I’d like to think that after what happened to me earlier this year that I’ve learned my lesson. In March, only a month before my first Boston Marathon, I’m laid up with the Mother-Of-All torn hamstrings. The rip’s the size of a quarter just south of the right butt-bone. Today, a half-year later and I feel only the faintest of tugs back there; my range of motion as normal as it’s ever been.
Since then, getting back on my feet and on the road in June (a year after Thurb! came into our lives), I’ve been pretty much pain-free – outside of a sizzlingly hot July day on Fire Island when after about a nine-miler the forefoot pain returned, like what I suffered at the 10-10-10 Steamtown Marathon. But months later even that pain has eased and not because I have done anything different. Rather, I’m just staying to a steady pre-marathon training regimen, running a 1:05 with Thurb and without, depending more on his schedule than mine. (We both need to run, to shake out the cobwebs; I wouldn’t be keeping this blog, prepping a book proposal, preparing for travel, if I didn’t keep up with my running. Mind and body in sync. Keeping age at bay. At this point, almost effortlessly. What I see every morning in the hound. He’s raring to go. Start the day. Get up and run. Anything’s possible. Show me.)
Running for Your Life: Canada: A Visit
My brother T and my sister-in-law L are visiting from Canada (Sept. 29-Oct. 2). It’s been awhile since they’ve been in Brooklyn. Certainly more than a decade, but for busy-ness, this period of time has few parallels in life. Now, though, all our kids are grown, and needing us in different ways, so during our visit to Canada in the summer (See Running for Your Life: Canada!, posted July 28) T asked what weekend would work best for them to come visit in the fall, which turned out to be the one in brackets above, a week before my birthday (Oct. 5) when the tourist buzz at Brooklyn’s TKTS is down to a dull roar so that reasonably priced seats can be had for even high demand shows like “Billy Elliot” and “Anything Goes,” L is fine to go along with whatever during the weekend, enjoying everything in equal measure but she’s the one who picks Billy Elliot, so on Saturday morning T and I do the hunting and gathering, snagging a couple pair in the mezzanine, which for a dance extravaganza like BE was just the ticket, because it was an amazing show.
Running for Your Life: Relativity of Size
A lifetime ago, in January 1985, I'm standing among a large group of young Cuban students. The woman I was seeing at the time, a Yugoslav translator for Cuban authorities and a student of social revolutions, is running her hand casually through the locks of one particularly handsome boy in a way that seemed timelesss, without a tincture of self-satisfaction on her part, rather that it was the most natural gesture in the world.
It also was a time, the only moment in my life, in that sunny day crowd, when my less than normal North American size, 5’11” and low-150s, is well above the norm. Not just my height but my girth. I’m young myself, 29, but in this company like post-steroid Barry Bonds among his SF Giants teammates. My shoulders, hips and legs much bigger and thicker than the youngsters I see. They are skinny but healthy- and athletic-looking, slender reeds to a Louisville Slugger.
It also was a time, the only moment in my life, in that sunny day crowd, when my less than normal North American size, 5’11” and low-150s, is well above the norm. Not just my height but my girth. I’m young myself, 29, but in this company like post-steroid Barry Bonds among his SF Giants teammates. My shoulders, hips and legs much bigger and thicker than the youngsters I see. They are skinny but healthy- and athletic-looking, slender reeds to a Louisville Slugger.
Running for Your Life: Curse-Mudgeon
Rain, sleep-inducing humidity, Thurb! training imperatives combined to keep us off the country road this past weekend. We’d planned a ride north with the hound for apple-picking and cider-sampling, the wide-open spaces of upstate New York. (Why do I keep thinking Fresh Kills but it’s Something-Kills or –Kill, not a landfill site, but maybe that partially explains why we stayed put. Inertia, ironically enough, is a powerful force, isn’t it?)
Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.
Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.
Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast
On the Manhattan-bound R Train, Union Station, Brooklyn, two elderly bookish white New Yorker women are loudly comparing the merits of two prominent Malcolm X life story accounts, the Marable http://amzn.to/dry2Jz and the Haley http://bit.ly/68w4Ha, the morning of the planned execution of accused Georgian cop killer Troy Davis, a black man widely believe to be innocent.
“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.
“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.
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