When it comes to running, 2012 was all about the Boston Marathon. With temperatures in the mid- to high 80s F, I wasn’t about to keep up my pattern of improving upon my marathon times. In fact, I finished Boston at just over four hours, my slowest recorded time since I finished my first one in the early 1980s.
So, despite my age (57), I remain convinced that I can improve upon my personal best, which I managed on 10-10-10: 3:33:08 in the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa. I’ve yet to decide where I will run a marathon next year, but I will do one in 2013. I did both Pittsburgh and Steamtown in 2010, so perhaps I’ll get it together to run one of those. Or the nascent Brooklyn Marathon, which had its 3rd annual running last month. In any event, I resolve to run faster than 3:33:08 this year.
If I were to offer advice to others, who would like to get into a regular running regimen in 2013, I’d say take it slow. Oh, and don’t just see any doctor, if you are on the old side and looking to get medical clearance to begin a running program. (Some folks just stop when their GP, who oftentimes is inclined to treat running as a pastime for certain age individuals as akin to tobacco smoking or a bottle-of-wine-per-night drinking habit, tells them to quit.) Make an appointment with a sports medicine doctor and tell her that you want to run. It could be that your knees or back or ankles, one or both of which caused you to stop running in the first place, are not so damaged or worn down that they can’t be repaired through muscle-strengthening or stretching. I’ve become a big believer in cross-training, in building up body strength while I work on running harder, longer and faster. So far, so good. And there is nothing about my case that is all that special. I’m more a found athlete than a born one. And man, do I love the benefits of a running life, which I have expounded here on this blog for the past two and a half years.
As for my other resolutions, I’ve a few days to meditate on them. (With hopes the apocalypse threat will pass without incident …)
Happy pre-New Year, everybody. To your health, and the best of all things in 2013 and beyond.
Next: Running for Your Life: A Brooklyn Holiday
Running for Your Life: Winter? What Winter?
It’s that time of year. You can tell by looking at the calendar, mid-December, and for people like me who run long distance during the cold weather months, I mark the official start of winter when public workers turn off the drinking fountains in Prospect Park.
This presumes that the temperature is falling. And in past years that, as memory serves, was the case. So much so that it seemed to make sense. That pipes could actually freeze, and theoretically cause damage to outdoor plumbing. It could be as long as late March before workers could reasonably be assured that the long, dark freezing nights were over. That the fountains could be restored to working order, meaning Thurber (our frisky redbone coonhound) and I would again be able to stop for our strategic lappings, always a smile-inducing moment every year.
Now, it seems, the water turnoff is purely symbolic. The past month the cold has barely sustained a freeze long enough to put frost on a pumpkin.
What are the extremes over the four-day weather forecast? High 51 and low 34.
Winter? What winter?
As a native of Ontario, I’m used to winter. I lived in a town where it wasn’t uncommon to have snow cover from mid-November to mid-March. Even in the worst weather, I wouldn’t stop running.
What I’m not used to, though, are hurricanes that sweep up the US northeast at the end of October. The change in New York weather has turned downright scary.
Odds are we will get a blizzard before we suffer another hurricane or a tornado. But, frankly, given the strange, warm, even humid days we’ve had since Sandy, I’m not holding my breath.
Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions for 2013
This presumes that the temperature is falling. And in past years that, as memory serves, was the case. So much so that it seemed to make sense. That pipes could actually freeze, and theoretically cause damage to outdoor plumbing. It could be as long as late March before workers could reasonably be assured that the long, dark freezing nights were over. That the fountains could be restored to working order, meaning Thurber (our frisky redbone coonhound) and I would again be able to stop for our strategic lappings, always a smile-inducing moment every year.
Now, it seems, the water turnoff is purely symbolic. The past month the cold has barely sustained a freeze long enough to put frost on a pumpkin.
What are the extremes over the four-day weather forecast? High 51 and low 34.
Winter? What winter?
As a native of Ontario, I’m used to winter. I lived in a town where it wasn’t uncommon to have snow cover from mid-November to mid-March. Even in the worst weather, I wouldn’t stop running.
What I’m not used to, though, are hurricanes that sweep up the US northeast at the end of October. The change in New York weather has turned downright scary.
Odds are we will get a blizzard before we suffer another hurricane or a tornado. But, frankly, given the strange, warm, even humid days we’ve had since Sandy, I’m not holding my breath.
Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions for 2013
Running for Your Life: Secessionism vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism
Let’s break up. No, let’s come to some common understanding. No, all notions of the public good are derived from personal experience.
Here, in the homeland of Liberal heresy (Park Slope, Brooklyn, where if the Democrat candidate were ever to be removed from the ballot, the Communist, not the Republican, would receive the most votes), it’s hard to believe after the overwhelming election victory last month by our chosen candidate, President Obama, that included on the first Web page of the most popular petitions on the “We The People” White House website http://1.usa.gov/Or4mqw (as of Dec. 9) are requests to secede from the United States of America from six states – Texas (with 119,247 signatures!), Florida, Tennessee Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina – and create six separate governments.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t necessarily see these paltry efforts as serious movements to secede. (As The Economist points out in its Dec.1 issue http://econ.st/11B55yy those Texas signatures amount to less than 1 percent of the state’s population, and a lot less than the 4 percent who actually voted for Obama. Oh, yeah, and secession is illegal in all fifty states, as evidenced by Texas v White, 1869. )
Still, the thousands of signatures are a sign of just how polarized this country has become. In fact, the day after Obama was elected Louisiana submitted its secession petition on the site. It has to date (Dec. 9) collected 37,357 signatures. I’d also like to point out that that is not a lot of time: from Election Day to Dec. 9 is just over a month. And, yeah, a picture of a Chihuahua in a Santa hat is likely to get three times that many “likes” on a Facebook page. But, hey, this is America where politics ranks next to trick-snowboarding in popularity. As many as 37,357 citizens signing on to the idea of chucking America and launching the hypothetical Great National Experiment of Louisiana isn’t a drop in the bucket.
Which brings me to bipartisanism. Seriously. Who besides Obama still believes in this lame idea? Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it. For anyone still believing in bipartisanism, take a wee peek behind the curtain of the protracted NHL labor talks that have yet to yield a deal in order to save the rapidly vanishing 2012-13 season. Or meditate on the likelihood the Republican opposition will submit to reasonable behavior before the fiscal cliff date of Dec 31. That will cure you.
So what can we expect in the Obama’s second term? With neither secessionism nor bipartisanism as our guiding political thought, we’re reduced to, yep, right back to where we were before the presidential campaign, before the Tea Party and the 2010 mid-term elections: me-ism.
The current standard-bearer of me-ism is a long-winded piece by Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic http://bit.ly/S8sl48, in which the author proposes that Americans get used to the idea of being immersed in a sea of guns and that what we need to better promote public safety is to pass select regulation, all of which is predicated on the author’s personal reflections surrounding the mass murders by Colin Ferguson that took place in 1993 on a Long Island Rail Road passenger train.
So get with it, policy makers and commentators. All politics is personal. Put your “me” in the center of your idea and let it fly. The other two “isms” have been abject failures; this one has all the earmarks of one that will get some traction.
Of course I shouldn’t be surprised. Me-ism is nothing more than secessionism in extremism – as in every person is a nation. With such a specious me-ism argument coming from a publication as august as The Atlantic, fuhgeddaboud any other “isms” gaining prominence anytime soon. The die is cast.
Next: Running for Your Life: Winter, what winter?
Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes?
You don’t see them very often. Which is a big surprise to me. A year or so ago I was really beginning to think they would catch on – at least in my neighborhood of Park Slope, the Berkeley of Brooklyn.
There is the ugly-fashion factor. Hardly a deterrent for me, who will wear the same sweat-stained ball cap to social events just short of meeting friends for drinks at Terroir, the Brooklyn offshoot of the upscale TriBeCa winebar that has opened at the end of our street. But in New York City, you’ll find folks are, as the popular billboard says: “Tolerant of Your Beliefs, Judgmental of Your Shoes.”
Here, TOYBJOYS is a more powerful axiom than “Walk Inside Cushions and Don’t Exercise Your Feet.” That’s the message from the mega-seller “Born to Run” by Chris McDougall, which has single-handedly reshaped thinking about whether the human body is actually born to run and that in the past millennium we here in Western civilization have been mucking things up by not running – and not in bare feet, no less.
I don’t do it and have never done it. Run in these five-finger shoes, that is, which is as close to barefoot running as you can get. It could be that, in my late fifties, I feel that a significant change like this could only throw me off, as in introduce stresses that could lead to a lifestyle-ending injury. (I run with athletic orthotics and compression hosiery to keep neuritis and shin splints, respectively, at bay.) The LEI is not something I care to risk. Maybe, in the spring, I’ll get a pair of five-finger shoes for walking around and take it from there, because I do believe in the advantages that come from treating your feet to a workout in the same way that I have fallen in the habit of doing for my other bone and muscle groups.
If I were a runner in my twenties or thirties, though, I’d like to think I'd be out there in those five-finger shoes. They are especially advisable for those whose pace results in a neutral foot strike. As McDougall writes in “Born to Run,” bare feet will support you in a way that will promote whole body health like nothing else.
And when it comes to the rubberneckers, who believe me will hear you coming before they see you, think again. Let them TOYBJOYS. You’re on a run, not on the red carpet. And in your ripe old age you’ll be able to wear whatever shoes you want (that, odds are, won’t be propped up on wheelchair foot rests) !
Next: Running for Your Life: Secession vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism
Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick
There is something special about pen and paper, and type on high-quality paper, what is more deeply satisfying than reading words in a clean font on finely made paper when the writing is carefully crafted – indeed lovingly crafted – and why this especial joy has captured the best of our minds.
Words on screens don’t touch us in the same way. It is, for want of a better way to describe it, why one sees the religious faithful among us reading and praying from books, or portions of the Bible, the Torah, the Book of Common Prayer (check out this wonderful essay about the BCP by James Wood, which was recently in the New Yorker http://nyr.kr/QWjfp7,) in the most private conversation with their personal God and NOT from the screen of an iPhone or a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet. Or why the sensitive secular among us wouldn’t think of reading if it means abandoning our totems: our bound books by Herman Melville, David Foster Wallace and Mary Morris.
All of which is to say that not a single one of a dozen people we heard read at the Melville’s Moby-Dick Reading Marathon on Saturday (Nov. 17) chose to read their portion of the legendary tale (a taste of mine, from Chapter 73, “Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him:” From Stubb: “Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump- do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs”) from anything but a bound book, meaning one with black type on medium- to top-grade paper (although it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone among the one hundred and sixty readers who this past weekend joined in the Moby-Dick marathon read from a small type, worn paper classic for sentimental reasons, because reading a good story is one of the most intimate acts – and a computer is anything but intimate.)
Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes
Words on screens don’t touch us in the same way. It is, for want of a better way to describe it, why one sees the religious faithful among us reading and praying from books, or portions of the Bible, the Torah, the Book of Common Prayer (check out this wonderful essay about the BCP by James Wood, which was recently in the New Yorker http://nyr.kr/QWjfp7,) in the most private conversation with their personal God and NOT from the screen of an iPhone or a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet. Or why the sensitive secular among us wouldn’t think of reading if it means abandoning our totems: our bound books by Herman Melville, David Foster Wallace and Mary Morris.
