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.
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Running suits me because much is hidden and solitude is my field of play. Often when M and I travel we see male and female athletes – basketball players from the US, soccer ones from away. They line the rows of airliners, each looking a lot like the other, impossible, at least for me, to tell who are the stars, the subs, the grunts, but they all definitely belong, marked difference to the non-athletes, something in their muscle tone, the way they walk, the sparkle in their eyes; they are predominantly young after all, but even back in the day when I interviewed the grinders and the power forwards and the stay-at-home defensemen of the Boston Bruins for a radio documentary I was doing on the retirement of Bobby Orr, these men, elite athletes, were hardly hidden, through my young man’s eyes like Greek gods. I look back now and remember how I was filled with awe, struck dumb, feeling foolish with my school-issue microphone, in their smiling, robust-to-bursting presence, marked as different to you and me as if the Lord’s hand had marked them with ash as I said a little Lenten prayer, the good Anglican church boy I was at the time.

A months later I saw an image of myself in a plate-glass façade in Ottawa, a couple of years since the hospital horror, my pulmonary embolism and leg blood clots, and while in the beginning I saw running as little more than medicinal, a pastime that kept the blood rushing through my veins, the first year, 1976, shuffling like an old man, not even aware of my pace, or if I was I’ve blacked it out now, but that evening I saw myself out of the corner of my eye, reflected in the dying light, while across the road stood a kid with a skateboard under his arm, who had stopped to watch as I was legging it home. Maybe only curious, but in my mind’s eye I think admiring, imagining perhaps this run is worth paying attention to. I’m not going fast but with authority, or something close enough to it to capture an audience of one, and for the first time I think, hey, maybe I’m a runner. For once I’m not hidden, my field not just one of solitude, and when I race in marathons now – Boston, my third in less than a year – and complete strangers call out, “Nice pace!” “You’re looking great, keep it up!” “Congratulations, man!” I often return to that time in Ottawa when I first saw myself as a runner, as someone who was hidden but at times found, and with no small joy, appreciated for what I’ve worked hard to do.

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Yesterday (Ash Wednesday) it’s prophylactic Aleve (2) and plans for water at the Picnic House, Prospect Park, Brooklyn. At best, going for a ten-miler, more than a month now since anything of that length and I’m more than a little unsure, pushing spring in my Expos T, a gift from K, and skin-tight shorts for hamstring support. Along Sixth Avenue, all is well, the wind whips from the harbor, wintering Lady Liberty hailing me in the distance, arms red-tail red in the icy wind, at the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery I’ve the light but a funeral procession and gi-normous flora display, St. Paddy’s Day float-size, wends its way through, running on the spot, thinking there’s still plots to be had, imagine that; the Quaker Parrots are out, loud, but this time I see a few of them, ruffled feathers near their Con Ed substation nests, this winter day the cold a piker; pace is fine, even fast as I climb 36th Street, the perimeter of G-W, from a certain point it’s a verdant valley of the dead, more England than here especially on this gray day, a Jackie Gleason depot bus pauses, its driver waves me on, waiting to turn in to the entrance, then a white school bus idles, asphalt jungle of smashed glass, shreds and whole car bumpers, empty plastic bags, trash of all types, “Red Hook Commercial Driving School,” and on the back, in Cyrillic, I recognize from a bygone Russian conversation class, “We Speak Russian,” in the zone now, around G-W and up through the wind tunnel alongside the Prospect Expressway, darling snake-shape park of benches and paving stones, Det. Joseph Mayrose by name, to the top of Windsor Terrace, where I live and breathe, the Ash Wednesday church bells toll, Our Lady’s Field, and notice for the first time across the road, a stained-glass doorway, a century-old sign “BOYS” of the parish school, and soon I’m in the park, drinking water at the Picnic House, once around the loop, and surprised at the end, judging from the pace as I look up at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Clock Tower that I’ve been out 1:35, with no pain, that’s about 11.5 miles to start the day, happy as a clam.

Next: Running for Your Life: Week Four