So you want to live in Park Slope department:A principal mating ritual in Park Slope winter: Adult female wearing the bright orange glow-in-the-dark PARK SLOPE FOOD CO-OP traffic vest as an ass-hugging skirt.
Prospectors, land. Natives, land too. In the case of this blog, mental geography. How on recent mild weather runs what I feel inside is my first run as a New York City resident, not a visitor, there had been plenty of those. But twenty-five years ago on a run around the reservoir at Central Park during a peculiar swath of Indian summer weather so much like today (Dec. 22) when I ran for an hour around Green-Wood Cemetery that it brought the earlier run flooding back to mind, and not just as a passive memory but as an active reality, as real as anything that is this run I lay claim to that person who was in that moment in December 1988. We are one I think as I run because I am always letting the surroundings I see and feel dictate the mental terrain. It is what I mean about claiming space. It is what we have done in the West. Whether as white invaders (prospectors and settlers) or native activists seeking land stolen in treaties or long-distance runners laying claim to mental space, to geography in the mind.
In this spirit, consider this as a new year’s resolution. When next you hear the phrase, mental loss, find a way to change the conversation. There is a power in words. I have a dream that one day when we Google the phrase “mental gain” it will appear as often as “mental loss.” Here is one of the lessons I learned from the brilliant short story writer DW Wilson, whose recent collection, “Once You Break A Knuckle,” http://bit.ly/19KIfL7 includes the story “The Persistence.” In it is the life lesson, Persistence Beats Resistance. And how. There are ways to fire the brain through natural means so that mental gain can be a reality. Or so I believe, and man, there is a world of power in that.
Best of the season, everyone!
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
Running for Your Life: Claim Space
Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to Take a Week Off
Sometimes I’m not running. Say after I blew out my hamstring in February 2011. Or for two days to rest my body, which doth protest, especially as I nudge the fringe of sixty, for days, no weeks, after I take it on the road for its annual punishment, twenty-six miles of running, hard and fast enough so that I manage a sub 9-minute mile pace, never many days am I away from running, until, early in December, a week to ten days were the doctor’s orders, not-running or exercising, my first significant time away since pre-training for the Boston Marathon 2011 left me with the blown hamstring, and for the past two years hence, I’ve done a 60-set of evening pushups and at least three days a week running, so what was I to do?
Funny, how when I read back these notes I’m struck primarily by hubris of numbers – nine-minute mile, 60-set pushups – and place, Boston, when the reality of my running is much less and then more than these details, how to “Geoff Dyer” the results, the outcomes, that while the journey is so seen and, thus, accomplished, that it yields to that one dimensional reportage, why I often find it dull to read non-fiction, just the facts, ma’am, and analysis that is so ordinary and lame in its ordinariness to fail to pass the GD test, What do you feel that is as transporting as a run, the runs I do, in any case, because, especially during that week of not-running, cannot for a moment imagine what it is to be in a group, one in which, say, you put bells on to run, the Jingle Bell Jog was held during my not-running time, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with me the run is a quiet time, mine own, a form of worship without father, I’m a mile in, that’s nine minutes, thirty outdoor or twenty indoor to follow, those life-total minutes, near-countless now, I find myself in that space of no time, what David Grossman writes in “Falling Out of Time,” http://bit.ly/1gJcs1d, eventually, without apology, I could in rapture see myself enveloped in a hole in the ground, convincing me that inside are those who I’ve sought and are either in Toronto, Owen Sound, Chicago, Croatia, then those dead and gone, but I don’t have the words, they are nearly as alive to me in the solitude of my running than those who I’m with every day, M, K and T. “Geoff Dyer” the results; what are these photos of Victorian-era northern places http://bit.ly/1bfes9D taken by whom, that there is an inner feeling that comes off them, that they are not objects of simple age but rather embued with the spirit of those times and cannot be seen unless you’ve meditated solely on them.There is a holy act that takes you, often at great effort to launch from ennui or a general tiredness, out
for a run on a cold day. Shake it off. Stride. Years ago, it was true. I could be faster. Not now.
Now. I. Simply. Must. Run. It is what shapes my life. The air I breathe.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter
Put on your shorts, shoes, the lot, zipper leggings and short down jacket, run out the door and into the neighborhood gym or the Y, take off the outerwear. Run on the treadmill. ... Repeat through mid-March, or until the temp highs hit, say, the 50s until next December.
Next: Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to take a week off
Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf
So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard climbing the GAP hill in Prospect Park, bikers, training in their team gear, “I was biking in a small town . . . in the south of France when a older French woman stopped me …”Next: Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter
It’s been too long. Prime season and all. Leaf-catching season. I’d like to think it’s about opportunity that I haven’t caught a leaf in a few seasons now. For a variety of reasons I’ve been out running in late October and November less often than in past years, and maybe it’s just bad luck, these blustery days when leaves are falling, a week of such weather and fully twenty to thirty percent of the prime specimens, whirlings, corkscrew their way to the ground and inevitably I’m not there, dunno where, but not in the park; there was a time when I didn’t have to keep track, every hand-to-leaf season I’d catch cleanly – not trap with my body, and rules are clear – only park leaves, those in the public domain are eligible, at least one leaf would not feel the humiliation, the despoliation of hitting the ground, held aloft only by the catching hand, and tacked to the cork board that hangs above my basement writing desk.
It’s not the end of the season. I may yet get my leaf. It is harder to catch while running with Thurber, and that too, may be a factor. I dunno. Soon, though, I’ll get my next leaf. It’s been more than six weeks since Steamtown – and most of those nasty post-marathon aches and strains are ebbing. It’s fun. And a whole lot more satisfying than any running app could be.
Running for Your Life: Upstate With Thurber
Among the many benefits of working for a full-on tabloid (headlines: ESTUPIDO GIGANTE; graphics that, no kidding, have depicted a teachers’ union president as a dominatrix with collars on two hedge fund bosses) is browsing the novel-discard table. Hard to imagine how writers get the attention they deserve when the conversation about literature in today’s society is as noteworthy as a house fly on a heap of putrefying garbage, all the more reason that when you find something fabulous it is notable not only for its fabulousness but for the very real thrill of reading something that pretty much nobody in New York City knows anything about, cue deep throb of human nature, akin to the smugness at the perceived underachievement of childhood friends, their sense of their failure to measure up to the apparent fullness of your life, at least as my current society (New York, New Yorker) gatekeepers would score it.
- A boy with a Superman hair curlicue, ’do parted on the side and short, a la Clark Kent, in a herringbone jacket too small for him, the whitest sneakers this side of a cancer ward and black skinny jeans, Dunkin’ Donuts paper bag on the subway floor, white cup with raised drink spout – DEEP into the opening pages of the Ayn Rand paperback, “Atlas Shrugged.”
- Ah, the pick-up book. It is The Voyage by Murray Bail http://bit.ly/HxXHPF by a London imprint Quercus: married up to a novel I’m reading before bed, Mating by Norman Rush, http://amzn.to/1hk12Sy, back in a novelist’s frame of mind, having finished the massive and without mercy, The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston http://nyti.ms/1gscY3j, during my months of marathon training, the subject as sober and as dark and as shocking as the title suggests.
Thurber and Mary and I went for a road trip to Poughkeepsie, Millbrook, Cold Spring and Peekskill in October. We didn’t run, Thurber and I. But for a brief time on a swath of the Appalachian Trail, Thurber did scale a rock and scrub pine outcropping and stood on the top for more than a beat, a view before him that had to be so awesome that it was worth it, all these years now, of walking him during our routine park strolls, to see him up there, free as a bird …
Next: Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf
Running for Your Life: The Road Back
At dawn after the marathon the parrots came. On fall mornings the Quaker parrots that nest in the Green-Wood Cemetery main entrance arch and the nearby Con Ed substation, the parrots fly through our neighborhood, announcing themselves by squawking, a din easily distinguished from the jays and crows who also pass by and sometimes roost for awhile in our massive oak tree, leaves brush the house’s back wall, the other side of which I heard the parrots’ call that morning.
It was much different than other days. In fact, I had never heard the parrots at dawn. I woke with a start and in that moment listening to the parrots the pain and aches in my legs eased. It was only a moment before the worst of the pain returned. I couldn’t help but think that the parrots had come for a reason. Lying in bed, I thought, yes, something essential had been misplaced this past many months. At some point or other I’d let the idea of my being a marathoner, a man who could not only complete a 26.2 mile race but do so with distinction, define a large part of myself. In focusing on time and finishing place I’d left the parrots behind. How long had it been since I’d thought of running as bird-flying. To look into the sky as I run, to contemplate the hawk on the hunt, the soaring gulls, and most important, how long had it been since I’d gone on a run with a principal goal of seeing the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood in all kinds of weather.
Today (October 23) marks the ninth day since Steamtown, the first of which I ran more than thirty minutes, and yes, the Green-Wood parrots were there, a small flock of five on the most beautiful, fresh fall day. I smiled and felt a certain lift as I came back to running for my life.
Next: Running for Your Life: Upstate with Thurber
It was much different than other days. In fact, I had never heard the parrots at dawn. I woke with a start and in that moment listening to the parrots the pain and aches in my legs eased. It was only a moment before the worst of the pain returned. I couldn’t help but think that the parrots had come for a reason. Lying in bed, I thought, yes, something essential had been misplaced this past many months. At some point or other I’d let the idea of my being a marathoner, a man who could not only complete a 26.2 mile race but do so with distinction, define a large part of myself. In focusing on time and finishing place I’d left the parrots behind. How long had it been since I’d thought of running as bird-flying. To look into the sky as I run, to contemplate the hawk on the hunt, the soaring gulls, and most important, how long had it been since I’d gone on a run with a principal goal of seeing the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood in all kinds of weather.
Today (October 23) marks the ninth day since Steamtown, the first of which I ran more than thirty minutes, and yes, the Green-Wood parrots were there, a small flock of five on the most beautiful, fresh fall day. I smiled and felt a certain lift as I came back to running for my life.
Next: Running for Your Life: Upstate with Thurber
Running for Your Life: Half of One Percenters
Yesterday (Oct. 13), I did, indeed, run the Steamtown Marathon http://bit.ly/1emaLmv, and although I may not have done what I had hoped for at the outset (ie, managing a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:40 – best roadside sign of the day – You are ALL running better than the government!), I did come to a satisfying conclusion.
That in spirit I am a runner, not a racer. My time, 3:50:31, or 760th of 2,166 finishers, is something to be proud of. And I am. But there is something more.
At the end of the marathon, after a street food Philly cheesesteak, a shower in the Catholic high school boys locker room, and before hazarding the drive home in which, I thank my lucky stars I didn’t cramp up on the three-hour journey back to Brooklyn, I went to watch runners coming in at the finish line. The 5-hour-plus runners were nearing the end of their race. Here, I saw a dad runner, cradling one infant boy, the other is walking beside him. (The boys likely entered the course only a few yards before I saw them.) This man had done what I had just done, run a marathon. I turned to go to the car thinking a photo finish will be taken of the three of them.
These days the phrase one percenter has been co-opted by the class warriors. There are the wealthy, the one percenters, and the rest of us.
Then, there are the half of one-percenters. Those who have run a marathon.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Road Back
That in spirit I am a runner, not a racer. My time, 3:50:31, or 760th of 2,166 finishers, is something to be proud of. And I am. But there is something more.
