Running for Your Life: Running Without Race Goals

It's funny but the simple fact is when I don't run I miss it.

I can go without breakfast (not coffee!) but on a running day (I've been running year-long on alternate days for the past thirty-six years) I can't not get into my gear: tension hose to guard against shin splints (and ease swelling in my bad, left leg), Brooks Defyance neutral sneaks, orthopedic insoles that have calmed my interdigital neuritis, cap, shorts, and wife beater in summer and early fall, and go out the door, often with Thurber, my boon companion when I'm off-road in Prospect Park, loping beside me at times, at others in seeming manhunt mode, his hunting instincts piqued as we move through woodland trails and over meadows and up the hillside paths that take me on my runs without race goals, a place I've been through most of these past thirty-six years.

My Boston Marathon 2012 behind me, I'm looking forward to the fall and winter and spring and summer when I'm sure I'll come upon my next race goal. In the meantime, it's back to basics: running, reading and 'riting.

Next: Running for Your Life: Don't Stop 

Running for Your Life: Trampoline Gold

Go Canada! In the Summer Olympics the Bronze Nation is known for distinguishing itself with (a half-lifetime in the United States has taught me there is no point in getting excited about games and athletics unless you compete with a ferocity verging on illegality – yes way, talking about YOU American Women Soccer – and win the gold) strong and noble performances that rarely result in being No. 1 in the world. So far (Day 12), we are Trampoline Gold. Women’s Trampoline, courtesy of the perky, cereal-box cutie Rosie MacLennan, who told reporters after pulling off a spectacular final routine, I “might as well leave it all on the trampoline.”

Not basketball. Or soccer. Or diving, swimming, or equestrian. But trampoline. Watching the Olympics in a U.S. office where the odds are stacked against non-American competitors in the marquee games: basketball, soccer and volleyball, and patriots stand ready to cheer the inevitable crowning of American majesty, the idea that Canada, my beloved country of birth, is embracing Rosie and the trampoline is gratifying – and, dare I say it, a truly Canadian-esque victory. The nation of Who Do You Think You Are? is a perfect fit for Trampoline Gold. The trampoline’s an Olympic sport? It’s not a warm-up tool? Who knew?

Well, Rosie knew. And now I picture office workers all over Canada, from Nova Scotia to Toronto to Victoria, doing silent, butt lifts in their office chairs. Suddenly, they are up and down and up and down. A spring in their step, as they cheerily make their way to the water cooler. In WW II, the US had Rosie the Riveter, in London 2012, Canada has Rosie the Trampoliner.

When it comes to the Olympics, I’m down with the Bronze Nation. Only the Top 7 nations have more bronze medals than Canada .¤.¤. Give me Trampoline Gold any day!

Next: Running for Your Life: Running Without Race Goals

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