Running for Your Life: Cities of Gold

Got $5 million in assets and live in the United States?

Then you’re counted in Fortune magazine (Aug. 1 edition)!

It’s hard to believe that Occupy Wall Street was almost six years ago. At that time, a small protest group camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The group created a political phrase, the forgotten 99 percenters, and helped create the conditions for a surprisingly robust run by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency.

Where are we now?

That’s where the Fortune graphic column comes in

http://for.tn/2vc1aAe

The highlights: Global private financial wealth increase last year by 5.3% to $166.5 trillion, according to the Boston Consulting Group – with 45 percent of that dough held by 18 million millionaire households worldwide.

The US is way out in front, natch, with 7 million millionaire households vs. 2.1 million for China.

As to $5 million households, New York City tops ’em all, with 81,240 (LA is No. 2 at 43,252).

Questions: Is it fair to pit the haves vs. the have-nots? And just what to do about that?

Next: Running for Your Life:  The Letter Campaign  

Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Okay, so you’re beginning to age out of running – knees hurt, back, neck … and God knows, your feet.

Doc says, spouse says, man, even your dog says, Stop running.

I mean Novak Djokovic, of all people, is taking a year off playing tennis due to injury. And he’s only 30 years old.

My advice: If a doctor is leaning toward having you stop, change doctors.

That’s what I’ve done. My wife M, who truth be told is a firm believer in this run-every-other-day thing of mine, recommended her podiatrist to me. And it couldn’t have worked out better.

It’s called sports medicine, and the pros who practice it are experts in finding a way for you to keep doing what you do. In my case, running an average of twenty miles a week, forty during training months.

Since I started this blog in 2010, there’s been a long list of ailments: hamstrings, a blown knee, foot neuromas and a killer heel. The sore heel came back a month ago, but not like it was before, so I went to M’s doctor to see what he could do.

He watched me run, is what he did. First without orthotics, then with. I see a profound difference in your gait, he says. … I’ll tell you what, he goes on, wear the orthotics when you run and do this stretching exercise.

Doc schooled me on the best way to do the exercise. (I guarantee you, you’re not getting the best out of the stretches you’re doing … I know I wasn’t until I was being monitored by my sports doc.)

Saturday (July 29) will mark the second week since seeing him, and I’ve done just as he said, and you know what, I’m running 5, 6, 7 miles without a lick of heel pain.

And so it goes. Running for your life. Believe it; it can be done.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cities of Gold

Running for Your Life: A “Most Perfect Things” Summer

In a “Manner” of speaking, this post qualifies as a sleeper. As in, a cultural enterprise (movie, book, play) that is fantastic but will very likely escape your notice.

The kind of prose you find in “Most Perfect Things About People,” a novel by Mark Jordan Manner, is as far away from what will put you to sleep as, well, “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. Actually, I read Knausgaard at night before bed, and Manner during my subway rides. Problem is, reading prose like I've posted below and you’re likely to get so engrossed you’ll miss your stop. Here’s a sample, from a mother artist to her baby:

“An uneasy feeling lifted inside my chest. My breasts felt sick and strange. The moon kept approaching, got closer and closer. It blocked the sky. I hung up the phone, walked over to you and smelled your hair. Your daddy used to complain working at the warehouse made his hair dry and his mouth parched. All the fucking cardboard, he used to say. It’s funny, because that’s how I imagined him. I pictured him in a cell with his hair like hay and a plain, thirsty tongue. It dangled from his mouth, gray and empty, until I pressed your tiny hands into my palette and together we colored the whole thing in.”

 Next: Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Running for Your Life: On Vacation

M and I are long back from our annual vacation. We go the end of May, the first week in June, this year to southern Italy.

The goal, of course, after each trip aboard is to keep the above two words in mind. On vacation.  Maybe it helps that I’ve always felt in New York City as if I’ve come from away. It may sound like a line, but the phrase “boring routine” lands on my ear like an indecipherable phrase in a foreign language. It simply doesn’t pertain to my daily life.

