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.
Ah, but the age group that caught my eye: men, eighty and over. Three started and two finished. The winner: Clarence Hartley, 81, from Georgia, Official Time: 426:25.
I’ve only twenty-five years to go. And a lot of miles. Just ask Clarence.
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It’s not as though you should be crazy about balance. That would just set the wrong tone, wouldn’t it? Or boring either. To say everything in moderation doesn’t, or shouldn’t, suggest middle-management accountancy. Or to say nothing in excess. (Careful how you say this one, though. Once, my father-in-law, who in his nineties was looking thirty years younger, advised a 50-ish women to this end a number of years ago; she couldn’t believe her ears, calling her friends over to where Dad was sitting. She thought he had said Nothing to do with SEX! Boy was she relieved to hear that he didn’t say that .¤.¤. )
I manage to find not only pleasure in balance. But a life force. And energy. The alternative, in the end, not something I’m interested in.
Here are some areas of balance to think about:
Activities: I write to excess about how I find balance in writing, reading and running. And art. And politics. And economics. An insight: In my senior year in college, I chose business as my specialty reporting area. I knew next to nothing about business and the economy. So that’s what I studied and I’ve never regretted it.
Love: Self-explanatory. Devote yourself to its many non-X-rated and non-self- and non-home-destructive forms.
Food: We are what we eat. No need to be holistic here. But for goodness sake cut down, if your budget allows, on fast food of all types, read meat and supersize faux-natural fruit drinks at McDonald’s, have a glass or two of red win at night, cook with fresh ingredients. Tomatoes! And curb your snacking at your desk and everywhere else for that matter. Drink water and farm fresh and squeezed juices. And coffee. Omigod, like you can live without coffee? Fuel yourself right and you’ll be surprised with the balanced energy all day long.
Exercise: Ten minutes on the subway platform I do simple leg stretches and body torques. If I miss that workaday exercise I’m a little put out. If the train is late, I’ll be a little late for work. But I don’t stress. Rather I just expand the exercises I do while I wait.
Workout And Run: This combination is a new one on me. But after my bad hamstring tear last spring, I mix running and working out. After decades of resisting, I now belong to a gym. I will work up to upper body training. But now I do hamstring and calf and hip sets and burn 400 to 1,000 calories on the elliptical one day, and run for an hour or so. I’m happy to say; so far, so good.
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Three years ago I got an email from a writer who didn’t like something that appeared in The Post. I work there, the New York Post, newspapers, for good or ill, have always been a big part of my life. Ink in the veins, that’s what a newspaperwoman at my hometown paper once said. Hardly original, but say it out loud now and I’m with my pal Greg, helping him with his paper route, after school delivery of the Owen Sound Sun-Times, folding them and stuffing them in his cloth bag, twice the size of him, I’ve a paper route, too, The Toronto Telegram, long-defunct, trucked up from the Big Smoke, most folks taking just the Saraday Telly, less for the news of the week than the sports coverage of the Maple Leafs and the section’s beloved writer, George Gross. But that wasn’t what I start with. Rather it’s the smell. The whiff of that paper room at the Sun-Times. Dozens of cubbies piled high with that day’s final edition. In summer, winter, it didn’t matter. That ink on paper smell, musty and old and wise and sexy, what it feels like when you have ink in your veins, which I must have since I’m always around them, papers, like an earlier generation the smell of horse and stables in the dairy yard, shoe leather and hot metal at the neighborhood cobbler. Something to tell the grandchildren, maybe one who will have a poetic bent to listen. Anyway, the writer from The New Yorker, Paul Simms, said in the email he disagreed with our review assessment of his humor piece, that it “lost steam,” implying he wasn’t the only person to hold that opinion, nevertheless, he showed how big he was about it by saying he would continue to follow our magazine reviews, that is if they didn’t “lose steam.”
In the past five years I don’t think they have. And neither has the work of Paul Simms. For his latest in The New Yorker, check out, “God’s Blog” http://nyr.kr/oAzqQX. You won’t be sorry.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Movie
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