Running for Your Life: Reward Yourself

You gotta love that early moment in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” when our hero scoots off in her sparkly sneakers and runs up to an urban jogger and greets him with a smile and remarks, her arms pumping with glee, how much she loves to run.

Kimmy, for the uninitiated, has been out of cultural circulation for a medieval generation, fifteen years, so missed the Great Running Craze, the movement away from running that children do in play to what adults do in a workout.

The active word here is “work.” A big part of what has kept me running for my life all these years – I’ll be sixty in October – is that I’ve kept work and running (writing and reading, too) separate. For me, like Kimmy, running is pleasure … I “work” for a living, in my salaryman life. But that’s where my work ends.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t set a reward for the running that I do. (And not by running with music, because, by my lights, the music lives in the reward category. I know this is old school, but how about turning on your favorite tunes AFTER a run as you celebrate by singing in the shower ? … Just a thought.)

Make your reward something simple. Maybe after the shower, unwrap an energy bar with your “juice” of choice and watch a little “Kimmy.” We can all learn from that girl.

Next: Running for Your Life: Bern, Baby, Bern!

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

If only Oscar Wilde were alive. He’d have a few things to say. As even a cursory inventory of what he did say makes eminently clear:

• A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. 

• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

• I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. 

• A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. 

• True friends stab you in the front.
  
  
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reward Yourself

Running for Your Life: Core Principles

At some point, I don’t know precisely when, I started to care about my bad posture. When you have an oversized head as a child that will do it. As a boy I was mocked for my walk. I hung my heavy head, arched my back and took long strides. Father John was the inside family joke. You look like a farmer striding over rows of half-grown corn.

It wasn’t as though I was proud of my walk. But what to do. It was my walk. I may as try to change the way I talked. Or laughed; wasn’t a walk what you were born with?

But running changed my walk. If I were going to go far (and stay well with blood circulating to the busted valves of my damaged left leg), I’d convinced myself I had not only to run but to run long and fast. That meant I had to pay attention to where my head was as I moved. Too far forward and I’d labor too much, lose speed. I took up tai chi for awhile in my late twenties and learned about core strength, about the idea of a spine being lifted up from above as if you were a puppet held up on a string by a gentle power who seeks only the right thing for you, a power that you can trust.

Good posture is core. Hips drop down and feet move apart, shoulders go square, and even though I’m close to forty years from my bad posture days, my head still disproportionately large compared to the rest of my body, strength in my other muscles, my core, compensates. That twelve pounds of brain, bone and flesh sits squarely on my shoulders, and to date I’m still running for my life without any pain in my neck, back, hips, knees or ankles.

Believe me, core principles are worth heeding.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reward Yourself

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

Another pro hockey season has come and gone, and with it, as always, memories of the year that was. The Blackhawks win again, their third in six years and fourth in 54 years, when one of my favorite hockey players of the day, Bobby Hull, led them over Jean Béliveau and the Montreal Canadiens.

In those days, I was no fan of Big Jean, Le Gros Bill, as he was known. When it comes to sports and our teams, we cherish the triumphs but still feel the bitter defeats in our hearts, as if we are still the excited child allowed to stay up late to watch the game that had gone into overtime between my beloved Bruins and the hated Habs, only to be devastated by the deadly shot of the big centerman over the glove of goalie Gerry Cheevers and into the gaping net behind. It was April 1969.

Now he is gone. The best of the best. The original team man. Jean Béliveau passed away in December 2014 during the hockey year that was. I'm still not a fan of Les Canadiens, but it’s a harder man than I am capable of being not to miss the grandeur that Béliveau brought to the game – and to life.  

  

It has been almost seven months, but it bears repeating: This from an article by Dave Stubbs in the Montreal Gazette, Dec. 3, 2014:

“Rarely has the career of an athlete been so exemplary,” Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said on the occasion of Jean Béliveau Night at the Forum on March 24, 1971, the Canadiens paying on-ice pregame tribute to their captain a few months before his retirement.

“By his courage, his sense of discipline and honour, his lively intelligence and finesse, his magnificent team spirit, Béliveau has given new prestige to hockey.”

Béliveau accepted an oversized cheque that night for $155,855, giving birth to his foundation that in the decades ahead would distribute nearly $2 million to organizations helping sick, underprivileged and physically challenged children.

“Everything I achieved throughout my career, and all the rewards that followed, came as the results of team effort. If they say anything about me when I’m gone, let them say that I was a team man. To me, there is no higher compliment,” he wrote in his autobiography, “My Life in Hockey,” published in 1994.

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Principles

Running for Your Life: Are You STILL Running?

It's funny how this question comes out in conversation. Are you STILL running? With emphasis on the STILL.

Invariably, it's a question I hear from someone who I haven't seen in some time. That makes sense, I suppose. I guess it is fair to say that there are not that many folks in their sixtieth year who run an average of 20 miles a week.

And sure, when I do hear that phrase, it strikes me as someone thinking out loud. If one of my friends and acquaintances says "Are You STILL Running?" ten of them of are thinking it, in the spirit of a pal who blurts out something nervy, then says, "Oh, my, did I just say that out loud?"

But, if you think about it, they don't say, "Are you STILL smoking?," or "Are you STILL sniffling from allergies?," or "Are you STILL living on First Street?" (although they will still say, "Are you STILL working at The Post?", which says as much about the politics of my neighborhood than anything.)

