Running for Your Life: Winter? What Winter?

It’s that time of year. You can tell by looking at the calendar, mid-December, and for people like me who run long distance during the cold weather months, I mark the official start of winter when public workers turn off the drinking fountains in Prospect Park.

This presumes that the temperature is falling. And in past years that, as memory serves, was the case. So much so that it seemed to make sense. That pipes could actually freeze, and theoretically cause damage to outdoor plumbing. It could be as long as late March before workers could reasonably be assured that the long, dark freezing nights were over. That the fountains could be restored to working order, meaning Thurber (our frisky redbone coonhound) and I would again be able to stop for our strategic lappings, always a smile-inducing moment every year.

Now, it seems, the water turnoff is purely symbolic. The past month the cold has barely sustained a freeze long enough to put frost on a pumpkin.

What are the extremes over the four-day weather forecast? High 51 and low 34.

Winter? What winter?

As a native of Ontario, I’m used to winter. I lived in a town where it wasn’t uncommon to have snow cover from mid-November to mid-March. Even in the worst weather, I wouldn’t stop running.

What I’m not used to, though, are hurricanes that sweep up the US northeast at the end of October. The change in New York weather has turned downright scary.

Odds are we will get a blizzard before we suffer another hurricane or a tornado. But, frankly, given the strange, warm, even humid days we’ve had since Sandy, I’m not holding my breath.

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions for 2013

Running for Your Life: Secessionism vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism

Let’s break up. No, let’s come to some common understanding. No, all notions of the public good are derived from personal experience.

Here, in the homeland of Liberal heresy (Park Slope, Brooklyn, where if the Democrat candidate were ever to be removed from the ballot, the Communist, not the Republican, would receive the most votes), it’s hard to believe after the overwhelming election victory last month by our chosen candidate, President Obama, that included on the first Web page of the most popular petitions on the “We The People” White House website http://1.usa.gov/Or4mqw (as of Dec. 9) are requests to secede from the United States of America from six states – Texas (with 119,247 signatures!), Florida, Tennessee Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina – and create six separate governments.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t necessarily see these paltry efforts as serious movements to secede. (As The Economist points out in its Dec.1 issue http://econ.st/11B55yy those Texas signatures amount to less than 1 percent of the state’s population, and a lot less than the 4 percent who actually voted for Obama. Oh, yeah, and secession is illegal in all fifty states, as evidenced by Texas v White, 1869. )

Still, the thousands of signatures are a sign of just how polarized this country has become. In fact, the day after Obama was elected Louisiana submitted its secession petition on the site. It has to date (Dec. 9) collected 37,357 signatures. I’d also like to point out that that is not a lot of time: from Election Day to Dec. 9 is just over a month. And, yeah, a picture of a Chihuahua in a Santa hat is likely to get three times that many “likes” on a Facebook page. But, hey, this is America where politics ranks next to trick-snowboarding in popularity. As many as 37,357 citizens signing on to the idea of chucking America and launching the hypothetical Great National Experiment of Louisiana isn’t a drop in the bucket.

Which brings me to bipartisanism. Seriously. Who besides Obama still believes in this lame idea? Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it. For anyone still believing in bipartisanism, take a wee peek behind the curtain of the protracted NHL labor talks that have yet to yield a deal in order to save the rapidly vanishing 2012-13 season. Or meditate on the likelihood the Republican opposition will submit to reasonable behavior before the fiscal cliff date of Dec 31. That will cure you.

So what can we expect in the Obama’s second term? With neither secessionism nor bipartisanism as our guiding political thought, we’re reduced to, yep, right back to where we were before the presidential campaign, before the Tea Party and the 2010 mid-term elections: me-ism.

The current standard-bearer of me-ism is a long-winded piece by Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic http://bit.ly/S8sl48, in which the author proposes that Americans get used to the idea of being immersed in a sea of guns and that what we need to better promote public safety is to pass select regulation, all of which is predicated on the author’s personal reflections surrounding the mass murders by Colin Ferguson that took place in 1993 on a Long Island Rail Road passenger train.

So get with it, policy makers and commentators. All politics is personal. Put your “me” in the center of your idea and let it fly. The other two “isms” have been abject failures; this one has all the earmarks of one that will get some traction.

Of course I shouldn’t be surprised. Me-ism is nothing more than secessionism in extremism – as in every person is a nation. With such a specious me-ism argument coming from a publication as august as The Atlantic, fuhgeddaboud any other “isms” gaining prominence anytime soon. The die is cast.