At the end of the marathon, after a street food Philly cheesesteak, a shower in the Catholic high school boys locker room, and before hazarding the drive home in which, I thank my lucky stars I didn’t cramp up on the three-hour journey back to Brooklyn, I went to watch runners coming in at the finish line. The 5-hour-plus runners were nearing the end of their race. Here, I saw a dad runner, cradling one infant boy, the other is walking beside him. (The boys likely entered the course only a few yards before I saw them.) This man had done what I had just done, run a marathon. I turned to go to the car thinking a photo finish will be taken of the three of them.
These days the phrase one percenter has been co-opted by the class warriors. There are the wealthy, the one percenters, and the rest of us.
Then, there are the half of one-percenters. Those who have run a marathon.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Road Back
Running for Your Life: Last Week
Here we go. This Sunday at Steamtown, hoping for lucky No. 7. At this point, adrenalin counts for so much. Funny after all these years I still feel the butterflies. Training can only take you so far. Among a million thoughts that day, special ones will go out to my childhood friends in Canada because Sunday, the day before Thanksgiving Day, was traditionally the day we all gathered to play tackle football from our teens to twenties and thirties ... then, nevermind.Happy Thanksiving! Looking forward to reporting back on the other side!
Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Race
Running for Your Life: Stay the Course
There is no easy answer to this. A week from Sunday I will be competing in my seventh marathon, my fourth since 2010. On Saturday, I will turn fifty-eight, and yeah, I’ve every intention of – if I manage to be steady enough at Steamtown to qualify for the Boston Marathon again – to run in 2015, my sixtieth year.
It bears reminding that I suffer from a condition: deep vein thrombosis that predominately affects the circulation in my left leg. If I don’t get in at least an every-other-day run, the leg will swell more than it does without, and, well, I’ve never been inclined to see what a long layoff would do to it, to how stiff and uncomfortable it might make for me in doing even the most simple things, like climbing stairs or walking up a hill, so suffice to say there has never been – outside of illness and injury, which might in the past thirty-five years total about a month of days – a time when I didn’t run at least a little bit every other day.
Once you find a course that you love, my advice is to keep at it. Saturday, my birthday, I will be a week away from picking up credentials for my seventh marathon. And, it’s not a lie to say that I’ve never felt better prepared for a marathon. All that, and more, because I have stayed the course.
Next: Running for Your Life: Last Week!
It bears reminding that I suffer from a condition: deep vein thrombosis that predominately affects the circulation in my left leg. If I don’t get in at least an every-other-day run, the leg will swell more than it does without, and, well, I’ve never been inclined to see what a long layoff would do to it, to how stiff and uncomfortable it might make for me in doing even the most simple things, like climbing stairs or walking up a hill, so suffice to say there has never been – outside of illness and injury, which might in the past thirty-five years total about a month of days – a time when I didn’t run at least a little bit every other day.
Once you find a course that you love, my advice is to keep at it. Saturday, my birthday, I will be a week away from picking up credentials for my seventh marathon. And, it’s not a lie to say that I’ve never felt better prepared for a marathon. All that, and more, because I have stayed the course.
Next: Running for Your Life: Last Week!
Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature
On Sundays, before I come in to work on the business desk at the New York Post, M and I visit the farmers’ market in our neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Recently (Sunday, Sept. 22), while M was out of town – a whirlwind author event tour – I went on my own, where, a bit down in the dumps about my own writing career, I confided some of those feelings to Rafael, our premium coffee, nut, granola and nut spread provider, who had, a year or so ago, lifted my spirits by calling me out as one of the readers during the “Moby Dick” marathon reading event in Brooklyn, saying only “Moby Dick,” his English not being as strong as it is now, and in this case, Rafael stepped away from a customer who was buying at least a three-pack of nuts to quote to me Paul Verlaine, saying, “And All the Rest is Literature,” which led me to look up the translation itself, THE ART POETIQUE, the final stanza of which is:
“Let your verse be the happy occurrence,
Somehow within the restless morning wind,
Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme...
And all the rest is literature.”
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All systems go for the Steamtown Marathon. Twelve days and counting!
Next: Running for Your Life: How to Stay the Course
Running for Your Life: One Last Long One
Best run (Sept. 25) since I don’t know when. There is something about the fall. 62 degrees Fahrenheit, the AWAKE! LED clock bleeds as I climb the grade on the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, dodging the inevitable throngs of tourists, in a mood to forgive them their inattentiveness to both runners and cyclists, intent as they (the tourists) are at getting photos of the Freedom Tower – oh no, WTC 1, as the bureaucrats would have it – but by the tone of the near-genuflecting gentry on the bridge I’d say it’s Freedom made Sacred, how solemn-appearing are the picture takers of the tower before their dark tourism visit to the September 11 Museum.
And on, feeling no pain, quite the contrary as light on my feet as I can remember (thanks Eddy! Foot Freedom!), mind alert, spirit lifted, struck (to wit, drawn particular attention to) by the super-size fancy-pants strollers of Tribecistanis; my favorite ironic T shirt, a skinny girl exercise-walking in an oversize “Viva La Revolucion” (as in fresh from the Bolivian jungle, Sandinista chic, del Blasio for mayor), just short of the Christopher Street Pier, forty-five minutes from Brownstone Brooklyn, five minutes shaved from my twenty-miler eleven days earlier, all is well, water up, and return, the northern view of the Freedom Tower (Yay!) and on, the pro-lookalike tennis teacher, sitting on a park bench, waiting on his obscenely high hourly rate student(s), and later, near City Hall Park, a suit on the phone overheard saying “I wouldn’t think that we can adjust the hourly rate” and close to home, overheard conversation from a construction crew, working on the Whole Foods development at Third Street and Third Avenue, speaking, I swear to God, joual!
Eighteen days and counting until Steamtown ...
Next: Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature
Running for Your Life: Zombies/Running
J, my fellow hound owner friend (Go! George!) brought up “World War Z,” the zombie apocalypse movie http://bit.ly/Qs8zC7 (on Sept. 24), saying it was a capstone of zombie representation in today’s undead obsessed culture. How so?
Many ways. Let’s take running. In scene after scene zombies flail away in comic-menacing bluster, bodies as if rebuilt by a methed-up Victor Frankenstein, looking in a not too far-fetched way like clots of desperate-faced joggers in Central Park, the mid-pack shufflers in the New York City Marathon. A capstone of our mass society, the likely end result of four generations of industrialized culture, which yields the conundrum: sanitized corruption of human potential, the wicked byproduct of which fouls the Earth to such a point that even those who have an individualistic bent cannot extract themselves unless they are among the privileged elite who from their fortified cities defend to the death the right to throw off the masses (think those streams of zombies in the WWZ trailer above, with no place to go, yet will never stop in their reckless climb up and into these fortresses only to suffer the release of a certain death once inside.)
The Hollywood story, of course, sees an antidote. Here is where the audience (which sees itself not as a zombie, rather in our “American Idol”-entertainment culture we are conditioned to see ourselves as the Other, one who is superior to the poor MF-ing zombies, weak and pathetic, not at all like me) is given the sappy bromide: Hands across America, we are all one, aren’t we?, Brad Pitt, he will bring us all to the Promised Land, one of concord and hope.
*
Steaming toward Steamtown. Nineteen days and counting!
Next: Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature
Running for Your Life: Running to West 70th Street Pier
It’s done. Not to Harlem, but three hours from brownstone Brooklyn to the modern pier jutting into the Hudson River at West 70th Street and back to brownstone Brooklyn, which according to the Googly amounts to a mile short of twenty miles, but given that the pedestrian route isn’t as direct as the driving one (through Battery Tunnel and up the West Side Highway vs. inner city Brooklyn, cross the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan to Battery Park City and the Hudson River park north), I’m thinking that I met my goal, running at least twenty miles without stopping a month or so before the running of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa.It went as planned on Friday, Sept. 13, hours before sundown when fasting starts over the Yom Kippur holy day, and while there is nothing automatic about running for twenty miles (or reasonable about deciding to do such an injury-susceptible exercise on Friday the 13th!) it went well, my “dogs” holding up, and the rest, plenty of water on the route, from brownstone Brooklyn to the Brooklyn Bridge to the Hudson River Park, just enough electrolyte chews to keep my strength (and pace) up. This week marks my second to last training week of sizable runs, perhaps a ten-miler on Wednesday (Sept. 25), before I begin tapering (not bond-buying but slowing to jogging, from ten milers to threes and twos), the last week in September.Onward to the goal, a marathon, my lucky No. 7, in Scranton on Sunday, Oct. 13!Next: Running for Your Life: All the Rest is Literature
Running for Your Life: Fall Mood
Wishing it were as it were – meaning fall in September. Cold mornings and brilliant blue skies. Sept. 11 mornings. Not here, twelve years later. No coincidence that I had chosen to run the longest since the Boston Marathon 2012 (not the terrorist-bomb marathon, the one before). But instead, with the humidity in the scary zone, the heat clearing 90 degrees, I treadmill-ran for an hour in A/C indoors. In New York City this late summer and early fall the new normal is sleep shirt-drenching humidity, breezes that belie cooling off, rather just move sweat droplets along the skin not dry them, stay the natural relief that we who were born during early fall crave in our favorite season, the one before the strong cold sets in, teeth-grinding with the thought, sweetness to pair with fiber, winter when men and women are tested, what doesn’t kill you, instead the body hovers in limbo, the humid horror of Sandy, the new normal, as I say, that was Halloween 2012, not fall, no, anything but, if weather is a color make it gray-purple, if a substance, mud, in part because mud cannot be numbered, not like apples, say, or buildings; mud defies the consciousness shaped like pages in a book, think the horror movie Blob http://bit.ly/UNvgQE mud covers and smothers, throws you off and under, waiting as I do now, and every year, for the real fall to come.
(Here’s hoping that Friday afternoon, before the holiday sundown of Kol Nidre, the Jewish new year, when the stifling humidity is supposed to break, I will finally be able to get in my long run, 20+ miles to brownstone Brooklyn to Harlem. Waiting…)
Next: Running for Your Life: Running to Harlem
Running for Your Life: Chi Plea
Maybe it’s my stronger core, smoother foot strike, overall body strength, but I learned on Aug. 30 that I can still run, continue to train, while waiting for my orthotics to be refurbished. Thank God for that – and for Eddie, who runs the coolest shop in the Rockefeller Center concourse, old school cobbler who I trust will make those pain-relieving lifts as good as new on Wednesday (Sept. 4), a week before I’ll be taking on that pesky long run (Sept. 11th, of course, and my route will take me right past Ground Zero . . .) with the idea of getting in three hours, running or walking, whatever it takes to put in the long one, 20 miles to 22 miles. From Brooklyn brownstone to Harlem. While I had hoped to do it at the end of the August, Sept. 11 will mark 32 days before Steamtown. Pretty much exactly where I want to be, in my training schedule, with tapering beginning two weeks later, around Sept. 25 . . .In the meantime, I’ve been able to keep up running without the orthotics. In the past few days, I’ve managed, 1.8 miles (Aug. 30), 7.6 miles (twice) Saturday and Labor Day, and today (Sept. 3), 3.8 miles. And I’m sitting, now, with the slightest of left forefoot pain.All of this is to say, that I’ve passed through the down moment that I wrote about here in my last post. In fact, here’s a diary entry from Bellport, LI, after that 7.6 miler on Saturday (Aug. 31):"Run was great! Thinking core all the way, lift up and separate, in part, I think, what had hurt me was the hardness of my body, how I wasn’t thinking chi, and here I’ve done so much work on the core, as strong as I’ve ever been, if that’s possible. Instead, by not feeling light on my feet, a string puppet held aloft by two fingers, I do not “go away” in my mind and spirit; too much hard, not enough soft, how soft works to prepare the body, also the mind and spirit, if you don’t go away, then what, pray tell, is the point?”