Perhaps if I were in or near a place of my birth then that feeling would be known to me. But it’s not the path that I’m on so I can only surmise.

In Buddhism, the phrase that pays is the beginner’s mind. If you’re got that, you tap the child in yourself, the dog, all animals in fact. Seeing things as they are rather than as our experienced (jaded) eye sees them.

So do what you can to be “on vacation” every day. Put your mind to good use. It is something too beautiful to go to waste.

Next: Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Running for Your Life: Brief History of Tomorrow

So there’s this article in the London Review of Books (July 13) about the latest book by the Israeli historian Yuval Harari that carries the title above.

I underlined a few things that, well, appeared sound but utterly frightening, ie:

• Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotech, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science.

• Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, and remember, we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human “self,” and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modeled by these formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms.

• In the argot of Silicon Valley, now-useless human beings are just “meat puppets.”

• Harari doesn’t go so far as to imagine the superhumans accepting the logic of the Final Solution. (But) what will (regular folks) do all day? Will they discover the joys of art? Probably not: it’s more likely that the “useless masses” will find whatever satisfaction they can in shopping, drugs, computer games and the thrill of virtual reality, which will “provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside.”

Man, this kind of outlook has me jonesing for the latest from the climate futurists …

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: Schooling Trump

Looking for an angle on the best way of handling Trump? Look north. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s got the right idea.

Trudeau started by outmatching Trump during the president’s bully handshake encounter, then he played the pal card by giving him the tools to gracefully accept a change in a negotiating position.

That’s how you handle a bully, of course. You coax him, do your best Jiminy Cricket imitation, as in, “Here’s how you should think about this, sir” kinda thing, and then allow him (the bully) to take credit for the idea.

Here’s how Justin puts in a recent cover piece in Bloomberg Businessweek:

“I’ve learned that (Trump) listens. He is a little bit unlike many politicians. That might be enough. Leave that sentence right there. As politicians, we’re very, very much trained to say something and stick with it.

Whereas (Trump) has shown that if he says one thing and then actually hears good counterarguments or good reasons why he should shift his position, he will take a different position, if it’s a better one, if the arguments win him over.

There’s a challenge in that for electors. But there’s also an opportunity for people who engage with him to try and work to achieve a beneficial outcome.”

Here’s a suggested daily political diet for the rest of the summer.

Read two stories about Trump, then one story about Trudeau.

Next, get to the beach and read a novel.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: All About Ice

Writer David Bromwich is ripping up the London Review of Books with a Trump article. I don’t buy a lot of what he’s selling in THE AGE OF DETESTING TRUMP http://bit.ly/2tNAIv8, but I do want to make a point of stressing his conclusion, ie:  

“Trump is the name of a cause and not just a person, and you can only fight him with another cause. The name of it might be climate change.”

With that, I give you this:

http://nyp.st/2tQCUk0

and, in a bid to established my ice credentials, this:

http://amzn.to/2vhN3pm

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: The TOM post

I live hundreds of miles away from Canoe Lake, but I am heeding its call this month.

Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, marked the watery grave of one Tom Thomson (pictured on Facebook and Twitter with his painting, West Wind), an incomparable artist who came of age in my hometown of Owen Sound. He went missing on July 8, 1917, and his body – bleeding from its right ear, fishing wire coiled around an ankle – was found on July 17.

His life and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have long been a passion of mine. I am now working on a book about TOM, all caps, as he is branded at the 50-year-old Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound. The idea of writing a letter to my hometown hero-legend has grown, from one to another to another …

In Canada, TOM tributes are flowing, as are feature articles http://bit.ly/2tFfobc. But the mystery of his death remains. In my book, I touch on some questions that have gone unanswered, exactly one hundred years since his passing.

