Running for Your Life: Hubris Handicap

When it comes to being pigheaded, runners training for a marathon win the prize.

How else to explain the way we balance pain (garden variety or thin edge of horror-type) and the base fitness level necessary to run 26.2 miles at one time and not fall apart at Mile 16, or hit the wall at Mile 20.

From that first marathon when I was twenty-seven in 1983, training with my pal JM from Brockville, and running too with my childhood friend GD, we often mentioned that we had to get the miles in the bank. No excuses.

So I sit on the subway writing this (Oct. 27) with not just a sore heel – as described in this space last week – but with a diagnosis of mild cases of both Achilles tendonitis and plantar fascia. My right foot doesn’t hurt flat as they are on the floor of the subway. But when I get up and walk around, go up subway stairs. Oweeee !

When it comes to running (and races) I favor doctors without borders. My kind podiatrist has me with a PT program that rocks – and a pledge to shoot these dogs with steroid painkillers in the event the condition doesn’t settle down by race day (Nov. 15).

In the meantime, that means exercises as prescribed by my doctor and my new physical therapist, and running when the pain subsides some. Otherwise low-impact cross-training. At night, massage the bottom of my foot with a tennis ball, treat the inflammation by step-and-roll on a frozen water bottle.

All for the race. My hubris handicap? Maybe. But how do I know? Being pigheaded has its advantages.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Long, Hot Stretch   

Running for Your Life: Roman Mood

Back from a best time of your life family vacation in Rome. We’re talking walking, eating pasta and drinking wine and amaro. Below is a taste of what we found:

Imperial Past I

This place Roma is one in which

People resist the other

While kissing her on both cheeks

And then a third time

To seal the illusion.

Imperial Past II

When you are so long gone

From being the Imperial

What to do but cling to

Your exception, no maps will

Mark the spot, find the center,

Your desire on terms of the ancient conquerors,

A mind game that isn’t tied to rules

You can possibly understand

And that, best of all, are so

Pre-digital as to make even the squarest

Disciple bow in disbelief.

Imperial Past III

We’re on board Alitalia, the nine-hour flight home. The plane so tight there is no extra room, a knee-crusher, and me with my deep vein thrombosis concerns. It’s been more than fourteen years since I’ve popped a blood clot, but the fear of spitting off a new one never leaves.

K is sitting across the aisle, trying to read “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, but when she presses her “light” button on the handrest nothing is illuminated. In her row at least. A light in Row 34, directly in front of hers, does go on. She then turns to the fellow passenger behind her in Row 36 and kindly asks him to touch the lightbulb graphic on his handrest. He does so and Kate blinks out of darkness and into her “Wild” reading.

M and I notice later that in each of the four-seat middle rows to the bulkhead, the light switches work – but for the row directly in front, not overhead.

M presses her flight attendant button and when our assigned person comes by in due time, M tells her about the malfunction. People have also complained about hardly working entertainment systems. Mine is out for four of the nine hours, except for the channel that offers the slow narrative of the tiny white plane and Western world graphic whose 1980s Atari-style technology offers nostalgic comfort.

The flight attendant tests a few of the lights to see if what M says is true, and sure enough, it is.

“I’ve never seen that before,” she says with a Mona Lisa smile. Then she shakes her head and goes back to wherever it was she came from.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hubris Handicap

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

For reasons that I won’t go into now, I’ve recently taken up with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). It’s curious to think in these hyper-political days during the run-up to next year’s presidential election that are ninety parts promotion and 10 parts substance (I’m not looking at you, Bernie Sanders!) of an American great who, according to Malcom Cowley’s introduction of the 1948 Penguin edition of “The Portable Hawthorne,”  “was reserved to the point of being secretive about his private life, and yet he spoke more about himself, with greater honesty, than any other American of his generation.”

More important to me – and I would imagine to all writers and would-be writers – is this quality, as described by Cowley:

“If Hawthorne in his later years had a better, more flexible style than any other American author of his time, the fact was easy to explain: he had learned to write, first by reading, then by talking to himself, and most of all by writing a great deal.”