Next: Running for Your Life: Fall Mood
Running for Your Life: Managing Pain
Each couple of weeks or so Steamtown Marathon scribe Jim Cummings writes an email update to those running the Oct. 13 race. These witty dispatches – the event is less than seven weeks away – draw attention to such details as the date upon which entry fees will not be refunded, usually because the would-be racer has suffered from injury or been deficient in training. Once past that date, it’s good luck to you.
Truth is any runner can enter a marathon (except Boston). The trick is to enter and finish four hours or under. In other words, to push your inner athlete, to manage pain (because no matter what you do as a non-elite athlete there is going to be pain.)
For beginners, those who are making the leap from recreational running, the occasional half-marathon, fun runs, etc., stepping up to marathon training, is no easy task. And because of that, one-and-done bucket list runners who’ve completed a marathon and then retired makes good sense. There comes a time when pro athletes decide to hang up the cleats or skates. Training to compete in a tough sport at a better than average level is a punishing proposition. The proof is in the pain, almost despite the train.
Thankfully, after 10 weeks of training – that means both stretching and strengthening, rest days, pretty much alternate week long runs – I’m hoping that it’s enough. That’s because I’m actually going to have to delay my long run. I tried on Wednesday (Aug. 28), during an especially humid day, to get it in and managed closer to 15 miles – and significant forefoot pain that well . . .
Okay, it’s now a day after that run (Aug. 29), and it wasn’t great, my dogs, both of them, started with that old pain that I’ve written about here too much by half, so much so that I actually went to a podiatrist who took one look at my orthotics and said, please, they are worn to the hard shells, refurbish them, you’ve been running with little real support, the lift you need, no wonder you’re in pain. I can’t imagine it, really (that was in her eyes); it’s been a helluva morning, sitting at the Dunkin’ drinking sweet coffee and glazed donuts and earlier – on an endless commute to get to the doctor’s did a most unscientific study of the subway car I’m riding in and an average of sixty percent of people around me (I’ve zero energy to read; as I said it’s been a horrid morning) are either wired or are staring dully, screens in their hands.
It’s a down moment. Training will yield a few like this. But I’m on the road. The lifts are in the capable hands of Eddie’s Shoe Repair at Rockefeller Center – they’ll be back to me the morning of Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 4.), Eddie has assured me, which means my long run (20+ miles) won’t happen until the following week. About a month before Steamtown . . .
Next: Running for Your Life: There Oughta Be a Law
Running for Your Life: Why Race?
It’s not an easy answer, this one. It’s been posed before in this space.
Truth is, for twenty-three years – 1987 to 2010 – I didn’t race. In fact, aside from the occasional tennis game in the’90s and early oughts and a memorable broomball match at Mohonk Mountain Lodge in New Paltz, NY, (our team won 2-0 and I scored both goals!) I didn’t do much in the way of competitive sports.
Instead I ran. But in the manner of Confucius, who famously said, “The superior man has nothing to compete for.” That the spirit of competition itself fouls the purity of sport.
Last week (Aug. 19-23) my mother sent a card to M and me celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary. Inside, she’d stowed a small trove of daily newspaper clippings she’d kept for me – some for as long as fifty years.
One, I couldn’t believe. In a one-column headline, set in 18- to 20-point type were my names in lower case style: Larry O’Connor. The second and third lines told readers that I’d scored a hat trick in an ice hockey game. As I recall I was probably about sixteen years old.
I had totally forgotten that at one time I had been a young competitive athlete. My mom, God bless her, didn’t forget. (Word to the wise: No one loves you quite like a mother.)
Is it about approval then? So strong is that need for parental approval. Run, sure, but race and take a chance that what you will accomplish will again fill that breast of pride, create another clipping, one that your mother will snip out and hold for you, stir the blood like nothing on Earth.
You could call it pride. Or you could call it a mother’s love.
Of course, I’d feel her love if I were to return to simply running – not racing – for my life. But frankly I’ve come to like the idea of the clipping. And if God is good, it won’t be my last.
Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Pain
Running for Your Life: California Mood
So much about life here feels like an outtake.
Scene: Rose Café, Venice:
A couple of old guys, retired, recount their pre-retirement stories; a clutch of young people, in jeans, flannel shirts, open neck, listening to a geek in a beard detailing ideals about business plans, set on charting a path away from producing things we need, rather toward purchases based on the pressure of social and personal tastes.
It is easy to fill a life with the empty, rather than the endless, why we tend to think that the endless is equivalent to the empty when in a certain frame of mind the endless is precisely what we want from life, which is what Neruda teaches us in the most beautiful line:
“Life in its jewel boxes is as endless as sand.”
What can we see in a tide pool? How does it change? How can we simulate that endlessness in what we surround ourselves with in our own lives? Must keep moving forward. Like the tide pool.
Entrepreneur table: Woman perched (see the emphasis of the perky breasts) never says a word, others lock in on “cachet,” “techno-centric,” “primal version of storytelling around the fire,” “platform toolset.”
Retired guys: Blowhard movie dude in conversation with the RG Woody Allen-sighting anecdoters, tells some kind of story that involves Gettysburg (Civil War?) and then in what seems way too scripted receives a cell phone call (loud ring); looks at the screen, and yes, acknowledges to the cronies that with mild regret he must take the call, walking away in a tone of voice that is both loud and important-sounding . . .
*
On to, well, Week 9A, of Steamtown Marathon (Oct. 13) training. In the interest of keeping body (if not mind) in order, I’m taking a second relief week before Week 10, and my longest training run (now planned for Friday, Aug. 30) of about 20 miles. Steady as she goes, folks.
Next: Running for Your Life: Why Race?
Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down
It’s Week 8 of my 15-week training program that will end in my entry in the 2013 edition of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa.
If there is one thing I’ve learned from my teaching days (and with living with M) is that you don’t keep going back to anything unless you’re learning something new.
So it goes with marathon training. The Sunday, October 13 running of Steamtown will mark my seventh entry in this bruiser of an event, a 26.2-mile foot race. In the previous six, I’ve finished four of them. (In 2011, I was forced to pull out of the Boston Marathon due to injury … I’m not counting that one because I didn’t make it to the starting line.)
What I’ve learned – especially as an older than average marathoner – is that my body will not do what it used to in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Despite my best efforts to counteract those aging effects through attention to diet, anti-inflammatory meds and foods, stretching and strengthening.)
More than anything, as I crest the hump of my 100-day training program (Aug. 6 is Day 51), I am facing my Achilles Heel – So, ease up, already, OC!
Instead though I continue to run – even during my long, over 15 milers – at my marathon pace, or about eight minutes per mile. Or train on the treadmill at fast speeds, rather than slow ones.
The manual I’m using, Joe Henderson’s, Marathon Training, The Proven 100-Day Program for Success http://amzn.to/15DmV56, is very helpful at instructing me to alternate long runs with shorter runs (as well as take plenty of rest days and cross train).
But how to throw the body into that lower gear. Currently it is taking me a day or more to recover, with stiff muscles and soreness, tender hammies. I’ve been bound and determined to get close to a New York City Marathon qualifying time of 3:14, a 19-minute lop from my first Steamtown in 2010. It’s doable. But this week is a critical one. On Thursday, as per Henderson’s manual, I plan to run a 10K race simulation. But otherwise I’m going short and slow, with days of rest. At the end of the Week 8, or Day 56, I’ll have only put in about 20 miles. With the view that during Week 9, I’ll have paced myself enough to resume harder training.
Next: Running for Your Life: California Mood
If there is one thing I’ve learned from my teaching days (and with living with M) is that you don’t keep going back to anything unless you’re learning something new.
So it goes with marathon training. The Sunday, October 13 running of Steamtown will mark my seventh entry in this bruiser of an event, a 26.2-mile foot race. In the previous six, I’ve finished four of them. (In 2011, I was forced to pull out of the Boston Marathon due to injury … I’m not counting that one because I didn’t make it to the starting line.)
What I’ve learned – especially as an older than average marathoner – is that my body will not do what it used to in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Despite my best efforts to counteract those aging effects through attention to diet, anti-inflammatory meds and foods, stretching and strengthening.)
More than anything, as I crest the hump of my 100-day training program (Aug. 6 is Day 51), I am facing my Achilles Heel – So, ease up, already, OC!
Instead though I continue to run – even during my long, over 15 milers – at my marathon pace, or about eight minutes per mile. Or train on the treadmill at fast speeds, rather than slow ones.
The manual I’m using, Joe Henderson’s, Marathon Training, The Proven 100-Day Program for Success http://amzn.to/15DmV56, is very helpful at instructing me to alternate long runs with shorter runs (as well as take plenty of rest days and cross train).
But how to throw the body into that lower gear. Currently it is taking me a day or more to recover, with stiff muscles and soreness, tender hammies. I’ve been bound and determined to get close to a New York City Marathon qualifying time of 3:14, a 19-minute lop from my first Steamtown in 2010. It’s doable. But this week is a critical one. On Thursday, as per Henderson’s manual, I plan to run a 10K race simulation. But otherwise I’m going short and slow, with days of rest. At the end of the Week 8, or Day 56, I’ll have only put in about 20 miles. With the view that during Week 9, I’ll have paced myself enough to resume harder training.
Next: Running for Your Life: California Mood
Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth
(Diary entry, 6/20/13)
Sitting here at the MoMA sculpture garden, I am thinking of Europe. Both America and Europe yield public space to those poor unfortunates who beg for food and the basic necessities; but in America, there is a SELF-clarion call that roots in those indenturing individual rights and freedoms, which, of course, is why the homeless are more prominent outside these cloistered walls. Remember, fifty percent of the world’s welfare subsidy payments are doled out in Europe, which has only nine percent of the world’s population. *
That will change but not soon. Europe will remain a place where the espresso and croissant flags the battalion of the AMERICAN breakfast, “Yo, bitch! This is America!” So quaint, this tidy power. If there is a single luxury that I would husband for myself it is to prolong my visits to this bygone place, where the political economies cannot sustain themselves on the weakening productive capacity, or through the antics of aging leaders misguiding young people. See and feel it now before the inevitable change sucks the air out of what we’ve come to know and love. Time will kill fantasy like rising saltwater does the roots of even the grandest oak.
* Harper’s Index
Next: Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down
Sitting here at the MoMA sculpture garden, I am thinking of Europe. Both America and Europe yield public space to those poor unfortunates who beg for food and the basic necessities; but in America, there is a SELF-clarion call that roots in those indenturing individual rights and freedoms, which, of course, is why the homeless are more prominent outside these cloistered walls. Remember, fifty percent of the world’s welfare subsidy payments are doled out in Europe, which has only nine percent of the world’s population. *
That will change but not soon. Europe will remain a place where the espresso and croissant flags the battalion of the AMERICAN breakfast, “Yo, bitch! This is America!” So quaint, this tidy power. If there is a single luxury that I would husband for myself it is to prolong my visits to this bygone place, where the political economies cannot sustain themselves on the weakening productive capacity, or through the antics of aging leaders misguiding young people. See and feel it now before the inevitable change sucks the air out of what we’ve come to know and love. Time will kill fantasy like rising saltwater does the roots of even the grandest oak.