All of which is to say that not a single one of a dozen people we heard read at the Melville’s Moby-Dick Reading Marathon on Saturday (Nov. 17) chose to read their portion of the legendary tale (a taste of mine, from Chapter 73, “Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him:” From Stubb: “Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump- do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs”) from anything but a bound book, meaning one with black type on medium- to top-grade paper (although it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone among the one hundred and sixty readers who this past weekend joined in the Moby-Dick marathon read from a small type, worn paper classic for sentimental reasons, because reading a good story is one of the most intimate acts – and a computer is anything but intimate.)
Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Want to get a sense of why – suddenly – New York City became America’s largest urban evacuation zone.
The sad, moving spectacle of Breezy Point, the Rockaways, and the Jersey Shore (yes, the Sitch and Snook as spokescharacters) aside, look at the view to New York Harbor and Lady Liberty while walking/running on 23rd Street in Brooklyn between Seventh and Sixth avenues. It’s the most dramatic vantage that I know of to illustrate how low the lowlands are at the sea and why Red Hook and the Gowanus stand a chance of being permanently inundated if water levels continue to rise as they have in recent years.
What also strikes me is how Brooklyn – unlike a second lowlands place, New Orleans, which, of course, has fewer options, chose Green-Wood Cemetery, the highest ground – for its final resting place (see the Athena monument, at right, waving at her distant sister, Lady Liberty).
Suddenly homes on the hill in New York City have even more reason to be more expensive than their weight in gold.
Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick
Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
You live in a bubble your whole adult life only to find yourself in a seemingly impermeable bubble within that bubble for ten long months since the Iowa caucuses in January, a bubble that was suddenly pierced November 6th when even Fox News called the election against you, and Mitt, you decided to stay in your bubble, the original one, for what must have been close to an hour, trapped in a narrative that I swear to God that only you and Karl Rove still believed in, otherwise you would have conceded, Mitt, humbly accepted your fate before you did.
Which, alas, is still the case: that you’re not able to come to grips with what happened to you on Election Day 2012. Mitt is milling around, not yet mulling his options. To be Mitt Romney these dark days in November is to be like a lone survivor in a landscape laid waste by a nuclear explosion, where nothing that is left standing bears any resemblance to your expectations.
This Mitt is not John McCain, he is not John Kerry, he is not Bob Dole. Or Walter Mondale. We won’t be seeing Mitt Romney because he’s not leaving that original bubble of his, the one reserved for the uber-wealthy. Mitt won’t be taking a seat across from me on the subway (not that McCain or Kerry or Dole or Mondale will either . . .) or be reading a Kindle at a bus stop, waiting for the cross-town.
The truth is, given my life being what it is, a relatively ordinary one, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it’s like for Mitt Romney. I wonder, in a year, will I even remember his name. At this moment it is the one thing he has going for him. How can you forget a name like Mitt?
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Which, alas, is still the case: that you’re not able to come to grips with what happened to you on Election Day 2012. Mitt is milling around, not yet mulling his options. To be Mitt Romney these dark days in November is to be like a lone survivor in a landscape laid waste by a nuclear explosion, where nothing that is left standing bears any resemblance to your expectations.
This Mitt is not John McCain, he is not John Kerry, he is not Bob Dole. Or Walter Mondale. We won’t be seeing Mitt Romney because he’s not leaving that original bubble of his, the one reserved for the uber-wealthy. Mitt won’t be taking a seat across from me on the subway (not that McCain or Kerry or Dole or Mondale will either . . .) or be reading a Kindle at a bus stop, waiting for the cross-town.
The truth is, given my life being what it is, a relatively ordinary one, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it’s like for Mitt Romney. I wonder, in a year, will I even remember his name. At this moment it is the one thing he has going for him. How can you forget a name like Mitt?
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Running for Your Life: Running to Work
When I came to New York City in late 1988 from North Bay, Ontario, I expected, in fact sought out, excitement. A lifelong Canadian, I'd never lived for any length of time in a place the size of Toronto, much less New York.
So, yeah, I went to shows, restaurants, ran in Central Park, and openly gaped at the skyscrapers in Midtown. Eventually I would find work in one of them. Since 1997 I've been pretty much steadily employed with New York-based newspapers.
What I hadn't bargained for was excitement of a different sort. It doesn't mean that I haven't found a way to adjust to the fact that NYC is a terrorist target (I was coming out of a subway entrance in the World Trade Center neighborhood during the second air terrorist attack, and consider myself a survivor of the events of that day, and most recently I served in the emergency press crew during Superstorm Sandy, working to make sure that news from the near-epicenter of the storm made it out to readers).
On Halloween, faced with no public transportation to my Midtown skyscaper workplace in the storm's aftermath I duct-taped a string bag with a change of clothes to my back, and, in my jogging gear, ran the 9-plus miles to work and arrived as close to my everyday arrival time as ever. When I walked to the building security desk I made the peculiar request of borrowing a pair of scissors so that I could cut open my duct tape bag enclosure because I'd made it so snug that I'd not been able to slip it over my head.
The woman rent-a-cop asked me how far I'd walked, and her colleague (with the scissors) immediately corrected her, saying, no, that I'd actually ran the distance, which I'd explained was likely about nine miles from my Brooklyn neighborhood.
She stared at me as if a chimpanzee, not a human being, was standing before her.
That night I ran home to Brooklyn, and it was my scariest Halloween since I was a kid. My office tower is at Sixth Avenue and West 47th Street, and I was in good form, running south on Eighth Avenue. Then at 27th Street, the lights were out. It was cloudy, so the night sky offered little help. For a few blocks I ran behind a man who was wearing a penlight on a head band and carrying a little flashlight. He eventually veered off on a sidestreet and I was alone in the dark. I slowed down to a light jog, but didn't stop. For blocks I could barely make out the uneven pavement and curb cuts. At 14th Street, a gaggle of rubberneckers were looking at the ripped-back facade of an apartment building. Some people above and below Canal Street had gathered before harsh light powered by rattling generators. Mostly, it was pitch black and bizarrely empty of people.
Finally, and gratefully, I jogged to the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian crosswalk. It was about 9 p.m. and black as coal as I made my way up the wooden walkway that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. You can't imagine what it felt like to see the bright, twinkling lights of my home borough. When I saw them, I picked up my pace and made my way home as fast as my feet would carry me.
Next: Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
So, yeah, I went to shows, restaurants, ran in Central Park, and openly gaped at the skyscrapers in Midtown. Eventually I would find work in one of them. Since 1997 I've been pretty much steadily employed with New York-based newspapers.
What I hadn't bargained for was excitement of a different sort. It doesn't mean that I haven't found a way to adjust to the fact that NYC is a terrorist target (I was coming out of a subway entrance in the World Trade Center neighborhood during the second air terrorist attack, and consider myself a survivor of the events of that day, and most recently I served in the emergency press crew during Superstorm Sandy, working to make sure that news from the near-epicenter of the storm made it out to readers).
On Halloween, faced with no public transportation to my Midtown skyscaper workplace in the storm's aftermath I duct-taped a string bag with a change of clothes to my back, and, in my jogging gear, ran the 9-plus miles to work and arrived as close to my everyday arrival time as ever. When I walked to the building security desk I made the peculiar request of borrowing a pair of scissors so that I could cut open my duct tape bag enclosure because I'd made it so snug that I'd not been able to slip it over my head.
The woman rent-a-cop asked me how far I'd walked, and her colleague (with the scissors) immediately corrected her, saying, no, that I'd actually ran the distance, which I'd explained was likely about nine miles from my Brooklyn neighborhood.
She stared at me as if a chimpanzee, not a human being, was standing before her.
That night I ran home to Brooklyn, and it was my scariest Halloween since I was a kid. My office tower is at Sixth Avenue and West 47th Street, and I was in good form, running south on Eighth Avenue. Then at 27th Street, the lights were out. It was cloudy, so the night sky offered little help. For a few blocks I ran behind a man who was wearing a penlight on a head band and carrying a little flashlight. He eventually veered off on a sidestreet and I was alone in the dark. I slowed down to a light jog, but didn't stop. For blocks I could barely make out the uneven pavement and curb cuts. At 14th Street, a gaggle of rubberneckers were looking at the ripped-back facade of an apartment building. Some people above and below Canal Street had gathered before harsh light powered by rattling generators. Mostly, it was pitch black and bizarrely empty of people.
Finally, and gratefully, I jogged to the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian crosswalk. It was about 9 p.m. and black as coal as I made my way up the wooden walkway that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. You can't imagine what it felt like to see the bright, twinkling lights of my home borough. When I saw them, I picked up my pace and made my way home as fast as my feet would carry me.
Next: Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
Running for Your Life: Is It Nov. 6 Yet?
I've been living in the US now through six presidential election campaigns -- all of them as a resident of one of the most big "D" democratic states (blue) in the nation, New York. (In terms of voting years, it's 14 in Canada versus 25 in the USA.)
I have memories of six prime ministers: Diefenbaker, Pearson, Trudeau, Clark, Turner and Mulroney. In Canada -- and granted I'm a political animal, always have been, and in my younger years even more so -- it seems to me that during the campaigns for prime minister that I recall, my support as a voter meant something: both to me and the political party that I identified with.
Here, in the US, with its peculiar Electoral College voting system in which the leaders are chosen, the narrative does not revolve around the individual voter. In fact, if you don't live in a swing state, one that does not normally go either Republican or Democrat (oh, if only there were a NEW DEMOCRAT!), or you've got it in your mind to get the vote out by traveling to a swing state and talking to the voters who matter to the final outcome, then there is no individual stake to be found in the mechanics of what should be the imperative of, the very essense of, the individual's social contract with the democratic state: that the vote the candidate solicits actually matters. That your vote is as important as any other vote, that each and every one of us has an equal bearing on the election outcome, and thus on the performance of the public servants who earn the right to represent us.
All of which makes for an argument for getting disenchanted with this process. Especially when the other night during the last of the presidential debates O did not hammer away at R for his "47%" persuasion, and why oh why didn't O man up and suffer being falsely tarred as a Class Warrior by calling the trillions of dollars of savings that will come at year-end when he allows the worst of the Bush tax cuts to expire a TAX CUT DIVIDEND that will be redirected to programs to benefit ordinary Americans AS WELL AS superwealthy ones who R has made himself beholden to?
Yeah, I've always been a political animal. But when it comes to this one, I can't wait for it to be Nov. 7 already.
Next: Running for Your Life: What's Up with Five Finger Shoes?
I have memories of six prime ministers: Diefenbaker, Pearson, Trudeau, Clark, Turner and Mulroney. In Canada -- and granted I'm a political animal, always have been, and in my younger years even more so -- it seems to me that during the campaigns for prime minister that I recall, my support as a voter meant something: both to me and the political party that I identified with.
Here, in the US, with its peculiar Electoral College voting system in which the leaders are chosen, the narrative does not revolve around the individual voter. In fact, if you don't live in a swing state, one that does not normally go either Republican or Democrat (oh, if only there were a NEW DEMOCRAT!), or you've got it in your mind to get the vote out by traveling to a swing state and talking to the voters who matter to the final outcome, then there is no individual stake to be found in the mechanics of what should be the imperative of, the very essense of, the individual's social contract with the democratic state: that the vote the candidate solicits actually matters. That your vote is as important as any other vote, that each and every one of us has an equal bearing on the election outcome, and thus on the performance of the public servants who earn the right to represent us.
