dog Day Delights
“When did it turn?” I’m talking to my friend D at the annual memorial barbecue for the great and underappreciated cartoonist/filmmaker and my very great friend, Mickey Siporin http://bit.ly/qG4Fp4, now in his early 70s, he knew Mick when they were art student freshman college roommates in Carbondale, Ill. D grew up in The Village, in the heyday of The Cedar Tavern, Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. If aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Midnight in Paris) saw Paris in the Twenties as his ideal place and time for artistic imagination, then The Village in the Fifties and early Sixties works for me. D was in his twenties then.
So I ask him, “When did it turn?”
“When I saw my first bottle of economy-size Coke,” D says.
“Wow!” I say, ‘that’s –”
“You’re a writer. Feel free to use that.”
So I ask him, “When did it turn?”
“When I saw my first bottle of economy-size Coke,” D says.
“Wow!” I say, ‘that’s –”
“You’re a writer. Feel free to use that.”
Running for Your Life: Canada!
Sign in Hepworth, Ont., ten minutes drive from my parents’ year-round home at Sauble Beach, often voted as the province’s best beach, seven miles of brown sugar-pack sand, its texture ideal in summer for sculpture, our favorites on Friday, July 22, is Ella’s Mermaid with sea turtle neighbor and a smooth-skinned nude sand goddess torso done by a blond-haired, blue-eyed male sculptor in his early thirties, even feathered the ribs under her perky breasts, head slightly turned away, looking toward the entrance, a flirt, thinking a brown sexpot, say Brad SandPit, will arrive anytime now, and yes, it reminds of Winterbourne, a blonde beauty herself, but oh so real, and oh so long ago, who has chosen me, a boy three years her elder, the privilege of putting tanning lotion on her back and thighs, my homeboys watching as I slather the lotion on my hands then press them down on Winterbourne’s shapely back, moving up and around when suddenly she shrieks and darts out of my grasp like a fish, shouting, “L! What are you doing? That really hurts! . . . Let me see your hands.” Well, yes, they were full of sand, and her back where I’d massaged her is beet red from the coarse rub she’d suffered from the boy she’d no longer have anything to do with; our friend the sculptor, though, is much older than I was then, and by the looks of him, keen to reel in some lovin’ of his own, perhaps one of the Winterbourne-like girls who are standing around, chatting him up, struck by the sly wonder of the sand goddess, maybe, one asks, Will you do a sculpture of me? Yes, he says, I will. But please, first, come to my place, I’ll need to make a cast. That is what I did to make this one. It won’t take but a minute . . . “Save Our Jails,” the hand-written sign says. “Save Our Jails.”
Running for Your Life: A Summer Run With Thurb
So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.
The other day M and I, while writing and reading on a knoll in Prospect Park, are interrupted by some movement in a stand of trees. Whatever it is has caught the attention of a gaggle of people in ear buds with iPods, standing on a trail, the group of them wearing what looks like marathon bibs with No. 262 on them. A close look and I can see an athletic-looking woman is running this way and that in the bit of woodland, striking angular poses, at times like a bird at others almost simian, until she bolts away, and down the knoll past us, sprinting. After an awkward pause, the group carries on after her, doing their level best to keep up. *
The other day M and I, while writing and reading on a knoll in Prospect Park, are interrupted by some movement in a stand of trees. Whatever it is has caught the attention of a gaggle of people in ear buds with iPods, standing on a trail, the group of them wearing what looks like marathon bibs with No. 262 on them. A close look and I can see an athletic-looking woman is running this way and that in the bit of woodland, striking angular poses, at times like a bird at others almost simian, until she bolts away, and down the knoll past us, sprinting. After an awkward pause, the group carries on after her, doing their level best to keep up. *
Running for Your Life: My People, Part Two
A woman (summer visitor?) in Windsor Terrace, a stone’s throw from the borough-famous Farrell’s Bar (and critical supporter of the original urban field of dreams, Holy Name ballfield) says to me as I run past, forty-five minutes into my Green-Wood Cemetery-plus training run:
“You look like you are ready for a marathon.”
Speechless, I smile in response.
“You look like you are ready for a marathon.”
Speechless, I smile in response.
Running for Your Life: My People, Part One
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”
In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”
In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules
So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Running for Your Life: Holidays and Hamstrings
From my perch at the gym, the manager’s lookout when this place was a bank, I can see the lobby television which today (July 5) is playing a video loop of baseball highlights. With hockey over, a part of my brain, like metal filings slowing shaping around a magnetic gnat, attaches to my distant second sport, baseball, and in July the lobby TV favors ESPN and baseball highlights.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
Running for Your Life: A Year of Blogging
It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
Running for Your Life: Staying Cool
A pause to kvell. Kate, my daughter, she of the Rosa Luxemburg-like sensibility – “Enthusiasm combined with political thought. What more could we want of ourselves!” http://bit.ly/mIqiTV – burst onto the national opinion-making scene on June 17 http://nyp.st/ielb6l. That’s my daughter! Rosa’s letters, new ones recently published by Verso in English translation, cut to the heart of what I am talking about. Another quote: Attacking the decision by her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, which voted in favor of the munitions budget in August 1914: “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat.” Thank God Rosa wrote these letters – and that her friends saved them. Kate, I’m proud to say, is cut from this kind of cloth.
