Now in the fifth week of a 100-day training program for Steamtown 2013, on October 13. So far, so good, thanks to Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success" http://amzn.to/15DmV56
To date, on Day 30, as for longish runs, I’ve managed only an 11.8 miler (in part because the temps in late June and through mid-July have been too brutal for pushing any harder) and a simulated 10-K race, which in my neck of the woods means twin revolutions of the roadway in Prospect Park.
It seems odd to be marathon training again since my last one was Boston 2012. Training to finish is one thing – for me and my outsized goals (3:14 for the New York City Marathon and 3:40 for the Boston Marathon) it’s something else. But I think if I run a smart race in Steamtown (Scranton, Pa.) both could very well be a reality. (Well, New York City may be a stretch … but if I run Steamtown 2015, then at 60! the QT slims to 3:24 …)
Given the October race day temps aren’t likely to be anywhere near as punishing as they are now – closer to 100 degrees under the sun than 90 – I’ve been doing a lot of treadmill training at the gym. It’s important, as I’ve learned in training for previous marathons (on the morning on October 13 I will be at the starting line of my seventh 26.2 miler) to get in the miles, but not at the risk of affecting your overall health or, heaven forbid, losing training time to injury. Pushing yourself in the heat and humidity will do just that.
Henderson’s manual is BIG on rest days and alternating hard days with easy days. In the past, I haven’t been very good at that, and, instead, tried to take the course straight up to the mountaintop rather than via the slower and smarter switchbacks: that meant every week I’d just get tougher and tougher on myself, without going easy, and without taking day breaks, or cross training days. This time, though, I've been much more conservative: through the first four weeks, I’ve run the following totals: 27.3 miles, 29.2 miles, 28.6 miles and 29 miles.
Tomorrow (July 17) it’s forecast to be close to 100 degrees at midday, and I still plan to put in my longest run yet – 14 miles on the treadmill of my local gym. It’s hot and humid, baby. Fine, for a two, three, even six miler, but anything more grueling and I’m opting for the indoor (i.e. air-conditioned) track.
Next: Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth
Running for Your Life: Ligurian Mood
Sunbathing customs at fine hotels like Caravelle http://bit.ly/1biVCSe on the Italian Riviera are built around food and drink: continental breakfasts lashing spokes of fresh fruit and fiber cereal, juices of myriad variety, yogurt from 7:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then the sunbathing begins on fine days to lunch time at 12:30 p.m. or 1 p.m. when it’s antipasti, fruits of the sea, calamari, pulpo and asparagus (not white) and shrimp, whatever green vegetable is in season, a spinach pie made by the mother/owner of the hotel who works the tables as only a proud woman who sees to everything can do, the overfed seagull she feeds also part of her lunchtime routine … the big fellow called Chee-Chee, named for his hungry cry … (the proprietress also makes the lemon and orange rind marmalade that we spoon liberally over the farm fresh yogurt for breakfast) all the antipasti drizzled to poured with olive oil, a centuries-old recipe from the family’s groves in the terraced mountains . . . if you run like I do up the hills, you are alone on the switchbacks going higher and higher the stone walls separating the trees, the walls regularly rebuilt, kept strong enough to sustain the farming but still looking like they would have, say, one hundred or three hundred years ago, close your eyes and that is what you feel, it is from terraced farms like these that the oil is made, why tales of the gods are best read here, all is the fruit of the land, the sea and it is not even two o’clock, a grilled fish is available but that will be for later, rather we chose a primi: pasta with pesto and potatoes, the noodles more al dente that an American chef would allow so that each bite is replete with texture, complemented with the DOC rose wine, not a type of wine I normally enjoy but this one, so light on the berry and crisp that there is no better choice and finish with a short, strong coffee … Any other place it’s siesta, but the meal energizes not stupefies and at 3 p.m., with still seven hours of sun to come, return to the Mediterranean beach, so many lounge chairs with head-vent shades and each pair its own sun umbrella, a tiny shelf to hold your bottles of cream, tanning oil and Chapstick …
Next: Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five
Next: Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five
Running for Your Life: New Meal
Fuhgeddabout the New Deal. Politics and governance are so corrupt (see Predator Nation by writer and filmmaker Charles Ferguson [‘Inside Job’] http://amzn.to/ykXoXg) and beyond change short of nuclear winter, that the idea of a New Deal will make a substantial difference in the lives of ordinary people is nothing but a Grim (cq) fairy tale.