The STILL says it all. That with grace and self-respect I will finally give up this unlikely pursuit of running and turn my hand to more age-appropriate exercises, like, say, lawn bowling or, if I must, doubles tennis.

It's hard to keep that tinge of judgment out of our tone, much less out of our minds. But it could be worth a try.

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Principles

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

It should’ve been in there. In the movie, “North by Northwest.” David Trotter writes about it in the June 4, 2015, edition of the London Review of Books, entitled “Hiatus at 4 a.m.”

Alfred Hitchcock was being interviewed around this time of year in 1962 (yeah, 53 years ago!). He was 62. (I like to think part of his reason for giving so much in these talks with Francois Truffault was the irony: 62 in ’62 – he wouldn’t be 63 until later that summer.)

Imagine this scene: Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. He stops in Detroit in its Motor City heyday … Here’s what Hitchcock tells Truffault:

“I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foreman. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece.  Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut  and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!”

Hitchcock, he never stopped … What a man! An inspiration to us all.

This too, is a great takeaway from the Trotter essay of four books, including one by our friend Michael Wood: “Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much”:

“The transitions between films became almost as swift and as seamless as the transitions within them.”

Words to live by. If only this great were still with us!

Next: Running for Your Life: Are You STILL Running?

Running for Your Life: In Honor of Tootsies

When you’re running for your life, it stands to reason that some parts of the body will begin to feel it.

For many that means knees, hips, calves. For me, it’s feet and to be more precise, toes.

So what to do? Pay attention. Don’t be afraid to act when you feel pain. Too many people will run as recreation and then with persistent pain or discomfort stop cold.

For years now, I’ve run with prescription orthotics in my shoes. (Stay with me, this is going to be worth it.) They help to level the foot strike and have alleviated the neuritis that just a couple of years ago had me in agony, especially after runs in double-digit miles. Since then I’ve taken to buying Dr. Scholl’s insoles for everyday shoes.

After almost forty years of regular running, I feel like I should treat my feet (toes!) with a little tenderness. These orthotics and Dr. Scholl’s make a world of difference to me.

Oh, and buy oversize. Give those toes room to move. I’m too old for “Born to Run,” the shoeless Joes and Janes of the trail. Especially for the middle-aged and post-. Roomy is groovy.

Another thought: Long runs. Be kind to your tootsies. Layer them in petroleum jelly. They’ll love that. After all, your toes don’t have any say in this multi-mile running thing.

Matter of fact, tootsies pretty much have no say, period. That’s it. Take some time. Check ’em out. Pedicare isn’t just about what color you choose for your nails.

Ask Caitlyn Jenner, if you don’t believe me. Dr. Scholl’s or Vaseline should sign her to endorse their products. Bruce, he knew from toe punishment as a decathlete, and Caitlyn will know it – and how! – trying to get into – and stay into – those six-inch Jimmy Choos.

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

Running for Your Life: Firefly Season

I don’t have a bucket list. What I’d love to do before I die. In fact, I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets, resentments, has-to-be’s. It might have something to do with expectations. I didn’t spend a childhood thinking about college or what would happen after college. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m not driven: there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to chase my passions: writing, running, reading, the ones I talk about in this space. I give myself a chance, that’s all we can expect.

Soon, the fireflies will be here. They’re going to be late this year. The nights have been too wet and cold for them. But I’ll be sitting on my back deck in Brooklyn, with M and Thurber, and we’ll watch in the dimming light as the fireflies wink and sparkle in that magical way that they do, and if I were to have a thought about bucket lists and death and what you’d like to think would be one of your last thoughts on Earth, it would be the glorious sight of those simple beasts as they dance and flicker in the sweet night air, that if man is wise and God is good, this moment – this firefly season – will delight and inspire those who follow in this bejeweled space.

Next: Running for Your Life: Tootsies

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

My pal Mickey Siporin (1941-2005), from a cartoon entitled Millennial Meanderings ... What is the muse that fueled the work of this incredible artist and enlightened reformer and devoted friend and father ... "I'm much too young to be this old . . ." The new work that flew off his pen in the spaces of the periods of the ellipsis, beyond and to infinity.

It is hard to believe that Mickey is gone ten years. What would he have made of our abuse of drones, the Kardashians, Edward Snowden and . . . Bernie Sanders !!!! I swear he wouldn't have been surprised at all with the first three on this list. The fourth? He'd be going door to door, riding the Bernie Bus and doing a daily cartoon.

He is missed.

Next: Running for Your Life: Firefly Season  

Running for Your Life: Yes, Cross Train!

When you get to be my age, pretty much everything counts as cross training. Say, taking the garbage out, going for a walk with the dog, wrestling with the top of a pickle jar . . .

Seriously, though, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to just run out the door. Now that I’m in the pre-training period for my fall marathon, I’m beginning an every other day training regimen. That means on those off days I dedicate at least twenty minutes of stretching and massaging sore and strained leg muscles on a roller and twenty minutes of working with machines, mostly core and leg, with some upper body. Nightly pushups (which I've been doing for the past five years).

And I feel it the next day. On the treadmill, where I’m slowly starting to ramp up the miles and the incline, and on the long, outdoor runs, the hour-plusses. You need to cross train to build strength and endurance, to ease your mind into thinking that yes, God dammit, you can do this, if done in a way that's smart, that embraces slowness as a contributing principle (see recent post), you can keep pace, you can reach that next plateau.

Next: Running for Your Life: Firefly Season