All of which makes for an argument for getting disenchanted with this process. Especially when the other night during the last of the presidential debates O did not hammer away at R for his "47%" persuasion, and why oh why didn't O man up and suffer being falsely tarred as a Class Warrior by calling the trillions of dollars of savings that will come at year-end when he allows the worst of the Bush tax cuts to expire a TAX CUT DIVIDEND that will be redirected to programs to benefit ordinary Americans AS WELL AS superwealthy ones who R has made himself beholden to?
Yeah, I've always been a political animal. But when it comes to this one, I can't wait for it to be Nov. 7 already.
Next: Running for Your Life: What's Up with Five Finger Shoes?
Running for Your Life: Think Fly Not Flu
The other day at the gym a drug chain employee had set up a table where she was giving out free flu shots, along with a brochure citing the ostensible advantages of being a regular shopper at a chain store based somewhere not far from the gym, a place in Romney’s America that cares for shareholders first, paper-thin profit margins, debt-laden profit ownership, virtual slave labor that across RA has driven out mom and pops, and earned the sobriquet, “That We Built It!”
But even if it were a mom and pop – or my OWN Mom and Pop – I wouldn’t have gotten that flu shot. The last time I received a flu shot was the last time I suffered from the flu.
From time to time I do feel a little “punk,” as my mom says. Those first deep chills in the air will get under my skin, but instead of reaching for a pill – or calling my doctor for a flu shot – I put on my exercise duds and go out for a long, hard run.
Maybe I sweat the punkness out, I dunno. But on the road, as I push myself up hills and through interval training drills, up and down stone steps above The Lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, that webby weakness goes away.
On the road during a runner's high I identify more with the birds than the people. Birds on the wing don’t get flu shots. Or dogs, either, for that matter. Thurber, for example, our beautiful boy at right, knock on wood, hasn’t been sick more than once since he joined our family in June 2010. And, yeah, he’s had his shots. But never a flu shot.
When I look down on Thurber, as he’s lying in a tightly curled ball on his blue easy chair, and ask him if he’d like to go out for a run, he’s ready. Off we go; thinking fly, not flu.
Next: Running for Your Life: Is it Nov. 6 yet?
Running for Your Life: Playing the Race Card
So, what’s next? It’s been more than six months since my last race and I’m starting to feel a little antsy. It’s funny that before I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon in 2009, I hadn’t given road racing very much thought. In fact, I was just content to lope along, to get out running every other day as I’ve done since the mid-1970s, a few months after I very nearly died from a malicious circulatory breakdown that I firmly believe has been held in check largely because of my running exercise routine, which my wife, M, monitors, not that she needs to because I’m a slave to it but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate her attention.
Hard to pinpoint what changed, but I put some it down to hubris. In the early years of my running, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, my pace was so hampered by a leg that even today swells because of my circulatory issues that I didn’t even dream of competing well in my age group. It was a matter of pride, I guess, because before I got sick I'd considered myself an athlete of sorts, so I didn’t much like the idea of racing with a bum leg that pretty much guaranteed that I'd finish in the last third of even the most recreationally oriented race.
Now, though, in my late fifties, those thirty-plus years of running – and now months of cross-training since my hamstring injury of March 2011 – have helped to boost me into a different race status. Even in the Boston Marathon 2012, I finished well within the top third of my age group (307th of 1,080 finishers, or 28 percent), which has pricked that hubristic layer that I mentioned above.
What’s happened is this: Closer to sixty years old than thirty, I’m trying to measure what is the best I can be. It’s a twist, but I’ve convinced myself that at age 57, or 58, or even 60, I’ll have finished a half-marathon or a marathon with a new PR (Personal Record). At what point I’ll have to accept that I’m getting slower not faster I can’t begin to know.
Which brings me to the race card. I’m shooting for the Brooklyn Half in May 2013 and then the Catalina, Calif., vertical half in late September (with daughter Kate!), then a year later I’ve every intention of running the Steamtown 2014. If I manage to qualify for Boston, then look for me at the Boston Marathon 2016. I’ll be in a new age category, 60-64. That’s my goal, God willing. Oh yeah, and a promise to keep this blog up and running too. For at least three and a half more years!
Next: Running for Your Life: Think Fly Not Flu
Running for Your Life: Pioneer Park Slope
Here’s what comes to mind in Prospect Park, a short, vertical run from our house in what we call in Brooklyn Center Slope:
How the American custom of the covered wagon is replicated in the wheeled covered fort that is the Prospect Park baby carriage: where the legacy is not the hard, rawboned family of pioneer survivors but the cloistered privileged expectations of the all-too-often selfish sole family survivor.
During Jewish Holy Week, hundreds of Hasids, men and women, pray in their ecstatic, davining style, before the not-shallow Lake, their non-swimming children sitting cross-legged nearest the edge, to my eye, unattended.
This may be a period of time when the humidity and drought of this untypical summer has made for less-fertile trees, my prime example, our oak tree, which is producing radically less acorns than past years, but still these past weeks have produced at least some fruit of the golden ginkgo trees, special note the trail parallel to Prospect Park Southwest, the border of Windsor Terrace, where crouching Asians have been gathering a tenth of their usual crop of the vomit-smelling mush, making just a cameo performance during this strange season.
Running for Your Life: What’s Next on the Race Card
Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
I’m asked this question from time to time. One day at our local gym, a former runner, I’d guess maybe ten years older than me, asked if I was still running. I said yes, and he grimaced. “I miss it every day,” he said. He went on to say that he was many years a racer and that he was forced to quit. One day, he said, one knee – that had never caused him any trouble – simply gave out. Now he works out, does low-impact cardio. But, alas, his running days are over.
So yeah, I’m still running. Every other day, and on the alternate day I like to stretch and work out on weight machines at the gym. Lately, I’ve taken to wearing all-black compression sleeves, which have worked wonders at keeping me from nagging shin splints. And my sport orthotics stop the neuritis in its tracks. I don’t go out the door without my orthotics (which aren’t visible, of course) and my compression sleeves, which obviously are.
I have to admit that these all-black compression sleeves do make for some snickering from passersby. Especially if I wear them with my baggy blue shorts, which I do half the time. Remember Forrest Gump? How he just kept running, seemingly oblivious to his cornpone attire? Same thing with me.
Which brings me to dialogue that came to me the other day: an imaginary conversation between two elderly folks at an old age compound near Prospect Park at a time of year when birdlife is scant but running life is rife; circa 2042.
The scene: A man in his nineties and a woman, slightly younger, are sitting on a park bench near a jogging trail where a steady stream of colorful runners are moving past:
“Look at that one,” he says, wagging a finger.
“The girl, the one in the pigtails?”
“No, the woman in the tube top and the knee socks. Sweet stride. And such a soft heel strike.”
“Whoa, yes. That’s the way I did it.”
“That’s the way you like to think you did it.”
“Smarty . . . I like that fella there. The one with the dog. Handsome.”
“The dog or the fella?”
“The dog, silly.”
“You gotta love these runners, though. Oh, look! There’s a red one, and over there, a navy. Yellow, green, orange . . . And that one in pearl gray Vibrams, the FiveFingers. Sheesh, they’ll always look weird to me.”
“And omigod. Can you believe it? There’s a guy moving along pretty well who has to be our age. Over there, wearing those hideous all-black compression sleeves and baggy blue shorts. Still running after all these years.”
“Yeah,” the old fella says, pulling the blanket up on his legs, which are starting to feel numb. “That OC, who does he think he is?”
Next: Running for Your Life: Pioneer Park Slope
Running for Your Life: Open Letter to Candidate Ryan (aka Kvelling over Katalina Kate!)
My daughter Kate on Saturday (Sept. 29) ran her first big race, Candidate Ryan: the Catalina Island Conservancy Half Marathon.
She is some kind of running mate, my girl!
Not only did Kate manage to finish in what the event announcer shouted out as the best style of the finishers to that point in the race, but she chose as her first competitive long-distance race what is regarded as one of the most difficult halfs in America!
(Don’t concern yourself, Candidate Ryan, allow me to supply the facts: your reputation on race facts and ignorance of all things California – aka Obama Nation – is a matter of public record.)
In Kate’s first half-marathon she finished under three hours, at 2:59:44, 127th out of 196 finishers, the 54th woman to cross the line!
But don’t despair, Candidate Ryan. You too can show your stuff! Next September, not being an election year, please join Kate and me for a run up the mountain. At Catalina, it’s nine miles straight up and three-ish back to sea level. Kate has invited me to join her and the last weekend in September is already penned into my calendar.
Given your he-man workout regimen this race should be a snap for you, Candidate Ryan. Oh, and don’t worry about your personal record, go ahead and claim the fastest time in your age group. No one will be paying the least bit of attention to anything you say or do at this time next year.
Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
Running for Your Life: What? No Hockey?
It’s no secret in my family. Ice hockey’s in my blood. I was born on Oct. 5, the day after the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955. But Oct. 5 also marks in my mind the start of the professional hockey season. It is also hockey great Mario Lemieux’s birthday, Oct. 5, 1965.
So what’s up with hockey? As I write this the second work stoppage in eight years is about to delay the birthday-time opening of the 2012-13 edition of the National Hockey League. It is strange to think of it. When the weather changes, the nights get cooler, every year since I can remember a slice of the reptilian portion on my brain begins pulsing, hockey! hockey! hockey! hockey!
This time, as it did in 2004-2005, when the NHL owners locked out the players for the entire season, that part of my brain does gather stimuli: a PR-supplied coffee table book called “Team Canada 1972,” marking the 40th anniversary of the Summit Series between Canada and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Wow! The In Memoriams are especially poignant: Gary Bergman, Bill Goldsworthy, Rick Martin, Michel “Bunny” Larocque and assistant coach John Ferguson); a daily taste of poison about the progress of the league’s talks with the players on www.tsn.ca; and planning for a roadtrip with buddy Coach to see an AHL Bridgeport Sound Tigers game in December. But alas it's not the same as games: pretty much every night from Oct. 5 to mid-June. It could be all that will be lost.
Oh, and I suppose I’ll be running more this season. That is, until the unlikely event that these two sides, which are currently far apart in their demands, come to an agreement and end the work stoppage. This season I'll be running with my fingers crossed.
Next: Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
Running for Your Life: Plastic Bag Brigade
I’ve taken it upon myself to, while running, especially along the ultra-urban pathways that circumnavigate Green-Wood Cemetery, to pick up litter, i.e., plastic bags, which I then scrunch and run with.
It’s one of my personal measures to promote the idea of sustainability, as spurred by the reading of the review of the nonfiction book “Moby-Duck,” Donovan Hohn’s quest to follow the trail of the 28,800 bath toys lost at sea http://bit.ly/RA538s
Herewith is my mode of plastic bag selection:
- Just discarded and thus relatively clean;
- Being tumbleweed-like blown en route;
- And the rare occasion when it appears the bag is at least contentless
Upon returning home I stuff the former litter and now reclaimed and functional bags in my early morning Thurber-walk string bag (also inside: Doggie Beach sticks, two squeaky toys, a small container of dried liver treats and a foul-smelling tennis ball). These bags are then used as pooper scoopers and disposed in the FIDO (Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs & The Owners) supplied trash barrels in Prospect Park.
Next: Running for Your Life: What? No Hockey?
Running for Your Life: Treadmill Notes
For years I scoffed at the treadmill. The very idea of a real workout on the treadmill as likely as a sock without a hole in it after three washings. In the immortal words of Rosie MacLennan of trampoline gold fame, “I would leave it all on the trampoline.” Leave it all on “the treadmill?” Seriously?!
