Running for Your Life: What If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Had it not been for a highway accident 39 years ago next month (May), my great pal, Doug Marshall (known simply as Marsho), would still be giving me the gears -- and schooling me in lacrosse, which he succeeded in showing me a thing or two. To know Marsho was to know that he was a tiger at fighting against the odds to get what he wanted. His voice is one I hear often -- especially on those long runs that, even now, during my gray-hair days -- take me to the next plateau.

"The night is still young, sort of thing," he would say.

Next: Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running? 

Running for Your Life: Steady Does It

Maybe it’s because I consider myself an asterisk athlete. If I don’t run, my deep vein thrombosis kicks in and my left leg is prone to swelling. I don’t know how debilitating it would’ve been had I not taken up jogging in my early twenties, during the early months after I suffered blood clots in my left leg and a pulmonary embolism. In my mid-twenties, I considered myself a runner, and ran in my first 10 kilometer race, a festive international romp between Prescott, Ontario, and Ogdensburg, New York.

Slowed by my bad leg, seeing the whole practice as being more about staying healthy than being competitive, I finished well back in the pack. But I was on my way.

Since then, I’ve run in eight marathons, completed six of them. In one, the 2010 Steamtown Marathon, I finished at 3:33:08, my personal record, which I’ve gotta acknowledge will be my fastest marathon. An eight-minute mile pace comes to just under 3:30 for a 26.2-mile race. I daresay I won’t be doing that kind of thing again.

After all, I’m 60 in October. On the treadmill, I’ll average a pace of 8:30 over five miles. That seems plenty fast enough, thank you.  If I can manage a nine-minute mile pace over 26.2 miles, that’s a time of just under four hours. Will that get me back to Boston? Well, the qualifying time in the 60-65 age category is 3:55. Worth shooting for!

That is, if I go about it smartly. Steady has been my mantra for almost four decades. I shouldn't be looking to rock the boat now.

Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running?

Running for Your Life: What If the Greats Were Us Thursday

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who perished at the hands of his blood foes, the Nazis, would have us meditate on the lessons to be learned from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

How often, in these days of hate and suspicion between God fearers and liberal sneerers, between Fox believers and Comedy Centrists, do we pause and try to hear the uncluttered message of love and forbearance, of meekness and faith, what Bonhoeffer would say if he were alive today, that:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them … sound no trumpet before you.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Steady Does It

Running for Your Life: Clutter Fighter

Take an hour, any hour. Pick through stuff in your closet. Set aside three distinct piles, to wit:

1/ Sucks as fashion item and will always suck as fashion item

2/ Reminds you of some unpleasant memory (person or thing)

3/ Provisional and dead obvious keeper

Then get big non-see-through bag(s) and throw in contents of first and second piles. No need to sort these piles at this time.

How about that? You just save yourself $20 in book costs and didn't add to your clutter. Congratulations !

Next: Running for Your Life: Steady Does It 

Running for Your Life: Jazz Palace, NYC !

They’re off! The lives of Benny, Pearl, and Napoleon et al, are in the minds of thousands, with book launches in Chicago, and most recently, in Brooklyn. At the party of the year, the cocktails – Al Capone and the Plot Twist – were delicious, thanks to my multi-talented daughter Kate and actor and friend Michael Early, the Audio Book reader of The Jazz Palace, did a dramatic performance of the place they called The Stroll.

People streamed to the party at the Community Bookstore on Seventh Avenue, some sipping wine at the back or in the garden, listening to live jazz, and others in the front where the cocktails were poured. Next in Manhattan, the Center for Fiction on Tuesday, April 28, http://bit.ly/1F83MgD. Oh, and you don’t have to make a beeline to the next event. See what all the excitement is about. Read the book of the season: The Jazz Palace http://bit.ly/1AWKSSS.

Next: Running for Your Life: Steady Does It

Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Then, of course, there is Goya. Who better to lay bare the essence of our current times? Critic T.J. Clark tells us about a show of the Album D drawings by the great Spanish artist (1746-1828) now at London’s Courthauld until May 25: Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album.

Clark writes:

• “There seem to be difficult things in the world, like old age and human cruelty and petty malice and the ugliness of lust, to which I (Goya) am drawn, and which I can’t put down – can’t get used to.”

 Elsewhere:

• “I couldn’t put a name to the quality of Goya’s laughter, or decide how much I wanted to join in.”

 And:

• “The wordlessness of Goya’s pages – the way his images annihilate their scribbled captions, and never stop saying ‘De esto nada sabe’ (‘Nothing is known of this”) – seems intrinsic.”

 Finally:

• “This is old man’s art – Goya was in his seventies, as profoundly deaf as his contemporary Beethoven, when he did Album D – and in old age acceptance and abhorrence often keep company.”

A lifetime is too short to stand before these drawings and wonder of them as Clark does in the April 9 edition of the London Review of Books.

To quote Matthea Harvey’s title of her beautiful book of visual poetics, “If the Tabloids Are True, What Are You?” There is a reason this work by the incomparable Goya is something you can’t put down. You can’t get used to.

Next: Running for Your Life: Jazz Palace, NYC !

Running for Your Life: “It Follows”

I don’t really go for horror movies all that much. But there’s a lot to like in “It Follows” by David R. Mitchell, now at your local Bijou.

