Week Two ends in Millbrook, New York, with a six-miler along a gully and into sloping farmland, with the inevitable pop-pop-pop of a firing range. It’s hot, with a breeze, and rolling hills to keep me honest, but enough trees, towering oak and maple, to throw shade on the road at 10 a.m. that the sun is not beating down on me.
I wrote about my first race on a summer run: an international 10K in 1979, where for a year I wrote Corner Sports, a column that in July, when my race column ran, covered the girls’ softball team, the Prescott Angels and boys’ baseball, the Pirates. We ran across the bridge at Prescott, Ontario, to Ogdensburg, New York, where hundreds lined the streets to watch. “They had you,” I wrote in the Aug. 1 Journal, “with their smiles and clapping hands. For the first time, my bodily control had transferred into the hands of people who were completely foreign to me. Those people with garden hoses, cups of water and fruit drinks owned me.”
My placement: 136th out of 232, with a time of 50:31. Converted to miles, that’s a pace of about 8:10 per mile, pretty much what I’m doing on the road this summer.
*
I was 23 then; at 20, my bedmate Sam sat up all night beside me to alert the nurse when I stopped breathing. Sam never let on, but Ben, the orderly, who was firing me up with a painkiller into the intervenous bottle that was connected to my arm told me what he did. For a week of nights, Sam didn’t sleep.
Ben is standing by the window, a cobalt blue sky. Sam, a heart patient, has left that day. Ben tells me about Sam, about how he had saved my life, how he willed himself to stay up night after night. Like an angel or something, Ben says. He tells me I am lucky to be indoors; it is the coldest winter in Ottawa in fifty years.
A homeless man who is scheduled for surgery to remove some frostbitten toes, and whose face is disfigured by the cold, moves into Sam’s bed. A man younger than me, who had had a drug overdose and whose lower body was now paralyzed, occupies the third bed that up to now had been vacant. He is receiving his first visit from a speech therapist today.
Sam and I did not even exchange addresses.
*
Is a patient patient? I was, I suppose. I’m still very much that young man in the bed. As a writer, I go back to what Poets and Writers says about stamina and patience: that it's the right stuff for writers and marathoners. The last novel I read was “Salammbo” by Gustave Flaubert: if Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” doesn’t have a hero, than Salammbo doesn’t have a human being, the forward says in the edition I finished. It’s not that I will read everything, but I like to think that I focus into the heart of a writer’s intentions. Salammbo is painstakingly researched, a masterpiece of detail that takes the reader away to Carthage and its pagan rituals, a panoramic sweep of sights and sounds in North Africa that, if you read the history of the book’s publication, stirred only scholars nitpicking the historical accuracy of his account. Not every read is a classic, a first. But, with writing, you can tell from the first page. Like the first step of a run.
*
Week Three I’d like to up the ante a bit. Run thirty miles, with a game of tennis with my neighbor, Gerry. Monday, it’s hot. Train for an early October marathon in New York City and August is the cruelest month. Temp: 91 on Monday, 93, Tuesday . Thankfully, though, there’s a little breeze, especially when I make my way down the hill stone-step staircase that leads to the manmade lake.
About halfway down, a female cardinal swoops down from an oak tree, squawking and surprisingly alone, definitely exercised over what it is impossible to say, flash of wings like close-up magic; who wouldn’t like to be on an updraft. Up, up and away.
On the 19th, I’m off for my second long run: again to the Christopher Street pier, the Brooklyn Bridge Watchtower clock and the mosque site. (See The Mosque on Thursdays.) The polls are showing an increasing number of Americans would like to see the mosque moved so that it is not so close to Ground Zero. Is it a mosque or a prayer center? Is there a difference?
Two days, later, Saturday, Aug. 21, we visit our friends Mark and Marilyn in Bridgewater, Conn. There is no bridge and no water, as far as I can see, but a long-gone town was flooded as part of a hydro development project so maybe that’s the connection. In the morning, we visit the county fair. Savory pulled pork, corn on the cob and birch beer.
A woman my age next to me near the grandstands at the tractor pull suddenly falls to the ground. At first I think she must have had a little something in her birch beer, but she doesn’t get up, and I see that she has stepped into a nasty hole. A moment later, we help her to her feet and someone who knows her calls to her daughter in the bleachers. The daughter hurries to her as Mom’s ankle turns purple-blue. I start to get light-headed, which I always do when I see a lot of blood or a personal injury like this, turn my head and move away. “Can we get medical staff to the edge of the grandstands,” the tractor pull announcer says. “We’ve a lady with a twisted ankle who’d like a little help.”
My ankle often feels a twinge. From when I badly strained my ankle, during my first summer of running. I feel it today, going downhill. From our friends’ house, it is either downhill or uphill. Very steep. It is hot, of course, and in my training so far I’ve not done heavy climbing, so I don’t want to overdo it. I’m extra careful, think Tai Chi as I run.
