So here’s the first week’s totals: Exactly thirty miles, the long run, 11 miles on Day 6, moderate hills and hard to moderate pace. No pain, although after Day 7, an ill-thought-out cross-training/treadmill with only hamstring strengthening and 6:30 per minute pace, with not enough time to stretch afterward; hamstring and groin muscle tightening to tension. A little scare. But Monday (Dec.5, Week Two, Day One), after a easy to moderate five-miler, there is no aftereffect, only tiniest of feelings in the butt-hamstring, even the forefoot feels fly. Note to self: Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! After cross-training, treadmill or running.
Running for Your Life: Your Immune System
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.
A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.
Running for Your Life: After Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is here and gone. Is there any month that goes faster, than U.S. Thanksgiving to Christmas? Well, perhaps, not so much in my case because now the sidewalks and the intersections and the plazas in the vicinity of my near-Times Square office building are shoulder to shoulder with people, the majority of whom are out-of-towners, not in any kind of hurray to go anywhere, so each day from the first workday after Thanksgiving the odds of me getting to work precisely on time rise because now between subway exit to office desk lies a route with late-minute factor of three or four or five depending on the sedimentary – no, not sedentary, I’m thinking more like a river that fills with sediment so that it no longer flows – quality from subway to office chair. Keep pouring in the sediment and the river can slow to a stop.
Running for Your Life: Our Pack
At Milwaukee airport early on Packer GameDay, the Air Trans staff manning the gates is wearing the home green of his favorite player, No. 30, fullback John Kuhn. I’ve boneheaded my way to another travel mishap, somehow managing to mislay my driver’s license so I have no official photo ID to travel with on Sunday morning (Nov. 20), hours before Aaron Rodgers will again helm his Concussionites to victory, this time over the Tampa Bay Bucs, 35-26.
I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.
(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)
I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.
(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)
Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel
Subway Moment, midafternoon, Wed., Nov. 16:
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.
Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”
*
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.
Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”
*
Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)