Alas, those were my out-of-door days. When literally all I did in terms of exercise was to run every other day. Boring but interesting. In my first thirty-three years I entered a grand total of six races: two 10Ks, three marathons and a multi-mile coastal run in New Zealand in the early 1980s. In my second 10K, I won a trophy in 1980 for finishing in first in my age category. (In those days when not everyone and his dog were runners, I believe I was one of four in the category.) I loved to run, but some days I asked myself why I kept doing it.
Now in my late fifties I can’t just go out the door. And I can’t imagine not doing it, so I take safeguards. Every other day I work out with the view that by stretching and strengthening my body I am stretching the time I’ve got left as a runner.
That means treadmill workouts. These days when I’ve got it in my head that I’ve not hit my marathon PR yet, they are especially important. If I have only twenty minutes to run (which is often the case in the non-summer months) then I go for a run on the treadmill at our neighborhood gym.
Here I dial up the incline and run at a modest pace, and then in two-minute intervals dial down the incline while increasing the speed. In twenty minutes I’ll have put in a hard 2-plus miles workout – one that I feel in my legs and my lungs: an aerobic workout that serves to tune me up for the next day of more moderate outdoor running, an eight-minute-mile pace, say.
So don’t scoff at the treadmill. It helps to build bone density and fosters legs muscle strength and, yes, knee health while keeping you on the road, perhaps for years and years to come.
Next: Plastic Bag Brigade
Running for Your Life: Don’t Stop
M, K and I were recently in Canada: a gem of a place, hidden in plain sight, little known in parts of Canada, much less in the land of O and Mitt (O-MITT this election; sounds like an Occupy slogan . . .)
By Chadsey’s Cairns on Loyalist Parkway, Prince Edward County, eastern Ontario, is a one-of-a-kind destination: of legend (ask about Ira!), wine and song, weekend smoker barbecues, summer dances in the hay barn. The winery run by my great friend Vida and the vineyard, the pride of her charming husband Richard, is one of my favorite places in the world. Bar none. Plan a visit. You won’t be sorry.
Midday last month (Aug. 24) K and I started a run along the parkway to our destination at North Beach, a strand along Lake Ontario. It was hot and humid, mid-80s, Boston Marathon 2012 weather. But doable; around nine kilometers to the beach turnoff.
We loped along, talking for awhile until K begged off, indicating she needed to conserve her breath. We ran in silence when we saw the sign, Chadsey’s 5 kilometres. Half-way there, we reckoned, this shouldn’t be too difficult. We saw Vida and M drive by. They would set up camp on the beach and we’d be joining them soon.
When we passed the 7 kilometre Chadsey’s road sign, K waved me on, said she wanted to go it alone. Fine, I said. And off I went.
Cyclists saluted me, as did SUV drivers who gave me a wide berth. They must see their share of cyclists and joggers, I thought, judging from their driving behavior.
Up ahead, I thought, must be the left-turn only lane to North Beach. But no. Just beating-down sun – and no shade. Bungalows and trailers at what must be the 9 kilometre mark, then a field of miniature horses roaming a meadow adjacent to a shallow lake and wetlands, the sign, Little Hooves and Big Hearts: one horse with a cascading mane of golden hair.
At intervals I scanned the road behind me but there was no sign of K. Finally, not far from Little Hooves, I saw the North Beach turn ahead. The beach, though, was not near as I falsely remembered. Instead it must be a mile or more away, judging from the patch of blue on the low-rise horizon.
Just off the parkway, I saw M in the rental car, stopping to see if I was okay, then showing worry about K. “Maybe drive out and ask,” I said. She did and I went on, finally reaching the beach, where, exhausted, I pulled up before my friend Vida.
K, though, won’t stop, M told me when she returned K-less. She is training for her first half-marathon in Catalina Island, California, where the buffalo roam.
But she has to be hurting under the sweltering sun. It was an hour since we started. But I know my girl and she's a fighter. She was going to gut it out.
I was the first in our party to see her. What must have been a half-hour after I arrived at the Lake Ontario shore. We greeted in our arms-to-the-sky way and after we embraced she explained how she had been up and down the beach three times and not seen us. (We’d gone to an adjoining lake.)
She didn’t know if maybe we’d gone to another beach because it was her first time at this one, which given her failure to find us was not an unreasonable thought.
“It was brutal out there, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “But I did it, didn’t I? I’m here!”
“That you are, girl. That you are.”
Next: Running for Your Life: Treadmill Notes
Running for Your Life: Lyin' Ryan
If the Republicans win the presidency by spending in the swing states like drunken yachtsmen then will SOMEONE finally admit that the electoral college, this vestige of patrician America, does such a collosal disserve to democracy when the winning party campaigns to LOSE the women vote, the gay and lesbian vote, the ethnic vote -- and the runner vote ! -- that it needs to be thrown on the ash heap of history and replaced by a system that at least attempts to be representative of the people.
How can Paul Ryan, the athlete/candidate for GOP vice-president who lied to an interviewer about his marathon time(s), (a) implying that he had run more than one, and (b) that he finished in the low-3's or high-2's, when he had, in fact, finished only one marathon in his life (at over 4 hours), be seen to be credible in anything?
This is the kind of thing that really pisses runners off. First, training to do something as punishing as running a 26.2 mile race is a humble pursuit. It is why marathon organizers bestow a medal on each and every FINISHER (as in, who the hell cares what time you managed; you just ran-walked-gutted through a 26.2-mile race course). In my case, I finished my first marathon in a Ryan-esque 4-plus hours, and then failed to finish my next two marathons ... Then I left racing, for 23 years, and at the 2010 Pittsburgh Marathon I surprised myself with a PR: 3:47:42; five months later I did even better: 3:33:18. Then, in 2012, at the road-baked Boston Marathon, I slowed to 4:03:27.
Runners know these figures off the top of their heads. Or if they don't, they simply say that they finished, which any normal person would regard as an amazing personal achievement all on its own.
Runners have a duty to convey that they believe Paul Ryan to be manifestly untrustworthy. Others may feel that Ryan-Romney will not serve their constituencies. But when it comes to Ryan, runners will see him for what he is: a shameless, self-promoting liar who you support at your own peril.
Next: Running for Your Life: Don't Stop
How can Paul Ryan, the athlete/candidate for GOP vice-president who lied to an interviewer about his marathon time(s), (a) implying that he had run more than one, and (b) that he finished in the low-3's or high-2's, when he had, in fact, finished only one marathon in his life (at over 4 hours), be seen to be credible in anything?
This is the kind of thing that really pisses runners off. First, training to do something as punishing as running a 26.2 mile race is a humble pursuit. It is why marathon organizers bestow a medal on each and every FINISHER (as in, who the hell cares what time you managed; you just ran-walked-gutted through a 26.2-mile race course). In my case, I finished my first marathon in a Ryan-esque 4-plus hours, and then failed to finish my next two marathons ... Then I left racing, for 23 years, and at the 2010 Pittsburgh Marathon I surprised myself with a PR: 3:47:42; five months later I did even better: 3:33:18. Then, in 2012, at the road-baked Boston Marathon, I slowed to 4:03:27.
Runners know these figures off the top of their heads. Or if they don't, they simply say that they finished, which any normal person would regard as an amazing personal achievement all on its own.
Runners have a duty to convey that they believe Paul Ryan to be manifestly untrustworthy. Others may feel that Ryan-Romney will not serve their constituencies. But when it comes to Ryan, runners will see him for what he is: a shameless, self-promoting liar who you support at your own peril.
Next: Running for Your Life: Don't Stop
Running for Your Life: Running Without Race Goals
It's funny but the simple fact is when I don't run I miss it.
I can go without breakfast (not coffee!) but on a running day (I've been running year-long on alternate days for the past thirty-six years) I can't not get into my gear: tension hose to guard against shin splints (and ease swelling in my bad, left leg), Brooks Defyance neutral sneaks, orthopedic insoles that have calmed my interdigital neuritis, cap, shorts, and wife beater in summer and early fall, and go out the door, often with Thurber, my boon companion when I'm off-road in Prospect Park, loping beside me at times, at others in seeming manhunt mode, his hunting instincts piqued as we move through woodland trails and over meadows and up the hillside paths that take me on my runs without race goals, a place I've been through most of these past thirty-six years.
My Boston Marathon 2012 behind me, I'm looking forward to the fall and winter and spring and summer when I'm sure I'll come upon my next race goal. In the meantime, it's back to basics: running, reading and 'riting.
Next: Running for Your Life: Don't Stop
I can go without breakfast (not coffee!) but on a running day (I've been running year-long on alternate days for the past thirty-six years) I can't not get into my gear: tension hose to guard against shin splints (and ease swelling in my bad, left leg), Brooks Defyance neutral sneaks, orthopedic insoles that have calmed my interdigital neuritis, cap, shorts, and wife beater in summer and early fall, and go out the door, often with Thurber, my boon companion when I'm off-road in Prospect Park, loping beside me at times, at others in seeming manhunt mode, his hunting instincts piqued as we move through woodland trails and over meadows and up the hillside paths that take me on my runs without race goals, a place I've been through most of these past thirty-six years.
My Boston Marathon 2012 behind me, I'm looking forward to the fall and winter and spring and summer when I'm sure I'll come upon my next race goal. In the meantime, it's back to basics: running, reading and 'riting.
Next: Running for Your Life: Don't Stop
Running for Your Life: Trampoline Gold
Go Canada! In the Summer Olympics the Bronze Nation is known for distinguishing itself with (a half-lifetime in the United States has taught me there is no point in getting excited about games and athletics unless you compete with a ferocity verging on illegality – yes way, talking about YOU American Women Soccer – and win the gold) strong and noble performances that rarely result in being No. 1 in the world. So far (Day 12), we are Trampoline Gold. Women’s Trampoline, courtesy of the perky, cereal-box cutie Rosie MacLennan, who told reporters after pulling off a spectacular final routine, I “might as well leave it all on the trampoline.”
Not basketball. Or soccer. Or diving, swimming, or equestrian. But trampoline. Watching the Olympics in a U.S. office where the odds are stacked against non-American competitors in the marquee games: basketball, soccer and volleyball, and patriots stand ready to cheer the inevitable crowning of American majesty, the idea that Canada, my beloved country of birth, is embracing Rosie and the trampoline is gratifying – and, dare I say it, a truly Canadian-esque victory. The nation of Who Do You Think You Are? is a perfect fit for Trampoline Gold. The trampoline’s an Olympic sport? It’s not a warm-up tool? Who knew?
Well, Rosie knew. And now I picture office workers all over Canada, from Nova Scotia to Toronto to Victoria, doing silent, butt lifts in their office chairs. Suddenly, they are up and down and up and down. A spring in their step, as they cheerily make their way to the water cooler. In WW II, the US had Rosie the Riveter, in London 2012, Canada has Rosie the Trampoliner.
When it comes to the Olympics, I’m down with the Bronze Nation. Only the Top 7 nations have more bronze medals than Canada .¤.¤. Give me Trampoline Gold any day!
Next: Running for Your Life: Running Without Race Goals
Running for Your Life: More Managing Disappointment
Perhaps, as a writer, there can be no better example of an author efficiently managing disappointment than Karl Ove Knausgaard, who, after his six-part, 3,600-page book called “My Struggle,” or “Min Kamp” in his native Norwegian (yes way, “Mein Kampf” in German) became a national phenomenon, and now an international one, http://nyr.kr/MZQA2l sealed with the requisite James Wood rave in the New Yorker, tells the New York Times http://nyti.ms/LAyNui that he has no idea whether he will ever write again, and has used his royalties to move to the Swedish countryside and found a small publishing house.