* Harper’s Index
Next: Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down
Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five
Now in the fifth week of a 100-day training program for Steamtown 2013, on October 13. So far, so good, thanks to Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success" http://amzn.to/15DmV56
To date, on Day 30, as for longish runs, I’ve managed only an 11.8 miler (in part because the temps in late June and through mid-July have been too brutal for pushing any harder) and a simulated 10-K race, which in my neck of the woods means twin revolutions of the roadway in Prospect Park.
It seems odd to be marathon training again since my last one was Boston 2012. Training to finish is one thing – for me and my outsized goals (3:14 for the New York City Marathon and 3:40 for the Boston Marathon) it’s something else. But I think if I run a smart race in Steamtown (Scranton, Pa.) both could very well be a reality. (Well, New York City may be a stretch … but if I run Steamtown 2015, then at 60! the QT slims to 3:24 …)
Given the October race day temps aren’t likely to be anywhere near as punishing as they are now – closer to 100 degrees under the sun than 90 – I’ve been doing a lot of treadmill training at the gym. It’s important, as I’ve learned in training for previous marathons (on the morning on October 13 I will be at the starting line of my seventh 26.2 miler) to get in the miles, but not at the risk of affecting your overall health or, heaven forbid, losing training time to injury. Pushing yourself in the heat and humidity will do just that.
Henderson’s manual is BIG on rest days and alternating hard days with easy days. In the past, I haven’t been very good at that, and, instead, tried to take the course straight up to the mountaintop rather than via the slower and smarter switchbacks: that meant every week I’d just get tougher and tougher on myself, without going easy, and without taking day breaks, or cross training days. This time, though, I've been much more conservative: through the first four weeks, I’ve run the following totals: 27.3 miles, 29.2 miles, 28.6 miles and 29 miles.
Tomorrow (July 17) it’s forecast to be close to 100 degrees at midday, and I still plan to put in my longest run yet – 14 miles on the treadmill of my local gym. It’s hot and humid, baby. Fine, for a two, three, even six miler, but anything more grueling and I’m opting for the indoor (i.e. air-conditioned) track.
Next: Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth
To date, on Day 30, as for longish runs, I’ve managed only an 11.8 miler (in part because the temps in late June and through mid-July have been too brutal for pushing any harder) and a simulated 10-K race, which in my neck of the woods means twin revolutions of the roadway in Prospect Park.
It seems odd to be marathon training again since my last one was Boston 2012. Training to finish is one thing – for me and my outsized goals (3:14 for the New York City Marathon and 3:40 for the Boston Marathon) it’s something else. But I think if I run a smart race in Steamtown (Scranton, Pa.) both could very well be a reality. (Well, New York City may be a stretch … but if I run Steamtown 2015, then at 60! the QT slims to 3:24 …)
Given the October race day temps aren’t likely to be anywhere near as punishing as they are now – closer to 100 degrees under the sun than 90 – I’ve been doing a lot of treadmill training at the gym. It’s important, as I’ve learned in training for previous marathons (on the morning on October 13 I will be at the starting line of my seventh 26.2 miler) to get in the miles, but not at the risk of affecting your overall health or, heaven forbid, losing training time to injury. Pushing yourself in the heat and humidity will do just that.
Henderson’s manual is BIG on rest days and alternating hard days with easy days. In the past, I haven’t been very good at that, and, instead, tried to take the course straight up to the mountaintop rather than via the slower and smarter switchbacks: that meant every week I’d just get tougher and tougher on myself, without going easy, and without taking day breaks, or cross training days. This time, though, I've been much more conservative: through the first four weeks, I’ve run the following totals: 27.3 miles, 29.2 miles, 28.6 miles and 29 miles.
Tomorrow (July 17) it’s forecast to be close to 100 degrees at midday, and I still plan to put in my longest run yet – 14 miles on the treadmill of my local gym. It’s hot and humid, baby. Fine, for a two, three, even six miler, but anything more grueling and I’m opting for the indoor (i.e. air-conditioned) track.
Next: Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth
Running for Your Life: Ligurian Mood
Sunbathing customs at fine hotels like Caravelle http://bit.ly/1biVCSe on the Italian Riviera are built around food and drink: continental breakfasts lashing spokes of fresh fruit and fiber cereal, juices of myriad variety, yogurt from 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then the sunbathing begins on fine days to lunch time at 12:30 p.m. or 1 p.m. when it’s antipasti, fruits of the sea, calamari, pulpo and asparagus (not white) and shrimp, whatever green vegetable is in season, a spinach pie made by the mother/owner of the hotel who works the tables as only a proud woman who sees to everything can do, the overfed seagull she feeds also part of her lunchtime routine … the big fellow called Chee-Chee, named for his hungry cry … (the proprietress also makes the lemon and orange rind marmalade that we spoon liberally over the farm fresh yogurt for breakfast) all the antipasti drizzled to poured with olive oil, a centuries-old recipe from the family’s groves in the terraced mountains . . . if you run like I do up the hills, you are alone on the switchbacks going higher and higher the stone walls separating the trees, the walls regularly rebuilt, kept strong enough to sustain the farming but still looking like they would have, say, one hundred or three hundred years ago, close your eyes and that is what you feel, it is from terraced farms like these that the oil is made, why tales of the gods are best read here, all is the fruit of the land, the sea and it is not even two o’clock, a grilled fish is available but that will be for later, rather we chose a primi: pasta with pesto and potatoes, the noodles more al dente that an American chef would allow so that each bite is replete with texture, complemented with the DOC rose wine, not a type of wine I normally enjoy but this one, so light on the berry and crisp that there is no better choice and finish with a short, strong coffee … Any other place it’s siesta, but the meal energizes not stupefies and at 3 p.m., with still seven hours of sun to come, return to the Mediterranean beach, so many lounge chairs with head-vent shades and each pair its own sun umbrella, a tiny shelf to hold your bottles of cream, tanning oil and Chapstick …
Next: Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five
Next: Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five
Running for Your Life: New Meal
Fuhgeddabout the New Deal. Politics and governance are so corrupt (see Predator Nation by writer and filmmaker Charles Ferguson [‘Inside Job’] http://amzn.to/ykXoXg) and beyond change short of nuclear winter, that the idea of a New Deal will make a substantial difference in the lives of ordinary people is nothing but a Grim (cq) fairy tale.
Instead, try a New Meal. I’ve written about food here a lot, but recently (May 26) I came upon something new to me: phytonutrients, natural chemicals found in a variety of plant foods. It turns out, according to a Sunday NY Times article, http://nyti.ms/13SKDLT) that they have been shown to help in the fight against the Boomer scourges: cancer, cardio-vascular disease and dementia.
Join me in building a New Meal, one that includes such foods as arugula, dandelion leaves, yellow corn, violet potatoes, wild blueberries . . .
Spurn mild and go for the wild. That seems to be the secret. Which, when you think of it, goes along with a new New Deal. As in, going off the grid. Getting away from politics and governance, where corruption is but a dark-hued storyline on stress in a land where the ultimate enemy is time, which if you allow yourself to believe in the New Meal can be caught off-guard and befriended.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spanish Mood
Instead, try a New Meal. I’ve written about food here a lot, but recently (May 26) I came upon something new to me: phytonutrients, natural chemicals found in a variety of plant foods. It turns out, according to a Sunday NY Times article, http://nyti.ms/13SKDLT) that they have been shown to help in the fight against the Boomer scourges: cancer, cardio-vascular disease and dementia.
Join me in building a New Meal, one that includes such foods as arugula, dandelion leaves, yellow corn, violet potatoes, wild blueberries . . .
Spurn mild and go for the wild. That seems to be the secret. Which, when you think of it, goes along with a new New Deal. As in, going off the grid. Getting away from politics and governance, where corruption is but a dark-hued storyline on stress in a land where the ultimate enemy is time, which if you allow yourself to believe in the New Meal can be caught off-guard and befriended.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spanish Mood
Running for Your Life: Go Your Own Way
It’s getting harder to do. The truth is, I’m glad I was born when I was. At a time when a TV was not yet in every home, when I played outside as a child, skated when winter was winter on a rink my dad made for us. When the very idea of Facebook, say, would’ve seemed like a nightmare, which if you give it any kind of thought, it is.
“Go Your Own Way,” the Fleetwood Mac anthem from 1976 http://bit.ly/aJhxQE isn’t a path social media would like us to take. The line drawn from TV to Facebook status is so straight and without imagination that it paralyzes me to think about it too long.
Media is the organizing principle, not class as Marx had it. The dilemma: How to know yourself when media channels and distorts the way it does.
What does this mean in terms of exercise? Just about everything. Run, walk, swim, jog, cycle. Or non-exercise: read, think, laugh, talk, listen. Bring yourself to the moment. Leave mocking and mediation to the clones. As K, aka Gramma makes clear: get real. Bring it back to where it matters.
Next: Running for Your Life: New Meal
“Go Your Own Way,” the Fleetwood Mac anthem from 1976 http://bit.ly/aJhxQE isn’t a path social media would like us to take. The line drawn from TV to Facebook status is so straight and without imagination that it paralyzes me to think about it too long.
Media is the organizing principle, not class as Marx had it. The dilemma: How to know yourself when media channels and distorts the way it does.
What does this mean in terms of exercise? Just about everything. Run, walk, swim, jog, cycle. Or non-exercise: read, think, laugh, talk, listen. Bring yourself to the moment. Leave mocking and mediation to the clones. As K, aka Gramma makes clear: get real. Bring it back to where it matters.
Next: Running for Your Life: New Meal
Running for Your Life: Sunday Blessing in the Rain
He didn’t get up and visit like he normally does. Usually, it’s like clockwork, 8:30 in the morning and he pokes his nose into our bedroom. I know because oftentimes I am waking up just as he arrives. It’s not any noise that he makes. Think the ticking of a clock; he arrives and I wake up.
But today (May 19) he doesn’t come to our door. It’s 9:30, 10, 10:15 before I go downstairs, and see him, still sacked out on his parlor bed. Maybe it’s the day, I think, dreary and pissing rain. He hasn’t spat-howled to the thump of the Sunday Times on the front door. Soon, though, he is up, has his breakfast and is ready for his walk.
At three, he’s a different dog than he was at two. Subdued, less likely to lunge at kids on scooters or men wearing stacked headgear. Which is a good and bad thing. Perhaps, I think if I let myself, he’s lost a spirit-step or two, and that’s what I’m thinking when – both of us soaked – a fellow stops us, gloomy Gusses we are, and beams a smile, saying, “Izzat a redbone?”
I say, yes, and the man with the trussed-up headgear approaches Thurber – and that can be bad – but not this fella. T’s tail flies into whirlybird and he immediately takes to the man’s extended hand.
“I had a redbone,” he says.
“They’re not ideal for the city,” he says, admonishing.
“I know,” I say.
“You have to run them.”
