Running for Your Life: VERY Cool Literary News

The Jazz Palace – that amazing novel by my wife Mary Morris – is in the news again. This time for winning the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the unanimous choice of these five distinguished jurors: Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rita Dove, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Schama and Stephen Pinker.

Here is what the poet Rita Dove had to say about The Jazz Palace: “Here I was, drenched in the soot and stink and noise of early 20^th-century Chicago, walking along the docks, threading through the alleys, listening to a trumpet wail from a corner saloon.”

What a joy for readers like these illustrious five to have felt what I felt in reading this glorious novel. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award may not have the name recognition of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer. But what’s in a name? The Cleveland Foundation honors work that best confronts racism and most profoundly examines diversity. In the turbulent times we live in now, no prize resonates with greater importance than the Anisfield-Wolf.

Congratulations, again, to Mary. I couldn’t be prouder of her accomplishment!

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

Running for Your Life: Spring Training

This just in: I can train again!

I don’t know what I will be training for: 10K, or half-marathon (definitely not the main event, the marathon, just yet).

But I’m back. Easy does it. Still, I ran thirty-six minutes today (April 5) on the treadmill at slightly slower than a pre-injury pace. (Nine-minute mile, four miles to the dot) And felt zero ill-effects.

When one of the things that you count on goes south, it’s a reasonable response to say, OK, that’s it. No more of that. At your age, you can run but you can’t train. Don’t even think about entering a race.

I am so psyched to say that that kind of thinking is history. Perhaps rightfully, I should follow my smarter-half instinct and abandon the idea that I will enter to run in my ninth marathon.

Abandonment, though, has never been my thing. Suffice to say that, with plenty of days left in this current season, that I am spring training again. A state I can hardly believe I’m crossed into !

If I can do it, after the injuries I sustained last summer, fall and winter, then you can too. Hope to see you out there!

Next: Running for Your Life: VERY Cool Literary News

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

Just when you thought there wasn’t a cool head in Washington, along comes a pleasant surprise.

From former GOP presidential nominee John McCain, no less.

Oh, yes, thankfully, McCain is still with us. (And, if there is a higher power let her bestow real power on the likes of Republicans like John McCain in these next several months before the general election.)

No, this If the Greats Were With Us Thursday, is about The Good Soldier. McCain speaks for him in the person of one Delmer Berg. McCain wrote about Delmer Berg in a New York Times opinion essay, the best I’ve read in the Gray Lady in many a moon.

Here it is: Let the spirit of what moved McCain to write this piece lift prejudice and hate wherever it is found.

The Good Soldier by John McCain (NYT, March 25)

An interesting obituary appeared in The New York Times recently, though the death of its subject last month was largely unnoticed beyond his family and friends.

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Running for Your Life: Earbud Art

I have little use for earbud headphones while running, or walking. Or in the subway.

But I do have an idea.

How about earbud art?

Say tangles of white (and color painted) headphone cable and earbuds in the style of a Jackson Pollock.

Or, more daringly, an earbud tangle in the shape of the Creation of Adam, the Sistine Chapel fresco by Michelangelo.

Or, third, The Scream by Edvard Munch.

I would suggest our Earbud Art show end on The Scream.

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

Running for Your Life: The Knee Solution

Maybe I’m not the ideal commentator on this subject. I have never suffered a serious knee injury, say, an ACL tear or a hampering meniscus injury. But the day before Halloween last year I was forced off a fast-moving treadmill when I felt something “snap” in the muscle group on the outside of my left kneecap.

What followed was such debilitating pain that kept me away from running for months. While I never got a firm diagnosis for what happened to me, the closest I came was what my sports physical therapist said: I had a runaway IT Band (Iliotibial Band) that messed with nerve endings. (There was minimal swelling and no bruising.)

My Knee Solution? A combination of lunges, squats and leg lifts, that zero in on building thigh, knee and butt muscles. Most important, in doing the lunges and squats, stick with it. Do reps of 30 each. Taking special care that when you go down on the lunge the forward bent knee does NOT extend beyond the front foot.

These kinds of exercises helped to restore my running form, in that I keep my full weight more parallel to the ground so that I cushion the inevitable pounding of the foot strikes through my newly conditioned thighs, knees and butt.

The upshot is that I am back to thinking that I could retrain to run long for my life. Right now, I’m happy to do four miles, five miles, the occasional six.

If you have sore knees, or don’t want to have them, think about working out with these simple exercises. They are certainly working for me !

Next: Running for Your Life: Ear Bud Art