One week from Boston registration. Through the summer more than intact. Since this time last year, my longest training run: one hour, thirty minutes. And today (Wed., Sept. 7) I neared that, 1:25, and plenty of gas left in the tank. Months since I’ve felt even a twinge in the torn upper right hamstring, my dreaded forefoot pain has flared up only once this summer, and I’ve done nothing to medicate it, just stayed true to a regimen, using weight machines at the gym, focusing on calves, hamstrings, butt and hip muscles, a lateral/shoulder workout, elliptical, nightly pushups (one set, sixty per), the latter of which helps in balance of thrust. Feel that my strides are softer, so that aches and pains after a run are minimal. I must and will get in the habit of stretching after long runs, which really help to relieve muscle strain and ward off injury.
I’m reminded as I go about longer runs of what my physiatrist said about my favoring my large leg, the damaged one, and consciously stride up steps, and when I increase my speed, with my right instead of my left. Heretofore, I don’t just go out the door. Like everything else that is worth doing well, I’m working at it.
Running the circumference of Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, 478 acres, 600,000 graves, on 36th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway, (Wed., Sept. 7), mist now of a three-day rain, nothing but the kitchen sink, being carried by a worker along the southern sidewalk, scores of street trees freshly planted, lots already dead or diseased, and it seems to me the roadway so deserted that a landscaper should take out the living ones, oak and maple and flowering pear, and replant them where they have a fighting chance of survival. So deserted and disaffected around here that no one would raise a peep.
Later, same circumference, 20th Street, down from Bishop Ford High School, I make fleeting eye contact with a man squatting outside a hole-in-the wall mechanics shop. He’s covered head to toe with red paint, even on parts of his face that he’d covered with a mask. I can’t read his expression except to say that it is not a happy one.
Soon, again, back at fantasy central: Windsor Terrace, Our Lady’s Field, Holy Name Parish. T-ball, anybody? After the rain we’ve had, this field of dreams has never looked so good. I run along its outfield fence, and then around the block to where the players and fans come to see. And then, from there, it is a breeze, only fifteen minutes from home, and half of the trail downhill.
*
Look around you. Tributes everywhere. How they pour in. Marking ten years after. Regular readers here know that I was there that day, on the street. At one point, literally, running for my life. I have written about it, and one day that story will be told. Not just yet though. And never, no never, will I ever visit the museum. Millions will, of course. There is actually a business model for it: “dark tourism” http://bit.ly/ndMCW7. Miller-McCune, an otherwise exceptional magazine, sees the value of it. Tribute, in extremis.
I don’t undervalue the importance of remembrance. I grew up in the footsteps of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who as long as I knew him every 11/11 he brushed off his tunic from the First World War, buffed up his shoes, polished and pinned his medals, and marched in the veterans’ parade. Then I’d stand at his side at attention before the Town Cenotaph as he saluted and often cried for his fallen comrades.
Lest we forget. A phrase that gives succor to the living. I only depart in this:
Perhaps not now, but the time will soon come that we don’t forget, but rather we expand our view. Think about looking at Google Earth at only a single setting. There are others: when you feel you can, take the time and consider them, as Thomas Laqueur’s “Something Fine and Powerful,” the August 25 review of John Dower’s “Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9/11/Iraq,” http://bit.ly/nhhj1V in the London Review of Books, helped me to do.
Next: Running for Your Life: On Solitude
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