Me, I make less grandiose efforts to manage disappointment. And not like a work colleague of mine, who has written a novel, screenplays and stories, all unpublished, and says that he is totally fine with the idea that those works will remain in a drawer and be published posthumously, if at all.
I write every day. And, yeah, it’s been awhile since I sent out my last novel. But I remain convinced that it will be published.
Will I be disappointed if it never sees the light of day? You betcha. But that prospect won’t keep me up at night. I’ve got too much writing to do, that I have to get done.
And none of it goes out post-humorously.
Next: Running for Your Life: Trampoline Gold
Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging
It’s been two years that I’ve been keeping this blog. And no time. Hardly a day goes by now I don’t think about not thinking about getting old. The condition I have (not suffer from, the word “condition” need not be the Boomer gen perjorative) is known as reverse aging.
As a Boomer friend said over dinner recently, “Good luck with that.”
I reply, no, I’m not kidding myself. In fact, as I told her, I’m now, at age 56, in the best shape of my life. I have no aches and pains. Why shouldn’t I feel such possibilities that come from the idea that there might be something to the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” http://imdb.to/99N3VE (If you haven’t seen this 2008 feature staring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett then Netflix it . . . M and I saw it this year on board our flight to Paris and we both loved it).
Reverse agers start from a place where there is no pain. In my case, even the forefoot pain that I’d complained about in posts here has been corrected by athletic insoles; a sports podiatrist diagnosed the problem as inflammation caused by high arches and prescribed insoles that have scrubbed the pain away.
From there I have been running as hard – perhaps harder – than ever. In most cases I move from rest to full-tilt eight-minute-mile pace with little resistance. I run out the door and into a mental landscape, one that is soon awash in restorative body chemicals, slipping into a high, as I push my bad leg up the hills and slopes around my Brooklyn home.
On Saturday, July 14, I took a twenty-minute nap, read some more of “Wish You Were Here” by Graham Swift, then scampered out the door, and up into the park where I did intervals up and down the lookout steps. I can’t wait for my next run.
So far, 36 years and counting, I’m having good luck with this.
Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Disappointment
As a Boomer friend said over dinner recently, “Good luck with that.”
I reply, no, I’m not kidding myself. In fact, as I told her, I’m now, at age 56, in the best shape of my life. I have no aches and pains. Why shouldn’t I feel such possibilities that come from the idea that there might be something to the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” http://imdb.to/99N3VE (If you haven’t seen this 2008 feature staring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett then Netflix it . . . M and I saw it this year on board our flight to Paris and we both loved it).
Reverse agers start from a place where there is no pain. In my case, even the forefoot pain that I’d complained about in posts here has been corrected by athletic insoles; a sports podiatrist diagnosed the problem as inflammation caused by high arches and prescribed insoles that have scrubbed the pain away.
From there I have been running as hard – perhaps harder – than ever. In most cases I move from rest to full-tilt eight-minute-mile pace with little resistance. I run out the door and into a mental landscape, one that is soon awash in restorative body chemicals, slipping into a high, as I push my bad leg up the hills and slopes around my Brooklyn home.
On Saturday, July 14, I took a twenty-minute nap, read some more of “Wish You Were Here” by Graham Swift, then scampered out the door, and up into the park where I did intervals up and down the lookout steps. I can’t wait for my next run.
So far, 36 years and counting, I’m having good luck with this.
Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Disappointment
Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction
Item: Nokia slashes price of Lumia 900 Windows phone to $49.99 with a two-year contract.
Item: Young man in Prospect Park flogging cut-rate mobile-phone service near-interrupts me, thrusting a promotional postcard, while I’m on a fast-paced run.
It’ll get you, Internet addiction. Read the “iCrazy” Newsweek cover story, if you dare. http://bit.ly/LDSy5j, as in:
Item: The brains of Internet addicts look like brains of drug and alcohol addicts.
Item: A researcher on aging and memory selected 12 experienced Web users and 12 inexperienced ones and passed them all through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Webbies showing fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. The novices went away for a week and were asked to spend a TOTAL of five hours online. The brains of the novices had rewired and were similar to the Webbies.
Item: The average teen processes 3,700 texts a month (123 texts daily).
Item: Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count the time spent multitasking on several devices.
How hypocritical of me. People turning to this blog – either on a mobile device, a PC, a Mac, etc. – are adding to their screen time. And too often every day I find myself checking to see how many visits my blog posts have attracted. I’m typing into a computer screen right now, my rewired brain piqued by the rush that I’m attracting readers, maybe even followers.
In the event of followers, listen to this: Log off. Go out for a run. Pet the dog. Pick up a pen and journal and write. Call a friend and make a plan to play tennis, or golf. You can be assured that Facebook and Twitter – and yes, Running for Your Life – will be there when you get back.
Next: Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging
Running for Your Life: ‘Wish You Were Here’
Once long ago (I’ve been keeping this twice-weekly blog for two years now) I wrote here that this Web log would touch on three R’s – running, ’riting and reading. But for a good stretch of that time I’ve actually been fixated on a fourth: racing.
That is, when I was focused on running the Boston Marathon in a sub-3:30 in order to time-qualify for New York in November. That didn’t happen, 4:03:27 did in the sweltering April(?!) heat that would Boston 2012.
Now that I’m on an extended break from race-training, I’m turning to reading. And in the case of good reads, writing about them.
I read and loved Graham Swift’s “Waterland” http://bit.ly/LPIjuH, a sprawling wonder of a thing that merits being in the category of such set piece historical/mythological works as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s “Fall on Your Knees” or Rose Tremain’s “Sacred Country” or “Shadow on the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon or “World’s End” by T.C. Boyle.
“Wish You Were Here” is no less brilliant than “Waterland.” In contrast, though, the novel taps the blood of rawboned Jack Luxton, a farmer-turned-seaside caravan operator. Jack reminds of the rural stalwarts of my youth; the friends of my father – and my father himself – sitting stone-faced during my at-home reading from my memoir, Tip of the Iceberg http://amzn.to/NmujdH, in the Main Street bookstore.
Jack, or so he thinks, has only Ellie, his wife. Whose voice sears in a chapter that – very surprisingly – delivers on the significance of the title.
Secrets and pacts and what we can never know. Jack and Ellie. I feel that what Swift did with the fens in England he has done with the tortured love of Jack and Ellie. An equal wonder.
Next: Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction
Running for Your Life: Running And Poems
I never know what will come to me when I run. How it will come. The “it” I’m referring to are ideas, often so fleeting that I don’t hold onto them.
Often, not so much ideas as images. Daydreams. Sometimes it’s a memory, perhaps a memoir morsel that, later, I write down in a journal. Sometimes a phrase, something about a movie that I saw a week ago, a month ago.
I have to get down these ideas, images, sensations. Sometimes just a quick sketch, dash a few lines. No, not the computer, or the laptop. Just pen and paper. (studies show a third of smartphone users go online before getting out of bed in the morning; that brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like brains of alcoholics; that the average teen processes 123 texts a day) and yes, if I had time that wasn’t circumscribed by salary work I’d take these ideas and writing fragments and devote hours to the construction of stories, memoirs, novels, plays and poems.
I think, though, if there is a single literary expression that best approximates running for me it is poems. Running is poems. What is an attempt at the universal, the precision of life and language. Close, close again. And beautiful. Small and large and perfect. And simple.
Can’t wait to try to reach that perfection again.
Next: Running for Your Life: “Wish You Were Here”
Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head
I didn’t run for long today (Monday, July 2). Forty minutes – at my eight-minute mile lumber that’s five miles, which is what I did on Saturday (June 30) north of Milwaukee, Holiday Inn Express, Brown Deer, Wis., while visiting M’s mom, R, who turned 99 and a half on the weekend (when you get as close as R to 100 years old, you could the year in portions – only six months to go).
It was hot in Wisconsin. And hot in Brooklyn. In the 90s. Humid on Saturday, so I ran on the Holiday Inn Express treadmill. But a light summer breeze arose late Monday morning, so I chose an outdoor route.
When you’re fit enough you know how much you can do in the heat. When I threw open the kitchen window and felt the breeze, my mind was made up. I’d run in the park. The breezes in the shade of the trees would amplify the cool relief. Rather than run in the direct sunlight I’d run the woodland paths, connect the dots from shade to shade to shade.
Because here, in the “Summer Breeze” http://bit.ly/u8qAw of that Seals and Croft standard, hot is in your head. Your heart might be working a little harder, but, if you pay attention, the rewards are manifest. After two days of heavy humidity, the birds and squirrels are out in force. The treetops alive with sound and movement.
On this day I see a wee downy woodpecker on the forest floor and heard but didn’t see a songbird that was new to me, just missing as it darted higher into the trees.
In Wisconsin at dusk Sunday, from a picnic table in Brown Deer Park, M had told me of a blue heron she inadvertently startled into flight, and what she thought must be scarlet tanagers.
M and I are under the first full moon since being romanced by the one rising above us at Notre Dame de Paris and that night – Sunday – we are apart, and now today (Monday) after the run in the heat, where because of the breeze it didn’t feel like anything at all, just a light sheen of sweat, I think that M will be home tonight after saying goodbye for now to her mom, and we will be under a full moon once more.
Next: Running And Poems
Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real
Consider the letdown over. Paris – despite the picture at right, the moonrise over Notre Dame – is no longer at my fingertips. In some respects, it’s been hard to be back home. The working life, the lack of open endedness of our days.
It’s summer and although my mind is a beginner’s one, one that seeks flow and as M and I have declared, “The Summer of Stories,” the excitement and possibilities that come from creation, from new work, I’ve also returned to responsibilities: salary work, finances, family obligations, etc.
On running, I’m often asked, how do you keep it up? How do you keep it interesting? I can understand it with team sports, like soccer or softball, even individual sports like tennis, but how do you pick yourself up and got out for a serious run as often as you do?
“Rock of Ages,” starring Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, is a musical-farce, rock-concert of a thing (think Tower Records as Celluloid Cathedral). At its heart rock god Stacee Jaxx seduces/confides in a Rolling Stone writer that he is on a never-ending quest for the perfect song: rock ’n’ roll secular salvation.
In my case, I run. And some runs, some races feel near-perfect. But I’m not there. It’s like some reverse Doomsday Clock. Joyce has Bloomsday: a near-perfect fiction that is immortal, a work to plumb and plumb some more.
Running has some of that for me. Runes-Day. A kind of magic charm.
I say reverse Doomsday Clock because it turns the How It Ends http://bit.ly/MC5nP0 thesis on its head. That during a run, or while inside a Joyce sentence, the concept of end, for a moment, in a burst of ecstasy, ceases to exist.
It is, as I used to say among friends in high school, about keeping it real. When we – all of us – still believed that we could not only have dreams but we could live them too.
Next: Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head
Running for Your Life: More Why Paris
Written in the spirit of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”:
• Because the line about armed soldiers clearing passersby at Parc Beaubourg for no apparent reason, “Making the world safe to wear six-inch heels,” tickles M
• Because the views from the top floor of the Pompidou museum are more varied and historically evocative than anywhere else I can imagine
• Because the Pompidou offers free admission to card-carrying journalists (me!) and not to writers/college professors (M!)