“I do,” I say proudly, as the three of us walk toward the dog run. The rain has picked up. I’m glad I have an umbrella, but the man and the dog don’t seem to be phased by the sudden drenching.
“I can see that,” he says. “He looks great.”
“Thank you,” I say, smiling for the first time all day. He walks ahead of us, but then stops and looks back, grinning ear to ear.
“My dog lived to be sixteen, but he ran and swam to the very end. I live in Red Hook by the water, and he ran the beach and just loved to swim. Out on his own into the harbor.”
“Thurber loves to swim. He really takes to it.”
“They do.”
“You’ve made my day, thanks.”
We exchange waves and he goes on.
The dog run is empty when Thurber rushes to a blue object, a squeaky toy that someone has left behind. For a long time we play fetch with the toy in the pouring rain – just like he did when he was a pup.
Next: Running for Your Life: Going Your Own Way
But today (May 19) he doesn’t come to our door. It’s 9:30, 10, 10:15 before I go downstairs, and see him, still sacked out on his parlor bed. Maybe it’s the day, I think, dreary and pissing rain. He hasn’t spat-howled to the thump of the Sunday Times on the front door. Soon, though, he is up, has his breakfast and is ready for his walk.
At three, he’s a different dog than he was at two. Subdued, less likely to lunge at kids on scooters or men wearing stacked headgear. Which is a good and bad thing. Perhaps, I think if I let myself, he’s lost a spirit-step or two, and that’s what I’m thinking when – both of us soaked – a fellow stops us, gloomy Gusses we are, and beams a smile, saying, “Izzat a redbone?”
I say, yes, and the man with the trussed-up headgear approaches Thurber – and that can be bad – but not this fella. T’s tail flies into whirlybird and he immediately takes to the man’s extended hand.
“I had a redbone,” he says.
“They’re not ideal for the city,” he says, admonishing.
“I know,” I say.
“You have to run them.”
“I do,” I say proudly, as the three of us walk toward the dog run. The rain has picked up. I’m glad I have an umbrella, but the man and the dog don’t seem to be phased by the sudden drenching.
“I can see that,” he says. “He looks great.”
“Thank you,” I say, smiling for the first time all day. He walks ahead of us, but then stops and looks back, grinning ear to ear.
“My dog lived to be sixteen, but he ran and swam to the very end. I live in Red Hook by the water, and he ran the beach and just loved to swim. Out on his own into the harbor.”
“Thurber loves to swim. He really takes to it.”
“They do.”
“You’ve made my day, thanks.”
We exchange waves and he goes on.
The dog run is empty when Thurber rushes to a blue object, a squeaky toy that someone has left behind. For a long time we play fetch with the toy in the pouring rain – just like he did when he was a pup.
Next: Running for Your Life: Going Your Own Way
Running for Your Life: Food for Thought
Way back in November 2011 I wrote the blogpost below. As summer approaches and unhealthy food choices multiply with the mosquitoes (sorry, that's my dad peeping out there -- one of his favorite lines during, say, a century-intense whiteout blizzard: "I like it, son. No mosquitoes, no flies") I thought it was worth a replate, as they say in the newspaper business:
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
Running for Your Life: New Plans!
New plans ! New plans ! New plans !
K is here for Mom Day-M B’day doubleheader and this week (May 12-18) she asked if I would like to train for and then run the Midnight Sun Marathon in Baffin Island, the Arctic Circle, say, in July 2014. You kidding me? Of course, I said, I’m all in, the idea of going to my place of childhood dreams (the far north … http://amzn.to/NmujdH) with my daughter K for a week in July left me giddy with delight.
Then, I came upon this bit of news on the Web:
“Event no longer held due to the closing of the mine.”
Which brought us to our second thought (after its $4,000-plus per-person replacement, the Northwest Passage Marathon, was rejected as too damn expensive), the Utah Valley Marathon next June !
So instead of aiming for Boston 2014, it looks like I will delay my Steamtown qualification (God willing) to Boston 2015, with the view that there will be only one race (with K!) in ’14 (a favorite number, Davey Keon’s number and M’s birthdate) and that will be in the Valley (cascading waterfalls, Provo River and Utah Lake, it says on the website)!
Next: Food For Thought
K is here for Mom Day-M B’day doubleheader and this week (May 12-18) she asked if I would like to train for and then run the Midnight Sun Marathon in Baffin Island, the Arctic Circle, say, in July 2014. You kidding me? Of course, I said, I’m all in, the idea of going to my place of childhood dreams (the far north … http://amzn.to/NmujdH) with my daughter K for a week in July left me giddy with delight.
Then, I came upon this bit of news on the Web:
“Event no longer held due to the closing of the mine.”
Which brought us to our second thought (after its $4,000-plus per-person replacement, the Northwest Passage Marathon, was rejected as too damn expensive), the Utah Valley Marathon next June !
So instead of aiming for Boston 2014, it looks like I will delay my Steamtown qualification (God willing) to Boston 2015, with the view that there will be only one race (with K!) in ’14 (a favorite number, Davey Keon’s number and M’s birthdate) and that will be in the Valley (cascading waterfalls, Provo River and Utah Lake, it says on the website)!
Next: Food For Thought
Running for Your Life: Cross Train, No Pain
This might be a little premature to say. Imagine me as I write this, pausing and knocking on wood. . . . There. Done.
I’ve been running pain-free since I finished the Boston Marathon in 2012. As most running blogs go, I’ve done my share of writing about pain. About how it came about and what I did to try to deal with it (shin splits and forefoot pain, in my case, and in February-March 2011, a massive hamstring tear that kept me away from running for some time). Now, though, I’m compelled to share what I think could be of help to others who, true to this blog’s theme, would like to run for their life.
To recap, in October I’ll be running my seventh marathon and the first since Boston last year. It will be my second running of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., and while I begin my training regimen in mid-June. At 58, I will be shooting for – realistically I’ve come to think – a personal record. While I’ve never really thought that I’d be capable of qualifying for the New York City Marathon, I believe that it’s not out of the question. To do so, I would need to run 3:14 or better. Currently my PR is 3:33:08. But in that race I was suffering foot pain for about half of those 26 miles. I have yet to establish a relatively pain-free marathon mark. Maybe it’s not possible. But, considering my current running and exercise routine, it’s worth a try.
Before my hamstring injury I’d never done much in the way of cross training. Now, it’s as important to me as the run itself. In these non-training months before Steamtown, I run every other day and train on the second day, taking Sundays off. I’m not crazy about it, but on a cross-training day, I set aside forty minutes in the morning. I run a short distance to the gym and then do a series of leg- and core-related stretches and strength sets for about thirty minutes, and the balance I work with weights (again, because of the hamstring injury, I focus on leg muscle-focused weight sets).
As for the foot pain and shin splints, I haven’t run without prescription athletic shoe insoles since Boston, or without my snazzy calf compression sleeves (not exactly, but since wearing them I’ve not had even a hint of shin splint pain). I also use a patellar tendon support for my right knee. (I’ve never experienced any significant knee pain but I did at one time feel a mild strain in my right knee, so I use the little Velcro support strip which gives me as much mental comfort as physical.)
All of this is to say I believe you can get to a place where you are running for your life if you listen to your body – and when you’re ready – to run for fitness and then for speed, strength and distance.
Next: Food For Thought
I’ve been running pain-free since I finished the Boston Marathon in 2012. As most running blogs go, I’ve done my share of writing about pain. About how it came about and what I did to try to deal with it (shin splits and forefoot pain, in my case, and in February-March 2011, a massive hamstring tear that kept me away from running for some time). Now, though, I’m compelled to share what I think could be of help to others who, true to this blog’s theme, would like to run for their life.
To recap, in October I’ll be running my seventh marathon and the first since Boston last year. It will be my second running of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., and while I begin my training regimen in mid-June. At 58, I will be shooting for – realistically I’ve come to think – a personal record. While I’ve never really thought that I’d be capable of qualifying for the New York City Marathon, I believe that it’s not out of the question. To do so, I would need to run 3:14 or better. Currently my PR is 3:33:08. But in that race I was suffering foot pain for about half of those 26 miles. I have yet to establish a relatively pain-free marathon mark. Maybe it’s not possible. But, considering my current running and exercise routine, it’s worth a try.
Before my hamstring injury I’d never done much in the way of cross training. Now, it’s as important to me as the run itself. In these non-training months before Steamtown, I run every other day and train on the second day, taking Sundays off. I’m not crazy about it, but on a cross-training day, I set aside forty minutes in the morning. I run a short distance to the gym and then do a series of leg- and core-related stretches and strength sets for about thirty minutes, and the balance I work with weights (again, because of the hamstring injury, I focus on leg muscle-focused weight sets).
As for the foot pain and shin splints, I haven’t run without prescription athletic shoe insoles since Boston, or without my snazzy calf compression sleeves (not exactly, but since wearing them I’ve not had even a hint of shin splint pain). I also use a patellar tendon support for my right knee. (I’ve never experienced any significant knee pain but I did at one time feel a mild strain in my right knee, so I use the little Velcro support strip which gives me as much mental comfort as physical.)
All of this is to say I believe you can get to a place where you are running for your life if you listen to your body – and when you’re ready – to run for fitness and then for speed, strength and distance.
Next: Food For Thought
Running for Your Life: The Real “Frankenstein”
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
I found myself, while reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” for the first time (I finished the novel this week) meditating on the above line from Victor Frankenstein. To this human mind, that’s the line that best describes the novel’s theme.
I found myself, while reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” for the first time (I finished the novel this week) meditating on the above line from Victor Frankenstein. To this human mind, that’s the line that best describes the novel’s theme.
For reasons that I’d always found a little baffling, when it comes to the monsters we know as children – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf – I’ve always been drawn to Frankenstein. Now, after reading Shelley’s slim but powerful volume, I get it.
“Frankenstein” is as relevant now, it seems to me, as when it captured the public imagination after publication in 1818. (The one I read – at right, the Signet Classic paperback version, 1965 – is a reprint of the 1831 republication, which was heavily revised by Shelley [when she was in her early thirties)]. Next, I’m going to read the first one – before the revision. The one that came to her in a dream.
“This one was working,” Gertrude Stein said of Picasso. Maybe that’s what makes a classic.
What is birth but change? My daughter, K, is coming home next Thursday. I will go and pick her up at the airport. When I see her I will think of what it felt like to read those first tortured yet graceful thoughts of the demon (in the novel, Frankenstein is the creator, his creation never ranked above “demon” or “beast” as a third-person reference). As children, we don’t have the luxury (the torment?) of sharing our deepest feelings with our creator. Instead, we must settle for a poor second, our parents, a poet’s task.
One of the chief tragedies in “Frankenstein” is the change the demon implied mortally threatened the humans he encountered during his brief time on earth. If they could have seen him, as he was inside, his life would have changed for the better, one that did not take him off to the ends of the earth (the far north, which is another story …).
Like an acolyte before a teacher, I’m drawn to the demon, to his capacity to feel and value the idea of being the best a man can be. “This one was working,” I’ll say to K when I see her.
Next: Cross Train, No Pain
Running for Your Life: Off-Road With Thurb
You don’t have to have a redbone coonhound to train with. But it helps.
