Running for Your Life: More Managing Disappointment

Perhaps, as a writer, there can be no better example of an author efficiently managing disappointment than Karl Ove Knausgaard, who, after his six-part, 3,600-page book called “My Struggle,” or “Min Kamp” in his native Norwegian (yes way, “Mein Kampf” in German) became a national phenomenon, and now an international one, http://nyr.kr/MZQA2l sealed with the requisite James Wood rave in the New Yorker, tells the New York Times http://nyti.ms/LAyNui that he has no idea whether he will ever write again, and has used his royalties to move to the Swedish countryside and found a small publishing house.

Me, I make less grandiose efforts to manage disappointment. And not like a work colleague of mine, who has written a novel, screenplays and stories, all unpublished, and says that he is totally fine with the idea that those works will remain in a drawer and be published posthumously, if at all.

I write every day. And, yeah, it’s been awhile since I sent out my last novel. But I remain convinced that it will be published.

Will I be disappointed if it never sees the light of day? You betcha. But that prospect won’t keep me up at night. I’ve got too much writing to do, that I have to get done.

And none of it goes out post-humorously.

Next: Running for Your Life: Trampoline Gold

Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging

It’s been two years that I’ve been keeping this blog. And no time. Hardly a day goes by now I don’t think about not thinking about getting old. The condition I have (not suffer from, the word “condition” need not be the Boomer gen perjorative) is known as reverse aging.

As a Boomer friend said over dinner recently, “Good luck with that.”

I reply, no, I’m not kidding myself. In fact, as I told her, I’m now, at age 56, in the best shape of my life. I have no aches and pains. Why shouldn’t I feel such possibilities that come from the idea that there might be something to the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” http://imdb.to/99N3VE (If you haven’t seen this 2008 feature staring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett then Netflix it . . . M and I saw it this year on board our flight to Paris and we both loved it).

Reverse agers start from a place where there is no pain. In my case, even the forefoot pain that I’d complained about in posts here has been corrected by athletic insoles; a sports podiatrist diagnosed the problem as inflammation caused by high arches and prescribed insoles that have scrubbed the pain away.

From there I have been running as hard – perhaps harder – than ever. In most cases I move from rest to full-tilt eight-minute-mile pace with little resistance. I run out the door and into a mental landscape, one that is soon awash in restorative body chemicals, slipping into a high, as I push my bad leg up the hills and slopes around my Brooklyn home.

On Saturday, July 14, I took a twenty-minute nap, read some more of “Wish You Were Here” by Graham Swift, then scampered out the door, and up into the park where I did intervals up and down the lookout steps. I can’t wait for my next run.

So far, 36 years and counting, I’m having good luck with this.

Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Disappointment

Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction

Item: Nokia slashes price of Lumia 900 Windows phone to $49.99 with a two-year contract.

Item: Young man in Prospect Park flogging cut-rate mobile-phone service near-interrupts me, thrusting a promotional postcard, while I’m on a fast-paced run.

It’ll get you, Internet addiction. Read the “iCrazy” Newsweek cover story, if you dare. http://bit.ly/LDSy5j, as in:

Item: The brains of Internet addicts look like brains of drug and alcohol addicts.

Item: A researcher on aging and memory selected 12 experienced Web users and 12 inexperienced ones and passed them all through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Webbies showing fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. The novices went away for a week and were asked to spend a TOTAL of five hours online. The brains of the novices had rewired and were similar to the Webbies.

Item: The average teen processes 3,700 texts a month (123 texts daily).

Item: Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count the time spent multitasking on several devices.

How hypocritical of me. People turning to this blog – either on a mobile device, a PC, a Mac, etc. – are adding to their screen time. And too often every day I find myself checking to see how many visits my blog posts have attracted. I’m typing into a computer screen right now, my rewired brain piqued by the rush that I’m attracting readers, maybe even followers.

In the event of followers, listen to this: Log off. Go out for a run. Pet the dog. Pick up a pen and journal and write. Call a friend and make a plan to play tennis, or golf. You can be assured that Facebook and Twitter – and yes, Running for Your Life – will be there when you get back.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging

Running for Your Life: ‘Wish You Were Here’

Once long ago (I’ve been keeping this twice-weekly blog for two years now) I wrote here that this Web log would touch on three R’s – running, ’riting and reading. But for a good stretch of that time I’ve actually been fixated on a fourth: racing.

That is, when I was focused on running the Boston Marathon in a sub-3:30 in order to time-qualify for New York in November. That didn’t happen, 4:03:27 did in the sweltering April(?!) heat that would Boston 2012.

Now that I’m on an extended break from race-training, I’m turning to reading. And in the case of good reads, writing about them.

I read and loved Graham Swift’s “Waterland” http://bit.ly/LPIjuH, a sprawling wonder of a thing that merits being in the category of such set piece historical/mythological works as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s “Fall on Your Knees” or Rose Tremain’s “Sacred Country” or “Shadow on the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon or “World’s End” by T.C. Boyle.

“Wish You Were Here” is no less brilliant than “Waterland.” In contrast, though, the novel taps the blood of rawboned Jack Luxton, a farmer-turned-seaside caravan operator. Jack reminds of the rural stalwarts of my youth; the friends of my father – and my father himself – sitting stone-faced during my at-home reading from my memoir, Tip of the Iceberg http://amzn.to/NmujdH, in the Main Street bookstore.

Jack, or so he thinks, has only Ellie, his wife. Whose voice sears in a chapter that – very surprisingly – delivers on the significance of the title.

Secrets and pacts and what we can never know. Jack and Ellie. I feel that what Swift did with the fens in England he has done with the tortured love of Jack and Ellie. An equal wonder.

Next: Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction

Running for Your Life: Running And Poems

I never know what will come to me when I run. How it will come. The “it” I’m referring to are ideas, often so fleeting that I don’t hold onto them.

Often, not so much ideas as images. Daydreams. Sometimes it’s a memory, perhaps a memoir morsel that, later, I write down in a journal. Sometimes a phrase, something about a movie that I saw a week ago, a month ago.

I have to get down these ideas, images, sensations. Sometimes just a quick sketch, dash a few lines. No, not the computer, or the laptop. Just pen and paper. (studies show a third of smartphone users go online before getting out of bed in the morning; that brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like brains of alcoholics; that the average teen processes 123 texts a day) and yes, if I had time that wasn’t circumscribed by salary work I’d take these ideas and writing fragments and devote hours to the construction of stories, memoirs, novels, plays and poems.

I think, though, if there is a single literary expression that best approximates running for me it is poems. Running is poems. What is an attempt at the universal, the precision of life and language. Close, close again. And beautiful. Small and large and perfect. And simple.

Can’t wait to try to reach that perfection again.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Wish You Were Here”