Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

When it comes to still running for your life, as in the past 40-plus years, the idea of balance is one of the first things that comes to mind.

Balance in all things. What my father-in-law, who lived in a healthy fashion for more than century, and worked the room like a Hollywood A-lister during his posh 100^th birthday party, called everything in moderation.

That’s not to say boring. Lots of folks will equate balance with boredom. Fatal mistake. Well, maybe not fatal, but you get my drift.

Balance in food and nutrition. Stay away from white sugar, if you are doing high-energy exercise, be sure to keep up your carbs. Have a few drinks, sure, but don't overindulge, make it a habit. Eat and drink smart.

When it comes to the exercise itself, vary your runs. Don’t always do the same 5 kilometer route, spare the treadmill in fine weather, choose a hill instead of a straightaway if you feel that you aren’t pushing yourself enough.

I like to think of it in terms of the balance beam. Not the gymnastics apparatus, but the light that shines on that message. That in all things in life – love, friendship, work, writing, painting, running, whatever your passion – follow the light of the balance beam.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Attack, Please !

Running for Your Life: Townies vs. College Kids

Pardon the hockey head. It’s going on late April. I could fight it, but what’s the use?

My team is in it, the Pittsburgh Penguins. They are playing the Columbus Blue Jackets.

If you’ve watched this series at any length, the comparison above is apt. The Jackets are the townies; the Pens, the college kids.

It starts with the coaches, Sully, the good, and Torts, the bad (he famously says he prefers the company of dogs to people).

Downstate Ohio is Trump country to such a degree it helped swing the vote to The Donald’s favor in the US presidential election. Well, the counties surrounding Pittsburgh are equally for The Donald … And yeah, Pennsylvania went for Trump. For the record, both Columbus and Pittsburgh, as urban entities, went equally strong for Clinton.

Still, I would hazard to say the Jackets play the kind of he-man, hit-him-hard,    -harder, -hardest and often that would satisfy Trump’s notion of what to expect from a Rambo-style warrior. Pittsburgh, not so much.

What Pittsburgh does is play an “elite” style game. (Consider this akin to the word “liberal” in Trump country). The players they’ve been recruiting in the past few years predominantly come from American college ranks. Smaller, faster, and, dare I say it?, capable of smarter plays, than the townies.

What’s more, for Sully and the Pens, it doesn’t matter what the score is: up two goals or down two goals, they continue to push a college-style game, which is exciting to watch because it’s based on risky, offensive, what we used to call firewagon hockey, compared to the game preferred by the townies (ie, methodical, board-focused, grinding, with charging-through-the-walls heavy hits).

Here’s another comparison worthy of note. Trump was famously an underdog well into the late stages of the presidential election. As are the townies, the Jackets. They are down in the best of four Stanley Cup series, 3-1.

Can the Trump style pull off the upset in ice hockey that it did in the Electoral College? Can the townies repeat their role model’s feat and pummel the college kids into submission and ride to caveman victory? It will be telling to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

Running for Your Life: Go, Leafs, Go

Here’s a birthright moment for you.

I’ve identified the bonfire smell on the northern breeze as the uncommon but unmistakable odor of Maple Leafs on fire.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, that is.

In the US where I now live, NBC cable channels carry all the Stanley Cup playoff games. And if you happened to land on one of them last night (April 17), say about 10 p.m., all hell was breaking out on Yonge Street in Toronto.

The Maple Leafs had just won an overtime game against the powerhouse Washington Capitals. Its second overtime triumph over the Caps in as many games. They could have a stranglehold on the series had they managed to win the first overtime game. Instead, they are up 2-1, and have the Caps on their heels.

Maple Leafs haven’t been burning this hot since 1967. When they last won the Cup. That’s a lot of Don Cherry jackets and ties.

Who knows where this will lead? Who cares? But if you’re looking for something to do on Wednesday night, track down Game 4 of the Leafs-Caps series on NBC in the US, and see what all the fuss up north is about. You won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

Running for Your Life: This Hour Has Seven Hours

You might have to be Canadian-born (and a reporter) of a certain age to get this reference. But if there was a single TV show influence that drew me to work in public affairs it is the CBC news show called:

“This Hour Has Seven Days.”

I have to admit that I was too young to enjoy the short-run show (from 1964-66, only 50 episodes), but while a student at the Carleton University School of Journalism I studied it. Man, was it ahead of its time (and still is)!

Imagine this, cribbed from a Canadian Press review:

“The final segment featured unflappable Robert Hoyt interviewing two Georgia-based Grand Dragons of the Ku Klux Klan. Wearing hoods, the two elders had no idea Hoyt was going to invite a black civil rights leader onto the panel. By the end of the tense segment, you could barely see any of them through the thick haze of cigarette smoke.”

Which brings me the latest running-longevity study. So a new survey widely published says that one hour of running equates to an additional seven hours in the life department …

Let’s do the gazintas … Beginning in 1976, I started running every other day (as has been the subject of this blog since 2010). Let’s say the early, not-too-strenuous jogging years cancel out the marathon training years (eight), leaving, conservatively, 2.5 hours per week X 52 weeks, or 130 hours per year, X 41 years = 5,330 hours of running, X 7, or 37,310 additional hours, or expressed in days, 1,555, for a grand total of 4.3 additional years.

All this for a measly 4.3 years … ? Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that J

Next: Running for Your Life: Go, Leafs, Go !

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

Maigret in the USA ! Maigret in the USA !

