Running for Your Life: Rock 'N' Roller

Twenty years – no, thirty years – ago this message had one tell. Music and dance. “My Own Way to Rock” by Burton Cummings, “Old Time Rock and Rock” by Bob Seger, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets. Rock! Rock! Rock!

In those days I never gave rolling much thought. Or any thought for that matter. What was it that rolled? Your ankle bone in the socket? Your head on your neck? Your stomach on the floor? What?!

Rock, though, that made perfect sense. When Burton Cummings belts out “My own way to rock!”, I get it in every fiber. But when he follows that with, “My own way to roll!”, I’m puzzled. He’s into baking pies?

Happily, after thirty years, I’ve found it. My own way to roll. If you are a runner of a certain age, you gotta roll. On a roller, that is (see at right). Three decades of running leads to muscle tears, pulls, damage of all types, and fifteen to twenty minutes a day of rolling those muscles (hammies, calves and groin) does absolute wonders in repair, making it possible for you to not only run every other day but to build the foundation for training another marathon. For me, that’s July 27, my mom’s birthday, with K! at the Nova Scotia Marathon.

So join me on the road, sure. But don’t scrimp on the roller. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what your age. Find Your Own Way to Roll!

Next: Running for Your Life: March !

Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

People will ask me why I don’t wear headphones when I run. Part of the reason is that when I began running, portable music players didn’t exist. Believe it or not, the first Walkman didn’t infect public space until 1979. I’d been a regular runner for four years before that.

The answer comes down to mental space. How during the time that I run every other day – be it twenty-five minutes, a half an hour or an hour – I want, no, need, to clear my mind. That means it is free to wander to the beagle straining on a leash that I see from the treadmill window of our neighborhood gym, or to a long-suppressed memory about home that surprises, or the mood of the walking public (are they as collectively depressed as yesterday, and if not, why not? . . ..) I feel that bordering the experience with a soundtrack invades the marathon mental space that is the drug of my addiction.

A word about time. I was greatly moved by David Grossman’s latest novel, “Falling Out of Time http://bit.ly/1e4LPx8,” which goes to the heart of how time need not be how we normally experience it. I find in the quiet of a run that time will fall away. There is something about practice here. If the body is being fed, rested, the muscles relaxed and supple from stretching, the conditions are right for that slipping away. On the treadmill that doesn’t mean you look at the readout clock and – Shazam! – five minutes vanishes into thin air. Rather the pace, the miles traversed, and the clock become like water not stone, the body in command as the mind follows in the flow, I trust, without any regard at all to what has happened before the run or what will happen after. I am in, a pitman drilling down his personal mine.

Running for Your Life: Rock ’N’ Roller

Running for Your Life: Polar Vortex Morning

Cardinals at the base of a young tree splaying branches, no seeds or fruit that I can see, at least four red-headed adult males and their mates, at first indistinguishable among the more common-looking birds, but the gals too, amaze in the brilliant, sparkling white, hard crust of ice and top layer of snow, too thin to hold a human, but these birds, the male cardinals, most especially, flit and skate under the cover of this nondescript little tree, never moving beyond its circumference, as if the space is an ice rink and they are players, training for tonight’s match.

Further on in the treetops are other flashes of darting red. Errant kites caught and hanging there, evidence of a time in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, before the snow and ice, seems a distant dream in this, the dead of winter, rustling in the frigid wind. As cold in those leafless trees as it will be all year. At ground level Thurber bounds ahead, jacketless and heedless to the deep cold and the terrain that is virtually unwalkable for us two-legged beasts but home to this mountain dog, the prime reason I am seeing these wonders. It is a gift he gives me, although some mornings it doesn’t wax quite the way I’m putting down here.

Thurber, a skiff of snow on his nose. What kind of dog is he? He waits at the curb with such a gentle pose. No anxiety. What has shaped his life that he need not wonder what is happening next. He knows it will not be long and we will be on our march to the park. To a place where he will sit on command, graciously accept his meat treat. Four in June, and he looks so spry, so full of life. Great expectations are those of a dog bred to run and hunt if each day begins with a walk in the woods.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips

When it snows and blows and ices up like it has been during the past month or so, it’s easy to be coy and say, as I did in this space a few weeks ago, that to keep in running trim, you should put on your T and shorts and running shoes, cover up with zipper leggings and a warm jacket, walk or light jog to your neighborhood gym, take off your cover-ups and run on the treadmill for thirty minutes. There you have it; all the winter training tips you need.

It is true to a point. As I wrote about in this space, I suffered my worst injury by attempting to hard-train through similarly blizzard-like conditions during the winter of 2011. In February that year, I was on a cold-weather run in Prospect Park when I pulled a hamstring muscle. A month later I was near-hospitalized when my hamstring tore painfully and forced me out of the 2011 Boston Marathon. I came back to run Boston the next year, but I’ve since been shy to train in cold weather. In part because that blown hamstring muscle has never really felt like it did before the injury …

All of which is to say, when it comes to winter training tips, this runner goes back to basics. Call me coy, but I’d like to start training for my run with my daughter this summer. That means, for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be doing most of my running in the gym, on the treadmill. If you're training, or about to start a training regimen, and have any concerns about tight muscles, I'd advise you to do the same.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space