Running for Your Life: Stay the Course

There is no easy answer to this. A week from Sunday I will be competing in my seventh marathon, my fourth since 2010. On Saturday, I will turn fifty-eight, and yeah, I’ve every intention of – if I manage to be steady enough at Steamtown to qualify for the Boston Marathon again – to run in 2015, my sixtieth year.

It bears reminding that I suffer from a condition: deep vein thrombosis that predominately affects the circulation in my left leg. If I don’t get in at least an every-other-day run, the leg will swell more than it does without, and, well, I’ve never been inclined to see what a long layoff would do to it, to how stiff and uncomfortable it might make for me in doing even the most simple things, like climbing stairs or walking up a hill, so suffice to say there has never been – outside of illness and injury, which might in the past thirty-five years total about a month of days – a time when I didn’t run at least a little bit every other day.

Once you find a course that you love, my advice is to keep at it. Saturday, my birthday, I will be a week away from picking up credentials for my seventh marathon. And, it’s not a lie to say that I’ve never felt better prepared for a marathon. All that, and more, because I have stayed the course.

Next: Running for Your Life: Last Week!

Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature

On Sundays, before I come in to work on the business desk at the New York Post, M and I visit the farmers’ market in our neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Recently (Sunday, Sept. 22), while M was out of town – a whirlwind author event tour – I went on my own, where, a bit down in the dumps about my own writing career, I confided some of those feelings to Rafael, our premium coffee, nut, granola and nut spread provider, who had, a year or so ago, lifted my spirits by calling me out as one of the readers during the “Moby Dick” marathon reading event in Brooklyn, saying only “Moby Dick,” his English not being as strong as it is now, and in this case, Rafael stepped away from a customer who was buying at least a three-pack of nuts to quote to me Paul Verlaine, saying, “And All the Rest is Literature,” which led me to look up the translation itself, THE ART POETIQUE, the final stanza of which is:

“Let your verse be the happy occurrence,

Somehow within the restless morning wind,

Which goes about smelling of mint and thyme...

And all the rest is literature.”

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All systems go for the Steamtown Marathon. Twelve days and counting!

Next: Running for Your Life: How to Stay the Course

Running for Your Life: One Last Long One

Best run (Sept. 25) since I don’t know when. There is something about the fall. 62 degrees Fahrenheit, the AWAKE! LED clock bleeds as I climb the grade on the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, dodging the inevitable throngs of tourists, in a mood to forgive them their inattentiveness to both runners and cyclists, intent as they (the tourists) are at getting photos of the Freedom Tower – oh no, WTC 1, as the bureaucrats would have it – but by the tone of the near-genuflecting gentry on the bridge I’d say it’s Freedom made Sacred, how solemn-appearing are the picture takers of the tower before their dark tourism visit to the September 11 Museum.

 

And on, feeling no pain, quite the contrary as light on my feet as I can remember (thanks Eddy! Foot Freedom!), mind alert, spirit lifted, struck (to wit, drawn particular attention to) by the super-size fancy-pants strollers of Tribecistanis; my favorite ironic T shirt, a skinny girl exercise-walking in an oversize “Viva La Revolucion” (as in fresh from the Bolivian jungle, Sandinista chic, del Blasio for mayor), just short of the Christopher Street Pier, forty-five minutes from Brownstone Brooklyn, five minutes shaved from my twenty-miler eleven days earlier, all is well, water up, and return, the northern view of the Freedom Tower (Yay!) and on, the pro-lookalike tennis teacher, sitting on a park bench, waiting on his obscenely high hourly rate student(s), and later, near City Hall Park, a suit on the phone overheard saying “I wouldn’t think that we can adjust the hourly rate” and close to home, overheard conversation from a construction crew, working on the Whole Foods development at Third Street and Third Avenue, speaking, I swear to God, joual!

Eighteen days and counting until Steamtown ... 

Next: Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature

 

 

 

Running for Your Life: Zombies/Running

J, my fellow hound owner friend (Go! George!) brought up “World War Z,” the zombie apocalypse movie http://bit.ly/Qs8zC7 (on Sept. 24), saying it was a capstone of zombie representation in today’s undead obsessed culture. How so?

Many ways. Let’s take running. In scene after scene zombies flail away in comic-menacing bluster, bodies as if rebuilt by a methed-up Victor Frankenstein, looking in a not too far-fetched way like clots of desperate-faced joggers in Central Park, the mid-pack shufflers in the New York City Marathon. A capstone of our mass society, the likely end result of four generations of industrialized culture, which yields the conundrum: sanitized corruption of human potential, the wicked byproduct of which fouls the Earth to such a point that even those who have an individualistic bent cannot extract themselves unless they are among the privileged elite who from their fortified cities defend to the death the right to throw off the masses (think those streams of zombies in the WWZ trailer above, with no place to go, yet will never stop in their reckless climb up and into these fortresses only to suffer the release of a certain death once inside.)

The Hollywood story, of course, sees an antidote. Here is where the audience (which sees itself not as a zombie, rather in our “American Idol”-entertainment culture we are conditioned to see ourselves as the Other, one who is superior to the poor MF-ing zombies, weak and pathetic, not at all like me) is given the sappy bromide: Hands across America, we are all one, aren’t we?, Brad Pitt, he will bring us all to the Promised Land, one of concord and hope.

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Steaming toward Steamtown. Nineteen days and counting!

Next: Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature

Running for Your Life: Running to West 70th Street Pier

It’s done. Not to Harlem, but three hours from brownstone Brooklyn to the modern pier jutting into the Hudson River at West 70th Street and back to brownstone Brooklyn, which according to the Googly amounts to a mile short of twenty miles, but given that the pedestrian route isn’t as direct as the driving one (through Battery Tunnel and up the West Side Highway vs. inner city Brooklyn, cross the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan to Battery Park City and the Hudson River park north), I’m thinking that I met my goal, running at least twenty miles without stopping a month or so before the running of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa.

It went as planned on Friday, Sept. 13, hours before sundown when fasting starts over the Yom Kippur holy day, and while there is nothing automatic about running for twenty miles (or reasonable about deciding to do such an injury-susceptible exercise on Friday the 13th!) it went well, my “dogs” holding up, and the rest, plenty of water on the route, from brownstone Brooklyn to the Brooklyn Bridge to the Hudson River Park, just enough electrolyte chews to keep my strength (and pace) up. This week marks my second to last training week of sizable runs, perhaps a ten-miler on Wednesday (Sept. 25), before I begin tapering (not bond-buying but slowing to jogging, from ten milers to threes and twos), the last week in September.

Onward to the goal, a marathon, my lucky No. 7, in Scranton on Sunday, Oct. 13!

Next: Running for Your Life: All the Rest is Literature