Running for Your Life: Resolutions for 2013

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

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