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.
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.”
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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.
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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
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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
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.”
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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.”
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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