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 

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