Instead, try a New Meal. I’ve written about food here a lot, but recently (May 26) I came upon something new to me: phytonutrients, natural chemicals found in a variety of plant foods. It turns out, according to a Sunday NY Times article, http://nyti.ms/13SKDLT) that they have been shown to help in the fight against the Boomer scourges: cancer, cardio-vascular disease and dementia.
Join me in building a New Meal, one that includes such foods as arugula, dandelion leaves, yellow corn, violet potatoes, wild blueberries . . .
Spurn mild and go for the wild. That seems to be the secret. Which, when you think of it, goes along with a new New Deal. As in, going off the grid. Getting away from politics and governance, where corruption is but a dark-hued storyline on stress in a land where the ultimate enemy is time, which if you allow yourself to believe in the New Meal can be caught off-guard and befriended.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spanish Mood
Instead, try a New Meal. I’ve written about food here a lot, but recently (May 26) I came upon something new to me: phytonutrients, natural chemicals found in a variety of plant foods. It turns out, according to a Sunday NY Times article, http://nyti.ms/13SKDLT) that they have been shown to help in the fight against the Boomer scourges: cancer, cardio-vascular disease and dementia.
Join me in building a New Meal, one that includes such foods as arugula, dandelion leaves, yellow corn, violet potatoes, wild blueberries . . .
Spurn mild and go for the wild. That seems to be the secret. Which, when you think of it, goes along with a new New Deal. As in, going off the grid. Getting away from politics and governance, where corruption is but a dark-hued storyline on stress in a land where the ultimate enemy is time, which if you allow yourself to believe in the New Meal can be caught off-guard and befriended.
Next: Running for Your Life: Spanish Mood
Running for Your Life: Go Your Own Way
It’s getting harder to do. The truth is, I’m glad I was born when I was. At a time when a TV was not yet in every home, when I played outside as a child, skated when winter was winter on a rink my dad made for us. When the very idea of Facebook, say, would’ve seemed like a nightmare, which if you give it any kind of thought, it is.
“Go Your Own Way,” the Fleetwood Mac anthem from 1976 http://bit.ly/aJhxQE isn’t a path social media would like us to take. The line drawn from TV to Facebook status is so straight and without imagination that it paralyzes me to think about it too long.
Media is the organizing principle, not class as Marx had it. The dilemma: How to know yourself when media channels and distorts the way it does.
What does this mean in terms of exercise? Just about everything. Run, walk, swim, jog, cycle. Or non-exercise: read, think, laugh, talk, listen. Bring yourself to the moment. Leave mocking and mediation to the clones. As K, aka Gramma makes clear: get real. Bring it back to where it matters.
Next: Running for Your Life: New Meal
“Go Your Own Way,” the Fleetwood Mac anthem from 1976 http://bit.ly/aJhxQE isn’t a path social media would like us to take. The line drawn from TV to Facebook status is so straight and without imagination that it paralyzes me to think about it too long.
Media is the organizing principle, not class as Marx had it. The dilemma: How to know yourself when media channels and distorts the way it does.
What does this mean in terms of exercise? Just about everything. Run, walk, swim, jog, cycle. Or non-exercise: read, think, laugh, talk, listen. Bring yourself to the moment. Leave mocking and mediation to the clones. As K, aka Gramma makes clear: get real. Bring it back to where it matters.
Next: Running for Your Life: New Meal
Running for Your Life: Sunday Blessing in the Rain
He didn’t get up and visit like he normally does. Usually, it’s like clockwork, 8:30 in the morning and he pokes his nose into our bedroom. I know because oftentimes I am waking up just as he arrives. It’s not any noise that he makes. Think the ticking of a clock; he arrives and I wake up.