• Because despite that, M loved every minute of our visit to the Pompidou
• Because the view we saw that night (June 13) in the Gerhard Richter show occurred after a sudden thunderstorm – with Saint-Exupery-esque clouds scudding across the sky. It was still light at 9:30 at night
• Because my left pant leg was soaking wet from the downpour, still-bothersome during the Matisse but magically dry during the dazzling Richter which hardly anyone was attending
• Because I stood before Richter’s “Funeral” for more than a beat before we left
• Because M speaks French not only well but with impeccable manners
• Because now I don’t have to feel guilty about not having seen The Best Picture “The Artist.” (I’ve seen enough Jack Russell-owning Frenchmen to more than satisfy)
• Because the wine seller, who sold us a delicious boutique pinot noir, remembered me fondly from the day that I lost (then found!) the apartment key during our very nearly ruined stay in the Marais last October
• Because the line, “We’ll always have Paris,” doesn’t seem corny to me
• Because the first excerpt I read of Paul Auster’s “Winter Journal” memoir was of his taxi driver encounter in Paris
• Because I can sit on the New York City subway and dream of Paris. Every day if I want to . . .
Next: Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real
Why Paris?
So you want to live in Park Slope Department
(Overheard while on a Prospect Park six-miler)
“I don’t even know if he is a guy.”
Why Paris?
It isn’t for the runners, all seemingly well to do and oh so many Americans contentedly running along the hushed-stone main paths of Parc Monceau.
Or the cobbled walkway along the Seine, which is both uneven and yields too many dead-ends into tunnels chock-a-block with cars, always bumper to bumper (at least in the one in which I ran for about a kilometer – not so smartly along a narrow ledge for emergencies, which cars zoomed past with zero regard to my foolish presence).
Or the rare bike lanes.
Or in certain arrondissement sidewalks where you’re just as likely to see a scooter as a person, driven by not just messengers and delivery folks as one finds in New York City but by all manner of men and women professionals in helmets, fast-moving burners who like New Yorkers seemed so much in a hurry but unlike New Yorkers unconditioned to seeing runners as they zip around the myriad blind corners of the old city.
Or for the prospects of running along the Canal Saint Martin, an inner city waterway that one would think would draw evening joggers, even more so to the north, the Canal de l’Ourcq, with its hushed-stone surfaces that make for pick-up bocce games. Not so much. At the northern end of Canal Saint Martin in June 2012 the Sally Ann deliver services to the down and out, all men, hungry-looking with pinched Orwellian faces, thirty clochards per evening runner.
Or for the tourists that clog up the Seine sidewalks at twilight, folks grabbing a postcard souvenir or a Tour Eiffel magnet for a 2 euro piece, and then back on the bus.
If I didn’t run in Paris I’d discover none of this. I’d be in Prospect Park. Or at the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery, listening to the squawk of the Quaker parrots. Paris is a place where running feels as unique as it did when I first started thirty-plus years ago. That is, except in Parc Monceau. Where if you care to run in USA-like 2012, be my guest.
Next: Running for Your Life: More Why Paris?
Running for Your Life: A Paris Dream
It’s two days into our visit, our first since October. (Why I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks; I’ve been pretty much off line since May 30). Jet-lagged, I awake from a long nap at 10 p.m. in our top-floor Paris apartment with horizon views of the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre.
From the bed I see that the dark, stormy cloud cover has changed. In its place, against the still-bright sky, is a cloud shape of an ancien regime French schoolgirl in a bonnet. I’m amazed, thinking that she is so long in the sky that she is permanent, but as I watch, now wide awake, she slowly changes to a cockroach-like bug about to be taken by a predator and then the cloud-play is swift: shifting to a toupee atop an ever-broadening face, and it is at this time that I see M is awake too, and she answers to my question, “Do you want to go out for a walk?” with a decisive “Yes!” – and in a half-hour we’re at the Seine, under the darkening sky, the cobbles streaked with rain, the place deserted beyond my wildest imagination and for one of the rare times during the past two weeks there are few clouds to be seen when I realize that it isn’t the late evening sun that had floodlit my cloud show but a full moon that is now high above Notre Dame Cathedral.
Next: Running for Your Life: Why Paris?
Running for Your Life: In Praise of Haruki
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Memorial Day Run With Thurb:
He’s better now – with the e-collar, doesn’t pull me, like a shopping cart coupled to freight train engine; it’s elementary and not seemingly hard on Ole UnReliable, not like he’s suddenly a rag dog when I use the e-collar device.
In any event, I go out on an ill-advised run, 90-plus degrees yet with a slight breeze at 7ish p.m., prime picnic time in Prospect Park.
Running for Your Life: Healthy Habits
Judging from my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, you'd never think America had a health problem. Even on Monday (May 21), a stormy day, a sheets-of-rain dumping associated with Tropical Storm Alberto, I darted outside during a lull and ran with Thurb in Prospect Park. In Park Slope, that's common. You'll find joggers and runners going up and down the Slope during all hours, especially in the warmer weather months like now. When you come upon overweight people on the street, or in cafes, etc., your first thought is: Hmm, must be an out of towner . . .
All of which, of course, helps me stay on course in my effort to keep healthy habits. If I'm surrounded by people jogging and eating well, etc., then it makes it easier to do so myself. Not just every-other day runs, alternating with cross-training days, but in nutritional choices. As I've written on the blog, I've been following the spirit of the diet prescriptions detailed in The Runner's Body http://bit.ly/MbZ8QR. I've also been enjoying higher energy levels, better sleeping, and most amazingly to me, an end to cravings for food and drink that do not fuel the runner's body: ie, trans-fat loaded potato chips, Diet Cokes, and more than one or two glasses of wine at night.
All of which, of course, helps me stay on course in my effort to keep healthy habits. If I'm surrounded by people jogging and eating well, etc., then it makes it easier to do so myself. Not just every-other day runs, alternating with cross-training days, but in nutritional choices. As I've written on the blog, I've been following the spirit of the diet prescriptions detailed in The Runner's Body http://bit.ly/MbZ8QR. I've also been enjoying higher energy levels, better sleeping, and most amazingly to me, an end to cravings for food and drink that do not fuel the runner's body: ie, trans-fat loaded potato chips, Diet Cokes, and more than one or two glasses of wine at night.
Running for Your Life: Thurber Gets It Going
We can take Thurber to early morning off-leash hours in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and despite the high level of play and doggie chaos, he will come to us when we call him.
Thurber! Come! And he comes.
At 8:30 a.m. on Mother’s Day, M and I sat on a grassy knoll and watched as Thoroughbred Thurb raced across the Long Meadow, his nose clipping the ground. For the first time since T arrived on the First Street scene in September 2010, M and I were relaxed in public with him, sipping our coffee, just watching him run.
K, at home from LA, was sleeping in her childhood room.
Later, over overpriced overdone Eggs Benedict, K’s eyes lit up with the story of it. That Thurber is finally – after many months of fits and starts – free to run. He is starting to put his fear at bay, thanks to Tyril and the e-collar http://bit.ly/KQaiel. (See Running for Your Life: Thurber Sketch)
Following Thurb’s park-perfect run in the Long Meadow, he actually walked along with us throughout the park.
Come! Thurb! And he comes.
With Tyril’s help, M, K and I have got to the point where our pup – two years old next month – hardly needs to be e-collar paged, nicked or constant-ed. He is simply with us, with the promise of many years like this: the beautiful redbone coonhound scampering at our side, giving pleasure and comfort to us all.
Next: Running for Your Life: Healthy Habits
Thurber! Come! And he comes.
At 8:30 a.m. on Mother’s Day, M and I sat on a grassy knoll and watched as Thoroughbred Thurb raced across the Long Meadow, his nose clipping the ground. For the first time since T arrived on the First Street scene in September 2010, M and I were relaxed in public with him, sipping our coffee, just watching him run.
K, at home from LA, was sleeping in her childhood room.
Later, over overpriced overdone Eggs Benedict, K’s eyes lit up with the story of it. That Thurber is finally – after many months of fits and starts – free to run. He is starting to put his fear at bay, thanks to Tyril and the e-collar http://bit.ly/KQaiel. (See Running for Your Life: Thurber Sketch)
Following Thurb’s park-perfect run in the Long Meadow, he actually walked along with us throughout the park.
Come! Thurb! And he comes.
With Tyril’s help, M, K and I have got to the point where our pup – two years old next month – hardly needs to be e-collar paged, nicked or constant-ed. He is simply with us, with the promise of many years like this: the beautiful redbone coonhound scampering at our side, giving pleasure and comfort to us all.
Next: Running for Your Life: Healthy Habits
Running for Your Life: May Beckons
Road notes after a seven-miler:
POPLAR lookalike leaves on street trees, 36th Street up-slope from Fifth Avenue, not many, past the entrance to the Jackie Gleason bus and train depot, and along to where the road levels, a wink at Lady Liberty before the stretch you’ve earned – all downhill to Fort Hamilton Parkway, the poplars give way to .¤.¤.
LINDENS, 90-odd of them and on this misty day (May 2) I imagine I’m back in Belgium, where running tree-lined roads in the rain yields a meditative calm, the illusion that on those grounds my distant forefathers rode on mercenary quests, or as farmers, dug in the earth, a fertile past and its personal contours .¤.¤.
NOT so in Brooklyn, the country lindens in the city only a simulacrum, as in the Green-Wood Cemetery, at one time the second-most visited public destination in New York state behind only Niagara Falls, but now .¤.¤.
POPLAR lookalike leaves on street trees, 36th Street up-slope from Fifth Avenue, not many, past the entrance to the Jackie Gleason bus and train depot, and along to where the road levels, a wink at Lady Liberty before the stretch you’ve earned – all downhill to Fort Hamilton Parkway, the poplars give way to .¤.¤.
LINDENS, 90-odd of them and on this misty day (May 2) I imagine I’m back in Belgium, where running tree-lined roads in the rain yields a meditative calm, the illusion that on those grounds my distant forefathers rode on mercenary quests, or as farmers, dug in the earth, a fertile past and its personal contours .¤.¤.
NOT so in Brooklyn, the country lindens in the city only a simulacrum, as in the Green-Wood Cemetery, at one time the second-most visited public destination in New York state behind only Niagara Falls, but now .¤.¤.
Running for Your Life: Thurber Sketch
It’s May and I’m back to running Thurb, our impassioned manic mutt, Old UnReliable (That’s him at right), for the past six days, he’s been in “school” with the redoubtable Tyril, the dog whisperer of Brooklyn http://bit.ly/JcOKY4.
We’ve tried everything, of course, well everything but Tyril and the e-collar, but now that's what we're doing: paging, nicks and constants – not shocks, you understand, but carefully chosen mood adjusters, with an agreed-upon outcome that will satisfy not only M and me but Thurb and Tyril. Because if Thurb is going to be our dog then he has to be a pet we can manage, not one that we walk with trepidation, eyes in the back of our head, anxious in such a way that Thurb picks up on it, because dogs, especially finely bred hounds (or so says our pal, Tyril) like Thurb sense everything, don’t they? Body smells of anxiety and fears, such that only ramps up Old UnReliable’s own innate fear, because on the first day of school Tyril diagnosed that that was what was setting him off: fear. Not feeling secure in his body when confronted by anyone or anything that stirs his poor anxious soul. (And even in his own home, or in our bedroom, you know when he gets that look, it can only be a second and then .¤.¤. Watch out !!)
