Running for Your Life: Trolls at Halloween

What Halloween would be complete without a little scare – well, actually, a big scare.

That would be trolls. The internet variety.

A big pre-election thanks goes to writer Jared Keller and the Village Voice for his cautionary tale on trolls. http://bit.ly/2eNhE9r.

When it comes to just what makes news these days (Yes, I’m a member of an endangered species: the newspaper worker), look no further than the trolls.

If only – like the kiddie trolls who come to trick or treat at your door tonight – they will vanish with the dawn. But as Keller warns us, unless there is a hard reckoning of common sense, the trolls of the internet will continue to bear down on civil society like a late season hurricane.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sand County Almanac

Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Next year I will mark a milestone: my fifth decade of running every other day, or at least three times a week.

In that time I’ve entered eight marathons, finishing six of them, including Boston in 2012. I didn’t try my fourth until well into my 50s.

In those years, my pace has slowed some. I have taken to heart that I will never post a better marathon PR than 3:33:08 (which I managed in Scranton, Pa., when I was 55 years old).

Still, the other day I ran four miles and felt like I was in my thirties. I didn’t run the route as fast as I did in those days, but my body felt as good. Or at least that is what my brain was telling me.

If there is a secret to any of this, a lot of it comes down to being sensible about pace setting. The “setting” of your body as you run.

That means working on your running posture. You are not going to change the way you run. That’s bred in the bone. But look around you and you’ll see what I mean.

Most casual runners of all ages will lean forward and run out in front of their hip fulcrum. In so doing, with each footfall, the force of the stride falls disproportionately on the knee joint, and isn’t shared by the lower leg and ankle in the way that allows for optimum power efficiency.  After years of running in this way, injury often results.

What to do? Last year at this time my knee blew out because of those years of pounding. My pace “setting” was off all that time. For months in physical therapy I worked strenuously to correct that imbalance by doing lunges and squats to strengthen the knees – and equally important – the butt and lower leg.

For example, doing the squat and lunge appropriately (watch as people do them and often the case they are cheating the exercise and thus the good it can do) builds butt muscle as well as the knee and lower leg. But keeping the weight behind the knee as you do the full lunge and full squat, you are not overstraining the knee as you exercise. Rather you are training the body to distribute the weight of your body – and the pounding as you run – more evenly with each exercise lunge or each training stride.

Okay, that’s the Rime of the Ancient Marathoner lesson for the day. Next up and soon! is the plan for my next half-marathon. With my No. 9 marathon a realistic goal in the not too distant future.

Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: Yeah, That Addiction Thing Again

When it comes to appeasing liberal guilt in an age of tech dominance of public policy consider this:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has just released guidelines on cellphone use for our youngest users. I saw the news item about it as part of a national TV broadcast over the weekend (Oct. 21-23). Here are the highlights:

• ·         No screen time for children under the age of 2
• ·         No more than one hour of screen time a day for those between 3 and 5
• ·         Older kids? Guidelines get vague

Where to begin. While laudable, it’s hard to think of a more meaningless gesture. Imagine guidelines being set for children re: smoking. That they are cautioned against cigarette smoke intake while their parents chain-smoke through the day – and even during bedtime stories, or in their own bed, the blue light of the screen dumbing their faces as the child wanders in the room, awakened by a dream not stirred by looking into a phone.

I will believe the likes of politicians’ promises when they are not affected by the fortunes in campaign dollars being funneled to them by forces in Silicon Valley. When serious guidelines are published and distributed to warn adults against the dangers of overuse of mobile phones. Until then, do yourself a favor and read The Deep State. http://bit.ly/2eyEL9j

Would that we could get serious about informing people of the deleterious effects of cellphone addiction. That is a cultural climate change that I’d like to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Mo’ Canada

When it comes to my adopted country’s political season, where best to look for moral direction than Canada – my home and native land.

For those of you who didn’t see it on Facebook, check out this post

http://wapo.st/2epGSsp

Are Canadians too smug in their modesty? We’d rather not stake such a claim.

Consider my recent post about the quote I discovered from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

My childhood pal Frederick Harrison points out that this quote – and many many others –  received wide distribution in Canada in November 1967 (and to radio listeners around the world from the dynamic ideas program, The Massey Lectures on CBC Radio).

Here is the link to those lectures: http://bit.ly/2eL2a7g

As I wrote to Frederick in a recent commentary, the Massey Lectures have been truly formative in my thinking, travel and have shaped the way I see the world.  Most important for me was the 1984 Carlos Fuentes, "Latin America At War With the Past" that I listened to during the days I was employed as assistant night editor at the Windsor Star. Just a few months before I'd returned from three months living in Mexico (with a one-week tour of Cuba). In January 1985, I was back in Cuba, and in July, to Nicaragua where I wrote news articles during the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: Ed Whitlock Rocks!

OK, I had planned to post today about pace setting. Not in terms of racing, but just for those looking for guidance on an overlooked part of road training. Going out too fast. How do you stay within yourself? Listening to your body. Feeling comfortable with slow.

