Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf

So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard climbing the GAP hill in Prospect Park, bikers, training in their team gear, “I was biking in a small town . . . in the south of France when a older French woman stopped me …”

It’s been too long. Prime season and all. Leaf-catching season. I’d like to think it’s about opportunity that I haven’t caught a leaf in a few seasons now. For a variety of reasons I’ve been out running in late October and November less often than in past years, and maybe it’s just bad luck, these blustery days when leaves are falling, a week of such weather and fully twenty to thirty percent of the prime specimens, whirlings, corkscrew their way to the ground and inevitably I’m not there, dunno where, but not in the park; there was a time when I didn’t have to keep track, every hand-to-leaf season I’d catch cleanly – not trap with my body, and rules are clear – only park leaves, those in the public domain are eligible, at least one leaf would not feel the humiliation, the despoliation of hitting the ground, held aloft only by the catching hand, and tacked to the cork board that hangs above my basement writing desk.

It’s not the end of the season. I may yet get my leaf. It is harder to catch while running with Thurber, and that too, may be a factor. I dunno. Soon, though, I’ll get my next leaf. It’s been more than six weeks since Steamtown – and most of those nasty post-marathon aches and strains are ebbing. It’s fun. And a whole lot more satisfying than any running app could be.

           Next: Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter

Running for Your Life: Upstate With Thurber

Among the many benefits of working for a full-on tabloid (headlines: ESTUPIDO GIGANTE; graphics that, no kidding, have depicted a teachers’ union president as a dominatrix with collars on two hedge fund bosses) is browsing the novel-discard table. Hard to imagine how writers get the attention they deserve when the conversation about literature in today’s society is as noteworthy as a house fly on a heap of putrefying garbage, all the more reason that when you find something fabulous it is notable not only for its fabulousness but for the very real thrill of reading something that pretty much nobody in New York City knows anything about, cue deep throb of human nature, akin to the smugness at the perceived underachievement of childhood friends, their sense of their failure to measure up to the apparent fullness of your life, at least as my current society (New York, New Yorker) gatekeepers would score it.

• A boy with a Superman hair curlicue, ’do parted on the side and short, a la Clark Kent, in a herringbone jacket too small for him, the whitest sneakers this side of a cancer ward and black skinny jeans, Dunkin’ Donuts paper bag on the subway floor, white cup with raised drink spout – DEEP into the opening pages of the Ayn Rand paperback, “Atlas Shrugged.”
• Ah, the pick-up book. It is The Voyage by Murray Bail http://bit.ly/HxXHPF by a London imprint Quercus: married up to a novel I’m reading before bed, Mating by Norman Rush, http://amzn.to/1hk12Sy, back in a novelist’s frame of mind, having finished the massive and without mercy, The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston http://nyti.ms/1gscY3j, during my months of marathon training, the subject as sober and as dark and as shocking as the title suggests.

Thurber and Mary and I went for a road trip to Poughkeepsie, Millbrook, Cold Spring and Peekskill in October. We didn’t run, Thurber and I. But for a brief time on a swath of the Appalachian Trail, Thurber did scale a rock and scrub pine outcropping and stood on the top for more than a beat, a view before him that had to be so awesome that it was worth it, all these years now, of walking him during our routine park strolls, to see him up there, free as a bird …

Next: Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf

Running for Your Life: The Road Back

At dawn after the marathon the parrots came. On fall mornings the Quaker parrots that nest in the Green-Wood Cemetery main entrance arch and the nearby Con Ed substation, the parrots fly through our neighborhood, announcing themselves by squawking, a din easily distinguished from the jays and crows who also pass by and sometimes roost for awhile in our massive oak tree, leaves brush the house’s back wall, the other side of which I heard the parrots’ call that morning.

It was much different than other days. In fact, I had never heard the parrots at dawn. I woke with a start and in that moment listening to the parrots the pain and aches in my legs eased. It was only a moment before the worst of the pain returned. I couldn’t help but think that the parrots had come for a reason. Lying in bed, I thought, yes, something essential had been misplaced this past many months. At some point or other I’d let the idea of my being a marathoner, a man who could not only complete a 26.2 mile race but do so with distinction, define a large part of myself. In focusing on time and finishing place I’d left the parrots behind. How long had it been since I’d thought of running as bird-flying. To look into the sky as I run, to contemplate the hawk on the hunt, the soaring gulls, and most important, how long had it been since I’d gone on a run with a principal goal of seeing the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood in all kinds of weather.

Today (October 23) marks the ninth day since Steamtown, the first of which I ran more than thirty minutes, and yes, the Green-Wood parrots were there, a small flock of five on the most beautiful, fresh fall day. I smiled and felt a certain lift as I came back to running for my life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Upstate with Thurber

Running for Your Life: Half of One Percenters

Yesterday (Oct. 13), I did, indeed, run the Steamtown Marathon http://bit.ly/1emaLmv, and although I may not have done what I had hoped for at the outset (ie, managing a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:40 – best roadside sign of the day – You are ALL running better than the government!), I did come to a satisfying conclusion.

That in spirit I am a runner, not a racer. My time, 3:50:31, or 760th of 2,166 finishers, is something to be proud of. And I am. But there is something more.

At the end of the marathon, after a street food Philly cheesesteak, a shower in the Catholic high school boys locker room, and before hazarding the drive home in which, I thank my lucky stars I didn’t cramp up on the three-hour journey back to Brooklyn, I went to watch runners coming in at the finish line. The 5-hour-plus runners were nearing the end of their race. Here, I saw a dad runner, cradling one infant boy, the other is walking beside him. (The boys likely entered the course only a few yards before I saw them.) This man had done what I had just done, run a marathon. I turned to go to the car thinking a photo finish will be taken of the three of them.

These days the phrase one percenter has been co-opted by the class warriors. There are the wealthy, the one percenters, and the rest of us.

Then, there are the half of one-percenters. Those who have run a marathon.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Road Back

Running for Your Life: Last Week

Here we go. This Sunday at Steamtown, hoping for lucky No. 7. At this point, adrenalin counts for so much. Funny after all these years I still feel the butterflies. Training can only take you so far. Among a million thoughts that day, special ones will go out to my childhood friends in Canada because Sunday, the day before Thanksgiving Day, was traditionally the day we all gathered to play tackle football from our teens to twenties and thirties ... then, nevermind.

          Happy Thanksiving! Looking forward to reporting back on the other side!

          Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Race