Running for Your Life: Finding the grove
Back at it. In the groove. Running, that is. (And twice-a-week blogging!) Feeling a touch of “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami, his groove being a daily hourlong run without fail, a baseline to ramp up in training, but I go Haruki half-better, an hourlong run on alternate days, alternate day at the gym, hamstring strengthening and ellipitcal machine, not just marking time in these forty-five minute workouts, and so far, so good. On track for Boston, folks. Here I go again.
Running for Your Life: Summer Road
The day before The Rapture (May 21) M dreams about being taken. She is invited into a church and she wakes before making up her mind about whether to go or stick around in hell with me.
It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!
It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!
Running for Your Life: Love the Rain
Whoa! It’s been a long road, and one, if I’m true to what will be my destination, and what it might be a surprise to a casual reader to realize given that these past months of non-running, working through injury, that destination being, Running for My Life, that the road is not so flat and true, this body cannot just on its own, through running alone, and yeah, I’ve done some strengthening and stretching since returning to running marathons, my first in twenty-three years was Pittsburgh 2010, in the months before did a bit of core, flat-on-my-back leg raises, three sets of ten, and sit-ups, sixty at a go, and a slow pace, but now after the hamstring pull in early February, it was, more than three-and-a-half months ago, those days are gone even though I feel as good as I did before the injury, I’m changed. Think of the road as being changed: No longer flat and smooth, but pot-holed, chopped up, a mountain trail versus a high school track and for my body to continue on its way on the road, and not just for this season but for all seasons, or at least from now through the next thirty-five years, I have to change what I’m doing.
Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List
The publication of the moment has got to be Mark Twain’s autobiography. I confess that I missed the reviews when the first volume came out last fall, but recently both Harper’s and the London Review of Books http://bit.ly/i1YEja have done due diligence: in Harper’s the ever-readable Lewis Lapham weighs in. Check them out. Or if you are to buy one book this summer make it Twain: no one says it better and Lapham nails his quotes like a champion skeet shooter, especially the bit about the writer and the Mississippi River boat captain and his take on patriotism, as apt as any comments I’ve ever read on the American life – and what it means to be an American. (And not, primarily, because we persevered in the execution of an arch-enemy of the American way.) Ponder what Twain would say. On patriotism:
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”
Running for Your Life: Setting Goals II
In the late 1990s I shared a stage with writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, the program dictated, would read immediately before me at a book event that had drawn hundreds of listeners. Being relatively new to reading my work in front of a big crowd, I was nervously re-reading my essay in “A Few Thousand Words About Love,” http://amzn.to/kKnnmc, the anthology we were promoting. Next to me, though, Joyce was writing. I swear, it seemed to me at the time, that Joyce had written a few thousand words while we snaked through the alphabet of authors to the O’s. She read what she called her fiction-memoir flawlessly, and then as I rose shakily to do my bit, she gave me a little smile of support, just the jolt I needed to not only get through the reading, but to do it with a touch of confidence. When I returned to my seat Joyce was still at it, working to finish her scene, or note, or whatever it was because that's what writers do, they answer the call when it comes.
Running for Your Life: Setting Goals
M and I had no idea the Aflac duck job was up for grabs. The Sunday of the Boston Marathon we were resting on a park bench in the dappled sunlight of a floodplain mini-park in Bronxville, New York, a few dog walkers braving the soggy ground, near the banks of a surging river, no place for a Mallard couple that waddles, the female leading, toward M who is quack, quack, quacking in such a way that the couple makes a beeline for her, and it’s not until the two of them are about twenty feet away that they come up short, like children fooled until the last moment by a dead-ringer for their mother, but they don’t leave, M’s sotto voce quack, quack, quacking settles them as they both snuggle into the grass, only a body-length away and spend the rest of the afternoon with us, so don’t tell me that M wouldn’t have been a better choice to be the Aflac duck than a radio sales manager from Minnesota. If only we had known.
Running for Your Life: Getting to Know Water
Dr. O’s diagnosis, dated April 27, 2011:
Lumbosacral Spondylosis (ICD-7213)
Myofascial Pain (ICD-729.1)
Lumbar Disc Displacement, W/O Myelopathy (ICD-722.10)
Hamstring Strain
Precautions:
NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS
Prescription:
Modalities, Massage, TENS unit, Ultrasound Electrical Stimulation, Gait and Balance Evaluation and training, Stretching and strengthening of L/S paraspinal and abdominal muscles. Stretching and strengthening of lower extremities muscles, ROM of L/S spine and lower extremities joints, Lumbar Spine stabilization exercises, Theraband exercises for strengthening of rotator cuff muscles, proper posturing and body ergonomics training. Teach home exercise program.