I’ve been running with Thurber (at right), who turns three
in June, since he was little more than a pup. It’s not that Thurber has come to
gather up his leash in his mouth and follow me around the house. He doesn’t
show that type of enthusiasm. Rather, when he sees me in my running gear, and I
say, “C’mon, Thurb! C’mon! Are you up for a run?” You know what? He always is.
Winter or spring, fall or summer. He’s ready to go. We’re a
pretty good fit, Thurb and I. He pours on the after-burners in the beginning,
and it is all I can do to keep him on leash. (If you’re imagining a sped-up
version of the Cleese Walk as I struggle to stay with him, you’re not off the
mark.) Off-road in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where we run, except for the occasional manic lunge after an unsuspecting squirrel
(which, at his best, he manages to chase to a tree, which the rodent scales,
and Thurb runs to its base where he leaps a foot off the ground), he will settle into a trot alongside
me in a way that makes me think of the standardbred sulkies at the Hanover
Raceway back home in Ontario.
He’s such a creature of habit that he knows our route, slows
to make our turns, looks up to me as if to say something, but never anything
critical – or even complimentary. Never does he look at me in a way that I
think I may if the paw were on the other foot that says, “Is that the best you
can do?”
If anything, his look is one of quiet assessment. As if to
say that it is surprising enough that this beast following me can run as well as that on only two
legs. Which during marathon training is a comfort, I
can tell you.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Real “Frankenstein”
Running for Your Life: A Tribute/4:06:09
After a certain age we don’t have babies. But if we take
care of ourselves, we can run marathons.
Last year I ran Boston. The weather was in the mid-80s,
unbearably hot on the city streets. But it was like a party and we runners were
the lords and ladies, the rock stars, the heroes. The cheering and good feeling
so infectious that despite the pain and punishing heat, so many of us scaled
Heartbreak Hill without stopping and managed to cross the finish line in the
triumphant spirit shown in the photo at right. Like having a baby, it was an
achievement of a lifetime.
I confess to having been unaware of the day yesterday (April 15), the
117th running of the Boston Marathon. I had not qualified for this
event, so my attentions were elsewhere when I saw the first images, most
especially the one that has been repeated again and again, showing the finish
line where I was so deliriously happy a year ago, and the time on the race
clock: 4:06:09. Only minutes later than when I ran across the line a year ago.
I weep for those who died, the suffering and the loved ones.
There are no words. But hopefully many attempts at them, because to my mind
words claim the sacred space that viral videos on smartphones defile.
Consider the phrase: 4:06:09. Meditate on it. We pause now
to weep, to think on 4:06:09, and the lives that have been lost and changed. Lace
up your sneakers and start with a walk. Soon, the training begins anew, with
the promise of the finish line ahead.
Running for Your Life: Steamtown 2013
Without a slip this time, I’m in! Last month I lost a screwball race to Chicago Marathon registration, but yesterday (April Fools’) I registered successfully for the Steamtown Marathon that’s held every year in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This year the race is scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 13.
I won’t be training in earnest until mid-June. And race goals? If ever I have a shot to top my personal best of 3:33:08 (Steamtown 2010), it will be in October.
It’s beautiful in the fall in northeastern Pennsylvania. And if you’ve ever considered training for a marathon, make it this one. We start in the hills and end in downtown “Electric City” Scranton. Come along with me. You won’t be sorry.
Next: Running for Your Life: Off-Road With Thurb
I won’t be training in earnest until mid-June. And race goals? If ever I have a shot to top my personal best of 3:33:08 (Steamtown 2010), it will be in October.
It’s beautiful in the fall in northeastern Pennsylvania. And if you’ve ever considered training for a marathon, make it this one. We start in the hills and end in downtown “Electric City” Scranton. Come along with me. You won’t be sorry.
Next: Running for Your Life: Off-Road With Thurb
Running for Your Life: Full Nelson
These days I’m deep into THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM by Nelson Algren.
An eon ago characters like junkie-dealer Frankie Machine and his wife Sophie stirred the popular imagination, winning the National Book Award for Algren in 1950. Five years later an Otto Preminger movie starred Frank Sinatra (natch) in the title role; Frankie was nominated but failed to win the best actor Oscar. (It went to Ernest Borgnine for his role in “Marty.”)
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is a standout of literary realism, a classic that mines the mean streets of Chicago through a Proust processor of observed delights and dangers. What Proust does in the Belle Epoque, Algren does for Division Street, Chicago, in the 1940s. How does the lace curtain move during the night in an apartment kept just this side of chaos by a superintendent named Jailer? Read it in Algren.
Take the Great Sandwich Battle in which unlike so much of modern fiction the mockery is bone-deep, not on the surface, so the effect registers on all the warriors: Vi, Stash and Sparrow sing like an opera rather than prance like a musical, in the latter’s case soon to be as forgotten as the outcome of table games or the content of get-through-the-night conversations, disposable as Poland Spring.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Goals
An eon ago characters like junkie-dealer Frankie Machine and his wife Sophie stirred the popular imagination, winning the National Book Award for Algren in 1950. Five years later an Otto Preminger movie starred Frank Sinatra (natch) in the title role; Frankie was nominated but failed to win the best actor Oscar. (It went to Ernest Borgnine for his role in “Marty.”)
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is a standout of literary realism, a classic that mines the mean streets of Chicago through a Proust processor of observed delights and dangers. What Proust does in the Belle Epoque, Algren does for Division Street, Chicago, in the 1940s. How does the lace curtain move during the night in an apartment kept just this side of chaos by a superintendent named Jailer? Read it in Algren.
Take the Great Sandwich Battle in which unlike so much of modern fiction the mockery is bone-deep, not on the surface, so the effect registers on all the warriors: Vi, Stash and Sparrow sing like an opera rather than prance like a musical, in the latter’s case soon to be as forgotten as the outcome of table games or the content of get-through-the-night conversations, disposable as Poland Spring.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Goals
Running for Your Life: I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
So much of good writing comes from careful listening. I was
struck this week (March 18) by the fragment of a line in my daily reading of
the London Review of Books … “As [the author] remarks in one of the few aesthetically
pleasing sentences in the book . . .” Good writing is like good music; it
demands an ear. I like to take time when I write sentences, especially when
telling a story. A story well told is a gift that nourishes the soul.
Howard Norman, an author I admire, wrote an essay from the
above line, “I hate to leave this beautiful place.” I read it a week ago and it
has stayed with me. Outside of love and the rare friendship I find few things
in life have the staying power of a story well told.
“I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place” is a personal essay
that mines what matters to me these days. A search for wisdom and understanding
through events long gone but not forgotten, a different sort of the faraway
nearby. And like the memoir by Rebecca Solnit of that name (see previous post),
I picked up an advance copy of Howard Norman’s memoir (of the same title, “I Hate
to Leave This Beautiful Place,”) this month at The Post. It, too, has arrived
at a propitious time.
“IHTLTBP” is for old souls. Topics range from superstitious
bush pilots, Eskimo rock’n’ rollers, John Lennon’s killing, a god-like radio
announcer, a hint of murder, cannibalism and snow globes. In short, a wise folk
tale for the modern age crafted by a writer with the ear of a poet.
As winter wanes here in New York, “IHTLTBP” has warmed my heart.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Goals
Running for Your Life: The Faraway Nearby
In part because I don’t run while listening to music, my mind on the road wanders with the sights and sounds, which often, especially on a long run, lead to reverie, to what Mary Ruefle, in her poem, “Voyager,” cheers-laments, “still strewn with miracles,” a line I read this month (March 13) on my way into work at The Post, which is how it is with me these days, Passover and Easter approaching, deep in thought about the past and family, my parents, in their eighties now, my sister and my brother all in Canada, and my daughter, K, who we learned only a few days ago, much to our excitement, that she would be home for part of the holidays.
So it was beshert, Yiddish for something meant to be, that I picked up an advance reading book of essays at The Post this month, titled, “The Faraway Nearby” by Rebecca Solnit http://amzn.to/YCyTa1. I recognized the name as the writer of a cogent, insightful DIARY essay published recently about how the San Francisco street and local economy vibe has morphed into the Google Republic http://bit.ly/WvvyN1.
As Solnit reports in “The Faraway Nearby,” when Georgia O’Keefe quit New York for New Mexico, her landscape muse, she left behind friends and loved ones, who would receive letters from her that carried those words – from the faraway nearby – as part of her salutation.
It strikes me that that is the most healthy and wise observation of a state of mind necessary to hold those who are absent during those times when you are missing family and friends. That your loved ones may not be at home but they are not simply faraway, either. Their presence, how we love them by honoring them, our memories are as alive as those among us whose family is not faraway nearby but simply nearby.
Next: Running for Your Life: I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
So it was beshert, Yiddish for something meant to be, that I picked up an advance reading book of essays at The Post this month, titled, “The Faraway Nearby” by Rebecca Solnit http://amzn.to/YCyTa1. I recognized the name as the writer of a cogent, insightful DIARY essay published recently about how the San Francisco street and local economy vibe has morphed into the Google Republic http://bit.ly/WvvyN1.
As Solnit reports in “The Faraway Nearby,” when Georgia O’Keefe quit New York for New Mexico, her landscape muse, she left behind friends and loved ones, who would receive letters from her that carried those words – from the faraway nearby – as part of her salutation.
It strikes me that that is the most healthy and wise observation of a state of mind necessary to hold those who are absent during those times when you are missing family and friends. That your loved ones may not be at home but they are not simply faraway, either. Their presence, how we love them by honoring them, our memories are as alive as those among us whose family is not faraway nearby but simply nearby.
Next: Running for Your Life: I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
Running for Your Life: Chicago or No Chicago?
It was pretty much two years ago to the day that I thought my running days were over. I’d blown out a hamstring to such an extent that a surgeon (who didn’t operate!) said the damage was so bad that I’d never race again. You can always cycle, or walk, he said. Lots of men your age walk for exercise.
Well, suffice to say, I didn’t take these words to heart, so to speak. Instead, a little over a year later I ran my first Boston Marathon, the second hottest on record (the weather, not my foot speed), in just over four hours and I’m now champing at the bit to register for my seventh marathon.
Alas, though, it won’t be in Chicago, as I first reported here.
Time was when you could just register to run the Chicago Marathon. Now, though, it’s a smartphone contest. On the assigned day I’d tried numerous times to register online, but each time the marathon site froze, suggesting a server problem. There was: smartphone samurai swooped in, locking up sixty percent of the open slots.
Beats me, how they did it, but register they did, while I sat before the frozen site for the umpteenth time, scratching my head. Eventually the organizers in their wisdom chose to fill the remaining 15,000 race slots by random lottery. This week (March 12) those who won the lottery and the right to pay a $150 entry fee and run the Chicago Marathon in October were informed. I was not among them.
I’ll be running, but it won’t be in the Winded City. Three years ago I ran a personal record of 3:33:08 in the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, PA. In that race, I’d managed to run fast enough to qualify for Boston, a standard that was good for two years, which was how I was able to compete in Boston last year.
Do that again and I’d be eligible to run Boston again as late as 2015, my sixtieth year. Chicago’s gone for this year, but Boston beckons!
Next: Running for Your Life: The Faraway Nearby
Well, suffice to say, I didn’t take these words to heart, so to speak. Instead, a little over a year later I ran my first Boston Marathon, the second hottest on record (the weather, not my foot speed), in just over four hours and I’m now champing at the bit to register for my seventh marathon.