Next: Running for Your Life: Winter, what winter?

Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes?

You don’t see them very often. Which is a big surprise to me. A year or so ago I was really beginning to think they would catch on – at least in my neighborhood of Park Slope, the Berkeley of Brooklyn.

There is the ugly-fashion factor. Hardly a deterrent for me, who will wear the same sweat-stained ball cap to social events just short of meeting friends for drinks at Terroir, the Brooklyn offshoot of the upscale TriBeCa winebar that has opened at the end of our street. But in New York City, you’ll find folks are, as the popular billboard says: “Tolerant of Your Beliefs, Judgmental of Your Shoes.”

Here, TOYBJOYS is a more powerful axiom than “Walk Inside Cushions and Don’t Exercise Your Feet.” That’s the message from the mega-seller “Born to Run” by Chris McDougall, which has single-handedly reshaped thinking about whether the human body is actually born to run and that in the past millennium we here in Western civilization have been mucking things up by not running – and not in bare feet, no less.

I don’t do it and have never done it. Run in these five-finger shoes, that is, which is as close to barefoot running as you can get. It could be that, in my late fifties, I feel that a significant change like this could only throw me off, as in introduce stresses that could lead to a lifestyle-ending injury. (I run with athletic orthotics and compression hosiery to keep neuritis and shin splints, respectively, at bay.) The LEI is not something I care to risk. Maybe, in the spring, I’ll get a pair of five-finger shoes for walking around and take it from there, because I do believe in the advantages that come from treating your feet to a workout in the same way that I have fallen in the habit of doing for my other bone and muscle groups.

If I were a runner in my twenties or thirties, though, I’d like to think I'd be out there in those five-finger shoes. They are especially advisable for those whose pace results in a neutral foot strike. As McDougall writes in “Born to Run,” bare feet will support you in a way that will promote whole body health like nothing else.

And when it comes to the rubberneckers, who believe me will hear you coming before they see you, think again. Let them TOYBJOYS. You’re on a run, not on the red carpet. And in your ripe old age you’ll be able to wear whatever shoes you want (that, odds are, won’t be propped up on wheelchair foot rests) !

Next: Running for Your Life: Secession vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism

Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick

There is something special about pen and paper, and type on high-quality paper, what is more deeply satisfying than reading words in a clean font on finely made paper when the writing is carefully crafted – indeed lovingly crafted – and why this especial joy has captured the best of our minds.

Words on screens don’t touch us in the same way. It is, for want of a better way to describe it, why one sees the religious faithful among us reading and praying from books, or portions of the Bible, the Torah, the Book of Common Prayer (check out this wonderful essay about the BCP by James Wood, which was recently in the New Yorker http://nyr.kr/QWjfp7,) in the most private conversation with their personal God and NOT from the screen of an iPhone or a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet. Or why the sensitive secular among us wouldn’t think of reading if it means abandoning our totems: our bound books by Herman Melville, David Foster Wallace and Mary Morris.

All of which is to say that not a single one of a dozen people we heard read at the Melville’s Moby-Dick Reading Marathon on Saturday (Nov. 17) chose to read their portion of the legendary tale (a taste of mine, from Chapter 73, “Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him:” From Stubb: “Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump- do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs”) from anything but a bound book, meaning one with black type on medium- to top-grade paper (although it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone among the one hundred and sixty readers who this past weekend joined in the Moby-Dick marathon read from a small type, worn paper classic for sentimental reasons, because reading a good story is one of the most intimate acts – and a computer is anything but intimate.)

Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes

Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living

Want to get a sense of why – suddenly – New York City became America’s largest urban evacuation zone.

The sad, moving spectacle of Breezy Point, the Rockaways, and the Jersey Shore (yes, the Sitch and Snook as spokescharacters) aside, look at the view to New York Harbor and Lady Liberty while walking/running on 23rd Street in Brooklyn between Seventh and Sixth avenues. It’s the most dramatic vantage that I know of to illustrate how low the lowlands are at the sea and why Red Hook and the Gowanus stand a chance of being permanently inundated if water levels continue to rise as they have in recent years.

What also strikes me is how Brooklyn – unlike a second lowlands place, New Orleans, which, of course, has fewer options, chose Green-Wood Cemetery, the highest ground – for its final resting place (see the Athena monument, at right, waving at her distant sister, Lady Liberty).

Suddenly homes on the hill in New York City have even more reason to be more expensive than their weight in gold.

Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick