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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An ad that is running against the cable shows I watch with M in India – “Criminal Minds” and hockey, the last four minutes of US playoff football – a man is running with the Eiffel Tower before him. As he moves the tower does, slowly, a portrait above the leafy boulevard that says Paris at its most romantic, camera pans back to show runner is not in France but on a treadmill. (I mute the ads so I don’t know the point: high-tech treadmill? Viagra? the French tourist board?) Once I listen, and off-camera is a female voice to the effect: “Hurry up, I want to run the Boston Marathon.”

Why train for Boston when you can run it, mile for mile, on your treadmill and its high-def video screen? Tap into eBay and buy at auction an official BAA T-shirt and authentic Boston Marathon Finisher Medallion. All there for the taking.

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In the Dec. 16 London Review of Books, John Lancaster writes, “Let Us Pay,” for want of a better definition, an immodest proposal that would save newspapers, which he says, have at best five years of life as we know them, that without an efficient pay system for online products will cease to exist, and, where, let us pray, will you go for investigative stories, fifth estate checks and balances that have since colonial times been the single-most important, truly grassroots service to the symbol we call democracy, if we continue on the path we’re on; change like leaves that don’t come back in the spring or redwing blackbirds, thousands of them dropping from the sky (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/us/04beebe.html ), but where will you read about it? Also, in the Dec. 16 LRB, the prosecutor in the international criminal court trial of Slobodan Milosevic said, “All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most important, by a vigorous press.” A lifelong newspaperman, I’d like to be optimistic about the investigative press, and I’m no innocent, that there is something even remotely close to a “free” press, given the pressures of corporate and state ownership, and why those looking for deeper understanding read novels, what J. Robert Lennon (yep, LRB, 12-16), calls American literary schlumpitude, the unreconstituted nerd staking his (it’s ALWAYS his, isn’t it?!) pride on the 330-1,200-page novel of misgivings and regret and failed love, but masterly so, and the guys Lennon cites, Franzen, Lethem, Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and now, in his scruffy New York, Jewish and Russian immigrant (A trifecta!) corner, Gary Shteyngart (SHTAYN-gahrt), whose latest 331-page “Super Sad True Love Story” actually sounds pretty good.

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So why train for Boston? Why write this blog? Particularly these long posts that I do, all of them, by design, the lengths of a newspaper column, about 1,000 words. Flying in the face of the facts, take them at random, how about The Atlantic, January/February edition, a data-packed article by Timothy Lavin that notes the average minutes spent reading per weekend day, in the 15-to19-year-old category, declined in the US from 16 in 2007 to 5 in 2009. The blog, like my running, is a practice, and while each day I admit to checking – because you can do that, pretty easily, visit Google Analytics and see how many visitors are coming – I don’t vary what I say and how I say it. Alas, there’s no porn (although I did, once, run a color photo of Sarah Palin in red short shorts), no games, no bells, no whistles; and consciously, because it is something that my pal, M, recently brought to my attention, the surfeit of uttered sentences beginning with the word, “I.” Because the lesson is not that I want to stand out somehow. In another age, these writings would be in a diary or a series of letters to a trusted friend or brother, sister, wife, mistress, lover. The thread, Boston Beckons, very faint, but in Running for Your Life, forty-three posts later, that’s 43,000 words, give or take, and the journey deepens, trace it back to the beginning, and like a long run, a marathon, there are a few stumbles, but here’s the thread: starting in real time in 2009, the Brooklyn Half Marathon, then the next May, the big surprise, a personal record at the Pittsburgh Marathon, and then this idea strikes me, to start a blog and write about my days in hospital, when at twenty I very nearly died from a sudden onset of blood clots – a pulmonary embolism that for too long resisted treatment in hospital, many nights unable to catch a breath, finally I’m out, on a day not unlike today, brittle cold, heady taste of frigid air, tears in my eyes as I guide my wheelchair to the patient departure zone, where I make my pledge, like so many have before me, which now I renew, a little more than three months away from running in the Boston Marathon, dedicated to all those who find some inspiration in these writings, because if the pledge was in a drawer or in a sheath of letters it would be lost, that I wouldn’t accept a life as an invalid, I would get strong again, do what I could to bring myself back to what I was like before going into the hospital, and if possible, to be even stronger than that young man. What ultramarathoner Scott Jurek said, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”

Next: Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run