A friend and one of my favorite movie critics, Michael Wood, has this to say, “[It] offers an extraordinary mixture of over and under-statement, with almost nothing in between.”

There is a scene that crystallizes its message for me: When the girlfriend hero asks her boyfriend to play the game in which a person reveals his secret desire: who he would like to change places with. He chooses a coddled toddler.

These are teens with outsized fears before adulthood scrapes the life (the sex?) out of them. Could it be even teens see so much of their life has passed them by? If only we could do it over. But we can’t. “It Follows,” that we can’t. Mitchell is definitely on to something here.

Next: Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Running Season?

I do understand the idea of running season. That for five months of cold weather a person who considers herself fit turns away from lacing up her Nikes and instead goes to the pool and does laps, or takes a class. Zumba.

What’s at issue is the underlying premise. That running as a pursuit, as a pleasure, isn’t what we are talking about. Rather the premise is that it’s a necessary evil. As in, what’s necessary to reduce weight, or to keep weight off, to forestall memory loss, to keep looking young.

For me, though, running isn’t confined to a season. Thus the title, Running for Your Life. And not only due to my condition that I’ve written about here: My deep vein thrombosis.

Last Sunday (April 12) at 8:30 a.m. I had the simplest of accidents. I tripped over my dog, and with my hands full, stumbled forward, and landed with considerable force on my chin. One of the funniest words in the English language: Faceplant. A nasty gash opened, requiring five stitches to close. Because I am a “bleeder,” due to taking blood thinners, a doctor watched me carefully for any signs that I was having head trauma, as in intracranial hemorrhaging.

Thankfully, I wasn’t. Part of my reasoning? Because I'm careful with my medication. And I run. I keep myself in shape. All seasons. (I don’t swim and find running is the lone pursuit that works for me.) It keeps the swelling of a damaged DVT leg in check. So I run. Not just in running season. But every other day for as long as I can.

Next: Running for Your Life: “It Follows”

Running for Your Life: Hockey Hockey Hockey Hockey

It’s that time of year. What my pal Coach Tully and I call the best time of year, the last two weeks of April, the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs !

My team, the Penguins, limped in, and any reasonable observer would say their odds of getting past the first round and the powerfully built Rangers, the best team in the league, are pretty much nil. Indeed, these guys should harvest my Penguins in a sweep, like park rangers on a church group without a permit.

But wait a minute. The Penguins have a Sutter. Brandon Sutter. The only starting Sutter among the 16 teams in the tournament.

For the uninitiated, the Sutter family is hockey gold. His father Brent won the Cup twice with the New York Islanders. (The family from Viking, Alberta, counts six Cups as players, two as head coach [Darryl of the LA Kings]). And Brandon played hockey gold in the final game of the year, scoring both goals for the Penguins in a 2-0 victory over the Buffalo Sabres.

The odds are long. But we got Sutter gold. (Even Uncle Darryl’s Kings are in the show.) Let the games begin !

Running for Your Life: Running Season?  

Running for Your Life: If-The-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

This post is a shout-out to my cousin, Joanne, during the birthday month of William Samuel Neath (1889-1973). In so many ways, our grandfather is still with us.

Joanne wrote to me recently to say, that on his death bed forty-two years ago, Grampa told her, a then-college student: “Two things they can never take from you is your education and land …” She says she carries his philosophy with her to this day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey

Running for Your Life: Freethink this

The lead Talk in the New Yorker this week by George Packer http://nyr.kr/1DCf4u8 has me wondering about what is original in a land that is chilled into groupthink and away from freethinking … Isn’t that why so much of what we read, or see on stage and screen doesn’t vary much from what we have seen before? These horribly murdered young men are martyrs to a faith in taking risks. This is true no less in art than in politics. Consider this: stand for something. There is a deep message for all of us in the hashtag #iamavijit.

 Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey

Running for Your Life: All That Jazz Palace

Not today, but tomorrow. The Jazz Palace will be officially for sale -- in stores and online. Have you missed my previous post on The Jazz Palace? If so, here it is:

"Do yourself a favor and click on this link http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD. It will take you to another world. Have you ever seen such a beautiful object? And that’s just the beginning. The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris is not only the novel of the spring, but the event of the spring.

The Jazz Palace tells the story of Benny Lehrman, Napoleon Hill, the Gem Sisters. I’ve lived with these characters for years and to quote a friend, the one-of-a-kind drummer Jamey Haddad, they are hip cats, man. They lived the life in Prohibition America. This is a story of tragedy, race, friendship and love. Benny and Napoleon, they howl at the moon. Pearl and her mother, Anna, keep it real. Oh, and music. This spring, we need hot music.

So make The Jazz Palace Web site http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD you’re [spring] destination. Make it a favorite, share and retweet these few words of mine. Come to the events when they come to your ZIP, or a ZIP near you. Oh, yeah, and get the book. You won't be sorry.

Because it’s The Jazz Palace. You don’t want to miss it. Because it can’t miss."

There's more to come on this topic. Coming your way in the days ahead. Stay tuned. Or to be truer to the time, Don't touch that dial !

Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey !

Running for Your Life: If-The-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Could there be better lines to underscore just how far we have come since Herman Melville came up with the final lines to "Bartleby the Scrivener," a novel published almost one hundred and sixty-two years ago?

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

Next: Running for Your Life: Safe at Any Speed