Here is a national treasure who talked about himself with greater honesty at the service of art as he sought a deep understanding of the American condition. Hawthorne strived to write his books so that ever sentence “may be understood and felt,” so he said.

“There is nothing too trifling to write down,” he said in a letter to his friend Horatio Bridge.

So put down your smartphone and read a little Hawthorne. From a book. And then go ahead, talk to yourself. Could be, before long, you’ll be writing a great deal.

Next: Running for Your Life: Roman Mood

Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

It’s been awhile – January 2014, to be exact – since I’ve written about the importance of stick-to-it-ness. When it comes to running for your life – in your sixties, no less – it’s a lesson that deserves to be repeated.

As time goes by, so does the relatively pain-free aspect of high-mileage training. In July, while running in France, I pulled a hamstring muscle. Luckily, it wasn’t a severe strain. It slowed my training schedule, and did heal in time. These days, well into October, it feels like new.

Now it’s my right heel that’s inflamed. One of the things that I’ve written about in this space is the importance of knowing your body. When need be, I stop road training and switch to the low-impact elliptical machine. I’m deep into marathon training so as part of my regimen I’m taking anti-inflammatories for the residual pain. If the pain persists (it is a dull one when I run, on a scale of 1-10, a 2 to 3), I’ll be seeing my podiatrist before the marathon on November 15, just in case …

All of which is to say that despite the aches and pains (and an energy level that isn’t exactly what it was, say, ten years ago), I don’t miss a day of running. Or of cross-training.

Last week, our family went to Rome. The heel was sore, so instead of doing a long run, I did 20 reps up and down a 40-step staircase. Up on my toes where the inflammation didn’t hamper me. I did run through the pain, and have been running and doing low-impact workouts since we got back.

If you are going to run for your life, pain management is crucial. As is stick-to-it-ness. It’s hardest to do when you are not at your best physically. But the benefits are worth it, believe me.

Next: Running for Your Life: Roman Mood   

Running for Your Life: Canada Votes

In the United States, Harper’s is a respected progressive magazine. “Harper’s” has an entirely different connotation in Canada, my home and native land. For the past decade, Canada has been Harper’s. Stephen Harper’s, that is.

Today, Canada is voting, and if there is any social justice in the world, the country’s voters will vote Conservative Party Prime Minister Harper out of office.

I wish I were there to cast my vote for either the Liberals or the New Democratic Party. Not because I’m a big believer in politicians, or the idea that, as Lewis Lapham writes in November’s Harper’s, we – regular folks in Canada or the U.S. – can't realistically expect our vote to matter in terms of choosing democracy over concentrated wealth.

I would back the Liberals or the NDP because it would at least FEEL like the side of a civilized approach to government and public problem-solving is in charge. What a luxury to imagine the word citizen as a possible construct in a conversation. That would count for something.

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

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

From the master of the acerbic putdown, Evelyn Waugh, (1903-1966), best known as the author of “Brideshead Revisited,” whose work critic V.S. Pritchett remarked will delight long past his death for those who honor “the beauty of his malice,” words to borrow when you’ve been invited to something that, well, you just don’t want to attend:

“YOUR NAME HERE deeply regrets that he (she) is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.”

If only Evelyn Waugh were here to deliver on how best to skewer Donald Trump – and keep him skewered. Sigh. This from humorist Nancy Mitford: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday

There are more than a few reasons behind my October-love. It’s when baseball suddenly becomes real, like a favorite uncle who eleven months of the year is on the road, but every October he returns, refreshed with new and wildly entertaining stories to tell. I’m a Pirates fan (by default after my beloved Expos folded) so tonight (Oct. 7) is the night, which will be no horrendous loss if they fall to the Cubs, because, for God’s sake, they’re the Cubs! How can you not root for the Cubs in part of your heart – or your gut – for all those following the latest developments in the world of superorganisms http://bit.ly/1LiEgYL. This is a dated article from Michael Pollan but you get the drift …

Today also marks the opening of hockey season. In past years that delightful event has occurred on my birthday (Oct. 5), but no matter. It’s my birthday week, a Wednesday, and the Rangers are playing the ’Hawks. If only my Penguins were on against the ’Hawks, then it would make for a Pittsburgh-Chitown double-header. In any event, drop the puck. Let’s get it on!

