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.

Take the essay in Sunday Times (Jan. 30) by Frank Bruni, “The Ripped and the Righteous” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30bruni.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=frank%20bruni%20lalanne&st=cse , a reflection on the recently deceased TV minister of bygone calisthenics, Jack LaLanne. In America, where headlines are won for all manner of expertise (“Jersey Shore,” anyone?), LaLanne carved his name in the relatively tame world of TV exercise. Get up out of your chair and move a little, he said. You didn’t have to watch Jack, of course, but for those who did he looked great and doubtless he helped more than a few viewers feel better about their bodies, maybe even stop smoking. A small proportion of them got won over by Jack, were his disciples and, some of them, developed washboard abs, iron thighs and icebox chests. But not so many folks all told.

Until his death at 96, Jack never stops, and according to Bruni, is the founding father of gyms, personal trainers and cardio nuts of all varieties. Oh, and exercise guilt. At his shrillest, Bruni leaves us with this thought: “As Mr. LaLanne was siring new methods for shaping up, he was fathering something else too: a potent, and in some cases immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt.” Bruni on “the post-LaLanne landscape”: “It’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are the window to the soul.”

Poor Frank. A new study http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/phys-ed-brains-and-brawn/?scp=1&sq=weight%20training%20cognitive%20running&st=cse  tells us that along with running, weight-training regimens also show positive results in studies on rats, showing they (the regimens, not the rats) can improve cognitive ability. There are prophets in all beliefs, but I have to say the runners I know feel zero guilt when they haven’t run for a few days. Rather, we miss it. Bruni reports the mantra of one Amanda Rose Walsh, a personal trainer in Manhattan: “In order to have a healthy mind and soul and spirit, you have to start with the physical. You start with the body to get to the deeper levels.” The deeper place is the destination, but I quarrel with the route. My blogger “other” stakes little in bitterness and superiority implied by Walsh and Bruni, that in the matter of encouraging healthy cardio behavior I would be pleased if visitors here may find themselves inclined to discuss if not take up running, or tennis, or French, or some other pursuit that is theirs alone in this busy world that can, at its best, take us to a quiet, and maybe even healing, place inside ourselves, and if that personal effort is being seized upon, like, it seems to me in large part, Jack LaLanne’s vision is reduced to being in the Times screed by Bruni, then color me guilty of trafficking in an “immobilizing” strain of contemporary guilt.

Far be it from me to say, but I’d like to think that this blog will not be tarred by this brush. Walsh, for one, is the straw woman who Bruni strikes down, sounds like an exercise extremist. But the portal in “Matrix”-speak is not the body only, at times it is, yes, but if nothing else in these posts I’ve stressed the importance of balance, in my case, running, reading and writing, and not always in that order, so that in each the dreaded guilt rarely is a factor, and if guilt does play a part it is not that I have gone one-two-three days without a run, but that I’ve not been writing, or am dissatisfied with the novel I’m reading, feel I’m just reading to read like the errand boy in the supermarket, or yes, that I’m not getting to that place where I’m in my comfort zone on a run, when I best think about what I’d like to read next, or puzzle out how I should develop that scene near the end of my novel.

I hope shrill is not the new black. I’d like – actually – to read in the Times something smart, not just sassy, about Jack LaLanne, or when there is an article about the McMurdo Marathon, say,  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/sports/30antarctica.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mcmurdo%20marathon&st=cse it aims to strike a similar balance, doesn’t provide writers like Bruni the feelgood, unexamined material that can only work to build up more bad feelings and bitterness so that the next backlash shrillfest is sure to pass through hands of the Times' editor soviets and explode again on the pages of the Times like this bitter-bomb did.

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Running for Your Life: Interstate Imagination will appear next Tuesday. In the meantime, the training for Boston is going well, thank you. Day 28 of 100 the killer rain hit yesterday, so it was an off day, only a bit of LaLanne calisthenics. This morning I was back in Prospect Park where the footing is firm, and there are more birds than people. And not a single, solitary thought to my abs.

Next: Running for Your Life: Interstate Imagination