And here, silly me, I thought Dr. O was going to launch into a praise-Larry soliloquy, drawing attention to my hard work since the injury, exactly one month ago today (April 28), and that sure I should, could continue to follow the able advice of my physical therapists not computer-tap a jargon-filled prescription to be filled by whom? A physical therapist who will have me doing body realignment and – gasp! – suggesting yoga for full-body health and renewal or face what Dr. O called not once but twice the “dangerous” consequences of following the path that I’m currently on, so I ask myself the question as Dr. O’s prescription includes, NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS, shouldn’t I just take this prescription and put it a little too close to a flame and watch it burn to ash, and go about strengthening on my own terms because, baby, I got to this season not by listening to doctors, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and if there’s one thing to come out of my session with Dr. O it’s that she convinced me that whether I start the blog, “Knowing Water,” or not that I continue this summer with the plan of getting into Water – Rat We – relaxing, let it lift me up and turn a weakness into a strength.
Lumbosacral Spondylosis (ICD-7213)
Myofascial Pain (ICD-729.1)
Lumbar Disc Displacement, W/O Myelopathy (ICD-722.10)
Hamstring Strain
Precautions:
NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS
Prescription:
Modalities, Massage, TENS unit, Ultrasound Electrical Stimulation, Gait and Balance Evaluation and training, Stretching and strengthening of L/S paraspinal and abdominal muscles. Stretching and strengthening of lower extremities muscles, ROM of L/S spine and lower extremities joints, Lumbar Spine stabilization exercises, Theraband exercises for strengthening of rotator cuff muscles, proper posturing and body ergonomics training. Teach home exercise program.
And here, silly me, I thought Dr. O was going to launch into a praise-Larry soliloquy, drawing attention to my hard work since the injury, exactly one month ago today (April 28), and that sure I should, could continue to follow the able advice of my physical therapists not computer-tap a jargon-filled prescription to be filled by whom? A physical therapist who will have me doing body realignment and – gasp! – suggesting yoga for full-body health and renewal or face what Dr. O called not once but twice the “dangerous” consequences of following the path that I’m currently on, so I ask myself the question as Dr. O’s prescription includes, NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS, shouldn’t I just take this prescription and put it a little too close to a flame and watch it burn to ash, and go about strengthening on my own terms because, baby, I got to this season not by listening to doctors, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and if there’s one thing to come out of my session with Dr. O it’s that she convinced me that whether I start the blog, “Knowing Water,” or not that I continue this summer with the plan of getting into Water – Rat We – relaxing, let it lift me up and turn a weakness into a strength.
Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal II
So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit D:
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope
Running for Your Life: On Beshert
M’s mother Ro doesn’t bring much Yiddish into my life. But a long time ago she said that when a Canadian drives an unairconditioned car from the north into a heat wave in the US South and meets the girl of his dreams, the only non-southerner at a Richmond, Virginia, writers’ conference, it’s Beshert: Meant to be.
Ro never wavers in that belief, in that support of me. And I can only hope that I have, perhaps even in ways that she never at first imagined, carried that as a promise, never a burden. I know that now I think of her, finally a little feeble in her 98 years, that she has bestowed many gifts on me in my life, but perhaps none as generous and meaningful as that one. As that folk-pure belief in me.
Ro never wavers in that belief, in that support of me. And I can only hope that I have, perhaps even in ways that she never at first imagined, carried that as a promise, never a burden. I know that now I think of her, finally a little feeble in her 98 years, that she has bestowed many gifts on me in my life, but perhaps none as generous and meaningful as that one. As that folk-pure belief in me.
Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal
I can’t remember when it was I started writing in a journal. Certainly not in childhood. That would be too much like school. Even in university, where I chose journalism – the science of journals? hmmm – as a course of study, not because I was especially taken with the idea of being a newsman, or had a strong desire to express my opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, I was first inclined to take up acting, but when I learned that greater than ninety percent of professional actors were out of work, the very idea of college as a place to find, feed and care a passion, if not more than one that you will cultivate for the rest of your life, maybe even make a living out of, all central to the experience, the college years as Odyssey, discovery, a track as foreign to me as cricket. In my case, think table hockey, a narrow shallow slot from center to just below the faceoff dot, no surprises; go to college with a task in mind, a job at the end, and although Carleton University journalism was nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary, I entered its halls with no illusions: come four years and I’d be working in a job, and sure, let it be writing and reporting, and no it couldn’t just as easily have been computer programming, or accounting, or surveying, not anything further afield because my mind was made up, like the right wing riding up and down the table-hockey slot, just staying the course, the very idea that there was anything more to say about what I would do with my life not exactly a sacrilege because I didn’t prejudge myself, didn’t allow myself the luxury. In small-town Canada that greater sense of self, or a higher destiny, might suit in a confession to a girlfriend, or in my best pals from childhood, but any specialness like that had best be hidden away, you didn’t write any of it down in a journal, because to do so, to feel that you were worthy of such consideration could only mean one thing, the dreaded: Who do you think you are?