No trespassing signs, warnings to hunters. But, hell, there’s that pop-pop-pop again. Mark didn’t mention a firing range. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a lake and a lookout, called Lover’s Leap, and I wonder if anyone has, but then think not, if the town has no bridge and no water, then Lover’s Leap has to be metaphorical. Wishful thinking, maybe?
I’m guessing 20 minutes in, and my ankle feels normal again, as I run next to what I think is the manmade lake that flooded the town. At the end of the road is Mia Farrow’s house, where I imagine she gardens in a frontier-brimmed hat. I look toward the grounds, but there’s no sign of life.
The return road is steep, and for the first time in I don't know long my bad leg swells to twice the size of my healthy one. I think to stop, but I don’t. I slow to a light jog and like a cross-country skier scaling a mountain, crisscross my way up as best I can.
Next: Running for Your Life: Rest Stop: Say No to Jobs
Running for Your Life: Week Two
In one of my first memories, I’m standing over our cracked poured concrete laneway. Because of a gully water underground pipeline, my childhood home, which consequently was set back about thirty yards from the street, was connected to the outside world by this narrow gray ribbon. As a boy, about six, that old lane seemed an endless stretch, a journey itself.
After a rain the snails would come out of the grass and dry off there, and I’d stand over them and watch, bending to my haunches, studying, particularly the way they stretch their heads, the antennae arching out, taking in, what? So much is going on, or so it seems, and all at what is no speed at all, as close to reverse as possible.
Can time go backward? I could learn more from the snails if I could join them, and I lean in even closer, almost touch them, am as close as I can be, so that will have to do, that is enough, to see, almost feel, these animals that barely move yet convey so much in their stretching, head, little nodules and neck, on their way, coming from places where it isn’t out of the question that they were a moment before moving backward through time.
Isn’t that why I watched? Isn’t that part of the reason to be child-thrilled by the idea of something that could show so much energy and purpose at the fraction of the speed of a human heartbeat?
*
Week Two begins hot, mid- to high 80s and low 90s. Humid. We’ve a plan to see friends in Millbrook, New York, up the Hudson River on Saturday, Aug. 14, and Thursday, I’m set on a roundtrip 1 hour-30 minute run, without hills, to a water station at the Christopher Street Pier, which at my marathon pace, about 8:40 per mile, will be my long run: a little over 10 miles.
On Monday, I run at 10:30 a.m. in the park: midday temp 91. I’ve not a lot of time before work at the New York Post, where I design graphics and write headlines for a living. (No, I did not write the FREAKIN’ FLIER! headline that day for the wingnut JetBlue attendant Steven Slater, a 20-year vet of the airline industry who quit his job in gonzo style and was tab fodder for a week.) Still, though, I keep to my plan of running for an hour, with a set of six up-and-down intervals on the stone-step staircase that overlooks the park’s manmade lake.
On long runs, I run my 8:40 pace, with the view to bank the miles. That’s essential now, with only nine weeks to go before the marathon, to have trained A LOT of miles. (The books get precise, but enough to say here; if you think you’ve banked enough miles with nine weeks to go, you probably haven’t if you want to be a 53 percenter; See previous post.)
I’ve visual goals on the Week Two long run on Thursday. The Jehovah’s Witness Watertower clock at the Brooklyn Bridge, a half-hour door to door. From my home, I run along Third Street, down the Gowanus valley, a gradual rise, one of only two “climbs” on this run, up from the canal – pretty ripe in the August humidity – on the upside of the gully the row houses of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. At Carroll and Hoyt a sign for Duvel, the Belgian beer. They carry it at the gourmet deli, but I’ve never seen anyone enter. Just the guy who runs the cash, on the street, staring.
Across Atlantic Avenue and into Brooklyn Heights, where M and I will meet at a winebar tonight – one that I spot on Henry Street, just down the road from the movie we want to see, “Winter’s Bone,” based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, close to the Clark Street subway station for her, the High Street one for me. M will like that; a little different, out of our comfort zone.
Up and over the Bridge, the second "climb," careful with the “deaf” ones – runners and walkers, oblivious in headphones. I run at the edge of the bike lane, watchful that no one is zooming up behind, and of the lovers and families who stop suddenly to admire a view. Soon I am on the street, feeling strong, crossing through City Hall park, where at this hour, about 10 a.m., all the park benches are taken, the splash of the water fountain refreshes. Next, I check out the proposed home for the mosque on Park Place, not far from the World Trade Center site.
The sour faces don’t present themselves until I’m on the Hudson River Parkway itself. Runners in headphones, grim-looking, some actually talking as they run. Multi-tasking. By the time I get to Pier 40, the sour faces turn to appraisals, the gay couples camped out in the free tennis courts, chewed-up surface at the service line, never a true bounce. Basketball court, empty.
