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?

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?