Running for Your Life: Cities of Gold

Got $5 million in assets and live in the United States?

Then you’re counted in Fortune magazine (Aug. 1 edition)!

It’s hard to believe that Occupy Wall Street was almost six years ago. At that time, a small protest group camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The group created a political phrase, the forgotten 99 percenters, and helped create the conditions for a surprisingly robust run by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency.

Where are we now?

That’s where the Fortune graphic column comes in

http://for.tn/2vc1aAe

The highlights: Global private financial wealth increase last year by 5.3% to $166.5 trillion, according to the Boston Consulting Group – with 45 percent of that dough held by 18 million millionaire households worldwide.

The US is way out in front, natch, with 7 million millionaire households vs. 2.1 million for China.

As to $5 million households, New York City tops ’em all, with 81,240 (LA is No. 2 at 43,252).

Questions: Is it fair to pit the haves vs. the have-nots? And just what to do about that?

Next: Running for Your Life:  The Letter Campaign  

Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Okay, so you’re beginning to age out of running – knees hurt, back, neck … and God knows, your feet.

Doc says, spouse says, man, even your dog says, Stop running.

I mean Novak Djokovic, of all people, is taking a year off playing tennis due to injury. And he’s only 30 years old.

My advice: If a doctor is leaning toward having you stop, change doctors.

That’s what I’ve done. My wife M, who truth be told is a firm believer in this run-every-other-day thing of mine, recommended her podiatrist to me. And it couldn’t have worked out better.

It’s called sports medicine, and the pros who practice it are experts in finding a way for you to keep doing what you do. In my case, running an average of twenty miles a week, forty during training months.

Since I started this blog in 2010, there’s been a long list of ailments: hamstrings, a blown knee, foot neuromas and a killer heel. The sore heel came back a month ago, but not like it was before, so I went to M’s doctor to see what he could do.

He watched me run, is what he did. First without orthotics, then with. I see a profound difference in your gait, he says. … I’ll tell you what, he goes on, wear the orthotics when you run and do this stretching exercise.

Doc schooled me on the best way to do the exercise. (I guarantee you, you’re not getting the best out of the stretches you’re doing … I know I wasn’t until I was being monitored by my sports doc.)

Saturday (July 29) will mark the second week since seeing him, and I’ve done just as he said, and you know what, I’m running 5, 6, 7 miles without a lick of heel pain.

And so it goes. Running for your life. Believe it; it can be done.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cities of Gold

Running for Your Life: A “Most Perfect Things” Summer

In a “Manner” of speaking, this post qualifies as a sleeper. As in, a cultural enterprise (movie, book, play) that is fantastic but will very likely escape your notice.

The kind of prose you find in “Most Perfect Things About People,” a novel by Mark Jordan Manner, is as far away from what will put you to sleep as, well, “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. Actually, I read Knausgaard at night before bed, and Manner during my subway rides. Problem is, reading prose like I've posted below and you’re likely to get so engrossed you’ll miss your stop. Here’s a sample, from a mother artist to her baby:

“An uneasy feeling lifted inside my chest. My breasts felt sick and strange. The moon kept approaching, got closer and closer. It blocked the sky. I hung up the phone, walked over to you and smelled your hair. Your daddy used to complain working at the warehouse made his hair dry and his mouth parched. All the fucking cardboard, he used to say. It’s funny, because that’s how I imagined him. I pictured him in a cell with his hair like hay and a plain, thirsty tongue. It dangled from his mouth, gray and empty, until I pressed your tiny hands into my palette and together we colored the whole thing in.”

 Next: Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Running for Your Life: On Vacation

M and I are long back from our annual vacation. We go the end of May, the first week in June, this year to southern Italy.

The goal, of course, after each trip aboard is to keep the above two words in mind. On vacation.  Maybe it helps that I’ve always felt in New York City as if I’ve come from away. It may sound like a line, but the phrase “boring routine” lands on my ear like an indecipherable phrase in a foreign language. It simply doesn’t pertain to my daily life.

Perhaps if I were in or near a place of my birth then that feeling would be known to me. But it’s not the path that I’m on so I can only surmise.

In Buddhism, the phrase that pays is the beginner’s mind. If you’re got that, you tap the child in yourself, the dog, all animals in fact. Seeing things as they are rather than as our experienced (jaded) eye sees them.

So do what you can to be “on vacation” every day. Put your mind to good use. It is something too beautiful to go to waste.

Next: Running for Your Life: Heel, Runner

Running for Your Life: Brief History of Tomorrow

So there’s this article in the London Review of Books (July 13) about the latest book by the Israeli historian Yuval Harari that carries the title above.

I underlined a few things that, well, appeared sound but utterly frightening, ie:

• Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotech, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science.

• Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, and remember, we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human “self,” and our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modeled by these formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms.

• In the argot of Silicon Valley, now-useless human beings are just “meat puppets.”

• Harari doesn’t go so far as to imagine the superhumans accepting the logic of the Final Solution. (But) what will (regular folks) do all day? Will they discover the joys of art? Probably not: it’s more likely that the “useless masses” will find whatever satisfaction they can in shopping, drugs, computer games and the thrill of virtual reality, which will “provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside.”

Man, this kind of outlook has me jonesing for the latest from the climate futurists …

Next: Running for Your Life: On Vacation