Running for Your Life: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” Vol. II (and New Shoes!)

Volume I ends with the burying of the father, begins with a Proustian meditation on death.

Enter Volume II. Our hero doesn’t care what he eats as long as he has fuel for writing … then, with no explanation, he, a bitter-ish house husband, is planning and buying food at gourmet shops for elaborate meals. There are long, amazingly authentic sounding, all-inclusive literary, intellectual and philosophical eruditions between him and Geir, his close friend. Deeply personal, if not intensely intimate, details about the dark psychology of his one true love, his wife Linda. Being a parent. A bad one. Having one child and what she is about, how very early she is free and apart from him in her judgments and needs and preferences. There is a second child. A third. No wonder birth order matters. It has to. It’s “Your Struggle.”

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New shoes! New shoes! New shoes! I have been out for the second time in them. The first outdoors (Jan. 29) in the Asics Gel-Kinsei 5, a neutral bomb of a shoe!

You forget the difference new shoes make. Must mean I’m back in marathon-training mode. (Or could have as much to do with the Blizzard of ’15: I neglected to pack my running clothes and my old Brooks Bangers when I was tapped for an overnight emergency stay due to the surprise closing of the subways, and I bought them at an athletic-wear store not far from my Times Square area office building. Note to crowd haters: shop in the hours before a New York blizzard hits. The combined forces of a paranoid media and power-mad despot politicians keep people indoors. The usually jammed store was blissfully empty.)

Do yourself a favor and check out these beauties. If nothing else, just a walk around the shoe store floor. Asics Gel-Kinsei 5. This longtime Brooks believer is suddenly feeling like a convert!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

    

Running for Your Life: After Snow Day

It’s the day after the blizzard (Jan. 27), and, with more cold and snow on the forecast for Friday (Jan. 30), there will finally be an abundance of snow cover in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Time to get my cross-country skis going. Out with the Thurber, our Redbone Coonhound, who lives for Snow Days. Paws gripping the ice and climbing through undergrowth. So much ahead that excites. Life is short and in few places that I know of does that show as clearly as in the bounding clammer of a coonhound in the woods covered in snow and ice; like that of a dog bred for water work, say, in Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes.

Color me northern, but it thrills my heart to see this dog of the Ole South, of Tennessee and Georgia, in post-blizzard winter. To me, in day after day of heat and humidity, where is the fierce glow of life in that?

Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Vol. II 

Running for Your Life: Snow Day

For all intents and purposes, boys, we may as well be living within twenty-five miles of the Arctic Circle.”

– History teacher Don McLennan, circa 1969-71, West Hill Secondary School, Owen Sound, Ontario

Mr. McLennan’s chatty rejoinder didn’t do more than serve as mock fodder for the balance of my high school days.

But Mr. McLennan’s nerdy wisdom has stood the test of time. I can’t begin to think of what it was we “boys” were talking about that day, but I’ve never forgotten Mr. McLennan’s message.

As I write this (Jan. 26), the blizzard of the century – wait a minute, maybe two centuries – is churning toward us here in Brooklyn. We have our emergency supplies stocked and I’ve packed an overnight bag with the idea that I may not be able to get home to Brooklyn from Manhattan tonight. They are calling for as much as three feet of snow before it’s all over. When it comes to newspaper work, I’ve always been essential personnel.

What’s it like to be twenty-five miles within the Arctic Circle? When the wind howls, the snow swirls, step outside and within a New York minute you’re disoriented. You’ve lost your easy landmarks, and footing is potentially treacherous under all that snow. You can turn an ankle; if your bones are brittle, they can break; bad falls like cracks on the sidewalk. Inevitable.

So unless you’re essential personnel – police, fire or media workers – you stay at home. Read. Laugh. Drink. Play Yahtzee. Write.  Or if you’re born in the late ’90s or early ’00s, waste your youth as elegantly imaginable, the video games and social media apps have become so tantalizing.

