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

What limits me to these selections is the very real sense that for the seven or eight hours of pitch-black night, rats, not people, rule this domain. The prospect of scooping up a black plastic bag (inordinately the bags on this training route are shiny noir not the white with red logo variety that dominates my Park Slope neighborhood) and finding a rat in situ, having taken up temporary residency, deters me from this course of action.

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