Running for Your Life: Beginner’s Mind
They’ve redone the paving stones along the walk from the southeastern entrance to Central Park, today (April 9) finally a day that makes me think of summer, which if you were to ask me if that were possible last time I was here, Saturday, January 22, no one out the frigid morning of the Central Park Half-Marathon except us, rogue runners, the hardcore, in the many hundreds, I’d have to say it was unthinkable, and now as I sit here, finally not feeling sorry for myself, embittered by what seemed so certain to me once, the culpability of the physical therapist who worked on my hamstring muscles only twenty minutes before The Event, two weeks ago tomorrow, a grudge that’s vanished, as foreign in feeling to me as if it happened to someone else, this me on a different path altogether, not a runner’s one alas, instead, memory lane, the sun’s warmth, winter like a icy remote island, its ferocity past, truly past, a young man dressed all in brown, Kiplingesque braids, sweeping away the bits of trash, the evidence of now, so that as M and I go back in time, from the Strand book kiosk entrance at East 57th Street, behind us The Plaza, the scent of horses, birds chirping, the murmur of balloon-shaping clowns, a puppeteer, an Arab man sizing us up as tourists, declaring, “You are here!”, pointing to an illustrated map that opens before us like an accordion, and M, the more instinctive New Yorker, counters, “We live here,” and the man harrumphs as if to say, “Well, make it more obvious, would you, you’re wasting my time,” refolds the map as I feel only a twinge in my leg under the miracle Tiger Balm patch, a mental-reminder to buy stock in its maker, and try in the thickening crowds to keep an even keel so that we don’t talk about The Injury, engage instead the Beginner’s Mind, when each moment is lived as if it's the first and that is what we think, M and I, we think, “Where did all the time go?” We both feel and probably always will feel like young parents when we’re on these trash-swept-clean paving stones, “Where is she, Kate? Did she run off ahead of us.” Those years we would always come here, even the years after we moved to Brooklyn, M, L & K in Central Park, the animal musical band of the Delacorte Clock; here at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9, a half-month of Saturdays since the day of the freezing race, and off they march with their instruments, the Penguin drummer, the Bruin cymbalist, my faves, also the Hippo playing the violin, best seen in profile as it rounds the carousel and M sings the final note of a number that is being chimed, something from “Oklahoma!” that in the sun’s warmth comes flooding back to her from the first movie she’d ever seen on the silver screen.
Running for Your Life: Discovery of Stillness
Wednesday (April 6) makes ten days from The Event, the injury, enough time to reflect on something central: that I’m lucky. What happened to me when a muscle in my right leg spasmed, my upper right hamstring (Torn Hamstrings: don’t you think that makes a great name for a Boomer garage band?), my PT specialist B said it was remarkable that I didn’t, under the circumstances, fall backwards and down the stairs. I had a partial blackout, so I wouldn’t have been able to protect myself at all, I’m on blood thinners, wear a Medic Alert bracelet, I had only four basement stairs to fall down, but I’d be lucky to come out with only one broken leg, my head cracking the hard lino-cement floor and, considering I’m a bleeder –
Running for Your Life: Day One
“I would run through the forest until I was exhausted and could sleep; perhaps even as I ripped through ferns and over rotting logs, invisible now beneath the false second rain-forest floor, I would have some kind of vision. So I set off running. But before long, I only felt tired and stopped and turned around and walked slowly back. I had no faith in that kind of thing anymore, I realized. It worked in high school a few times even in college, but it seemed ineffectual now. So I put my clothes back on, descended past rubble and wire, concrete, brush, and stood over the wide fingerlings to twist each delicately under my heel.”
– “Legend of a Suicide,” David Vann
– “Legend of a Suicide,” David Vann
Running For Your Life: What’s Next
Do some dates bear little circles? Halos. Our actual birthdays, of course, not remembered, that is in your Birthday Suit, but who’s to say what the future holds, cosmologists today http://econ.st/e9mfDl examining data so that their profession is no longer sci-fi but real, the latest information backing arguments that the universe is forever expanding, that the Big Bang may not have been the first, and if so, then isn’t it possible that another Big Bang could occur, Creationists be damned, where’s the wonder in that?
Running for Your Life: More Pain Inc.
Enough with the public despair already. So unseemly. I haven’t bought my e-bus tickets yet, but I’m bound and determined to make it to Boston, come what may. Exactly three weeks today (March 28), I picture myself in the Boston Marathon April 18, 10:20 a.m. start, the White Wave by name, which brings to mind a line from “Ghostwritten,” the debut novel of ace novelist David Mitchell:
“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”
“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”
Running for Your Life: Lost Track
Injury. Sharp pain in the fat of my inner thigh. Pushing myself to where I thought I needed to be with less than a month to go until Boston, and now this. Now if Boston is going to happen, I’ll need some help.
Running for Your Life: Thurb Time
Thurber, K’s dog, is a handful, a glorious mutt that in the beginning presented as part-bloodhound, part-coonhound, part-red bone, nothing but a hounddog with a coat the color of burnt toast and a dog’s head for the Pyramids, now nine months old, the puppy is long – six feet from tip to toe, excluding tail – and not a great deal taller, think greyhound or vizsla, the mind muddies the answer to the simple question, “He’s beautiful; what is he?”
