Running for Your Life: More Summer Reading

A word of warning: This is not your typical summer reading list. Truth is, this is more a bucket list of books that I’ve been meaning to read and summer, being the season of reading, they have inadvertently found their way to this blogpost of More Summer Reading. Don’t consider this to be a list of any particular order.

My Struggle, Vol. 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I typed Karl “Over” at first. Which is true to a point, but I’m in through the previous three volumes, so given my tendency to stick with it, I’m bound to take this to the end. (Now, you’ve got a sense of what kind of reading list this is; you’ve had fair warning – run for your life, indeed!)

The Power Broker by Robert Caro. This guy, Robert Moses, was a tyrant and a real builder, in comparison to Donald Trump, Republican nominee for president, who is a tyrant and a fake builder. In any event, I’ve been fascinated by the life of Moses since I came to New York in 1988. (This book was published 14 years before that …)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. A great literary friend of mine recently recommended this novel to me. Freakishly, I’ve been turned off McCann after the author wrote a feeble commentary in New York Magazine years ago, but happily that cloud has lifted.

The Untouchable by John Banville. This guy can write. And we just happen to have this paperback lying around the house.

Grendel by John Gardiner. For the point of view, as per the brilliant suggestion of my wife, M. Who isn’t somewhat tired of Knausgaard-like narrators?

That should take me to November or thereabouts … Am going to be trying VERY hard not to let the political drama crowd out these page-turning ones !

Next: Running for Your Life: Slow Mo

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