The man at the Christopher Street pier snack bar tells me it’s 10:26. Perfect, that’s 45 minutes, halfway. I feel a blister forming on the ball of my left foot, so I begin to alter my pace a bit, run more flat-footed, ease into the Tai Chi horse position as I go. In Tai Chi, the idea is to feel the gentle pull of a puppet master, lifting your head, centering your body, lightening the foot strikes.
I’m on my way back now, in Cobble Hill, maybe Carroll Gardens, and the blister feels like it will need some treatment. It’s a long straight stretch and, despite the break in the weather, low-80s when I started, the humidity is getting to me. I drop down to what must be a 9-minute mile.
A woman is pushing an wire grocery cart. A rust-colored ’do, sweet mother-type in a sensible dress, sensible shoes. She smiles and stops as I approach her at a place where the sidewalk is narrowing as so often happens running on urban streets, with their fire hydrants and street trees, barrels of all types, workmen tearing up the sidewalks, holes in the asphalt.
She stops in what seems a long distance from me, watching. I’m gassed. And only 8.5 miles in.
The lady nods and smiles. “Let the runner pass,” she says. I manage a smile and put on a bit of a kick. Take it home.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Three
After a rain the snails would come out of the grass and dry off there, and I’d stand over them and watch, bending to my haunches, studying, particularly the way they stretch their heads, the antennae arching out, taking in, what? So much is going on, or so it seems, and all at what is no speed at all, as close to reverse as possible.
Can time go backward? I could learn more from the snails if I could join them, and I lean in even closer, almost touch them, am as close as I can be, so that will have to do, that is enough, to see, almost feel, these animals that barely move yet convey so much in their stretching, head, little nodules and neck, on their way, coming from places where it isn’t out of the question that they were a moment before moving backward through time.
Isn’t that why I watched? Isn’t that part of the reason to be child-thrilled by the idea of something that could show so much energy and purpose at the fraction of the speed of a human heartbeat?
*
Week Two begins hot, mid- to high 80s and low 90s. Humid. We’ve a plan to see friends in Millbrook, New York, up the Hudson River on Saturday, Aug. 14, and Thursday, I’m set on a roundtrip 1 hour-30 minute run, without hills, to a water station at the Christopher Street Pier, which at my marathon pace, about 8:40 per mile, will be my long run: a little over 10 miles.
On Monday, I run at 10:30 a.m. in the park: midday temp 91. I’ve not a lot of time before work at the New York Post, where I design graphics and write headlines for a living. (No, I did not write the FREAKIN’ FLIER! headline that day for the wingnut JetBlue attendant Steven Slater, a 20-year vet of the airline industry who quit his job in gonzo style and was tab fodder for a week.) Still, though, I keep to my plan of running for an hour, with a set of six up-and-down intervals on the stone-step staircase that overlooks the park’s manmade lake.
On long runs, I run my 8:40 pace, with the view to bank the miles. That’s essential now, with only nine weeks to go before the marathon, to have trained A LOT of miles. (The books get precise, but enough to say here; if you think you’ve banked enough miles with nine weeks to go, you probably haven’t if you want to be a 53 percenter; See previous post.)
I’ve visual goals on the Week Two long run on Thursday. The Jehovah’s Witness Watertower clock at the Brooklyn Bridge, a half-hour door to door. From my home, I run along Third Street, down the Gowanus valley, a gradual rise, one of only two “climbs” on this run, up from the canal – pretty ripe in the August humidity – on the upside of the gully the row houses of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. At Carroll and Hoyt a sign for Duvel, the Belgian beer. They carry it at the gourmet deli, but I’ve never seen anyone enter. Just the guy who runs the cash, on the street, staring.
Across Atlantic Avenue and into Brooklyn Heights, where M and I will meet at a winebar tonight – one that I spot on Henry Street, just down the road from the movie we want to see, “Winter’s Bone,” based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, close to the Clark Street subway station for her, the High Street one for me. M will like that; a little different, out of our comfort zone.
Up and over the Bridge, the second "climb," careful with the “deaf” ones – runners and walkers, oblivious in headphones. I run at the edge of the bike lane, watchful that no one is zooming up behind, and of the lovers and families who stop suddenly to admire a view. Soon I am on the street, feeling strong, crossing through City Hall park, where at this hour, about 10 a.m., all the park benches are taken, the splash of the water fountain refreshes. Next, I check out the proposed home for the mosque on Park Place, not far from the World Trade Center site.
The sour faces don’t present themselves until I’m on the Hudson River Parkway itself. Runners in headphones, grim-looking, some actually talking as they run. Multi-tasking. By the time I get to Pier 40, the sour faces turn to appraisals, the gay couples camped out in the free tennis courts, chewed-up surface at the service line, never a true bounce. Basketball court, empty.
