Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

If only Oscar Wilde were alive. He’d have a few things to say. As even a cursory inventory of what he did say makes eminently clear:

• A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. 

• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

• I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying. 

• A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. 

• True friends stab you in the front.
  
  
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reward Yourself

Running for Your Life: Core Principles

At some point, I don’t know precisely when, I started to care about my bad posture. When you have an oversized head as a child that will do it. As a boy I was mocked for my walk. I hung my heavy head, arched my back and took long strides. Father John was the inside family joke. You look like a farmer striding over rows of half-grown corn.

It wasn’t as though I was proud of my walk. But what to do. It was my walk. I may as try to change the way I talked. Or laughed; wasn’t a walk what you were born with?

But running changed my walk. If I were going to go far (and stay well with blood circulating to the busted valves of my damaged left leg), I’d convinced myself I had not only to run but to run long and fast. That meant I had to pay attention to where my head was as I moved. Too far forward and I’d labor too much, lose speed. I took up tai chi for awhile in my late twenties and learned about core strength, about the idea of a spine being lifted up from above as if you were a puppet held up on a string by a gentle power who seeks only the right thing for you, a power that you can trust.

Good posture is core. Hips drop down and feet move apart, shoulders go square, and even though I’m close to forty years from my bad posture days, my head still disproportionately large compared to the rest of my body, strength in my other muscles, my core, compensates. That twelve pounds of brain, bone and flesh sits squarely on my shoulders, and to date I’m still running for my life without any pain in my neck, back, hips, knees or ankles.

Believe me, core principles are worth heeding.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reward Yourself

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Another pro hockey season has come and gone, and with it, as always, memories of the year that was. The Blackhawks win again, their third in six years and fourth in 54 years, when one of my favorite hockey players of the day, Bobby Hull, led them over Jean Béliveau and the Montreal Canadiens.

In those days, I was no fan of Big Jean, Le Gros Bill, as he was known. When it comes to sports and our teams, we cherish the triumphs but still feel the bitter defeats in our hearts, as if we are still the excited child allowed to stay up late to watch the game that had gone into overtime between my beloved Bruins and the hated Habs, only to be devastated by the deadly shot of the big centerman over the glove of goalie Gerry Cheevers and into the gaping net behind. It was April 1969.

Now he is gone. The best of the best. The original team man. Jean Béliveau passed away in December 2014 during the hockey year that was. I'm still not a fan of Les Canadiens, but it’s a harder man than I am capable of being not to miss the grandeur that Béliveau brought to the game – and to life.  

  

It has been almost seven months, but it bears repeating: This from an article by Dave Stubbs in the Montreal Gazette, Dec. 3, 2014:

“Rarely has the career of an athlete been so exemplary,” Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said on the occasion of Jean Béliveau Night at the Forum on March 24, 1971, the Canadiens paying on-ice pregame tribute to their captain a few months before his retirement.

“By his courage, his sense of discipline and honour, his lively intelligence and finesse, his magnificent team spirit, Béliveau has given new prestige to hockey.”

Béliveau accepted an oversized cheque that night for $155,855, giving birth to his foundation that in the decades ahead would distribute nearly $2 million to organizations helping sick, underprivileged and physically challenged children.

“Everything I achieved throughout my career, and all the rewards that followed, came as the results of team effort. If they say anything about me when I’m gone, let them say that I was a team man. To me, there is no higher compliment,” he wrote in his autobiography, “My Life in Hockey,” published in 1994.

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Principles

Running for Your Life: Are You STILL Running?

It's funny how this question comes out in conversation. Are you STILL running? With emphasis on the STILL.

Invariably, it's a question I hear from someone who I haven't seen in some time. That makes sense, I suppose. I guess it is fair to say that there are not that many folks in their sixtieth year who run an average of 20 miles a week.

And sure, when I do hear that phrase, it strikes me as someone thinking out loud. If one of my friends and acquaintances says "Are You STILL Running?" ten of them of are thinking it, in the spirit of a pal who blurts out something nervy, then says, "Oh, my, did I just say that out loud?"

But, if you think about it, they don't say, "Are you STILL smoking?," or "Are you STILL sniffling from allergies?," or "Are you STILL living on First Street?" (although they will still say, "Are you STILL working at The Post?", which says as much about the politics of my neighborhood than anything.)

The STILL says it all. That with grace and self-respect I will finally give up this unlikely pursuit of running and turn my hand to more age-appropriate exercises, like, say, lawn bowling or, if I must, doubles tennis.

It's hard to keep that tinge of judgment out of our tone, much less out of our minds. But it could be worth a try.

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Principles

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

It should’ve been in there. In the movie, “North by Northwest.” David Trotter writes about it in the June 4, 2015, edition of the London Review of Books, entitled “Hiatus at 4 a.m.”

Alfred Hitchcock was being interviewed around this time of year in 1962 (yeah, 53 years ago!). He was 62. (I like to think part of his reason for giving so much in these talks with Francois Truffault was the irony: 62 in ’62 – he wouldn’t be 63 until later that summer.)

Imagine this scene: Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. He stops in Detroit in its Motor City heyday … Here’s what Hitchcock tells Truffault:

“I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foreman. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece.  Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut  and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!”

Hitchcock, he never stopped … What a man! An inspiration to us all.

This too, is a great takeaway from the Trotter essay of four books, including one by our friend Michael Wood: “Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much”:

“The transitions between films became almost as swift and as seamless as the transitions within them.”

Words to live by. If only this great were still with us!

Next: Running for Your Life: Are You STILL Running?