Running for Your Life: M and The Bluebird
Brooklyn Mood: Another dreary Thursday, a woman exits the subway as I’m entering, she still with the forehead-smudge of Ash Wednesday.
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Running for Your Life: What’s Hidden
Today (March 8), a month and ten days until Boston. Forty days and forty nights. My friend and fellow blogger, Mike Tully, http://bit.ly/hRtDDq works with me on Sundays at the New York Post where we prepare the Monday Business section, but spiritually and otherwise, he is the philosopher/coach. Recently, he’s scored successes in speaking engagements thanks to his years of experience with young athletes and as a reporter covering sports for UPI; he turns events into stories, into lessons that through hard work and word of mouth have led to a growing following among organizations looking for a committed voice like his that can make a difference for coaches looking for that extra edge, the margin between winning and losing, yes, and not just the game but the attitude, which Coach Tully will tell you is hidden, why it’s the special talent, humility in hard work for a chance at greatness cannot come without that something extra, the X factor that coaches and philosophers and therapists call out, the killer instinct because in games as in life there are times when even the most humble among us must fight, struggle, strike, hit so that our hard work is vindicated; these are your just deserts, what you have worked for, and what will fill your life with joy.
Running for Your Life: Week Three
I haven’t read “Born to Run,” the most popular running book ever written if you can judge by best-seller numbers, two years old but still in the Top 35, but you’d have to seriously question the impact it has had because despite the outsized role running as recreation plays among the book-reading public there are only a modest number of born-to-run enthusiasts who purchase those glove-like shoes, and more incredibly, run in them, a tiny majority of true believers in the message of “Born to Run” author Christopher McDougall, an advocate of one-hundred mile races and one-hundred-twenty-mile training weeks, with nothing else below the ankle than what God provided, a glorious invention, the foot, so you would think that a running-mad place like 2011 Park Slope, Brooklyn, I would see more than the occasional finger-foot runner, and maybe now I will as I push out in the finally snow-clear roads, the most telling weeks of Boston training regimen, Week Three of Seven, because the final one before April 18 doesn’t count, it is a tapering one, but my guess is I won’t, so what conclusion can we come to, that readers are buying this book as an inspiration for young althetes, encouragement for middle-aged shirkers, or vicarious pleasure for the elderly, with perhaps a single marathon once run, or a college history of track, because it can’t be just runners who are buying; in 2009, only 467,000 runners completed a US marathon, and if Pittsburgh 2010 is any guide, just 4,058 out of 7,620, or 53 percent, finished the whole grueling route, 26.2 miles.
Running for Your Life: Cage Diem
Tessi, our bird, is named for the Swahili expression, “Belongs to all of us.” I would hazard a guess that she is twelve years old, and like the Quaker Parrots of Green-Wood Cemetery, she is likely to outlive us all. Or so any reasonable person would deduce, considering that the first decade of her/his (we’ve never had the gender determined; and given her/his one-way excretion method it isn’t discernible to the naked eye) life she hasn’t once been to the vet, why worry if his/her health is good, which it is, both physical and mental, so much so that he/she calls out “ESPO!” only when our beloved housekeeper Esperanza is at home for her weekly visit, and “Goodbye!” only when Espo, M, K, and I leave, “I love you!” and “Hello!” at surprisingly aware times, and although as yet she/he cannot talk as well as fellow African Grey Parrot, Alex, of The Economist obituary http://econ.st/fOHV4U and the final words to her minder, “You’ll be in tomorrow?”, (sure, I’m more partial to the reputed final words of Oscar Wilde, “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do”) but Tessi did – very early on – scare the living shit out of our moody and now deceased Maine Coon cat, Callie, when we allowed the cat and the bird a patch of solitude at which time Tessi bellowed in a voice I’ve not heard before or since, a manner that can only be described as that of a Great Ape in Darkest Africa.
Running for Your Life: Week Two
So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit C:
“Are you alive in there”
– Addressed (without reply) as neither a statement nor a question by a cyclist to the interior of the bike’s closed trailer which housed a figure or an object topped by a hockey helmet. The cyclist had moments before stopped suddenly while hell bent for leather on the straightaway before the hill-descent near The Lake in Prospect Park. Later, the cyclist and the contraption that was clearly marked BURLEY lapped me at similar light speed as I was running near the Third Street exit. I never did see what was inside.
“Are you alive in there”
– Addressed (without reply) as neither a statement nor a question by a cyclist to the interior of the bike’s closed trailer which housed a figure or an object topped by a hockey helmet. The cyclist had moments before stopped suddenly while hell bent for leather on the straightaway before the hill-descent near The Lake in Prospect Park. Later, the cyclist and the contraption that was clearly marked BURLEY lapped me at similar light speed as I was running near the Third Street exit. I never did see what was inside.
Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.