But the power could go out. A centuries storm and you’d best be prepared for that. Lanterns. Flashlights. Candles. Plenty of batteries, kitchen matches. Then, you’re down to: Read. Laugh. Drink. Play Yahtzee. Write.

Through it all, you’ll talk. And hopefully not about the weather. But on days like this, that’s okay. You’d want to remember this day. It’s amazing what comes back in memory of those Arctic Circle-like times: 1966, 1996, and with luck, 2015.

After all, everyone is entitled to their own Don McLennan moment. It has been a delight for me all these years.

Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Vol. II  

Running for Your Life: Back From Key West

It’s twelve feet above sea level in Key West at its highest point, the cemetery.

One day, and it was one among ten, the Simonton Street bank LED showed 87F, and I was running then in the midafternoon when the sun is hottest, not much better than a 9 minute-mile pace but it’s flat, gloriously so, the only hill-like climb the rise of the bridge along Palm Avenue over the Garrison Bight, near the floating Thai restaurant with, believe it or not, real, honest to God Thai food – and Thai servers.

Key Westers will tell you that life has changed down here. But if your accommodation is taken care of – courtesy of friends or family, a conference, in my case – then I’d daresay less than other places you care to name. Chickens walk every whichway, roosters rule the roost, a sixty-something black man tells stories of how special a certain white man was to his reckoning back in the middle ’50s. (Ernest Hemingway, if you have to ask.) Which is not to say that Key West is diverse. Far from it. But it has not been destroyed by the grotesque money of the .001 percenters. Homeless live here. Showing more fear than the fowl, serving as a morning weather forecaster on one occasion, straight-talking picnic-table sitters in a second.

Run here and – because of its flatness – spring along. Next to the fat-tired bikes rented by gray hairs, and the seemingly endless supply, if not variety, of conch trains trailing as many as a hundred tourists, sitting down for the low-rise tour of the houses, the tallest freestanding structure being the near-buried in sand and dune plants, Fort Zachary, or maybe some port-area government buildings, but most everything veers to the small side, with cottages bearing the less-than-quaint name: shotgun.

It would be fun to return to Key West one day. Maybe taste a few more 80F-plus days. Now, though, am happy to be back home. In the midst of a New York winter.

Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Vol. II  

Running for Your Life: Cold, Hard Facts

It takes a certain something to run in the snowy cold.

Today (Jan. 6) as I write this it is in the 20s F and snowing, the first dusting of the year in Brooklyn, making the footing slippery, if not treacherous.

Twenty -- or even ten -- years ago I wouldn't have thought twice about suiting up and going out. After all, in New York, unlike Toronto, when the snow files the cars stay parked. Roads are plowed and relatively clear of snow. (There is only an inch or so of accumulation on the sidewalks.)

But now, in my sixtieth year, I'm a little more circumspect, wary of injury. My knees, my groin, my hamstrings, ankles are much more susceptible to strains or injury than they were in my youth. So I have to be smarter in order to run for my life, as my longtime blog pronounces.

So I go to the gym and run on the treadmill until the snow is gone. Snow-covered winter running is a risk I feel that I shouldn't take. Those are the cold, hard facts.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hot!

Running for Your Life: Resolutionary Road

It's that time. What's your deal? In my job as a New York Post headline scribe, I wrote "American Weigh" for a recent review column on the best of the get-thin-quick magazines.

That's not the cross I bear.

As I've written here many times, a substantial part of my life is divided into three pursuits: running, writing and reading -- not necessarily in that order.

Could I run more, write more, or read more? Or run harder, write more seriously, read with greater hunger to learn?

No, that's not my cross to bear eight.

Are we true to our loved ones? True enough that we don't sacrifice so much of what we hold dear to compromise that love? Do we examine the very idea of love in our life with the firm desire of deepening love? By taking the emotional risks that requires?

That's enough of Resolutionary Road for this year. Happy 2015, everybody!

Next: Running for Your Life: Cold Hard Facts