The man at the Christopher Street pier snack bar tells me it’s 10:26. Perfect, that’s 45 minutes, halfway. I feel a blister forming on the ball of my left foot, so I begin to alter my pace a bit, run more flat-footed, ease into the Tai Chi horse position as I go. In Tai Chi, the idea is to feel the gentle pull of a puppet master, lifting your head, centering your body, lightening the foot strikes.
I’m on my way back now, in Cobble Hill, maybe Carroll Gardens, and the blister feels like it will need some treatment. It’s a long straight stretch and, despite the break in the weather, low-80s when I started, the humidity is getting to me. I drop down to what must be a 9-minute mile.
A woman is pushing an wire grocery cart. A rust-colored ’do, sweet mother-type in a sensible dress, sensible shoes. She smiles and stops as I approach her at a place where the sidewalk is narrowing as so often happens running on urban streets, with their fire hydrants and street trees, barrels of all types, workmen tearing up the sidewalks, holes in the asphalt.
She stops in what seems a long distance from me, watching. I’m gassed. And only 8.5 miles in.
The lady nods and smiles. “Let the runner pass,” she says. I manage a smile and put on a bit of a kick. Take it home.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Three
Running for Your Life: Week One of Ten
So I’m cheating a bit. That’s the first thing. What I’m doing here is writing my personal marathon training regimen, not laying this out as a model for getting started. (See my earlier posts on this subject.) Suffice to say that – unless you are Superman or Superwoman – a person cannot reasonably expect to finish without breakdown (physical and mental!) a marathon in 10 weeks by starting training as if this were Day One for a non-runner.
There are plenty of places to go, to find a program that works if you are someone who ran track, say, twenty-plus years ago and now wants to take up running for health reasons, or someone who has been light jogging or speed-walking on a twice-weekly basis as part of a glossy-magazine-accredited good health program. There’s no single formula, a how-to book that will work for everyone. (Although Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success” is a pretty good one.)
Rather, RFYL: Week One parachutes the reader into the training regime of one runner, a 54-year-old man, gearing up to compete in his fifth marathon. For the next five weeks, I will be posting thoughts, advice, running facts and personal memories of 34 years of road running, leading up to the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., on Sunday, Oct. 10. My goal: to trim 2:48 from my Pittsburgh Marathon pace in May, or run a personal best 3:45 marathon, and in so doing qualify in my age class for the Boston Marathon next April.
For those keeping score, Week One is Aug 1 through 7, when I ran 2 hours and 30 minutes. In my case – and everyone is different – I train by keeping track of my hours on the road. Since my early 20s, I have been long-distance running at pretty much the same pace, at somewhere between 7:45 and 8 minutes per mile. (Remember, even now, my left leg swells uncomfortably during each and every run, so trying to maintain faster times is beyond me.) So in Week One, I ran about twenty miles.
I know what the books say, that between the ages of 25 and 30, your body stops laying down more bone.* But maybe there is something about starting running at an early age, in terms of being able to not only stay fit but strengthen your bones, which theoretically, could lead to even faster marathon times as you age, not to mention the invaluable added benefit of being able to maintain a training program without losing a lot of time to injury. As a serious runner since my early 20s, I have – knock on wood – been remarkably injury- and pain-free.
Consider this post a primer. Those 2.5 hours were pretty uneventful. I ran at home, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. On my long run, a 1:30 effort on Wednesday, Aug. 4, a hot and humid day in which I did “two” interval vertical climbs, I had my encounter with the girl playing with the ladybug toy. The gently loved toy had fallen out of her hands, and into the middle of a desire path under an oak tree. Her mom was sitting beside her on the grass. Breaking stride, I stooped to pick it up and gave it to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said in a soft voice of gratitude.
Given this is Week One, let’s end this post with some Running for Your Life basics. Because when it comes to running, it’s as important to bank words of inspiration as it is to bank hill climbs and long runs:
1. Whether you are training or not, get out the door and speed-walk, jog or run. If not every day, every other day.
2. Why? Because the secret to Running for Your Life – if there is a secret – is that you want to get to a place in your life where you can reasonably train to start and finish a marathon. (This does not mean that you have to do it; but more that you feel that you could do it. It’s a mental thing. I’ve not always been in marathon running shape, rather I’ve maintained a level of fitness that in 100 days, say, I COULD be ready.)
3. So you want to run a marathon? Train. At the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, 7,620 runners started and 4,011 marathoners finished, or 53% of the total. We’re all citizens, but in any given election only about 53% vote. Be a voter.
4. “I can’t run today. It’s too hot (or cold or wet).” Get over it, get out there. Invest in and wear gear you need to stay as comfortable as possible.
5. Hot weather running: Drink A LOT of water; plan a run with frequent water stations, and on long runs, take and eat energy bars.