Pain is there, or it’s not. Physical pain; where in the brain is that memory stored? Show pictures of emotions: sadness, joy, anger, despair, fear, surprise.Then pain. And it is all of these, the most recognizable expression that is not a feeling.
We baby boomers have two topics: pain and medicine. Bill Clinton: “I share your pain.” And to look at him, to hear him perform, you could almost believe it, but no more: fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us. A politician couldn’t run on that promise; she would be run out of town. Our pain is our own, not even the closest among us can share it. To talk of it, eyes glaze over. Ask Nielsen, what’s beyond the 18- to 49-year-old group? Losers lane, narrowing toward the void. And on the way, pain and medicine. Yawn. Do you feel sleepy?
We baby boomers have two topics: pain and medicine. Bill Clinton: “I share your pain.” And to look at him, to hear him perform, you could almost believe it, but no more: fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us. A politician couldn’t run on that promise; she would be run out of town. Our pain is our own, not even the closest among us can share it. To talk of it, eyes glaze over. Ask Nielsen, what’s beyond the 18- to 49-year-old group? Losers lane, narrowing toward the void. And on the way, pain and medicine. Yawn. Do you feel sleepy?
Running for Your Life: Resolutions
J, a friend of M’s came to the door the other night. With M in India last month, J hadn’t had the opportunity to say Happy New Year, so she did, almost two months and an untold number of snowstorms since Jan. 1, 2011. Or 1-1-11.
It strikes me that in these weeks I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions. That days go by and although I like to think of myself as thoughtful and prone to self-evaluation, but often as not I’m feeling pulled along by routine, three hundred days a year I leave home about the same time, stand on a spot on the subway platform
It strikes me that in these weeks I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions. That days go by and although I like to think of myself as thoughtful and prone to self-evaluation, but often as not I’m feeling pulled along by routine, three hundred days a year I leave home about the same time, stand on a spot on the subway platform
Running for Your Life: More on '18.3'
A fictive character of mine, newspaperman Ben Starwick, weighs in on some human costs of “18.3,” (http://www.economist.com/node/17957107). Overheard in conversation with a pal, our narrator Luke DeSoto:
“You don’t know the half of it, pal.” His dark brown eyes locked on to me.
“You don’t know the half of it, pal.” His dark brown eyes locked on to me.
Running for Your Life: Week One
Suddenly, Dr. Playground makes an appearance. The “y” in the shape of a stethoscope. Another freezing day, but that doesn’t stop Dr. Playground, the mobile fix-it truck that, presumably, keeps Prospect Parks’ many playgrounds in working order. But what to do since Dec. 26, when the snows came? No matter, Dr. Playground is spiffy as ever, sparkling clean forest green, no strained sewage for it, the color of the mini-growlers I had to hack out and around Vanya, twisting to get them out from under the car and I feel a twinge – uh, oh – but it’s a only temporary, put it down to my Jack LaLanne calisthenics, can’t afford an injury now.
Running for Your Life: Doppelgangers
“Swan Lake” meets “The Shining,” M tells the miraculously kind woman in the heart-shaped glasses who agrees to move two minutes before the !Coming Attractions! at the Regal Cinema, Union Square, Daniel Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” the feature presentation, in order to make it possible for M and I to have front row center stadium seats in the balcony for the Friday night show that I’ve modest expectations for and that exceeds those and beyond so much so that I find it even more remarkable than “The King’s Speech,” because like “The Shining,” “Black Swan” is a Henry James “madness of art” movie. (James: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”) M offers her assessment in the ladies room after thanking the woman again for moving so that all three of us could enjoy the show, M’s critique of which sparks the response, “Yes! That’s exactly right. Do you have a blog? You should definitely share that. ”
Running for Your Life: Interstate Imagination
There’s open water and thousands of black birds on the ground, and from the distance, even in my specs, hard to tell, but thinking crows not Canada geese, on the Jersey Turnpike, so far from God, and from the tropical birdhouse in Central Park, and the Key West butterfly house, catch your breath as you enter, here the scrub trees and what must be two feet of snow, two weeks ago on the road to Washington, DC, nothing but roadside sludge, color of strained sewage, tractor-trailer drivers at my height on this Bolt Bus, giant flat-sceen TV windows, why Post columnist Linda Stasi rants against “Jersey Shore,” a knife in the back of her Italian-American heritage, and horrors!, some of the characters playing the reality-TV stars on their way to Italy aren’t even Italian-American, set aside the fact that viewers respond to the show precisely because they recognize the culture’s unwillingness to value education and travel and to experience non-American appetites as full and rich and meaningful, as opposed to being threatened and intimidated by those with different ideas on, say, breakfast food or what side of the road to drive on, or how learning to say merci beaucoup, or a bientot, or s’il vous plait, before flying to Paris for a holiday isn’t unAmerican but rather enriches the American life, perhaps if such behavior were to catch on even to the point that “Jersey Shore” does not reflect the values of our dumbed-down culture and thus wouldn’t play in quite the same way, we wouldn’t be able to feel superior to Snooki and The Sitch in the same way that we do with American Idol, and don’t tell me this show (JS) blazes the fifteen minutes of fame trail, that’s so Andy Warhol, now dumb and numb enough and you’re in ten years of fame easy; I mean “Idol” is 10 years old next year. So rant, yes Linda! http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/boob_arians_invade_Ku6992bF0q7oN7r0zrpRrN . Ranting is good, better than bottling up your disgust, your rage at what accounts for mainstream TV culture in the American Imperium, consider John Milton, his “inward vicious rule,” to wit, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), “If men within themselves would be governed by reason and not generally give up their understanding to a double tyranny of custom from without and blind affections within, they would discern better what it is to favor and uphold the tyrant of a nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public state conformably governed to the inward vicious rule by which they govern themselves,” and thankfully, we’re just about there .¤.¤. off the Jersey Turnpike, bring it on Philly and Delware (with the “.” – see RFYL: A Congressional Run).
