Running for Your Life: Core Values

I might have written about this before. But isn’t a blog a conversation? Tell me, how many times does your spouse (best friend) bring up the same subject? There are two response threads. One: Don’t bother me with that again. Second: Really? I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about (subject here).

Which brings me to core values. It bears repeating. I firmly believe that I would not be looking forward to competing in a half-marathon in October (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, under the Verrazano Bridge! More likely I’d be making like Malcolm Lowry and be “Under the Volcano”) if I had not seriously taken up the strengthening and stretching exercises that my physical therapists thrust on me after my knee gave out last October.

That means core strength: lunges, squats, leg raises (both front and back, in order to engage butt muscles), sit ups. Run on Day One (typically from 30 minutes to an hour), do a hard 30 minutes of core strength exercises on Day Two.  Repeat.

Simple stuff, huh? Today, I ran for an hour before work. Tomorrow, I’ll write and stretch-strengthen. The proof is in how you feel. When I finish a run and begin the big cleanup before work, I’ll close my eyes and ask myself how old do you feel. Thirty? Twenty?

These core values have worked to keep a dream alive for me. I couldn’t recommend more highly the idea of such a regimen.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Summer Reading

Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

At a slim 170 pages, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – beloved author of the Moomintroll comic strips and books – is the beach book of, well, every summer.

Jansson wrote The Summer Book in 1972, and it was translated from Swedish to English in 1974. (Yes, the same year that Richard M. Nixon resigned from office.)

Much simpler times. All the more reason to pick up and read the island stories of Sophia and her Grandma. What happens? A road is built, there are storms, a bird-killing cat, a subdued girl visitor who takes some getting used to …

A sample. (Imagine the road to be Trump’s wall …)

The Road

It was a bulldozer: an enormous, infernal, bright yellow machine that thundered and roared and floundered through the woods with clanging jaws. The men from the village scrambled on and around it like hysterical ants, trying to keep it headed in the right direction. “Jesus Christ!” Sophia shrieked without hearing what she said. She ran behind a rock with the milk can in one hand and watched the machine pluck up huge boulders that had lain in their moss for a thousand years, but now they just rose in the air and were tossed to one side, and there was a terrible cracking and splintering as pine trees gave way and were ripped from the ground with torn and broken roots. “Jesus, help! There go the woods!”

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Values

Running for Your Life: Trump Cabinet, the memo

Russian e-mail intercept, Trump campaign

Memo: First Draft, Trump Cabinet Wish List (Core Group)

Secretary of State

Yosemite Sam

Defense Secretary

The General (General Insurance dude)

Treasury Secretary

Mr. Burns, from The Simpsons

Federal Reserve chief

Ludwig Von Drake

Education

Miss Grundy

Health and Welfare

Flo, the lone Progressive

Labor

Fred Flintstone

Trade

Hisself

Attorney General

Bugs Bunny

Agriculture

Porky Pig

Next: Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

Running for Your Life: Run for Fun

What do you do for fun? Catch ’em all with Pokemon Go (said to be OK for folks, in part, because it gets them out of the house and at least walking around)? Play games on your phone? Zone out before a blasting A/C, watching bad TV?

A casual reader of this blog knows that I’ve been running every other day for going on forty years. I have to admit there are days when, as I’m suiting up to run (in the old days, I was a diehard road warrior, both in heat waves or blizzards; now I opt for the gym treadmill in extreme weather) that I don’t think it’s going to be fun. And some days it just flat out isn’t. When that happens, I put in the time and while I can’t say that I go out the door smiling but my body – from my toes to the top of my head – is voting yes. That was good for now. We’ll have fun the next time.

And you know what, I do. I’m not looking to “Beat Yesterday,” as the rock-solid training types promote. Rather, my simple goal is to smile as I run, to hear the cardinals cheep-cheep in a Prospect Park glen, to see a rainbow after a summer storm, to feel the first sting of a cold shower after an hour of summer running.

Out on a run. A promise of forever, in body, mind and spirit.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

Running for Your Life: Election Protection

Comes a time when the right mind comes to the right topic at the right time. That happens in the essay that follows from the current Harper’s magazine. Enjoy (at least from the standpoint of giving concrete, critical form to what we are watching, dumbstruck, upon the political stage …)

DON THE REALTOR

The Rise of Trump

By Martin Amis, Harper’s August 2016

Discussed in this essay:

Trump: The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz. Ballantine Books. 384 pages. $16.99.

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, by Donald Trump. Threshold Editions. 208 pages. $25.

Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end. I mean his sanity: what is the prognosis for his mental health, given the challenges that lie ahead? We should bear in mind, at this point, that the phrase “Power corrupts” isn’t just a metaphor.

There have been one or two speculative attempts to get Donald to hold still on the couch. Both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have called him a “pathological liar,” but so have many less partial observers. They then go on to ask: Is his lying merely compulsive, or is he an outright mythomaniac, constitutionally unable to distinguish non-truth from truth — rather like those “horrible human beings,” journalists (or at least spiteful, low-echelon journalists), who, Trump claims, “have no concept of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ ”? PolitiFact has ascertained that Donald’s mendacity rate is just over 90 percent; so the man who is forever saying that he “tells it like it is” turns out to be nearly always telling it like it isn’t.

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