Thought of the day, from thirty-five minute cruiser training
run:
Today’s most accomplished hand-eye coordinated experts can
speed-walk and text on a busy urban street without causing serious harm to
themselves or to other similarly occupied passersby !
The blog title above might suggest advice on how best to
gain strength and speed by incorporating track-style training in a marathon
regime.
Not this blog. For me, track work refers to the writing and
drawing I do while commuting by train to my office job five days a week. (That workday
starts at 12:30 p.m. when the NYC subway is blissfully peopled so I don’t have
to share a seat on a bench ninety percent of the time.) I pull my journal from
my bag and write. Sometimes blog entries like this one, sometimes dialogue from
stories or novels that I’m working on, poems and pen sketches I do of my fellow
train riders. Watch this space for examples of my track work, which I’d like to
post here during the weeks leading up to K and my dream marathon in Nova Scotia
this July.
Track work because as I work I hear the sound of the steel
wheels on the track. It’s funny but as the days pass – not as I get older
because I reject the inherent limit of that construction – I find that I work
to fill moments with something that nourishes. In my running, that’s a natural
predisposition to eat carbs, gorge on fruit and enjoy the delicious homemade
juices that M has taken to make for us, or following closely the training
regimen that has me walking and running in these early days. I’ve written a lot
in this space about listening to your body. Now, at fifty-eight, I feel I’m
actually doing it.
Track work is the mental side of that equation. Writing and
sketching in my journal settles me for the workday ahead. I am ready to change
gears and do my challenging, creative work at the New York Post. As always I’m
energized by my running, my writing and my reading (currently the “City of
Ambition” by Mason Williams http://nyti.ms/1uC1PT4
about the dual New Deal accomplishments
of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; massively relevant
to today’s stasis in matters of public philosophy) and now, for the better part
of a year, by my Track Work! as well. (Images to come!)
My advice? Honor that special place where you go to plug in,
re-energize. For me, it’s always been primarily connected to words, and lately,
the lines that I put down in my journal.
Next: Running for Your Life: The First Fourteen Days