Oh yeah, the birthday thing. Sixty. My seventh decade. On Nov. 15 I will be running in the Brooklyn Marathon, my first shot at qualifying for Boston in the 60-64 age group. I’d be in range to qualify under ideal weather conditions: 45 degrees F with a 20-mile-an-hour swirling wind that miraculously is always at my back.

I know this blog can at times sound eye-rollingly upbeat. So, cynics, pass by. This decade promises to be the best yet! Hope the same is true for you, dear reader. I know I believe it, and there is power in that.

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

Running for Your Life: Marathons and War

Not so long ago I wrote about Tony Judt (1948-2010) who coined the phrase the crappy generation, whose members “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, either economic nor political.”

I had Judt in mind when I was talking to my friend J last month over cocktails. When J and I get together for Hendricks martinis and dinner on the side, we often talk about running.

One thought I had during out last session was that as a member of the crappy generation I had no mass, or national, war to occupy my body and mind. So, as a way to compensate for this deficiency (after all, we are talking “crappy” here), I run marathons.

How are marathons like wars? As a group, we marathoners struggle and suffer through months of basic training to bring ourselves up to the standards of road “combat,” which is running continually for 26.2 miles. Out there on the course, we urge each other forward, like mates in the trenches. We understand, as best we can, the common enemy (especially at mile sixteen or mile twenty when we are convinced that we have nothing left.) Along the course, the civilians cheer as if to the soldiers on march to harbor and their troop ships, saying reassuring war-years-like things: “Looking great!” “We’re proud of you!” “You’re all so amazing!”

At the end of race, we have a memory and a medal to show to those at home. And, after our marathoning days are over, we put the medal in a drawer for safekeeping. When we take it out we will handle it carefully and memories of our own sacrifice and those who shared it will come flooding back.

There will be no marathon cenotaphs, no memorials built for the nameless marathoner. It is, I’m sure you agree, better that way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday!

    

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

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) grew up breathing the air of southern Georgian Bay as I did a half-century later. In Canada, Thomson is known as the Great Outdoor painter who got away, the northern magus, the promise of a singular vision at a time when the nation itself hadn’t fully formed. His sudden, mysterious death by drowning occurred as the Great War was raging in Europe, when Canada was earning its stripes as an independent country, removed from England and distinct from the United States in the increasingly modern world.

This founding artistic father of Canada has always been a kind of spiritual brother to me … So, in some respects, this great is always with me. Here’s a sample meditation:

"It’s not like we have many letters from Tom Thomson. Not like Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) a generation before, a loner of an entirely different type, Vincent, whose shouts and sighs and embitterments seem mixed in the thick paint itself and is why I can stand before the paintings of his later years, or the other that started the thrall, “The Potato Eaters,” and if I’m still enough I can shut out the phone-snappers and loud, hard-of-hearing visitors, the ghouls who step right in front of me.

With Tom, you have to fill in the blanks. His paintings, say “West Wind” or “Jack Pine,” don’t shout or even mutter. They are like the place of his birth, Owen Sound, and the bush beyond, the bird-wing and tree-crack, the crunch of dry, hard leaves underfoot – and when Tom could he’d seek out the muddy shores and hear the sound of the loose suck with each step of his bone-dry hunting boots, think of the men at war.

Even in the trenches of Passchendaele, the Canadians don’t shout or mutter or cry of their lot. Tom didn’t go to war and at no point in his few letters and cards home and to friends does he say why. The papers, of course, wrote of nothing else. With photos too. So when he sought out the mud it was to pay homage to his fellow Canadians, those who didn’t rule men but felt the pull of the factory, the farm, the mine and, for Tom, the fishing hole. When he paints the browns, dull grays when the scene demanded something brighter, blame the war. What drove him even deeper into himself, brought a darkness to light."

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War