But today (May 19) he doesn’t come to our door. It’s 9:30, 10, 10:15 before I go downstairs, and see him, still sacked out on his parlor bed. Maybe it’s the day, I think, dreary and pissing rain. He hasn’t spat-howled to the thump of the Sunday Times on the front door. Soon, though, he is up, has his breakfast and is ready for his walk.
At three, he’s a different dog than he was at two. Subdued, less likely to lunge at kids on scooters or men wearing stacked headgear. Which is a good and bad thing. Perhaps, I think if I let myself, he’s lost a spirit-step or two, and that’s what I’m thinking when – both of us soaked – a fellow stops us, gloomy Gusses we are, and beams a smile, saying, “Izzat a redbone?”
I say, yes, and the man with the trussed-up headgear approaches Thurber – and that can be bad – but not this fella. T’s tail flies into whirlybird and he immediately takes to the man’s extended hand.
“I had a redbone,” he says.
“They’re not ideal for the city,” he says, admonishing.
“I know,” I say.
“You have to run them.”
“I do,” I say proudly, as the three of us walk toward the dog run. The rain has picked up. I’m glad I have an umbrella, but the man and the dog don’t seem to be phased by the sudden drenching.
“I can see that,” he says. “He looks great.”
“Thank you,” I say, smiling for the first time all day. He walks ahead of us, but then stops and looks back, grinning ear to ear.
“My dog lived to be sixteen, but he ran and swam to the very end. I live in Red Hook by the water, and he ran the beach and just loved to swim. Out on his own into the harbor.”
“Thurber loves to swim. He really takes to it.”
“They do.”
“You’ve made my day, thanks.”
We exchange waves and he goes on.
The dog run is empty when Thurber rushes to a blue object, a squeaky toy that someone has left behind. For a long time we play fetch with the toy in the pouring rain – just like he did when he was a pup.
Next: Running for Your Life: Going Your Own Way
But today (May 19) he doesn’t come to our door. It’s 9:30, 10, 10:15 before I go downstairs, and see him, still sacked out on his parlor bed. Maybe it’s the day, I think, dreary and pissing rain. He hasn’t spat-howled to the thump of the Sunday Times on the front door. Soon, though, he is up, has his breakfast and is ready for his walk.
At three, he’s a different dog than he was at two. Subdued, less likely to lunge at kids on scooters or men wearing stacked headgear. Which is a good and bad thing. Perhaps, I think if I let myself, he’s lost a spirit-step or two, and that’s what I’m thinking when – both of us soaked – a fellow stops us, gloomy Gusses we are, and beams a smile, saying, “Izzat a redbone?”
I say, yes, and the man with the trussed-up headgear approaches Thurber – and that can be bad – but not this fella. T’s tail flies into whirlybird and he immediately takes to the man’s extended hand.
“I had a redbone,” he says.
“They’re not ideal for the city,” he says, admonishing.
“I know,” I say.
“You have to run them.”
“I do,” I say proudly, as the three of us walk toward the dog run. The rain has picked up. I’m glad I have an umbrella, but the man and the dog don’t seem to be phased by the sudden drenching.
“I can see that,” he says. “He looks great.”
“Thank you,” I say, smiling for the first time all day. He walks ahead of us, but then stops and looks back, grinning ear to ear.
“My dog lived to be sixteen, but he ran and swam to the very end. I live in Red Hook by the water, and he ran the beach and just loved to swim. Out on his own into the harbor.”
“Thurber loves to swim. He really takes to it.”
“They do.”
“You’ve made my day, thanks.”
We exchange waves and he goes on.
The dog run is empty when Thurber rushes to a blue object, a squeaky toy that someone has left behind. For a long time we play fetch with the toy in the pouring rain – just like he did when he was a pup.
Next: Running for Your Life: Going Your Own Way
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