Alas, though, it won’t be in Chicago, as I first reported here.
Time was when you could just register to run the Chicago Marathon. Now, though, it’s a smartphone contest. On the assigned day I’d tried numerous times to register online, but each time the marathon site froze, suggesting a server problem. There was: smartphone samurai swooped in, locking up sixty percent of the open slots.
Beats me, how they did it, but register they did, while I sat before the frozen site for the umpteenth time, scratching my head. Eventually the organizers in their wisdom chose to fill the remaining 15,000 race slots by random lottery. This week (March 12) those who won the lottery and the right to pay a $150 entry fee and run the Chicago Marathon in October were informed. I was not among them.
I’ll be running, but it won’t be in the Winded City. Three years ago I ran a personal record of 3:33:08 in the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, PA. In that race, I’d managed to run fast enough to qualify for Boston, a standard that was good for two years, which was how I was able to compete in Boston last year.
Do that again and I’d be eligible to run Boston again as late as 2015, my sixtieth year. Chicago’s gone for this year, but Boston beckons!
Next: Running for Your Life: The Faraway Nearby
Running for Your Life: Man’s Brain
A Canadian in March, a week after a winter storm dumped a foot of snow and ice on Brooklyn, and what am I thinking about?
Hockey hockey hockey hockey.
In that order.
Next: Running for Your Life: Chicago or No Chicago?
Hockey hockey hockey hockey.
In that order.
Next: Running for Your Life: Chicago or No Chicago?
Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
Runners can be like farmers. Stubborn and independent. You can’t tell them anything. I know a bit about this because I was raised in farm country and have been both a regular recreational and a competitive runner for longer than most. Thirty-seven years this year, thrice a week running, more during marathon years (five; I’ve competed in six races but in 2010 I ran two in Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Scranton).
That’s about five thousand seven hundred seventy total runs; at a minimum average of five miles per run, we’re talking twenty-eight thousand eight hundred and fifty miles.
What’s surprising is that for most of those total miles I didn’t practice what I’ve been preaching on this blog. To mix it up. For years I never did. I just put on my running shoes and went out the door. But, heck, that’s not for every body.
And not for this body, either. Eventually it broke down. In February 2011 I tried to run through a strained hamstring like I always had – and suffered a severe hammy tear. It slowly healed, but afterward, for the past two years, I’ve been mixing it up, and thankfully that regimen has worked.
I’ve never felt as good as I do right now, and that’s after running close to thirty thousand miles, a milestone, so to speak, that I should be able to make in less than two years: thirty thousand miles before turning sixty: not Volvo numbers, by any means, but numbers you can live with.
Because it was my hamstring that broke down, that’s what I focus on. I don’t do much in the way of upper body conditioning. Except when I’m in marathon training (I adopt training techniques for 100 days before a race; otherwise I follow a strict pattern), I run one day, do a gym workout the next. In inclement weather, I use the gym treadmill, set at a higher incline and faster pace than I do outside as a means of strengthening (and also to keep alive my dream of improving on my marathon PR, which currently stands at 3:33:08).
As far as a gym workout is concerned, I predominantly stretch and strengthen in floor exercises: hammy, calf, groin and, most especially, core. A stronger core, it seems to me, has helped to soften my running gait so that I put even less strain on my hips and knees than I did when I wasn’t taking such precautions in the past.
It helps: I can’t stress it enough. In the beginning I found cross-training – especially stretching – to be the most excruciating waste of time. But as I run longer and with shorter and shorter periods of recovery time after long runs, I verge on the pedantic in my advocacy of a mix it up approach to running.
Wanna run for your life? Mix it up!
Next: Running for Your Life: Man’s Brain
That’s about five thousand seven hundred seventy total runs; at a minimum average of five miles per run, we’re talking twenty-eight thousand eight hundred and fifty miles.
What’s surprising is that for most of those total miles I didn’t practice what I’ve been preaching on this blog. To mix it up. For years I never did. I just put on my running shoes and went out the door. But, heck, that’s not for every body.
And not for this body, either. Eventually it broke down. In February 2011 I tried to run through a strained hamstring like I always had – and suffered a severe hammy tear. It slowly healed, but afterward, for the past two years, I’ve been mixing it up, and thankfully that regimen has worked.
I’ve never felt as good as I do right now, and that’s after running close to thirty thousand miles, a milestone, so to speak, that I should be able to make in less than two years: thirty thousand miles before turning sixty: not Volvo numbers, by any means, but numbers you can live with.
Because it was my hamstring that broke down, that’s what I focus on. I don’t do much in the way of upper body conditioning. Except when I’m in marathon training (I adopt training techniques for 100 days before a race; otherwise I follow a strict pattern), I run one day, do a gym workout the next. In inclement weather, I use the gym treadmill, set at a higher incline and faster pace than I do outside as a means of strengthening (and also to keep alive my dream of improving on my marathon PR, which currently stands at 3:33:08).
As far as a gym workout is concerned, I predominantly stretch and strengthen in floor exercises: hammy, calf, groin and, most especially, core. A stronger core, it seems to me, has helped to soften my running gait so that I put even less strain on my hips and knees than I did when I wasn’t taking such precautions in the past.
It helps: I can’t stress it enough. In the beginning I found cross-training – especially stretching – to be the most excruciating waste of time. But as I run longer and with shorter and shorter periods of recovery time after long runs, I verge on the pedantic in my advocacy of a mix it up approach to running.
Wanna run for your life? Mix it up!
Next: Running for Your Life: Man’s Brain
Running for Your Life: Get Your Google Glasses!
Your time is just about up. Today (Feb. 27) is the deadline for you to get your chance to pay $1,500 for a pair of Google Glasses. http://bit.ly/YFOd6d. Come up with your own tweet. Here’s mine:
#ifihadglass You give me 2 shares of Google stock, I don’t tweet about the prospects of serious brain rewiring from all-day use of computers
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
#ifihadglass You give me 2 shares of Google stock, I don’t tweet about the prospects of serious brain rewiring from all-day use of computers
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
Running for Your Life: Jesse On My Mind
The first time I visited Los Angeles was in 1983. With a frame backpack, bed roll, Hollywood hostel. I remember listening to the LA Philharmonic rehearse for that day’s evening concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Lovelorn, I teared up in a big-house cinema watching the sentimental Jersey love story by John Sayles, “Baby, It’s You;” Remember chatting up a pretty girl at a bar, when I told her I was from Ontario, Canada, not Ontario, California, she looked past me, a million-mile stare. Clueless before “Clueless.”
“Who needs to learn to parallel park when everywhere you go has valet?”
That’s a “Clueless” moment quoted by daughter Kate, who was eight years old when the movie was released, and will soon take her driver’s test in Los Angeles. (She tells me you don’t have to parallel park for the test, only show that you can comfortably back your vehicle along a street curb without going up on it.)
Then, in the summer of 1988, I was back, but only at LAX – and then south to Orange County, the land of laundry room notices for alien abductee support groups.
Twenty-five years later, I returned. On Jesse Street in Boyle Heights, the new neighborhood of my transplant Angel, K. I was there for only a short, awesome weekend.
Some thoughts:
• East LA is a real world away from Hollywood and West LA. And not like Manhattan’s West Side vs. its East Side. Let’s leave it at that.
• Pink grapefruit is five times as tasty as Brooklyn market ones. Color: Red-pink
• California rolls are HUGE, with REAL crabmeat.
• LA Kings-Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game Friday night: diverse fans, courteous and fun-loving; K and I only hear the word "suck" screamed twice, near the end of the game
• Skid row is SKID ROW; others are pretenders
• East LA is home to magical bridges that link raw riverside warehouses, lofts.
• This past weekend the river was a river (not a dry concrete roadway), where from some vantage points the homeless have Jay Gatsby-like views of downtown and the surrounding mountains.
East LA banishes those shop-worn clichés of Los Angeles. I won’t be thinking of it in that reductive “Clueless” way ever again.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
“Who needs to learn to parallel park when everywhere you go has valet?”
That’s a “Clueless” moment quoted by daughter Kate, who was eight years old when the movie was released, and will soon take her driver’s test in Los Angeles. (She tells me you don’t have to parallel park for the test, only show that you can comfortably back your vehicle along a street curb without going up on it.)
Then, in the summer of 1988, I was back, but only at LAX – and then south to Orange County, the land of laundry room notices for alien abductee support groups.
Twenty-five years later, I returned. On Jesse Street in Boyle Heights, the new neighborhood of my transplant Angel, K. I was there for only a short, awesome weekend.
Some thoughts:
• East LA is a real world away from Hollywood and West LA. And not like Manhattan’s West Side vs. its East Side. Let’s leave it at that.
• Pink grapefruit is five times as tasty as Brooklyn market ones. Color: Red-pink
• California rolls are HUGE, with REAL crabmeat.
• LA Kings-Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game Friday night: diverse fans, courteous and fun-loving; K and I only hear the word "suck" screamed twice, near the end of the game
• Skid row is SKID ROW; others are pretenders
• East LA is home to magical bridges that link raw riverside warehouses, lofts.
• This past weekend the river was a river (not a dry concrete roadway), where from some vantage points the homeless have Jay Gatsby-like views of downtown and the surrounding mountains.
East LA banishes those shop-worn clichés of Los Angeles. I won’t be thinking of it in that reductive “Clueless” way ever again.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
Running for Your Life: Lakeside Is for Boondoogle
In the good old days in brownstone Brooklyn, winter was a sensation for the cross-training athlete. When ice and snow transformed pavement to peril, I went skating before work at the outdoor rink in Prospect Park. Long before I saw my first rat, I considered myself one: a rink rat. M and I grew up skating, and from the 90s until 2010 in the winter it was a special joy.
Now, though, even the real rats don’t come to Wollman Rink, Brooklyn. That’s because that fond ramshackle barn was demolished to make way for what politicians and civic boosters alike said would be a world-class ice palace. Twin ice surfaces, with dramatic views of The Lake in Prospect Park.
Ha! It’s now three seasons and counting with no rink, much less two. Deadlines have come and gone, and there’s no telling when there will be ice skating again in Prospect Park. Street views of the building project itself are blocked by iDesign-like hoarding boards that promise: “Lakeside Is for Skating; Lakeside Is for Ice Hockey; Lakeside Is for Nature; Lakeside Is for Learning . . .”
But a view from the hill that overlooks the building site in winter, without leaves on the trees that have been brutally thinned by a series of storms in recent years, suggests a different story. There is no work going on, only a concrete shell of a structure in place.
The truth is, Lakeside Is for Boondoogle.
So, again, there will be no wintertime ice skating in Prospect Park for athletes like me. Or for children, their parents. And as Valentine’s Day approaches, for lovers, either.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
Now, though, even the real rats don’t come to Wollman Rink, Brooklyn. That’s because that fond ramshackle barn was demolished to make way for what politicians and civic boosters alike said would be a world-class ice palace. Twin ice surfaces, with dramatic views of The Lake in Prospect Park.
Ha! It’s now three seasons and counting with no rink, much less two. Deadlines have come and gone, and there’s no telling when there will be ice skating again in Prospect Park. Street views of the building project itself are blocked by iDesign-like hoarding boards that promise: “Lakeside Is for Skating; Lakeside Is for Ice Hockey; Lakeside Is for Nature; Lakeside Is for Learning . . .”
