Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees

Take care of them.

Sounds simple, and yeah, given that I’ve been running for 40-plus years, pounding these essential joints into what should by rights be sundered to ligament if not bone dust, I’m one to talk.

But after my Halloween 2015 knee collapse on a treadmill during which I was pushing this 60-plus body to 30-plus speeds, faster, stronger was my motto for those first 39 years of running.

The way I came back from that knee injury, something I’ve spent a good deal of time writing about in this space, changed all that.

Now I try to take care of those joints. With better, less worn running shoes, compression socks to ease leg pounding (No shin splints!) and Velcro patella straps to help keep the knees stable from foot strike to foot strike, stride after stride.

Oh, and as I slow down, know that my butt is more aligned with my stride below, rather than behind it, with my chest pushed out, in sprint mode.

Relax. After all, this is Running for Your Life.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Brooklyn Calling

Running for Your Life: Street Book Pathway

'Twas a found book on our Brooklyn streets, The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything by James Martin.

What is the validation of a life?

The quiet of indifference, the wisdom of discernment, the rewards of obedience to a code of ethics in contrast to the everyday clubby chat of the smug and self-satisfied.

Here, though, is the rub.

It is not a static phenomenon. You do not graduate and move on to an elevated plane of achievement. Rather, life is a work in progress.

When Jesus said, “Follow me,” he did not have in mind empty vessels, servants to sit idly by and wait to hear, to accept. A true mission would only come to those who think independently, and act according to the dictates of their moral compass.

A championship ice hockey team (It is the runup to the Stanley Cup playoffs, after all!) is filled with players who are not static, are moving their skates, thinking one-two-three moves ahead, because the picture of that science is visible to those who believe, who trust in their skill, practice and, most important, their teammates.

These are the players who will be rewarded with games won, yes, but rich in the knowledge that they are playing like champions. The light will shine both on them and in them, make it possible for them to get better as players, to realize a potential beyond their dreams, something that is, in and of itself, a blessing.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees

Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Herein lies the message of the strange villain Dimitri in Coetzee’s “Schooldays”: He is the person paralyzed by guilt, something that is at the core, and he knows it; that it can’t be fobbed off on his sad, lonely childhood, that it (the feeling of being unloved by your own flesh and blood) is not the driver of Dimitri’s tragedy, when in a fit of madness (unhinged passion, because, what, pray tell, do we REALLY know about what the human heart is capable of doing, both in grace and evil) he strangles his one true love who has miraculously come to him.

Technique to study: Simon, the narrator, the everyman, without him we don’t live as fully the extremes of the other characters, who like electrons swirl around, bombarded by stimuli, and we, the readers, are the neutron, the neutral being. Simon is simple, ordinary. We are moved to feeling for him, of course. Someone we can relate to; and perhaps more important, feel superior to. (The mass appeal message of the performance show that with The Simpsons made Fox TV what it is today: American Idol.)

Next: Running for Your Life: Street Book Pathway

Running for Your Life: Rough Road to Reddit

Journalism – the wonder of the news – captured my fascination when Globe and Mail reporter John Fraser began sending his dispatches from China in the late 1970s. It was an exciting time of global promise. China during the Democracy Wall movement. Jimmy Carter was president, the Cold War still on but somehow less vicious than the preceding decade.

Fraser wrote in a fashion that was described to me as like a charismatic man who stops you on the street, grabs you by the lapels, and proceeds to tell you what the hell is going on. If there was bullshit in it, I couldn’t detect it. I was 23 and intoxicated with the idea of working in the same business as John Fraser. Literally, chasing a passion, following my bliss, as myth maven Joseph Campbell advised.

Now in 2018, forty years on, what have we got? Newspapers? Magazines? Is that how 23-year-olds get their news?

Nope. We’ve got Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Here’s an education, the big read in the current New Yorker by Andrew Marantz http://bit.ly/2GoKuZs. Call Marantz a John Fraser throwback, somebody who has not lost the thread of what it means to chase the story. Damn thing is how and where do 23-year-olds in North America get their news? Go ahead, read the story.

There is a direct line from the collapse of the Democracy Wall movement to the rise of autocracy, of hate spheres of influence enabled by “news” sites like Reddit.

Still, I’m a diehard believer in the power (and the glory) of the honestly conveyed story. I mean, what other choice do I have?

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetze’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

The other day I broke a logjam. I don’t often suffer from writer’s block – as eye-rolling readers of this blog can attest – but there it was.

To dangle metaphors, I’ve been spinning wheels at my home writing desk. Uncertain (more than usual) and making excuses to myself for why it was I wasn’t getting a lot done – as in new writing, beyond keeping up my old-school correspondence with friends and family.

Park Slope is a mecca for street-abandoned arts and crafts: tables, thrown clay pots, books of all conceivable types, paintings, you name it.

I’m walking T, our special needs coonhound mix, when I saw a small wood panel oil painting. It struck me as being pretty cool – but I was in a hurry and at first went past at a fast pace, T leading.

Then I stopped and guided T back the half-block to where I picked up the painting, oils of T brown and scarlet. A still life object in the foreground. The painting fit snugly in my T string bag I carry that is full of plastic bags and assorted canine playthings – and off I went to finish my errand.

Now the painting is tacked to a place of honor above my writing desk. Before putting it up, I resurrected a photo of me as a young man, serene-looking smile on my lips, my left hand resting against the cover of “A WRITER’S DIARY,” by Dostoevsky, a book that brings back a flood of warm memories.

The image is of a brass lock that has been opened. There is no key, so it would be foolish to think of it ever being locked …

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”