Running for Your Life: Don't Stop for Nothing

Overheard recently (Aug. 25) in Prospect Park, from a high school running coach in conversation with a 40ish-year-old running enthusiast, who I’m assuming was seeking pointers about how to get more out of her relatively newfound pastime.

“Build in speed portions in your workout. If your jogging pace is a 10-minute mile, do some interval sprints. You want to regularly go twice that fast, if you looking to run stronger and faster. So bring some speed intervals into your practice.”

Oh, boy. If words alone could stretch hamstrings (for miles and years accustomed to a go-slowish pace) to the breaking point, those would be the ones …

That being said, I am a firm believer in doing things differently, to testing yourself. But, please, for your own health and safety, consider your running goals carefully: how fast, how far, how long. As my recent hamstring injury has taught me, there is no shame in going slow.

My rehab is thankfully going pretty well. I’m scaled back from doing hills, and staircase intervals on long runs. The longest run I’ve put in since my injury more than a month ago has been 45 minutes. I didn’t make the five-mile mark, but I also didn’t feel any muscle pain, or even soreness.

So, I’ll keep it slow. I haven’t given up on the Brooklyn Marathon just yet. After all, as the subject heading says: don't stop for nothing. But, when you get a little older, or if you’re just starting after an extended layoff, take it slow in the beginning and build up only bit by bit ...

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

Running for Your Life: Sixty? Really?

In my previous post I wrote about the first anniversary of our Neath family reunion of August 2014. Reunions connect us in ways we can't begin to imagine beforehand. In my case, the playground that was the summer backyard of my Uncle Rog's and Aunt Wilda's, taught me many lessons. Here's one that I carry with me that was both stated and shown in the childlike play by everyone -- children to elders -- during those glory days:

You are only as young as you feel.

I don't think about that saying very often. But it does show in my life. In pretty much every avenue of my life -- home, working, writing, reading, and running -- I don't feel any differently than I did in my thirties. Sixty? I'll be turning sixty in October. I'm blessed by a loving wife and daughter, work that matters to me, and yes, running. Running for my life.

Sixty? So far, it's just a number. Like Forty was before. And Fifty. Seventy? Really? Will that be just a number? Time will tell, but I'm liking the pattern from 1955 to 2015!

Next: Running for Your Life: Stop for Nothing

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

During my coming of age years, my idea of greats pretty much were defined in the sandy backyard of my Uncle Rog's cottage in Sauble Beach, Ontario.

That's where we played, the Neath clan, which celebrated a family reunion in that special space a year ago in August. Thinking today of cousins Gary and Lynn, in particular, for hosting us that day, including my mother, the youngest of the nine elder Neaths.

This month marks the birthday of my late aunt, the beloved Dell, an incomparable wit and champ leg-wrestler. Here was the space where daredevil badminton was played by my dad and Uncle Bob. There were horseshoes and barbecue burgs.

All because the elder children and their kids came to see the patriarch. My grandfather, Sam, whose picture is on this link on Facebook page, and on Twitter.

A year after the Neath reunion, I remember the greats of my coming of age. My aunts and uncles and my grampa.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sixty? Really?

Running for Your Life: Easy Does It

I've begun notes for a piece of writing: Rime of the Ancient Marathoner.

It seems apropos these days. Especially after having tweaked a hamstrung muscle in my right leg while training in the Bois de Boulogne last month.

A week later, after it seemed much better, I reinjured the same muscle running Sur La Grande Jatte.

Since then, while I should've been doing physical therapy in the hopes of building up my miles in the way that I need to in order to run in the Brooklyn Marathon in 88 days on Sunday, Nov. 15, I've taken to managing my training on my own.

Not wise, maybe. But I'm taking it easy. Slowing down to a 10-minute mile pace on the treadmill, gradually going up to 9:30, 9:20 ...

So far, after almost a month since the Bois Breakdown, I'm back up to 35 minutes. At about a 9:40 pace, more or less.

Slow but sure.

As will be that writing project: The Rime of the Ancient Marathoner. A poem, perhaps not a race.

Time will tell.

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

Running for Your Life: Marseille Mood

Making notes on board the high speed train to Paris, after six days in Marseille:

Three hours and twenty minutes, the perfect length for a video music composer, with the digital camera attached to the train outside, directed so that the sky takes up two-thirds of the frame. Because there is so much to love about the changing skies; Marseille, brilliant hot sun, cloudless blue sky, the lovers kissing on the platform at Avignon, the light as it plays on the plains, all the way to the outskirts of Paris, where the chill shows on the timeless fields, the clouds fill the sky with a near-London muscularity. Composers, complete your grant applications, file to Je t’aime, Paris …

Don’t miss the visit to MuCEM, only open for two years, a blink of an eye of Marseille’s mad history, and enter for free the wonder of its façade, the promenade within that encircles the massive cube space, ascending in an ever-so-gradual way, the late-afternoon light on the harbor water, how many times reflected in the space, outside, inside and all – at one time, I will show the photo story I took of MM’s slow walk ahead of me into the narrows of darkness. She is all white, a perfect contrast in the shadows of this extraordinary space.

The Vieux Port may have been redeveloped on the backs of mega-millions, but dashes of life – the skinny boy with the sunken chest plays at showing he can be like his friends, the boys he views as his betters – feel unchanged. (His betters are running and leap-frogging from harborside into the sea, choosing a place where dangerous-looking breakwater rocks are directly below, and where they are guaranteed of gathering a crowd to watch, because who can resist a daredevil show?) A cute, athletic girl has screwed up her courage – perhaps to leap the breakwater rocks for the first time; her jump does have that hope-against-hope arc to it – and she makes it, and in her first action afterward, she is flailing her arms, coaxing the boy with the sunken chest to try. He seems as determined as ever and to our horror he dashes up to the edge. Then stops. There are so many false tries. And each time he doesn’t do it.

Destinies are shaped during moments like this. For close to an hour we watch the boy, until he finally gives up, and sits at the harbor’s edge, his skinny legs dangling far above the inviting waves.

Next: Running for Your Life: Easy Does It