Alas, Georges Simenon – the intuitive author of the Jules Maigret detective novel series – is no longer with us, but, man, his books! They are some legacy.

Most especially – when it comes to trying to come to grips with just what has happened (and is happening) in US politics. Especially in places that don’t begin with “New” or “Los.”

I’m talking about the slim, 174-page novel, “Maigret at the Coroner’s.”

Do yourself a favor and pick it up. Our hero visits a coroner’s inquest in desert Arizona, and Wow!, do his observations about American justice and fair play deliver. As in the dark side of 1949 America sure has lessons for those of us trying to get some insights into 2017 America.

Consider:

Our hero is dubbed “Julius” by the folks he encounters … The idea of a man called Jules? Unheard of.

Then, this on page 77:

“There was a Bible on the night stand. In hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms, an identical Bible with a black cover sat waiting for the traveler.

In short (in America): the bar or the Bible.”

As to the bar:

“There were no terraces where people could have an aperitif, watch passersby in the setting sun and breathe the scent of chestnut trees.

They drank, but to do so had to shut themselves up inside bars sealed off from the eyes of others, as if satisfying some shameful need.”

And that’s not even to mention the pervasive misogyny in the story, a coroner’s inquest into the tragic death of a young women who was in the company of five airmen in the desert.

Next: Running for Your Life: One Hour Equals Seven Hours

Running for Your Life: Spring Tickets to Nowhere

Here we go. Spring !

Well, actually summer.

I can’t believe that just a week ago I bundled myself into a long winter coat to attend an evening wedding in Jersey City.

Today (April 11) is hot in New York City. Summer. And the puck has yet to drop on the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Talk about climate change.

This is not the first time that we New Yorkers have gone flush into summer from winter.

Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating. In the United States, we’ve got climate change deniers in the White House, so a denial-impulse has to be acknowledged.

On the face of it, doesn’t it make sense to say that in the parts of the US Northeast, famous for their four distinct seasons (mud season being the fifth in some), in which we lose a season, say, in this case, spring, that it amounts to a change?

Me, I’m all Annie Proulx (Barkskins) when it comes to climate change. I’ve just turned the final page on this magnificent novel, as Sapatisia Sel, descendant of Rene Sel, the protagonist whose second impression of New France (Canada) was: “a dark, vast forest, inimical wilderness,” demonstrates “the female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature.”

What’s in fashion this spring? Climate change protests, that’s what.

Next: Running for Your Life: Maigret in the USA

Running for Your Life: Hockey Hockey Hockey Hockey

The Mercurys did it the last time in 1927: won the Memorial Cup for an Owen Sound team.

Now, 90 years later, the Attack is on.

The Owen Sound Attack, that is.

This year marks a special moment as a hockey-loving Owen Sounder. The Attack, the junior club that has distinguished itself in competition in recent years is seen as being a genuine contender for the Memorial Cup, the trophy signifying supremacy in Canadian junior hockey.

The Attack is down 2-1 against the Soo Greyhounds, a team known for graduating a gangly kid from Brantford, Ontario, to the WHA, and then the NHL, back in the spring of 1978. (Yeah, Wayne Gretzky). But its next game is on Tuesday night in Owen Sound.

I’m counting on the Attack coming back strong on Tuesday, a day before the Stanley Cup playoffs open.

Most years at this time my focus is on my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. And the Canadian clubs: this year a good crop: Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and TORONTO !!

But, for now, that’ll have to take a back seat to the Attack. 

I mean when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, they ended a 54-year drought. When it comes to major junior clubs, it has been ninety years for Owen Sound. 

Time to put another team in orbit. Go, Attack, Go !!

Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Tickets

Running for Your Life: Beware the “Confidence” Man

I’ve been in this country long enough to comfortably make this observation below. 

I hope for a lot of people searching for answers about the current US leadership, concerns in their school and workplace, it will explain a lot:

Confidence on display in men who know less than nothing is a variant of American power.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey

Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees

Having been down this road before, I’m a little shy in putting this out there.

After all, I’ve not run in a marathon or a half marathon since July 2014. In those near-three years, my training has been interrupted by injury. The worst being a running-stopping knee crusher around Halloween 2015, just two weeks before the Brooklyn Marathon. Then the following “fall”, on the Thursday before the Bay Ridge Half Marathon, I literally smushed a faceplant, suffering minor concussion symptoms and a bloodied lip and face cuts.

Sweet, it hasn’t been.

Now, though, as I ready myself to start training for The County Marathon in Eastern Ontario in October, I want to say a word about knees.

Time will tell, and it could be these 40-plus years of running on these knees have taken their toll. That my next injury is just around the corner. Better, if I were smart enough to admit it to myself, that I should be happy to just jog three-, four-, five-, and at the outside, six-milers and be done with that.

Thing is the knees. They’ve never felt stronger. That is since the knee crusher in 2015, I’ve been strict in doing these exercises: lunges, squats and leg raises. We’re talking compression socks and patella bands to manage the shock of the street-pounding. This greater core strength actually has me sitting back in my stride a bit more, allowing my more muscled self (knees, quads and butt) to better absorb the shock and literally take the pressure off the knee.

It can be done. Meaning, you can train for a big one, and get stronger, rather than weaker as you put on the miles. Given my experience with sickness and health, the body is amazing. The older you get, you just have to treat it with a bit more respect.

That’s the theory. Time to put it in practice.

Next: Running for Your Life: Beware the “Confidence” Man