Then Ed Whitlock came along, courtesy of my pal in Canada, Susan Wright. When it comes to Running for Your Life, pause a moment to read this article and consider the last forty-plus years of Ed Whitlock's life. (I started running in 1976, so my forty-plus begins in January ...)

http://bit.ly/2dZ4IeH

Rime of the Ancient Marathoner, indeed !

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

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

Imagine if Dr. King were with us. For a fleeting moment I felt he was this morning, when I saw the quote below on signage in front of a Catholic Church in Gowanus, Brooklyn:

"Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Something our political leaders (and wannabe leaders) should show. If only.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Deep State S—t

Here are some uncheery thoughts.

Political campaigns may just be the leading growth business in post-industrial America. (Hurry! Please donate today to CAMPAIGN _________. There has never been a greater threat to civilization as we know it than the prospect of a ____________ Party victory. Don’t delay! Pony up today!)

And what do you get for that investment? Hope and change? Or more of the same?

Surprise! More of the same. That equates to trillions spent on defense and foreign policy prerogatives that have been proven failures, at best, and elitist pet projects, at worst.

Do politicians earn the right to represent us after filling their pockets from coins from our pockets? Yes. Do they actually control (or even mildly have influence to fiddle with) the levers of power in such a way as to earn the trust we put in them by our honest investments in their business. No. Not even close.

I read a lot of books: novels at home and nonfiction – primarily political and social science books – during my daily commutes to and from my paying job. Hands down the most interesting I’ve read this season is Mike Lofgren’s THE DEEP STATE http://bit.ly/2e4U19B.

DEEP STATE s—t is scary s—t. As scary as Trump being president? Well, no. But scary enough to warrant a new wave of folk considering asylum in Canada if its central messages were to be given wider distribution.

In our daily news feeds, the deep state doesn’t get discussed much. Consider what J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1950s-1970s (See THE BURGLARY http://bit.ly/2ebfJrr )  What Dwight D. Eisenhower complained about in his famous military industrial complex speech in 1961.

In the Hill-Pill debates, what time is given to balancing privacy concerns with national security? What gets classified? We know that Hillary used a personal e-mail server but do we ask the question: What does get classified? Who is in charge of those policies and practices? What are the checks and balances?

The deep state – the Washington, DC, Puzzle Palace – is in charge. And democracy? That’s the fastest-growing civilian business in post-industrial Amerca. It’s like melting gold and pouring it into an unused well in coal country.

Fraud, baby.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Faceplant or Face-plant?

Hmm. One word or hyphenated?

Current Merriam-Webster shows the word as hyphenated, to mean a sudden face-first fall.

In word use the hyphen has a way of dissolving – usually over a long period of time like forest rock giving way to matsutake mushrooms. But that process can be hurried by constant use.

In my case that applies. It just so happens the “faceplant” has emerged as my own private injury method. On Thursday, Sept. 29, only two days before my scheduled half-marathon in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I managed my second faceplant in two years. The first one occurred when I faceplanted while walking the dog: one hand holding a hot coffee, the other the dog leash, and Wham!, I tripped over Thurber’s back leg and went down chin-first on pavement.

Seven stitches later I went to The Post to work on a Sunday.

Then, on that last Thursday in September, I’m face-first again, this time while on a final training run before the Oct. 1 race. While on a Prospect Park trail I was zooming along, feeling no pain, when I tripped on a tree root – Screw You, Tree Root, my daughter K rejoined – and fell even harder than the first time: Right on the same spot as I’d injured during the dog-tripping incident. Then off to the clinic: 12 stitches this time (because the collision was harder, my teeth opened a wound in the roof of my mouth.)

The upshot? No Bay Ridge Half. And yes, this result in the spelling of “faceplant.” It’s on my mind so much now that when I close my eyes I see the hyphen dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in water.   

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t

Running for Your Life: Yeah, That Addiction Thing

Okay, so you didn’t drop everything and read the “Put Down Your Phone” essay by Andrew Sullivan that I posted last month. Don’t worry. Here’s another, this one in that swishy new Economist lifestyle magazine that continues to find its way to my door at home.

This report, by Ian Leslie, is called “The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive.” http://bit.ly/2dusGxV. Redeem yourself and stop everything to read THIS article. These Internet addiction pieces do seem to be piling up, like leaves falling year-round in our so-confused climate.

Some beauts. For those who insist on keeping their phone in their hands, rather than convince themselves they have time on the hands.

• When motivation is high enough, or a task easy enough, people become responsive to triggers such as the vibration of a phone, Facebook’s red dot, the email from the fashion store featuring a time-limited offer on jumpsuits.

• Respondents spent all their hours thinking about how to organize their lives in order to take pictures they could post to each persona, which meant they weren’t able to enjoy whatever they were doing, which made them stressed and unhappy.

• No matter how useful the products, the system itself is tilted in favor of its designers. The house always wins.

And finally:

• In theory, we can all opt out of the loops of incentive and reward which encircle us, but few of us choose to. It is just so much easier to accept and connect. If we are captives of captology, then we are willing ones.

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t