Running for Your Life: After Boston
My pal and original thinker Mike Tully http://bit.ly/hRtDDq has a thought about why it is that the older you get the faster time seems to go by. Coach Tully, who has made a close study of sports psychology (and is a high-demand public speaker on coaching, with an emphasis on athletic improvement), believes it may have something to do with the brain’s RAS, or reticular activating system.
As we age and get even more set in our ways (as most us do), our evolved RAS kicks in and our daily stimuli becomes so familiar that time appears to pass more quickly than it did when we were younger. (It is why, CT says, the drive home from an unfamiliar destination always seems noticeably shorter than the journey over foreign territory to get there. When you return, the course is known – it lacks surprise – and thus the time feels more compressed, even though it is virtually the same in physical length.)
Running for Your Life: More Boston
It’s been a week now since the Boston Marathon. What was it like?
I can’t imagine another four thousand runners on that course. As it was about four thousand stayed home because of the heat (and that the race administrator assured them that their qualifying times could be carried over until Boston 2013). Ninety degrees at its worst at the midpoint and beyond, to the throngs that ring the final four miles, screaming so much and so loud that they must have been hoarse with all the “Go! Go! Go!, You’re Looking Great! You’re a Hero!” My left foot – yes, again – was killing me, had been for a long time, but in that final four miles, Mile 22 and on, a little bit more than four, of course, 385 yards, that’s the length of almost four US football fields, so after twenty-six it is more than a kick, and then it’s Boylston Street, and yeah, let the tears flow because you made it, OC, not only made it but you’ve got enough left to run it, pass more runners than pass you. What is time? Past, present and future all in, which speaks to the signs on the route, Wellesley’s All In, Newton’s All In, Brookline’s All In.
The third-hottest Boston Marathon on record, for the first seven miles, precious little room on the packed course to even manage heel strikes, hard to find a rhythm, do what you’d trained yourself to do to ease the foot pain, feel the full foot, the toes, buy the barefoot running bargain, but no matter what you try to do the pain comes early, feeling it at 10K, and murder beyond.
Hell, yes, I stopped to walk; once, at about Mile 17, next to a man with a Canadian flag on his tunic, gray-haired guy like me and we talk about the Toronto Marathon coming up in October, gotta be better weather than this, and I say to him in sort of a pledge that I hope I can cross the finish line on a run at least. It’s so hot flimsy plastic cups lie in the gutter in melted clumps.
“Survive first,” he said. Good advice. As were the words from the woman at Mile 3 in Ashland, Mass.: “Save some for later,” and the best yet, the runner I've come to refer to as the race camp director at Mile 12, 13 and 14, before he was swallowed up in the crowd, loudly telling all of us around him to “Reset your posture! ... Arms in the air! . . . Just run a mile at a time!”
Everyone (all 22,480 of us) with a single goal to finish (21,606 did!) and the crowds willing us on. The “Kiss Me” sign gang at Wellesley, the myriad garden hosers, in each and every town on Route 135, the fire department had set out freezing water Swedish massage spray tents.
After my talk with my Canadian friend at Mile 17, I didn’t stop and walk again, only to Gatorade and water up and to take ice shards from blue bags held out by roadside angels and put the ice bits in my hat, helping to keep the body temp down – not something I fully understood then, but later that some runners finished with temps of 101 and higher, the threat of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, organ failure, something that very well could have happened – but the water stations, the fist-pumps, the waves of cheers, thousands upon thousands of well-wishers out there in the sweltering heat were magic as antidote.
And it all comes down to Bolyston Street, where in the final near four football field stretch that I put it out there, all that I had to give so that when I crossed the finish line I did so at a pace that was like the beginning in a way that I’ve come to think of time on this day being like one big every retreating second. One (that the image at right would seem to suggest) I will never forget.
Running for Your Life: After Boston
Running for Your Life: Boston Results!
Fini! The third-hottest Boston Marathon on record (97 in 1909; 100 in 1976), with temps climbing to low-90s. Am sore today, the day after, and pleased with my showing, 4:03:27, good enough for 307th among the 1,078 finishers in my age group. It is a day I will never forget ..! Thanks so much for all your wonderfully supporting comments, Facebook likes and otherwise. Especially on a day like yesterday, they were definitely an inspiration!
Running for Your Life: After Boston
Running for Your Life: After Boston
Running for Your Life: A Look Back
I got stuck on a phrase at MOMA’s “Exquisite Corpses: Drawings and Disfiguration.” It was used in a wall reference describing the rotund, planetary-like images of Hans Bellmer: “Accommodating and limitless docility.” Immediately I thought of the manatees milling around a warm water runoff spout at a Florida Power and Light Co. facilty that M, K and I liked to visit when we’d go south to stay with R & S, M’s parents. How drawn I was to the manatees. “Accommodating and limitless docility,” a state of mind where stress is as foreign as an iceberg in the Sahara. Rolling drifting looking but not seeing. Simply being sentient.
On Monday morning I’ll be looking to tap my inner manatee. I’ve trained in such a way that running – even for as long as three and a half hours – is the equivalent of rolling drifting looking but not seeing. Simply being sentient. Where there is no injury and no stress, there can be no pain. I have come to believe that I have done what I have set out to do and that is to be ready to run for hours. Not to race. But to be inside myself.
On Monday morning I’ll be looking to tap my inner manatee. I’ve trained in such a way that running – even for as long as three and a half hours – is the equivalent of rolling drifting looking but not seeing. Simply being sentient. Where there is no injury and no stress, there can be no pain. I have come to believe that I have done what I have set out to do and that is to be ready to run for hours. Not to race. But to be inside myself.
Running for Your Life: Down to the Wire
I just liked Lonesome George on Facebook. I would DEFINITELY follow him if he had a Twitter account.
The reason being, Lonesome George, the Galapagos tortoise, is about one hundred years old, but he doesn't look a day over forty. He just keeps motoring along. Imagine his tweets ... You can keep Lady Gaga, Alec Baldwin, Madonna, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lawrence. Lonesome George ... Now THOSE would be some awesome tweets.
The reason being, Lonesome George, the Galapagos tortoise, is about one hundred years old, but he doesn't look a day over forty. He just keeps motoring along. Imagine his tweets ... You can keep Lady Gaga, Alec Baldwin, Madonna, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Lawrence. Lonesome George ... Now THOSE would be some awesome tweets.
Running for Your Life: Finally, It’s April
Running a good pace on Manhattan streets is no mindless trot. And it makes sense, doesn’t it, I mean it’s understandable that most pedestrians are inclined to be on the lookout for fellow walking folk on city sidewalks, not necessarily food-delivery bike guys, or up tempo runners like me. It makes for defensive running – and varies the step, which in the end might be what the doctor ordered for me, in terms of managing my consistent (but oh so much less than last year) foot pain.
Have you ever watched as a smartphone user power-walking along, not paying any attention to where they are going, collide full-force in the face with a lamp standard or signpost? I saw one guy literally staggered by the blow to the head. I swear the impact of the collision should’ve knocked him out. I asked if he was okay, and for a moment anyway, he turned away from his iPhone long enough to say, “These phones are going to be the death of me.”
Not that there is anything wrong with that. That is as long as he doesn’t take anyone else with him.
(Me, I remain a Luddite holdout. My "tablet" discovery is the iPad-sized Moleskine notebook with a spine so flexible and durable that it makes for the most efficient subway writing imaginable !!)
Have you ever watched as a smartphone user power-walking along, not paying any attention to where they are going, collide full-force in the face with a lamp standard or signpost? I saw one guy literally staggered by the blow to the head. I swear the impact of the collision should’ve knocked him out. I asked if he was okay, and for a moment anyway, he turned away from his iPhone long enough to say, “These phones are going to be the death of me.”
Not that there is anything wrong with that. That is as long as he doesn’t take anyone else with him.
(Me, I remain a Luddite holdout. My "tablet" discovery is the iPad-sized Moleskine notebook with a spine so flexible and durable that it makes for the most efficient subway writing imaginable !!)
Running for Your Life: Terry Fox and EJ Scott
Terry Fox is my hero. In Canada, where I’m from, he is a legend. A runner who, to raise money and awareness surrounding the cancer that was killing him, started to run across Canada.
I was a few years older than Terry when he began his trek in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, and he kept at it. He wasn’t setting any land speed records (unless you count the category of one-legged male runners because in that league he was peerless). He made it to Thunder Bay, Ontario, 3,340 miles from the starting line on Sept. 1, 1980. He died a month short of his 23rd birthday in 1981. His Marathon of Hope lives on though; the annual Terry Fox Run, first held in 1981, has grown to involve millions of participants in over sixty countries and is now the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research; over $500 million has been raised in his name.
I was a few years older than Terry when he began his trek in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, and he kept at it. He wasn’t setting any land speed records (unless you count the category of one-legged male runners because in that league he was peerless). He made it to Thunder Bay, Ontario, 3,340 miles from the starting line on Sept. 1, 1980. He died a month short of his 23rd birthday in 1981. His Marathon of Hope lives on though; the annual Terry Fox Run, first held in 1981, has grown to involve millions of participants in over sixty countries and is now the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research; over $500 million has been raised in his name.
Running for Your Life: Tales During the Taper
I know I had set up to write about Running to Harlem. Well, outside of reporting that I did it. (Not only did I run toward Harlem, as in the 125th Street entrance off the Henry Hudson Parkway, but I made it there!) And then turned around and ran back to our Brooklyn home, with only one stop to refill my water bottle at a rest area just south of the 79th Street Boat Basin, the only watering hole I could find that day along the Hudson River Park. (I was carrying a strap-affixed fist-size bottle that I'd bought earlier that day; I also wore a Velcro-compression strap on my left knee to keep my patella from wandering.) The conditions were perfect, thank goodness; cool and misty. A cyclist gave me an encouraging smile when I was striding north near the cruise ship berths in the 40s. And if it is the first and last time I run to Harlem, I will always have the slender beauty of the flowering fruit trees along the river that Friday afternoon (March 16), about ten blocks below my turnaround spot, where remarkably I had the place to myself.
Running for Your Life: One Month Away
Poem
An Immigrant from Krygyzstan Takes her First MTA Subway Ride on the D Train, 12:25 p.m., 3/08/12
Click, clack
Click, clack
Bump, bump
Kticketa, ticketa ticketa
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Whoosh
Static, giggle, hush
Too! Tune!
Click, clack
Click, clack,
Rumble, irrumble
Too! Tune!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Mutter
Static He – he – he – he
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ka-choo!
Hong! Hong!
I might be losing it. It’s been two years that I’ve either been training for a marathon or recovering from the training for a marathon. Wednesday (March 14), I ran the equivalent of a half-marathon at a race pace (in Steamtown 2010, it was 8:08 per mile). The body is holding up (with the exception, on runs of 10 miles or more, of a cranky left knee that flares up a bit after I get home, but a half-hour of ice compress seems to put it right . . . ) but the mind? Obviously, (see above poem) there’s a case to be made that it may never be the same.
An Immigrant from Krygyzstan Takes her First MTA Subway Ride on the D Train, 12:25 p.m., 3/08/12
Click, clack
Click, clack
Bump, bump
Kticketa, ticketa ticketa
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Whoosh
Static, giggle, hush
Too! Tune!
Click, clack
Click, clack,
Rumble, irrumble
Too! Tune!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Mutter
Static He – he – he – he
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ka-choo!
Hong! Hong!