6. Push yourself. Trust your body, of course, and stop when it tells you to stop. But don’t be afraid to gradually increase the degree of difficulty. When you’re ready, add hills, or do staircases (inside and out).
7. Vary your regimen. We’ll talk about interval training a bit in Week Two. Simply said, don’t always run the same route at the same speed.
8. Be patient. The Rome Marathon wasn’t built in a day. The current Poets & Writers magazine tells it like it is: A successful writer needs to be more than a sprinter, which requires stamina, she needs to be a marathoner, with equal parts stamina and patience.
9. Pay attention to what works for you. The idea is not to blindly follow Henderson’s prescriptions, or mine, or what the columnists say in “Runner’s World.” Own your run, own your body.
10. Give yourself six months, of every day, or every other day running. You’ll recognize the changes in you. You will be Running for Your Life.
* “At this stage – and if you, or someone you know is this age, by all means run out and tell them! LOC – a weight-bearing sport like running (along with ingesting sufficient calories and calcium) will actually reduce the rate at which your bones weaken and the rate at which you lose bone mass,” The Runner’s Body by Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Two
There are plenty of places to go, to find a program that works if you are someone who ran track, say, twenty-plus years ago and now wants to take up running for health reasons, or someone who has been light jogging or speed-walking on a twice-weekly basis as part of a glossy-magazine-accredited good health program. There’s no single formula, a how-to book that will work for everyone. (Although Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success” is a pretty good one.)
Rather, RFYL: Week One parachutes the reader into the training regime of one runner, a 54-year-old man, gearing up to compete in his fifth marathon. For the next five weeks, I will be posting thoughts, advice, running facts and personal memories of 34 years of road running, leading up to the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., on Sunday, Oct. 10. My goal: to trim 2:48 from my Pittsburgh Marathon pace in May, or run a personal best 3:45 marathon, and in so doing qualify in my age class for the Boston Marathon next April.
For those keeping score, Week One is Aug 1 through 7, when I ran 2 hours and 30 minutes. In my case – and everyone is different – I train by keeping track of my hours on the road. Since my early 20s, I have been long-distance running at pretty much the same pace, at somewhere between 7:45 and 8 minutes per mile. (Remember, even now, my left leg swells uncomfortably during each and every run, so trying to maintain faster times is beyond me.) So in Week One, I ran about twenty miles.
I know what the books say, that between the ages of 25 and 30, your body stops laying down more bone.* But maybe there is something about starting running at an early age, in terms of being able to not only stay fit but strengthen your bones, which theoretically, could lead to even faster marathon times as you age, not to mention the invaluable added benefit of being able to maintain a training program without losing a lot of time to injury. As a serious runner since my early 20s, I have – knock on wood – been remarkably injury- and pain-free.
Consider this post a primer. Those 2.5 hours were pretty uneventful. I ran at home, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. On my long run, a 1:30 effort on Wednesday, Aug. 4, a hot and humid day in which I did “two” interval vertical climbs, I had my encounter with the girl playing with the ladybug toy. The gently loved toy had fallen out of her hands, and into the middle of a desire path under an oak tree. Her mom was sitting beside her on the grass. Breaking stride, I stooped to pick it up and gave it to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said in a soft voice of gratitude.
Given this is Week One, let’s end this post with some Running for Your Life basics. Because when it comes to running, it’s as important to bank words of inspiration as it is to bank hill climbs and long runs:
1. Whether you are training or not, get out the door and speed-walk, jog or run. If not every day, every other day.
2. Why? Because the secret to Running for Your Life – if there is a secret – is that you want to get to a place in your life where you can reasonably train to start and finish a marathon. (This does not mean that you have to do it; but more that you feel that you could do it. It’s a mental thing. I’ve not always been in marathon running shape, rather I’ve maintained a level of fitness that in 100 days, say, I COULD be ready.)
3. So you want to run a marathon? Train. At the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, 7,620 runners started and 4,011 marathoners finished, or 53% of the total. We’re all citizens, but in any given election only about 53% vote. Be a voter.
4. “I can’t run today. It’s too hot (or cold or wet).” Get over it, get out there. Invest in and wear gear you need to stay as comfortable as possible.
5. Hot weather running: Drink A LOT of water; plan a run with frequent water stations, and on long runs, take and eat energy bars.
6. Push yourself. Trust your body, of course, and stop when it tells you to stop. But don’t be afraid to gradually increase the degree of difficulty. When you’re ready, add hills, or do staircases (inside and out).
7. Vary your regimen. We’ll talk about interval training a bit in Week Two. Simply said, don’t always run the same route at the same speed.
8. Be patient. The Rome Marathon wasn’t built in a day. The current Poets & Writers magazine tells it like it is: A successful writer needs to be more than a sprinter, which requires stamina, she needs to be a marathoner, with equal parts stamina and patience.