At times during the most intense of my writing sessions, I allow the hubris to think that the result will bring an especial quiet to Canoe Lake, allowing the spirit of an amazing artist and singular Canadian soul to finally come to rest.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: It’s Just a Muscle

Sebastian Barry, the author of my current fave novel, “Days Without End,” has this theory. When asked by an Irish friend of his (who I had the pleasure of spending some time with this past weekend, July 7-9) what was the secret of his writing success, he said, “No secret. Writing is best seen as a muscle; to get strong you have to exercise it every day.”

This makes perfect sense to me.

I ran for about 35 years with my body out of balance. Early in 2011, the breakdown happened. I injured myself, a massive hamstring tear.

I could have been excused for quitting running. In fact, one of the doctors I saw that year advised me to do just that.

Instead, I started a modest exercise program. Nightly pushups, 60 per.

I haven’t hit 365 nights per year since then, closer to an annual average of 300, I’d say. But with a stronger torso, I put less strain on my legs, my joints. I’ve run pretty much pain-free for the past two years, because I’ve exercised my chest, shoulder and arm muscles. I can take on different and more difficult tasks. It’s not so much aptitude but exercise.

Just do it, as the slogan says. Write every day. Sometimes only half an hour, sometimes four hours, sometimes an in-between length of time. But do that and you’ll get better. My guess is Barry’s theory would work for just about everything.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: Write Stuff

One may consider the above statement to be self-evident. If we don’t write stuff, how can we know where we’ve been, or more consequentially, who we are?

Alas, if anecdotal evidence from riding the NYC subway for 40-plus minutes twice a day, five days a week for the past 25 years is any indication, we, as an urban people-variant, are writing less stuff.

As I look around me during this particular Thursday (July 6), I see about thirty people in the subway car. An easy 75 percent of whom are plugged into a device. The balance are resting.

I am the only person writing stuff.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the late 1980s, when I first came to New York, some people were writing stuff while on the way to work. Many others were reading books or newspapers: the Times, the Post, the Daily News.

Fact is, I work at a paper, the Post. Yes, I write stuff in the newsroom. Headlines, captions, copy for graphics. I think in full sentences, and write them down.

When you’ve been writing stuff your whole adult life, it comes naturally to you. A mind shaped by that experience isn't drawn to whatever is flashing on an LED screen, or doesn't suffer FOMO about the next hot thing.

The stuff that you write: ideas, feelings, what comes to mind when you simply open  the journal, remove the pen-top and begin to order your thoughts, take over. It isn’t fun, exactly, or not primarily.

It just is.

Like reading. And running. What this blog is all about. Getting to the point that you follow your passion without second-guessing. So that you increase the odds that you will coast into old age without noticing time passing by.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation

Running for Your Life: Running Feet

Want to keep running into your, say, eighties? Visit your podiatrist.

That’s what I did on Canada Day … And it was time well spent.

I do go to some lengths to continue running. As in, compression socks for shin splits, patella bands for knee caps, snug-fitting $15-a-pair flexo-socks, $120 Brooks.

Still, though, I get some foot pain. So last Saturday, I went to a new foot doctor in Brooklyn.

He was, in a word, awesome. He diagnosed my pain (compensation for top-of-the-foot arthritis) that can be addressed through orthotics.

I have orthotics, I say.

Well, you may need to have them redone, the podiatrist says.

Tell you what, he continues. Come back in two weeks in your running gear, with your orthotics, and we’ll go out the park together. I’ll watch you run and then we’ll take it from there. I will be able to tell what kind of orthotics you need by watching you run.

Really? I say. You’ll do that.

Yep, he says. I don’t see this as a major problem. We get this done, and you start running in a cheaper, neutral shoe, no more than three months for the miles that you do (current average: 17-20 per week) and you can run that kind of mileage and more for the next twenty-five years.

Marathons?

Sure, why not? You want to run for your life, don’t you?

Yep. You can say that again.

Next: Running for Your Life: Write Stuff