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

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

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