Running for Your Life: One Hundred Years

Thank God it has come to this. Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen … There is power in numbers, and post-2000, those blandly insignificant numbers, not meaningless but freighted with false importance that leads to soporific if not vacuous reflection while now, on the one hundredth anniversary of the twentieth century truly beginning in Sarajevo and the archduke terrorism assassination that helped set off the Great War, the one my grandfather, my first memories of him, his arm scar with the shrapnel still inside, the hard bit you could feel, the world a century ago that is brought forward to me as something so real that I can touch and smell it, grampa’s pipe tobacco and Amphora brand smoke, flakes of Sunkist skin, faint urine, black tea leaves. What is the English staleness that tilts toward death at all ages, but never mind because my grandfather is with me as I write this on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War, the one where his stories, and by extension mine, come from.

That’s what it is in, then. Why the past, 1999-2013, fourteen years yield little in comparison. That in stories we begin with reflection and until this moment in 2014 there wasn’t a root to grow from, a place from where a hundred years is yours, that you can live for a hundred years in a single moment.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: Claim Space

So you want to live in Park Slope department:

A principal mating ritual in Park Slope winter: Adult female wearing the bright orange glow-in-the-dark PARK SLOPE FOOD CO-OP traffic vest as an ass-hugging skirt.

Prospectors, land. Natives, land too. In the case of this blog, mental geography. How on recent mild weather runs what I feel inside is my first run as a New York City resident, not a visitor, there had been plenty of those. But twenty-five years ago on a run around the reservoir at Central Park during a peculiar swath of Indian summer weather so much like today (Dec. 22) when I ran for an hour around Green-Wood Cemetery that it brought the earlier run flooding back to mind, and not just as a passive memory but as an active reality, as real as anything that is this run I lay claim to that person who was in that moment in December 1988. We are one I think as I run because I am always letting the surroundings I see and feel dictate the mental terrain. It is what I mean about claiming space. It is what we have done in the West. Whether as white invaders (prospectors and settlers) or native activists seeking land stolen in treaties or long-distance runners laying claim to mental space, to geography in the mind.

In this spirit, consider this as a new year’s resolution. When next you hear the phrase, mental loss, find a way to change the conversation. There is a power in words. I have a dream that one day when we Google the phrase “mental gain” it will appear as often as “mental loss.” Here is one of the lessons I learned from the brilliant short story writer DW Wilson, whose recent collection, “Once You Break A Knuckle,” http://bit.ly/19KIfL7 includes the story “The Persistence.” In it is the life lesson, Persistence Beats Resistance. And how. There are ways to fire the brain through natural means so that mental gain can be a reality. Or so I believe, and man, there is a world of power in that.

Best of the season, everyone!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to Take a Week Off

Sometimes I’m not running. Say after I blew out my hamstring in February 2011. Or for two days to rest my body, which doth protest, especially as I nudge the fringe of sixty, for days, no weeks, after I take it on the road for its annual punishment, twenty-six miles of running, hard and fast enough so that I manage a sub 9-minute mile pace, never many days am I away from running, until, early in December, a week to ten days were the doctor’s orders, not-running or exercising, my first significant time away since pre-training for the Boston Marathon 2011 left me with the blown hamstring, and for the past two years hence, I’ve done a 60-set of evening pushups and at least three days a week running, so what was I to do?

Funny, how when I read back these notes I’m struck primarily by hubris of numbers – nine-minute mile, 60-set pushups – and place, Boston, when the reality of my running is much less and then more than these details, how to “Geoff Dyer” the results, the outcomes, that while the journey is so seen and, thus, accomplished, that it yields to that one dimensional reportage, why I often find it dull to read non-fiction, just the facts, ma’am, and analysis that is so ordinary and lame in its ordinariness to fail to pass the GD test, What do you feel that is as transporting as a run, the runs I do, in any case, because, especially during that week of not-running, cannot for a moment imagine what it is to be in a group, one in which, say, you put bells on to run, the Jingle Bell Jog was held during my not-running time, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with me the run is a quiet time, mine own, a form of worship without father, I’m a mile in, that’s nine minutes, thirty outdoor or twenty indoor to follow, those life-total minutes, near-countless now, I find myself in that space of no time, what David Grossman writes in “Falling Out of Time,” http://bit.ly/1gJcs1d, eventually, without apology, I could in rapture see myself enveloped in a hole in the ground, convincing me that inside are those who I’ve sought and are either in Toronto, Owen Sound, Chicago, Croatia, then those dead and gone, but I don’t have the words, they are nearly as alive to me in the solitude of my running than those who I’m with every day, M, K and T. “Geoff Dyer” the results; what are these photos of Victorian-era northern places http://bit.ly/1bfes9D taken by whom, that there is an inner feeling that comes off them, that they are not objects of simple age but rather embued with the spirit of those times and cannot be seen unless you’ve meditated solely on them.

          There is a holy act that takes you, often at great effort to launch from ennui or a general tiredness, out
          for a run on a cold day. Shake it off. Stride. Years ago, it was true. I could be faster. Not now.
          Now. I. Simply. Must. Run. It is what shapes my life. The air I breathe.

          Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

 

Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter

Put on your shorts, shoes, the lot, zipper leggings and short down jacket, run out the door and into the neighborhood gym or the Y, take off the outerwear. Run on the treadmill. ... Repeat through mid-March, or until the temp highs hit, say, the 50s until next December.

Next: Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to take a week off

 

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