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?