Running for Your Life: Jack Attack
Is shrill the new black? Increasingly, I find myself being stopped in mid-sentence, which is not my way. In the 1960s, Mom didn’t like to send me on supermarket errands because I’d read the list but study the labels, take an hour when I could have been in and out in ten minutes, so my patience is an alley (old Chinese proverb; see RFYL: Washington Memorial), and I’d like to think the change I detect in the press is not about me, rather that writers and commentators on both sides of the political fence are angry and bitter and all too often these days it comes out in what they have to say in print, fair game if the outburst is over dinner, or in the shower, while surfing cable TV, but you’d think the editors would tone down The Shrill, rather than encourage it, as M, the punster, would say: failing the Killer App, they embrace the Shriller App.
Running for Your Life: Washington Memorial
Jonathan Franzen will be here, at the Washington National Cathedral, I think as I run past the icy grounds, three days after DC’s worst blizzard of the year blew through, some people still without power and sidewalks icy and snow-covered, if Thurber didn’t need a walk/run and I didn’t need to get in some miles, only seventy-five days and counting until Boston, I’d be napping with M.
Running for Your Life: Let the Training Begin
Now I have to get some miles in. Less than three months to go. Eighty days till Boston. Once again I’m out of sync with the book, “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success,” with daily training logs by Joe Henderson. On my own again, winging it.
My personal trainer never would’ve let me stray. But I don’t have one. In fact have never had one. How do you find your way to fitness without a personal trainer in this day and age? In upscale New York City, here are the top three professions: 1) Personal trainer; 2) Dog walker; 3) Evening entertainment consultant. There’s always work if you know where to look.
My personal trainer never would’ve let me stray. But I don’t have one. In fact have never had one. How do you find your way to fitness without a personal trainer in this day and age? In upscale New York City, here are the top three professions: 1) Personal trainer; 2) Dog walker; 3) Evening entertainment consultant. There’s always work if you know where to look.
Running for Your Life: The Central Park Half-Marathon
Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the thin anklet socks. One layer long sleeve and unlined windbreaker. Thankfully there’s no wind to speak of. But plenty cold. From my “cattle” stall, the eight-plus-minute milers, I can see the CNN sign south in the pre-dawn light: 14 F. The same temperature as two years ago for the Manhattan Half, two loops of Central Park. In 2009, it did warm up to 18 F by 10 a.m., said S, a Park Slope neighbor who traveled with me to the 8 a.m. start. To the east, across the Sheep Meadow, the sun is finally rising. How freezing it must be for the young girl her voice trembling as she sings, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” S and I exchange “Good Lucks!”, she in a scarf and three layers of long sleeves and waist-hugging thermal windbreaker, setting in her earbuds, turning on her iPod, saying she’s off to her zone, and we slowly move along in the mass of 4,358 runners, it’s long past the official starting line before we pick up any pace at all, and I lope ahead because I could have stood waiting for the start in a stall for faster runners but I was enjoying S’s company, but now I’m in my zone, a 13.1-mile race in cold like I haven’t been in since I ran in North Bay, Ontario, twenty-four years ago.
Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run II
So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard on Seventh Avenue and Prospect Place, “Okay. I’ll pick up the poop, you park, then call me back.”
*
Mapquest and Google Maps and every other free online trip detailer must be in cahoots with GPS makers because these Web services flat out do not give directions that can be followed by a reasonable person making reasonable decisions based on the breadth of useless facts and scarcity of essential information they come up with.
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Mapquest and Google Maps and every other free online trip detailer must be in cahoots with GPS makers because these Web services flat out do not give directions that can be followed by a reasonable person making reasonable decisions based on the breadth of useless facts and scarcity of essential information they come up with.
Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run
“You training it? Or perhaps running?” (My friend J’s e-mail message about a planned trip to Washington to see K and J.)
