It's decided. K and I will jointly run a marathon together. On Sunday, July 27, in Barrington County, Nova Scotia http://bit.ly/1d8jtBK. Now comes the months of hard training, and the reward, a coastal route marathon around Cape Sable Island... Looking forward to that day, only six months (and many, many miles!) away.
Next: Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips
Running for Your Life: Sticking-to-it-ness
This time of year there’s a lot of talk about resolutions. In our, yes, notoriously self-centered culture the most common resolution is improved fitness. Enter the ad in this week’s New York magazine Jan. 20-27 for the overnight paperback bestseller, THE POWER OF HABIT http://bit.ly/1eKE2c4, that boils down to sticking-to-it-ness – three simple stages: Pick the cue; Choose a reward; Execute the routine.Makes sense, no? I get the cue and routine. But reward? All too difficult to isolate for most good-intentioned people who are clamoring to embrace sticking-to-it-ness and get into better shape.
That’s because, by my lights, in a typical middle-class life we are showered with rewards, i.e., the smartphone, game apps, Instagram, Facebook, a myriad instant gratifications available to all with a mobile platform. And the apps only get more and more seductive with each passing day.
I was reminded of this during a morning with Thurber this week (Jan. 15). Two joggers were slowing near me in Prospect Park, and on cue, as they came to a stop, both pulled out their mobile devices and stared at them. I thought a running app, something that would parse the data of that day’s run. Or maybe some other reward that had little to do with their just-completed exercise.
I’ve been running on a reward principle for thirty-five years. In the early days there was no such thing as a wearable music player, much less sophisticated running apps, so what served as a reward upon returning home after a run was a favorite song or two on the record player, if it was in the evening, a mug of cold ale.
I still run on this principle, with the idea true rewards are only possible if there is a clear separation, that the routine itself does not involve a reward. (Running with headphones, say.) That the routine is not some negative experience that needs the reward as compensation, but a positive one that is lived deeper with the addition of a simple reward.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
Running for Your Life: Once Your Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson
What a eulogy to place – and the people who rise out of a place that is so harsh that there are more commonalities to the brush and wild animals, the smells that pepper this nasty, short and brutish life, one a-glimmer throughout with the promise of the human spirit, not only of the child, the emerging man, but the fathers, the brothers, the elders, less so the mothers and sisters but there is a warmth and nonobjective quality to the women in the writing of Wilson, the most masculine of stylists, proof that REAL men writers need not remove women from their world to the point that they are less than the ideas the pugnacious male characters punch around like so much guff, a nod to the Normans – Mailer and Rush – who also serve women in a different way than Updike, Roth and Ford, the old men of American fiction and their shibboleths of jism-spurting palliatives; can we, the male writers in America, envision the woman who is “real” – a third “N” writer did, Nelson Algren, regardless of the narrowness of the vision -- what does it take for men novelists, those who build a world, are their own gods, as we are when we create a novel, to put both man and woman at its center. That is what Wilson has done. No mean feat. http://bit.ly/1bWcg7f.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
Running for Your Life: One Hundred Years
Thank God it has come to this. Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen … There is power in numbers, and post-2000, those blandly insignificant numbers, not meaningless but freighted with false importance that leads to soporific if not vacuous reflection while now, on the one hundredth anniversary of the twentieth century truly beginning in Sarajevo and the archduke terrorism assassination that helped set off the Great War, the one my grandfather, my first memories of him, his arm scar with the shrapnel still inside, the hard bit you could feel, the world a century ago that is brought forward to me as something so real that I can touch and smell it, grampa’s pipe tobacco and Amphora brand smoke, flakes of Sunkist skin, faint urine, black tea leaves. What is the English staleness that tilts toward death at all ages, but never mind because my grandfather is with me as I write this on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War, the one where his stories, and by extension mine, come from.
That’s what it is in, then. Why the past, 1999-2013, fourteen years yield little in comparison. That in stories we begin with reflection and until this moment in 2014 there wasn’t a root to grow from, a place from where a hundred years is yours, that you can live for a hundred years in a single moment.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
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