Running for Your Life: Pioneer Park Slope
Here’s what comes to mind in Prospect Park, a short, vertical run from our house in what we call in Brooklyn Center Slope:
How the American custom of the covered wagon is replicated in the wheeled covered fort that is the Prospect Park baby carriage: where the legacy is not the hard, rawboned family of pioneer survivors but the cloistered privileged expectations of the all-too-often selfish sole family survivor.
During Jewish Holy Week, hundreds of Hasids, men and women, pray in their ecstatic, davining style, before the not-shallow Lake, their non-swimming children sitting cross-legged nearest the edge, to my eye, unattended.
This may be a period of time when the humidity and drought of this untypical summer has made for less-fertile trees, my prime example, our oak tree, which is producing radically less acorns than past years, but still these past weeks have produced at least some fruit of the golden ginkgo trees, special note the trail parallel to Prospect Park Southwest, the border of Windsor Terrace, where crouching Asians have been gathering a tenth of their usual crop of the vomit-smelling mush, making just a cameo performance during this strange season.
Running for Your Life: What’s Next on the Race Card
Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
I’m asked this question from time to time. One day at our local gym, a former runner, I’d guess maybe ten years older than me, asked if I was still running. I said yes, and he grimaced. “I miss it every day,” he said. He went on to say that he was many years a racer and that he was forced to quit. One day, he said, one knee – that had never caused him any trouble – simply gave out. Now he works out, does low-impact cardio. But, alas, his running days are over.
So yeah, I’m still running. Every other day, and on the alternate day I like to stretch and work out on weight machines at the gym. Lately, I’ve taken to wearing all-black compression sleeves, which have worked wonders at keeping me from nagging shin splints. And my sport orthotics stop the neuritis in its tracks. I don’t go out the door without my orthotics (which aren’t visible, of course) and my compression sleeves, which obviously are.
I have to admit that these all-black compression sleeves do make for some snickering from passersby. Especially if I wear them with my baggy blue shorts, which I do half the time. Remember Forrest Gump? How he just kept running, seemingly oblivious to his cornpone attire? Same thing with me.
Which brings me to dialogue that came to me the other day: an imaginary conversation between two elderly folks at an old age compound near Prospect Park at a time of year when birdlife is scant but running life is rife; circa 2042.
The scene: A man in his nineties and a woman, slightly younger, are sitting on a park bench near a jogging trail where a steady stream of colorful runners are moving past:
“Look at that one,” he says, wagging a finger.
“The girl, the one in the pigtails?”
“No, the woman in the tube top and the knee socks. Sweet stride. And such a soft heel strike.”
“Whoa, yes. That’s the way I did it.”
“That’s the way you like to think you did it.”
“Smarty . . . I like that fella there. The one with the dog. Handsome.”
“The dog or the fella?”
“The dog, silly.”
“You gotta love these runners, though. Oh, look! There’s a red one, and over there, a navy. Yellow, green, orange . . . And that one in pearl gray Vibrams, the FiveFingers. Sheesh, they’ll always look weird to me.”
“And omigod. Can you believe it? There’s a guy moving along pretty well who has to be our age. Over there, wearing those hideous all-black compression sleeves and baggy blue shorts. Still running after all these years.”
“Yeah,” the old fella says, pulling the blanket up on his legs, which are starting to feel numb. “That OC, who does he think he is?”
Next: Running for Your Life: Pioneer Park Slope
Running for Your Life: Open Letter to Candidate Ryan (aka Kvelling over Katalina Kate!)
My daughter Kate on Saturday (Sept. 29) ran her first big race, Candidate Ryan: the Catalina Island Conservancy Half Marathon.
She is some kind of running mate, my girl!
Not only did Kate manage to finish in what the event announcer shouted out as the best style of the finishers to that point in the race, but she chose as her first competitive long-distance race what is regarded as one of the most difficult halfs in America!
(Don’t concern yourself, Candidate Ryan, allow me to supply the facts: your reputation on race facts and ignorance of all things California – aka Obama Nation – is a matter of public record.)
In Kate’s first half-marathon she finished under three hours, at 2:59:44, 127th out of 196 finishers, the 54th woman to cross the line!
But don’t despair, Candidate Ryan. You too can show your stuff! Next September, not being an election year, please join Kate and me for a run up the mountain. At Catalina, it’s nine miles straight up and three-ish back to sea level. Kate has invited me to join her and the last weekend in September is already penned into my calendar.
Given your he-man workout regimen this race should be a snap for you, Candidate Ryan. Oh, and don’t worry about your personal record, go ahead and claim the fastest time in your age group. No one will be paying the least bit of attention to anything you say or do at this time next year.
Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
Running for Your Life: What? No Hockey?
It’s no secret in my family. Ice hockey’s in my blood. I was born on Oct. 5, the day after the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955. But Oct. 5 also marks in my mind the start of the professional hockey season. It is also hockey great Mario Lemieux’s birthday, Oct. 5, 1965.
So what’s up with hockey? As I write this the second work stoppage in eight years is about to delay the birthday-time opening of the 2012-13 edition of the National Hockey League. It is strange to think of it. When the weather changes, the nights get cooler, every year since I can remember a slice of the reptilian portion on my brain begins pulsing, hockey! hockey! hockey! hockey!
This time, as it did in 2004-2005, when the NHL owners locked out the players for the entire season, that part of my brain does gather stimuli: a PR-supplied coffee table book called “Team Canada 1972,” marking the 40th anniversary of the Summit Series between Canada and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Wow! The In Memoriams are especially poignant: Gary Bergman, Bill Goldsworthy, Rick Martin, Michel “Bunny” Larocque and assistant coach John Ferguson); a daily taste of poison about the progress of the league’s talks with the players on www.tsn.ca; and planning for a roadtrip with buddy Coach to see an AHL Bridgeport Sound Tigers game in December. But alas it's not the same as games: pretty much every night from Oct. 5 to mid-June. It could be all that will be lost.
Oh, and I suppose I’ll be running more this season. That is, until the unlikely event that these two sides, which are currently far apart in their demands, come to an agreement and end the work stoppage. This season I'll be running with my fingers crossed.
Next: Running for Your Life: So OC, You Still Running?
Running for Your Life: Plastic Bag Brigade
I’ve taken it upon myself to, while running, especially along the ultra-urban pathways that circumnavigate Green-Wood Cemetery, to pick up litter, i.e., plastic bags, which I then scrunch and run with.
It’s one of my personal measures to promote the idea of sustainability, as spurred by the reading of the review of the nonfiction book “Moby-Duck,” Donovan Hohn’s quest to follow the trail of the 28,800 bath toys lost at sea http://bit.ly/RA538s
Herewith is my mode of plastic bag selection:
- Just discarded and thus relatively clean;
- Being tumbleweed-like blown en route;
- And the rare occasion when it appears the bag is at least contentless
Upon returning home I stuff the former litter and now reclaimed and functional bags in my early morning Thurber-walk string bag (also inside: Doggie Beach sticks, two squeaky toys, a small container of dried liver treats and a foul-smelling tennis ball). These bags are then used as pooper scoopers and disposed in the FIDO (Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs & The Owners) supplied trash barrels in Prospect Park.
Next: Running for Your Life: What? No Hockey?
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