9. Pay attention to what works for you. The idea is not to blindly follow Henderson’s prescriptions, or mine, or what the columnists say in “Runner’s World.” Own your run, own your body.
10. Give yourself six months, of every day, or every other day running. You’ll recognize the changes in you. You will be Running for Your Life.
* “At this stage – and if you, or someone you know is this age, by all means run out and tell them! LOC – a weight-bearing sport like running (along with ingesting sufficient calories and calcium) will actually reduce the rate at which your bones weaken and the rate at which you lose bone mass,” The Runner’s Body by Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Two
Running for Your Life: Running Without Headphones
I ran to a payphone and called my girlfriend when I saw my first one. I’d read about it in the newspapers, seen the television advertising. For a time, there was nothing else on the air or in print. As a college sophomore, studying to be a newsman, I read four papers every day, and no matter how I strained to keep my focus on the news – the consequences of the wind-down of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the fiscal crisis in New York and the headline on Oct. 30, 1975, that cinched my destiny in papers, “Ford to New York: DROP DEAD” – the ads for it drenched me like tropical rain. But I’d not seen a single one on the street until that day at Ottawa’s Byward Market in 1975.
“A Walkman!” I cried. “I saw one, on this girl. The vacant eyes. Like a zombie. How can we do this? . . . No, I wasn’t flirting with her. That’s just the point, if she wasn’t using the Walkman maybe I would have. But it wasn’t possible not even remotely. Why? Because she wasn’t there. She was absent.”
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“ . . .”
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“. . .”
She listened a little longer, but like an animal in a trap. Free only a moment before and now, Wham!, painfully stuck, imprisoned.
“Cut the crap. You were flirting with her, weren’t you?’
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“I’m sure. You’re a man for a figure, L.”
“ . . .”
*
Eight years later, I took a portable cassette player on what was going to be a yearlong trip to the South Pacific and Oceania. (Yeah, I’m almost 55 all right.) I was running at the time, of course; in Papeete, Tahiti, Auckland, New Zealand, Hobart, Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne. But not with the cassette player. I wanted music with me, but not while I was on the road. I close my eyes and I can hear the music I took with me that year: Laurie Anderson’s “America,” Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Bruce Cockburn’s “Joy Will Find a Way,” Theodorakis’s “Zorba the Greek,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Greetings from Asbury Park.” But when I revisit my journal, my writings during that time, I take away, the landscape, the people, the jumbled makings of a writer in progress.
I firmly believe that part of what made that trip such a wellspring of inspiration for me as a writer, as a runner, and a reader – remember, my three Rs: Running, Reading and (W)Riting – was that I gave myself over to an experience that was as unfiltered by technology as I could manage. Similarly, I am writing – have always written – first with a typewriter and now on a computer without distractions: No music plays, no Internet. Here, I concur with novelist Jonathan Franzen: “You plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.” *
In “Clouds,” the comedy by Aristophanes, Socrates is at one point suspended from the stage, staring into the heavens. An acolyte approaches, asks what he is doing. From this height, I am contemplating the sun, Socrates replies. “Why not do it from the ground, if at all?” the acolyte says.
“The earth sucks the thought-juice down,” Socrates says.
To me, headphones suck the thought-juice down. What would be more unthinkable than Socrates in headphones staring into the heavens?
My parents didn’t own much of lasting value, except for the Sklar lake-blue print sofa and our Grundig stereo. The Grundig didn’t get a whale of a workout. There was a Dean Martin album that my mother loved, with the song “Houston” that I’m sure had a lot to do with her visiting Houston once, her only trip deep inside the U.S. (Florida and Myrtle Beach don’t count), a Perry Como, and my first album, “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” by Elton John.
When I think of music, I think of the Grundig. Or of tunes like Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” a personal reward after a long run in the '80s. I feel the same way about music-listening headphone use as I do about people walking and talking on cellphones, or BlackBerry “thumbers,” or iPhone fanatics. Music is beautiful and transporting but personal and social. It is something to be celebrated, but when it comes to the public sphere, not alone, from ear plugs that speak only to the brain in a way that can’t enhance the outdoor experience and rather too often defines it.
In India, motorists in urban areas take their life in their hands if they drive wearing headphones. Because traffic is so chaotic, hearing, rather than sight, is more essential to staying alive. Usually, in America, the stakes aren’t as high. But motorists, pedestrians and runners alike paying more attention to what’s coming out of their earbuds then what’s around them, can court disaster.
Even at the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, during the first two or so miles of congested running, I found myself dodging around joggers wearing earbuds who were oblivious to the sounds of hundreds of runners around them. You’d think that in a race of this type that athletes wouldn’t be wearing headphones. In the materials for the Steamtown Marathon, for example, the restriction has to be expressly noted, as in, “Runners are respectful asked not to wear iPods, MP3 players or any other devices over their ears.” You’d think it would be self-evident, but there you go.
