Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to Take a Week Off

Sometimes I’m not running. Say after I blew out my hamstring in February 2011. Or for two days to rest my body, which doth protest, especially as I nudge the fringe of sixty, for days, no weeks, after I take it on the road for its annual punishment, twenty-six miles of running, hard and fast enough so that I manage a sub 9-minute mile pace, never many days am I away from running, until, early in December, a week to ten days were the doctor’s orders, not-running or exercising, my first significant time away since pre-training for the Boston Marathon 2011 left me with the blown hamstring, and for the past two years hence, I’ve done a 60-set of evening pushups and at least three days a week running, so what was I to do?

Funny, how when I read back these notes I’m struck primarily by hubris of numbers – nine-minute mile, 60-set pushups – and place, Boston, when the reality of my running is much less and then more than these details, how to “Geoff Dyer” the results, the outcomes, that while the journey is so seen and, thus, accomplished, that it yields to that one dimensional reportage, why I often find it dull to read non-fiction, just the facts, ma’am, and analysis that is so ordinary and lame in its ordinariness to fail to pass the GD test, What do you feel that is as transporting as a run, the runs I do, in any case, because, especially during that week of not-running, cannot for a moment imagine what it is to be in a group, one in which, say, you put bells on to run, the Jingle Bell Jog was held during my not-running time, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with me the run is a quiet time, mine own, a form of worship without father, I’m a mile in, that’s nine minutes, thirty outdoor or twenty indoor to follow, those life-total minutes, near-countless now, I find myself in that space of no time, what David Grossman writes in “Falling Out of Time,” http://bit.ly/1gJcs1d, eventually, without apology, I could in rapture see myself enveloped in a hole in the ground, convincing me that inside are those who I’ve sought and are either in Toronto, Owen Sound, Chicago, Croatia, then those dead and gone, but I don’t have the words, they are nearly as alive to me in the solitude of my running than those who I’m with every day, M, K and T. “Geoff Dyer” the results; what are these photos of Victorian-era northern places http://bit.ly/1bfes9D taken by whom, that there is an inner feeling that comes off them, that they are not objects of simple age but rather embued with the spirit of those times and cannot be seen unless you’ve meditated solely on them.

          There is a holy act that takes you, often at great effort to launch from ennui or a general tiredness, out
          for a run on a cold day. Shake it off. Stride. Years ago, it was true. I could be faster. Not now.
          Now. I. Simply. Must. Run. It is what shapes my life. The air I breathe.

          Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

 

Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter

Put on your shorts, shoes, the lot, zipper leggings and short down jacket, run out the door and into the neighborhood gym or the Y, take off the outerwear. Run on the treadmill. ... Repeat through mid-March, or until the temp highs hit, say, the 50s until next December.

Next: Running for Your Life: When You HAVE to take a week off

 

Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf

So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard climbing the GAP hill in Prospect Park, bikers, training in their team gear, “I was biking in a small town . . . in the south of France when a older French woman stopped me …”

It’s been too long. Prime season and all. Leaf-catching season. I’d like to think it’s about opportunity that I haven’t caught a leaf in a few seasons now. For a variety of reasons I’ve been out running in late October and November less often than in past years, and maybe it’s just bad luck, these blustery days when leaves are falling, a week of such weather and fully twenty to thirty percent of the prime specimens, whirlings, corkscrew their way to the ground and inevitably I’m not there, dunno where, but not in the park; there was a time when I didn’t have to keep track, every hand-to-leaf season I’d catch cleanly – not trap with my body, and rules are clear – only park leaves, those in the public domain are eligible, at least one leaf would not feel the humiliation, the despoliation of hitting the ground, held aloft only by the catching hand, and tacked to the cork board that hangs above my basement writing desk.

It’s not the end of the season. I may yet get my leaf. It is harder to catch while running with Thurber, and that too, may be a factor. I dunno. Soon, though, I’ll get my next leaf. It’s been more than six weeks since Steamtown – and most of those nasty post-marathon aches and strains are ebbing. It’s fun. And a whole lot more satisfying than any running app could be.

           Next: Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter

Running for Your Life: Upstate With Thurber

Among the many benefits of working for a full-on tabloid (headlines: ESTUPIDO GIGANTE; graphics that, no kidding, have depicted a teachers’ union president as a dominatrix with collars on two hedge fund bosses) is browsing the novel-discard table. Hard to imagine how writers get the attention they deserve when the conversation about literature in today’s society is as noteworthy as a house fly on a heap of putrefying garbage, all the more reason that when you find something fabulous it is notable not only for its fabulousness but for the very real thrill of reading something that pretty much nobody in New York City knows anything about, cue deep throb of human nature, akin to the smugness at the perceived underachievement of childhood friends, their sense of their failure to measure up to the apparent fullness of your life, at least as my current society (New York, New Yorker) gatekeepers would score it.

• A boy with a Superman hair curlicue, ’do parted on the side and short, a la Clark Kent, in a herringbone jacket too small for him, the whitest sneakers this side of a cancer ward and black skinny jeans, Dunkin’ Donuts paper bag on the subway floor, white cup with raised drink spout – DEEP into the opening pages of the Ayn Rand paperback, “Atlas Shrugged.”
• Ah, the pick-up book. It is The Voyage by Murray Bail http://bit.ly/HxXHPF by a London imprint Quercus: married up to a novel I’m reading before bed, Mating by Norman Rush, http://amzn.to/1hk12Sy, back in a novelist’s frame of mind, having finished the massive and without mercy, The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston http://nyti.ms/1gscY3j, during my months of marathon training, the subject as sober and as dark and as shocking as the title suggests.

Thurber and Mary and I went for a road trip to Poughkeepsie, Millbrook, Cold Spring and Peekskill in October. We didn’t run, Thurber and I. But for a brief time on a swath of the Appalachian Trail, Thurber did scale a rock and scrub pine outcropping and stood on the top for more than a beat, a view before him that had to be so awesome that it was worth it, all these years now, of walking him during our routine park strolls, to see him up there, free as a bird …

Next: Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf

Running for Your Life: The Road Back

At dawn after the marathon the parrots came. On fall mornings the Quaker parrots that nest in the Green-Wood Cemetery main entrance arch and the nearby Con Ed substation, the parrots fly through our neighborhood, announcing themselves by squawking, a din easily distinguished from the jays and crows who also pass by and sometimes roost for awhile in our massive oak tree, leaves brush the house’s back wall, the other side of which I heard the parrots’ call that morning.

It was much different than other days. In fact, I had never heard the parrots at dawn. I woke with a start and in that moment listening to the parrots the pain and aches in my legs eased. It was only a moment before the worst of the pain returned. I couldn’t help but think that the parrots had come for a reason. Lying in bed, I thought, yes, something essential had been misplaced this past many months. At some point or other I’d let the idea of my being a marathoner, a man who could not only complete a 26.2 mile race but do so with distinction, define a large part of myself. In focusing on time and finishing place I’d left the parrots behind. How long had it been since I’d thought of running as bird-flying. To look into the sky as I run, to contemplate the hawk on the hunt, the soaring gulls, and most important, how long had it been since I’d gone on a run with a principal goal of seeing the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood in all kinds of weather.

Today (October 23) marks the ninth day since Steamtown, the first of which I ran more than thirty minutes, and yes, the Green-Wood parrots were there, a small flock of five on the most beautiful, fresh fall day. I smiled and felt a certain lift as I came back to running for my life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Upstate with Thurber