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.
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”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)