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It’s a joke, of course. Not one that makes me laugh, but intuitive of J, and the truth is, as I wrote in RFYL: Mental Landscapes, I do look at roadscapes differently when I’m driving. With M still in India, I’m alone on my way to visit K and J in their new apartment in D.C., (It is a thrill to think that I will be my daughter’s first visitor to her new life with J!) and, yes, J (my friend) I do imagine myself on the highway, running. I’m
*
It’s a joke, of course. Not one that makes me laugh, but intuitive of J, and the truth is, as I wrote in RFYL: Mental Landscapes, I do look at roadscapes differently when I’m driving. With M still in India, I’m alone on my way to visit K and J in their new apartment in D.C., (It is a thrill to think that I will be my daughter’s first visitor to her new life with J!) and, yes, J (my friend) I do imagine myself on the highway, running. I’m
Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons II
Today (Jan. 11) is 1-11-11. Embedded here is the failure to label the post-twice-millennial decades (The Aughts? The Tens?), have to wait nine years, until 2020 before we enter The Twenties. Life is binary. Digital. Attention spans a blip on the screen.
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Overheard in that three-plus minutes of time when the NYC subway trains cross the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge span, and people on their cellphones are free to talk:
Girl (excited): “Seriously I walked into the room with my drink, and they were everywhere. Snooki lookalikes. I couldn’t take a step without bumping into one.”
Pause
Girl (annoyed): Of course it was hilarious! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
*
Overheard in that three-plus minutes of time when the NYC subway trains cross the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge span, and people on their cellphones are free to talk:
Girl (excited): “Seriously I walked into the room with my drink, and they were everywhere. Snooki lookalikes. I couldn’t take a step without bumping into one.”
Pause
Girl (annoyed): Of course it was hilarious! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons
Old Boston Garden. Bobby Orr. Noel Picard. Did you know “The Goal” was scored on May 10, 1970, almost 41 years ago? If I want to think of how old I am but not how old I feel, I remember what it was like at 14 years old, a Bobby Orr fan, if not a Boston Bruins one, that’s another story, to exult as Orr is in the act of scoring, upended by Noel Picard, soaring in flight over the ice as only he would, as only he could, and the shot by Ray Lussier, staff photographer of the bygone Boston Record-American, captures something of that moment but not it all because I close my eyes and I can still see him, as if time stands still, and Orr is suspended there, an angel, not a hockey player, this Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, on the other side of Georgian Bay, under the elephant’s tail (see RFYL: Why Run III), a place, home to another boy’s fancy, a Grade Eight speech in 1967, Orr’s rookie year in Boston, and a quote that resonates even now, and why I sit to watch, even the most banal of games, the Rangers vs. the Hurricanes, the Devils against the Wild, Islanders/Coyotes because there on that ice is a piece of home, where as a thesis graduate of Carleton Journalism, I return again, this time to write the script for a radio broadcast on the retirement of Boston’s hockey idol, Bobby Orr, with a memory of his brother, Ron, aboard the Zamboni, cleaning and flooding the rink at the Bobby Orr Community Centre in Parry Sound, and even in these mid-season games, the players show it to me again and again, so that if I can I won’t miss it; the quote: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” You’ll see what I’m talking about when he shoots and scores. The boy in the sideyard rink that my dad made. Shooting, then leaping as Orr did. Again and again and again. He shoots! He scores!
Running for Your Life: Mental Landscapes
I don’t think of space in the same way as I used to. As children, we need to be constantly watched. In the city, a child will bound into traffic, in the country, toward a precipice in a flash. Thurber, the puppy, will race up the side of blizzard snowbanks, only to plunge a long leg in a soft spot, and, a second later, do the same thing again, as if he has learned the sum total of zero, his life force taking over, the landscape, treacherous or not, a non-consideration, all is subservient to play, in service of adventure, dependent on those who steer him away from the barreling down SUV, the cliff edge, but our purchase on landscape is no superior to his. We must only keep him safe, embracing him as he is.
Running for Your Life: The Blizzard and the Buddha
Sunday night of the New York Blizzard, M and I turned on the TV set and “The Buddha,” a PBS special was on. The following Monday, she is off to India, to lands that Prince Siddhartha roamed, on a personal quest of her own.
I am moved by “The Buddha,” but curious. I feel the excluding of family in the Buddha’s teachings because, it is written, that at twenty-nine he abandoned them to meditate on the suffering of mankind when, even though he is an affluent prince of the warrior caste, he is bringing on – certainly – sufferings to his own young family by abruptly leaving them to go on his vague quest for the path to “happiness” for all men (and women.)
Windows rattle with the wind. I’m home from work just as the worst of the blizzard hits. Slumbering Thurber, who can sleep through a sidewalk jackhammer, is stirring on the couch.
I am moved by “The Buddha,” but curious. I feel the excluding of family in the Buddha’s teachings because, it is written, that at twenty-nine he abandoned them to meditate on the suffering of mankind when, even though he is an affluent prince of the warrior caste, he is bringing on – certainly – sufferings to his own young family by abruptly leaving them to go on his vague quest for the path to “happiness” for all men (and women.)
Windows rattle with the wind. I’m home from work just as the worst of the blizzard hits. Slumbering Thurber, who can sleep through a sidewalk jackhammer, is stirring on the couch.
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