Dear runner and reader, consider these past blog posts a primer. Next Tuesday, we’ve training notes to discuss, what I learned in Week One of Ten in preparation for the marathon on Oct. 10.
* Time magazine, Aug. 23, 2010
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part Two
When your eyes blink open you can’t see yourself. Before sleep, a cripple, you are told that you will wake up in a different body. To not be alarmed, and to ease into your changes. Whatever you do, don’t rise, take it slow. But you wake and you can’t believe anything is different. That is until you bring your blue hand in front of your face. Now, for the first time in I don’t know how long, you feel your legs. And before you know it, you are running. For the sheer glee of it, the warnings gone in the rush of movement, as you dash off, away, letting your new legs take you in what can only be described as a runner’s high.
I didn’t expect to like "Avatar." But that scene in which the actor Sam Worthington first is transformed from cripple to avatar stays with me. When I saw it at the theater, it sent shivers up my spine. Yes, I thought, they got it. That’s what it feels like. Through the magic of Hollywood, my thirty-plus years of running for my life was boiled down to one unforgettable twenty-second scene. At that moment, director James Cameron has you. Here is your hero, Jake Sully, the Avatar, running for his life.
I return to this often so that it seems like a tic. The business about not running in headphones. Where I run, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – in all kinds of weather: cold, heat, rain, snow – since 1976, if I could count the number of times I have run on treadmills it wouldn’t be any more than a few dozen – there are birds in all seasons. My favorites are the cardinals, but to see them you have to pay attention.
It’s their cheep you hear first, when they are in a pair. To see that flash of red in the gray urban bush trumps whatever I would hear in headphones. I can also almost sense the red tail hawks, too. As they circle high above me, watching. At times like this, I really think I could fly. Like a country song.
I promised practical suggestions in this post. And marathon trainers, have patience. Next week, I will be starting with Running for Your Life: Week One, leading to RFYL: Week Ten (The posts will not conform to real time; for example, expect Week One and Week Two next Tuesday and Thursday), which takes us to the Oct. 10 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Remember, too, go elsewhere for a nuts-and-bolts training manual: a 100-day program for success. Rather I see this as part-memoir, inspirational guide AND training log.
And when it comes to motivation, practical suggestions involve mental commitment. The stories I tell are rooted in the hope that I can reach someone, as I said in my first post, in hospital, or facing a personal crisis, and find some strength here to lace up your new running shoes and get out the door. It’s not that I won’t address questions about stretching, rest days, interval training. And if you have questions, please include them in the comment section. I will be happy to address your own specific concerns about a running regimen, or persistent leg or knee pain. But I’m a writer first, and believe that motivation comes from within.
Earlier this year, M and I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Modern Museum of Art. In one photo, elderly Chinese men pose like water birds in a marsh. In the accompanying magazine article, Western readers are introduced to the practice of Chinese boxing. In the script I see, the words tai chi don’t even appear. Rather, the magazine copy says groups of Chinese box without hitting each other every morning.
Tai chi has helped me stay motivated. For two months in the mid-1980s, I took a tai chi class. Although I don’t do the short form – what Cartier-Bresson saw – anymore, from those days and years afterward of tai chi training, I can intuit when my body and mind are moving out of alignment during a run. When it comes to mental preparation, I can’t say enough about tai chi as a discipline that can form the foundation upon which you can soon find yourself running for your life.
Staying motivated is about rewards, too. Non-runners often tell me the runners they see in public are a miserable-looking, unsmiling lot. The runners I know are not in clubs, doing a 5K after work, then going to a pub for some beers. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, runners are typically alone. And yes, usually with a sour look on their face.
There are times I look like that, but mostly not. To me, that is the secret of staying motivated. To bring to the road what the Buddhists call the beginner's mind, an attitude of openness and eagerness. I remember days in Windsor, Canada’s Motor City, training for the Windsor-Detroit Marathon. For my twenty-miler, I ran the leafy streets, long stretches of Riverside Drive to Tecumseh, the namesake of the great native warrior instrumental in the surrender of Fort Detroit, during the War of 1812, almost two hundred years ago. Bend in the river, meditative quiet. As I gaze across the St. Clair River to Belle Isle, I think about my rewards at home: A quart of cold water, a beer on ice, and while I’m drinking the beer, a whirly dance to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” from Songs in the Key Life, the volume thrown up on my stereo.
When it comes to the mind, there are other rewards, of course. New research shows people with weakly pumping hearts have decreased brain volume – a marker of brain aging – compared with those with more vigorous hearts. * After thirty-plus years of running, my resting pulse is 46 beats per minute. Elsewhere, a study by scientists at the University of Illinois found that three, vigorous 40-minute walks a week over six months will improve memory and reasoning. ** Call it, running for your brain.