But a view from the hill that overlooks the building site in winter, without leaves on the trees that have been brutally thinned by a series of storms in recent years, suggests a different story. There is no work going on, only a concrete shell of a structure in place.
The truth is, Lakeside Is for Boondoogle.
So, again, there will be no wintertime ice skating in Prospect Park for athletes like me. Or for children, their parents. And as Valentine’s Day approaches, for lovers, either.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
Running for Your Life: The Next Big Run!
Chicago 2013. Save the date: Sunday, Oct. 13, two weeks after the Catalina Island Half, where I have a longstanding plan to run with my daughter, K, seen at below right while on the sidelines of the Pittsburgh Marathon 2010, to honor my first marathon in 23 years. (K’s now in the City of Angels, natch.)
Chicago’s registration is in two weeks, then I’ve got less than eight months before race day. My goal this time: I’d like to improve on my Personal Record of 3:33:08. Good enough, though, is 3:40, which would re-qualify me for the Boston Marathon 2015.
From the beginning there was Chicago. My grandfather’s favorite club, the Blackhawks (Stan Mateeker, he called him), so the Golden Jet, Bobby Hull, was my first hockey god. My wife, M, was born in Chicago, and we were married there, at the Standard Club.
For years, M’s parents lived along the Lake Michigan waterfront, at One Thousand Lakeshore Drive. I know the short jog to the shore very well. For the next few months I’ll be running and training with the idea that I’ll be back home (I grew up on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron) along the Great Lakes shores, where I’ve never run a marathon.
Next: Mix It Up
Chicago’s registration is in two weeks, then I’ve got less than eight months before race day. My goal this time: I’d like to improve on my Personal Record of 3:33:08. Good enough, though, is 3:40, which would re-qualify me for the Boston Marathon 2015.
From the beginning there was Chicago. My grandfather’s favorite club, the Blackhawks (Stan Mateeker, he called him), so the Golden Jet, Bobby Hull, was my first hockey god. My wife, M, was born in Chicago, and we were married there, at the Standard Club.
For years, M’s parents lived along the Lake Michigan waterfront, at One Thousand Lakeshore Drive. I know the short jog to the shore very well. For the next few months I’ll be running and training with the idea that I’ll be back home (I grew up on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron) along the Great Lakes shores, where I’ve never run a marathon.
Next: Mix It Up
Running for Your Life: Rambling Runs in Key West
Key West is a state of mind. A place to bring work and books, that then sit on wicker furniture, untouched. Best to set minimal goals. Like referring to the foliage as fronds, not leaves. Or considering the wisdom of an afternoon rest under a palm tree with ripe-looking coconuts thirty feet above you.
Running in Key West is especially satisfying. For me, who normally trains in flat land-challenged Park Slope, Brooklyn, it’s a dream, either along the sidewalks facing Higgs and Smathers beaches, or up and out on Flagler Avenue, where on a recent visit I saw a spoonbill rooting for grubs, and admired, in the parking lot of Key West High School, a massive conch sculpture made of welded metal that was then painted, one part, lustrous pink, revealing inner space that literally cries out to be pressed to the ear.
Listen to the sea.
Off Flagler, just north of Fifth Avenue, a local told me to take Seventh Avenue and run along the salt marsh park road. The entrance is at Government Road and Flagler. Down this road only the most adventurous tourist comes. The company and sights instead: cove-hugging cormorants, turkey buzzards, egrets, dog walkers, an Air Cubana twin-prop relic that an aviation enthusiast may just be rehabbing, a sad-looking paint ball field, and perhaps most surprising, sign storage for Fantasy Fest (Don’t ask.)
Last year, M and I were in Key West and I wrote this post:
Back from Key West, the Conch Republic, where the captains who run the sunset sails thrill their predominantly Boomer clientele with the knee-slapper, “Welcome to North Cuba!”, upon return in the darkness because for most of us land lubbers it’s more than a little disorienting out there, for an hour out of the sandbank and mangrove low-water keys, the Gulf Stream visible the night we see the sun sink into the horizon and the captain blows the conch so that his face glows purple in contrast to the blood-orange of the sunset, all aboard the AppleBone, as poet Billy Collins dubbed it, because it was a literary cruise, not like the Disney one, a floating theme park that moors near our oceanfront balcony, ESPN Sports Center on a giant screen topside blaring into the otherwise romantic night; shallow draught Caribbean port bruisers these beasts; how they get into the slips, water deep as elderly knickers is anybody’s guess, and a frightening thought that the town fathers have been considering allowing 10,000-passenger monsters into port (although the Italian cruise disaster may put an end to that . . .), which if that doesn’t kill whatever charm north-to-central Duval Street has left then I’m a monkey’s uncle, not to mention the dubious safety of the cruiseships themselves, don’t begin to think that the capsizing of the Costa Concordia is an anomaly, the physics of these boats leaving no margin for error, turn away if you see the chalkboard math on the probability of it happening again, and especially in a place like Key West, where admittedly you do have to ask the question, “How many people can drown in two feet of water?”
I didn’t see Gene Hackman when I was in Key West. Or hear about the car accident he was in. But we did see Ricky Williams and marine life:
• Ricky “The Green Mile” Williams is lifting M in the air, her left foot is eighteen inches off the ground, legs helicoptering. Ricky, now playing with the Joe Tenuto Chicago-style blues band. Drummer we heard has been in bands since he was six, but no longer practices between gigs. Ricky does. Ricky, the blind keyboardist, never stops playing .¤.¤.
• With M, watching the minnows and barracuda, pinhead pursuers and slowly, as if the late scene entrance of the graybeard theater veteran, a ray swims with a nonchalance we’ve been waiting for. We stay for a beat then hop abroard our $40-per-week bikes and leave the water’s edge, Martello Tower Museum, just east of the Key West International Airport.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Big Run!
Running for Your Life: Why So Smug?
Maybe it’s just me, but this season every human image I see – in subway advertising, in New York Post lifestyle coverage, in glossy magazines – shows a smug expression.
Now that everyone with a phone is a photographer, then both sides, photog and subject, come to expect the smug caricature of their otherwise more complete selves.
I don’t see anything sinister in this, although perhaps a younger-me would. Rather, when we live in an age where each of us in the media-defining elite can easily aspire to be a leader in the constantly dividing and narrowing court of public opinion, smugness is not only our default expression but one that will only deepen and crystallize as this endlessly self-reflecting culture rolls on.
In this vein, beware the power and seduction of zomboid devotees of Ayn Rand and “Atlas Shrugged” (check out “Ayn Rand Nation” by Gary Weiss http://amzn.to/UQuYYB), the mirror image of New York City-style smugness, who in contrast to the complacent lamestream media have a truly sinister plan to dominate the mush we’ve wrought as social and political culture.
Running for Your Life: Rambling Runs in Key West
Running for Your Life: Weekend Cold Weather Running Tips
Current temperature in Brooklyn: 44 degrees F, five-day forecast highs: 47-55 degrees
Current temperature in Edmonton: 3 degrees F, five-day forecast highs: 5-29 degrees
Best airline-ticket price between NYC and Edmonton for Friday, Jan. 11 to Monday, Jan. 14 on Priceline (mid-afternoon Jan. 10): $721.
Pony up the money and fly to Edmonton, where it’s mid-January-appropriate below freezing and in tights and a good pair of gloves run outside on the streets and bridges. (Use Vaseline on your unprotected face and don’t forget your toque).
As for Brooklyn: Put on the same gear you do in April and go outside and run.
Next: Running for Your Life: Why So Smug?
Current temperature in Edmonton: 3 degrees F, five-day forecast highs: 5-29 degrees
Best airline-ticket price between NYC and Edmonton for Friday, Jan. 11 to Monday, Jan. 14 on Priceline (mid-afternoon Jan. 10): $721.
Pony up the money and fly to Edmonton, where it’s mid-January-appropriate below freezing and in tights and a good pair of gloves run outside on the streets and bridges. (Use Vaseline on your unprotected face and don’t forget your toque).
As for Brooklyn: Put on the same gear you do in April and go outside and run.
Next: Running for Your Life: Why So Smug?
Running for Your Life: A Brooklyn Holiday
I must confess to more than a little envy of my Canadian family and friends, the beneficiaries of snowy weather in the past weeks, enough to lay cover for a White Christmas that I’ve been able to enjoy in photos that fall like so many snowflakes in my Facebook feed.
This season Mary and I had the pleasure of an extended visit from our daughter, Kate. While we didn’t dash through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh, we were joined by a reindeer (Thurber, in his asymmetrical antlers, photo to come). Not for long, of course. Thurber soon got his jaws around the antlers and that was that. We’ll need to buy a backup pair for Christmas 2013. Or just a pair to put on him during the year to remind him who's boss.
We had our fun, the three of us. On Christmas Eve we discovered a new movie tradition: “How to Train Your Dragon,” starring Hiccup and Night Fury (Thurber’s new nickname), and Christmas Day joined millions of Americans – quite unlike us to do such a thing, but hey it was “Les Miserables” – at the movies. Later, we supped with our people, the Jews of New York, at first waiting for a table at a Chinese food place before settling on Thai.
This past Saturday, we went to the Milwaukee suburbs to celebrate a life: Rosalie Morris, my wife Mary’s mom who passed away 18 days before her 100th birthday. Ro, as she was known by family and close friends, was always a loving supporter of me, her Irish-Canadian son-in-law who she came to call Larry O’Cohen. Family and friends gathered for a delicious lunch catered by Larry’s Market of Brown Deer Village (visit for a nosh and a conversation when you’re in the vicinity http://bit.ly/7qVMso) and told stories, both old and new, of Rosalie, whose husband Sol died seven years ago at 102. With genes like those, Mary will be around for a very long time … Which is certainly epic news for me!
Wishing everyone the best of everything in 2013!
Next: Running for Your Life: Cold Weather Running Tips
This season Mary and I had the pleasure of an extended visit from our daughter, Kate. While we didn’t dash through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh, we were joined by a reindeer (Thurber, in his asymmetrical antlers, photo to come). Not for long, of course. Thurber soon got his jaws around the antlers and that was that. We’ll need to buy a backup pair for Christmas 2013. Or just a pair to put on him during the year to remind him who's boss.
We had our fun, the three of us. On Christmas Eve we discovered a new movie tradition: “How to Train Your Dragon,” starring Hiccup and Night Fury (Thurber’s new nickname), and Christmas Day joined millions of Americans – quite unlike us to do such a thing, but hey it was “Les Miserables” – at the movies. Later, we supped with our people, the Jews of New York, at first waiting for a table at a Chinese food place before settling on Thai.
This past Saturday, we went to the Milwaukee suburbs to celebrate a life: Rosalie Morris, my wife Mary’s mom who passed away 18 days before her 100th birthday. Ro, as she was known by family and close friends, was always a loving supporter of me, her Irish-Canadian son-in-law who she came to call Larry O’Cohen. Family and friends gathered for a delicious lunch catered by Larry’s Market of Brown Deer Village (visit for a nosh and a conversation when you’re in the vicinity http://bit.ly/7qVMso) and told stories, both old and new, of Rosalie, whose husband Sol died seven years ago at 102. With genes like those, Mary will be around for a very long time … Which is certainly epic news for me!
Wishing everyone the best of everything in 2013!
Next: Running for Your Life: Cold Weather Running Tips
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