Running for Your Life: Sticking-to-it-ness

This time of year there’s a lot of talk about resolutions. In our, yes, notoriously self-centered culture the most common resolution is improved fitness. Enter the ad in this week’s New York magazine Jan. 20-27 for the overnight paperback bestseller, THE POWER OF HABIT http://bit.ly/1eKE2c4, that boils down to sticking-to-it-ness – three simple stages: Pick the cue; Choose a reward; Execute the routine.

Makes sense, no? I get the cue and routine. But reward? All too difficult to isolate for most good-intentioned people who are clamoring to embrace sticking-to-it-ness and get into better shape.

That’s because, by my lights, in a typical middle-class life we are showered with rewards, i.e.,     the smartphone, game apps, Instagram, Facebook, a myriad instant gratifications available to all with a mobile platform. And the apps only get more and more seductive with each passing day.

I was reminded of this during a morning with Thurber this week (Jan. 15). Two joggers were slowing near me in Prospect Park, and on cue, as they came to a stop, both pulled out their mobile devices and stared at them. I thought a running app, something that would parse the data of that day’s run. Or maybe some other reward that had little to do with their just-completed exercise.

I’ve been running on a reward principle for thirty-five years. In the early days there was no such thing as a wearable music player, much less sophisticated running apps, so what served as a reward upon returning home after a run was a favorite song or two on the record player, if it was in the evening, a mug of cold ale.

I still run on this principle, with the idea true rewards are only possible if there is a clear separation, that the routine itself does not involve a reward. (Running with headphones, say.) That the routine is not some negative experience that needs the reward as compensation, but a positive one that is lived deeper with the addition of a simple reward.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: Once Your Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson

What a eulogy to place – and the people who rise out of a place that is so harsh that there are more commonalities to the brush and wild animals, the smells that pepper this nasty, short and brutish life, one a-glimmer throughout with the promise of the human spirit, not only of the child, the emerging man, but the fathers, the brothers, the elders, less so the mothers and sisters but there is a warmth and nonobjective quality to the women in the writing of Wilson, the most masculine of stylists, proof that REAL men writers need not remove women from their world to the point that they are less than the ideas the pugnacious male characters punch around like so much guff, a nod to the Normans – Mailer and Rush – who also serve women in a different way than Updike, Roth and Ford, the old men of American fiction and their shibboleths of jism-spurting palliatives; can we, the male writers in America, envision the woman who is “real” – a third “N” writer did, Nelson Algren, regardless of the narrowness of the vision -- what does it take for men novelists, those who build a world, are their own gods, as we are when we create a novel, to put both man and woman at its center. That is what Wilson has done. No mean feat. http://bit.ly/1bWcg7f.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: One Hundred Years

Thank God it has come to this. Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen … There is power in numbers, and post-2000, those blandly insignificant numbers, not meaningless but freighted with false importance that leads to soporific if not vacuous reflection while now, on the one hundredth anniversary of the twentieth century truly beginning in Sarajevo and the archduke terrorism assassination that helped set off the Great War, the one my grandfather, my first memories of him, his arm scar with the shrapnel still inside, the hard bit you could feel, the world a century ago that is brought forward to me as something so real that I can touch and smell it, grampa’s pipe tobacco and Amphora brand smoke, flakes of Sunkist skin, faint urine, black tea leaves. What is the English staleness that tilts toward death at all ages, but never mind because my grandfather is with me as I write this on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War, the one where his stories, and by extension mine, come from.

That’s what it is in, then. Why the past, 1999-2013, fourteen years yield little in comparison. That in stories we begin with reflection and until this moment in 2014 there wasn’t a root to grow from, a place from where a hundred years is yours, that you can live for a hundred years in a single moment.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: Claim Space

So you want to live in Park Slope department:

A principal mating ritual in Park Slope winter: Adult female wearing the bright orange glow-in-the-dark PARK SLOPE FOOD CO-OP traffic vest as an ass-hugging skirt.

Prospectors, land. Natives, land too. In the case of this blog, mental geography. How on recent mild weather runs what I feel inside is my first run as a New York City resident, not a visitor, there had been plenty of those. But twenty-five years ago on a run around the reservoir at Central Park during a peculiar swath of Indian summer weather so much like today (Dec. 22) when I ran for an hour around Green-Wood Cemetery that it brought the earlier run flooding back to mind, and not just as a passive memory but as an active reality, as real as anything that is this run I lay claim to that person who was in that moment in December 1988. We are one I think as I run because I am always letting the surroundings I see and feel dictate the mental terrain. It is what I mean about claiming space. It is what we have done in the West. Whether as white invaders (prospectors and settlers) or native activists seeking land stolen in treaties or long-distance runners laying claim to mental space, to geography in the mind.

In this spirit, consider this as a new year’s resolution. When next you hear the phrase, mental loss, find a way to change the conversation. There is a power in words. I have a dream that one day when we Google the phrase “mental gain” it will appear as often as “mental loss.” Here is one of the lessons I learned from the brilliant short story writer DW Wilson, whose recent collection, “Once You Break A Knuckle,” http://bit.ly/19KIfL7 includes the story “The Persistence.” In it is the life lesson, Persistence Beats Resistance. And how. There are ways to fire the brain through natural means so that mental gain can be a reality. Or so I believe, and man, there is a world of power in that.

Best of the season, everyone!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

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