There is nothing that says a runner in headphones would not – with only slightly breaking stride – pick up from the ground a gently loved lady bug stuffed toy that had fallen out of the hands of toddler sitting with her mom on the summer grass. But it’s likely you wouldn’t hear her soft voice of gratitude, “Thank you, sir.”
* Time magazine, Aug. 16, 2010
** Newsweek, June 28-July 5, 2010
Next: Running Without Headphones
I didn’t expect to like "Avatar." But that scene in which the actor Sam Worthington first is transformed from cripple to avatar stays with me. When I saw it at the theater, it sent shivers up my spine. Yes, I thought, they got it. That’s what it feels like. Through the magic of Hollywood, my thirty-plus years of running for my life was boiled down to one unforgettable twenty-second scene. At that moment, director James Cameron has you. Here is your hero, Jake Sully, the Avatar, running for his life.
I return to this often so that it seems like a tic. The business about not running in headphones. Where I run, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park – in all kinds of weather: cold, heat, rain, snow – since 1976, if I could count the number of times I have run on treadmills it wouldn’t be any more than a few dozen – there are birds in all seasons. My favorites are the cardinals, but to see them you have to pay attention.
It’s their cheep you hear first, when they are in a pair. To see that flash of red in the gray urban bush trumps whatever I would hear in headphones. I can also almost sense the red tail hawks, too. As they circle high above me, watching. At times like this, I really think I could fly. Like a country song.
I promised practical suggestions in this post. And marathon trainers, have patience. Next week, I will be starting with Running for Your Life: Week One, leading to RFYL: Week Ten (The posts will not conform to real time; for example, expect Week One and Week Two next Tuesday and Thursday), which takes us to the Oct. 10 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Remember, too, go elsewhere for a nuts-and-bolts training manual: a 100-day program for success. Rather I see this as part-memoir, inspirational guide AND training log.
And when it comes to motivation, practical suggestions involve mental commitment. The stories I tell are rooted in the hope that I can reach someone, as I said in my first post, in hospital, or facing a personal crisis, and find some strength here to lace up your new running shoes and get out the door. It’s not that I won’t address questions about stretching, rest days, interval training. And if you have questions, please include them in the comment section. I will be happy to address your own specific concerns about a running regimen, or persistent leg or knee pain. But I’m a writer first, and believe that motivation comes from within.
Earlier this year, M and I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Modern Museum of Art. In one photo, elderly Chinese men pose like water birds in a marsh. In the accompanying magazine article, Western readers are introduced to the practice of Chinese boxing. In the script I see, the words tai chi don’t even appear. Rather, the magazine copy says groups of Chinese box without hitting each other every morning.
Tai chi has helped me stay motivated. For two months in the mid-1980s, I took a tai chi class. Although I don’t do the short form – what Cartier-Bresson saw – anymore, from those days and years afterward of tai chi training, I can intuit when my body and mind are moving out of alignment during a run. When it comes to mental preparation, I can’t say enough about tai chi as a discipline that can form the foundation upon which you can soon find yourself running for your life.
Staying motivated is about rewards, too. Non-runners often tell me the runners they see in public are a miserable-looking, unsmiling lot. The runners I know are not in clubs, doing a 5K after work, then going to a pub for some beers. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, runners are typically alone. And yes, usually with a sour look on their face.
There are times I look like that, but mostly not. To me, that is the secret of staying motivated. To bring to the road what the Buddhists call the beginner's mind, an attitude of openness and eagerness. I remember days in Windsor, Canada’s Motor City, training for the Windsor-Detroit Marathon. For my twenty-miler, I ran the leafy streets, long stretches of Riverside Drive to Tecumseh, the namesake of the great native warrior instrumental in the surrender of Fort Detroit, during the War of 1812, almost two hundred years ago. Bend in the river, meditative quiet. As I gaze across the St. Clair River to Belle Isle, I think about my rewards at home: A quart of cold water, a beer on ice, and while I’m drinking the beer, a whirly dance to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” from Songs in the Key Life, the volume thrown up on my stereo.
When it comes to the mind, there are other rewards, of course. New research shows people with weakly pumping hearts have decreased brain volume – a marker of brain aging – compared with those with more vigorous hearts. * After thirty-plus years of running, my resting pulse is 46 beats per minute. Elsewhere, a study by scientists at the University of Illinois found that three, vigorous 40-minute walks a week over six months will improve memory and reasoning. ** Call it, running for your brain.
There is nothing that says a runner in headphones would not – with only slightly breaking stride – pick up from the ground a gently loved lady bug stuffed toy that had fallen out of the hands of toddler sitting with her mom on the summer grass. But it’s likely you wouldn’t hear her soft voice of gratitude, “Thank you, sir.”
* Time magazine, Aug. 16, 2010
** Newsweek, June 28-July 5, 2010
Next: Running Without Headphones
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)