I might be losing it. It’s been two years that I’ve either been training for a marathon or recovering from the training for a marathon. Wednesday (March 14), I ran the equivalent of a half-marathon at a race pace (in Steamtown 2010, it was 8:08 per mile). The body is holding up (with the exception, on runs of 10 miles or more, of a cranky left knee that flares up a bit after I get home, but a half-hour of ice compress seems to put it right . . . ) but the mind? Obviously, (see above poem) there’s a case to be made that it may never be the same.
Running for Your Life: Roadwork & Free Radicals
“If you left your laptop and muffin from Starbucks at the Recombulation Area, please contact an airport official and arrange to retrieve them.”
– Public address announcement at the Milwaukee international airport, Sunday, March 3
You never know what you’re going to see on the road. Last weekend M and I went to Chicago and Milwaukee to visit family. Rather than rent a car we took a northbound Amtrak train and then, the next day, an airplane home to Brooklyn.
I wish I were running alongside the train, and if I were, this is what I would have been thinking about:
• A sprightly looking sign says, “Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly.”
• Train bed rise through historic manufacturing and warehouse district, an urban outlaw paradise. Red brick manufacturing buildings, no more than three stories, probably two.
• “Chicago Dryer Company: the Global Leader in Flatwork Finishing Innovations”
– Public address announcement at the Milwaukee international airport, Sunday, March 3
You never know what you’re going to see on the road. Last weekend M and I went to Chicago and Milwaukee to visit family. Rather than rent a car we took a northbound Amtrak train and then, the next day, an airplane home to Brooklyn.
I wish I were running alongside the train, and if I were, this is what I would have been thinking about:
• A sprightly looking sign says, “Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly.”
• Train bed rise through historic manufacturing and warehouse district, an urban outlaw paradise. Red brick manufacturing buildings, no more than three stories, probably two.
• “Chicago Dryer Company: the Global Leader in Flatwork Finishing Innovations”
Running for Your Life: Alone Together
I’m struck by the idea of relevance. A new e-mail publication, or paid content that lights up your inbox on a regular basis, called Inside Hook, is devoted to the idea that men in their 40s need the equivalent of a social director on a cruise ship (presumably because in your 40s, as opposed to your 20s, you are saddled with non-hip responsibilities, aka, a wife, children, a dog, an income-producing job . . .)
This is why, it seems to me, Barney Rosset (see picture at right, and previous post) never failed to amaze me. As far as I was concerned, Barney, who passed away on Feb. 21, was always doing the equivalent of sitting on a park bench and reading manuscripts while the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso looked on. Another martini? Why the hell not? When you are the outlaw/badass of Manhattan publishing, what the hell do you need with the Inside Hook? You are the Inside Hook . . .
This is why, it seems to me, Barney Rosset (see picture at right, and previous post) never failed to amaze me. As far as I was concerned, Barney, who passed away on Feb. 21, was always doing the equivalent of sitting on a park bench and reading manuscripts while the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso looked on. Another martini? Why the hell not? When you are the outlaw/badass of Manhattan publishing, what the hell do you need with the Inside Hook? You are the Inside Hook . . .
Running for Your Life: The Life of Barney
The crows are circling high above the tree line, and the Quaker parrots that I always hear but rarely see are ruffle-feathered, a pair outside their condo nest, the morning after Barney died. Barney Rosset. Aged 89. Today (Feb. 22) is not just another day.
We, his family and friends, didn’t expect this. Not now. Just this past weekend we were all there in Manhattan’s civic chapel waiting area on Worth Street. Barney was too much a storyteller of the here and now to say our wait was like Godot. Still, to mention it would elicit that naughty, subversive, snake-like smile. (In an interview, Barney called himself “an amoeba with a brain.”) He wasn’t one to hold a grudge against someone for making such a lame reference.
We, his family and friends, didn’t expect this. Not now. Just this past weekend we were all there in Manhattan’s civic chapel waiting area on Worth Street. Barney was too much a storyteller of the here and now to say our wait was like Godot. Still, to mention it would elicit that naughty, subversive, snake-like smile. (In an interview, Barney called himself “an amoeba with a brain.”) He wasn’t one to hold a grudge against someone for making such a lame reference.
Running for Your Life: Intrepid Route
Musings from the road: 60 days! before the Boston Marathon.
Here’s a snippet of a post from last year at this time. Mid-February:
“My right leg, still tender, if I didn’t know better I’d be thinking blood clot, the pain is so sharp at times, but I’ve done my bit, stretched and strengthened like never before, and as I head out again – six-miler, easy pace, fifty/fifty-five minutes – right away feel the inner-thigh muscle tighten, not easing as it always does, it’s the cold, I tell myself as I slow down, listen to my body, as the running mavens say, and the muscle holds in its tightness; a drummer knowing the tone of the bass drum is off, the tension too tight, but not so that I can’t get through the set. I need this gig. It's Week One, and the show, if there is going to be the show in April, must go on.”
Here’s a snippet of a post from last year at this time. Mid-February:
“My right leg, still tender, if I didn’t know better I’d be thinking blood clot, the pain is so sharp at times, but I’ve done my bit, stretched and strengthened like never before, and as I head out again – six-miler, easy pace, fifty/fifty-five minutes – right away feel the inner-thigh muscle tighten, not easing as it always does, it’s the cold, I tell myself as I slow down, listen to my body, as the running mavens say, and the muscle holds in its tightness; a drummer knowing the tone of the bass drum is off, the tension too tight, but not so that I can’t get through the set. I need this gig. It's Week One, and the show, if there is going to be the show in April, must go on.”
Running for Your Life: Chasing the February Blahs
What is it about February? Even this one, a third over and temperatures have been closer to 50s than even 40s. Not balmy, of course .¤.¤. For the past three months not able to go out the door in anything but an overcoat of some kind; this uniform that we all wear: the navys and blacks and charcoal grays, in New York commuting for as often as I do the subway company I keep more funeral parlor than rumpus room.
Why do we grow up and into these Beckettian uniforms from the primary colors of kindergarten? (As a toddler I had a smashing ruby red shorts and harness outfit that I wore when tooling around on my fire-engine red tricycle .¤.¤. Now I don’t even own a stitch of clothing that’s red.)
Why do we grow up and into these Beckettian uniforms from the primary colors of kindergarten? (As a toddler I had a smashing ruby red shorts and harness outfit that I wore when tooling around on my fire-engine red tricycle .¤.¤. Now I don’t even own a stitch of clothing that’s red.)
Running for Your Life: Notes from the Long Ones
Marathon training – now up to 38-plus miles per week – tests your mind as well as your body. On my runs through Brooklyn and Manhattan, especially on the one day a week that I put on extra miles (this week I’m up to 14 miles per long run; I plan to bump that up a mile or so every week for the next eight weeks before Boston), I see the darnedest things:
On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.
In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.
On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.
In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.
Running for Your Life: Training, A Recap
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the body. Not in a Golden Globe kind of way, though. As in how fabulous Jane Fonda looks or get a load of Angelina Jolie’s bone-thin arms; the supermarket tabs really do have it right, she must be starving herself, the camera cutaway to hubbie Brad, train-seal clapping at his waste-away woman.
No, the body as vessel. Something that you think you know, but is more than likely a stranger to you. It is most common to just go along doing the same things to our bodies and they, of course, do what comes naturally: adding a pound or two each year after twenty-five so that a 120-pound woman at a quarter-century is a normal-enough-looking 155-pound woman at a half-century. BMI (Body Mass Index not fab, but not obese either .¤.¤.)
No, the body as vessel. Something that you think you know, but is more than likely a stranger to you. It is most common to just go along doing the same things to our bodies and they, of course, do what comes naturally: adding a pound or two each year after twenty-five so that a 120-pound woman at a quarter-century is a normal-enough-looking 155-pound woman at a half-century. BMI (Body Mass Index not fab, but not obese either .¤.¤.)
Running for Your Life: Key West Beat
Back from Key West, the Conch Republic, where the captains who run the sunset sails thrill their predominantly Boomer fare with the knee-slapper, “Welcome to North Cuba!”, upon return in the darkness because for most of us land lubbers it’s more than a little disorienting out there, for an hour out of the sandbank and mangrove low-water keys, the Gulf Stream visible the night we see the sun sink into the horizon and the captain blows the conch so that his face glows purple in contrast to the blood-orange of the sunset, all aboard the AppleBone, as poet Billy Collins dubbed it, because it was a literary cruise, not like the Disney one, a floating theme park that moored near our oceanfront balcony, ESPN Sports Center on a giant screen topside blaring into the otherwise romantic night; shallow draught Caribbean port bruisers these beasts; how they get into the slips with water deep as elderly knickers is anybody’s guess, and a frightening thought that the town fathers have been considering allowing 10,000-passenger monsters into port (although the Italian cruise disaster may put an end to that . . .), which if that doesn’t kill whatever charm north to central Duval Street has left then I’m a monkey’s uncle, not to mention the safety of the cruise ships themselves, don’t begin to think that the capsizing of the Costa Concordia is an anomaly, the physics of these boats leaving no margin for error, turn away if you see the chalkboard math on the probability of it happening again, and especially in a place like Key West, where you do have to ask the question, “Well, how many people can drown in two feet of water?”
Running for Your Life: Quietude and Plenitude
My hero Bessie Doenges didn’t live long enough to witness the cultural sanctification of Steve Jobs, the wizard god of gadgets (See previous post, “Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited”). The sole misgiving of that fact being that she didn’t weigh in on Jobs’ contribution to the affairs of women. And, baby, when it came to weighing cultural contributions, Bessie delivered the goods.
Bessie Doenges penned Bessie Writes. Well, actually, no. Bessie typed on an ancient manual Olympia her 250-word Bessie Writes columns that she then mailed (with a stamp and envelope that she bought with her writer’s wages, $20 per column) to me, her editor at The Westsider and Chelsea Clinton News, two Manhattan-based weekly newspapers that I ran in the early to mid-1990s. Here’s a sample. Not a column, but a letter to me, typed on that Olympia. I keep it in a place of honor at my desk:
Dear Larry: 10/17/94
These true stories of mine are 400 words, not 200 which you seem to prefer. I got my guts in them. I don’t write easily. I hope you’ll give them space. In our Senior Center they will be on a bulletin board with my picture next week. I love you.
Bessie
P.S. I managed to get it on one page after all.
Bessie Doenges penned Bessie Writes. Well, actually, no. Bessie typed on an ancient manual Olympia her 250-word Bessie Writes columns that she then mailed (with a stamp and envelope that she bought with her writer’s wages, $20 per column) to me, her editor at The Westsider and Chelsea Clinton News, two Manhattan-based weekly newspapers that I ran in the early to mid-1990s. Here’s a sample. Not a column, but a letter to me, typed on that Olympia. I keep it in a place of honor at my desk:
Dear Larry: 10/17/94
These true stories of mine are 400 words, not 200 which you seem to prefer. I got my guts in them. I don’t write easily. I hope you’ll give them space. In our Senior Center they will be on a bulletin board with my picture next week. I love you.
Bessie
P.S. I managed to get it on one page after all.
Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited
In the clear light of 2012, let’s return to the Jobs Front. Steve Jobs, that is. Where even today, almost three months since he died on Oct. 5 (my birthday), he is making headlines. As in, the next big buzz-busting day in the Apple universe, rumored to be Feb. 24th (he would’ve been 57 that day), the firm (today at 2:15 p.m. [Jan. 3], the first trading day in 2012, up 1.4 percent, $410.76 a share) will launch its iPad 3.
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:
“A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”
“He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”
And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”
Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4
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