Running for Your Life: Polar Vortex Morning

Cardinals at the base of a young tree splaying branches, no seeds or fruit that I can see, at least four red-headed adult males and their mates, at first indistinguishable among the more common-looking birds, but the gals too, amaze in the brilliant, sparkling white, hard crust of ice and top layer of snow, too thin to hold a human, but these birds, the male cardinals, most especially, flit and skate under the cover of this nondescript little tree, never moving beyond its circumference, as if the space is an ice rink and they are players, training for tonight’s match.

Further on in the treetops are other flashes of darting red. Errant kites caught and hanging there, evidence of a time in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, before the snow and ice, seems a distant dream in this, the dead of winter, rustling in the frigid wind. As cold in those leafless trees as it will be all year. At ground level Thurber bounds ahead, jacketless and heedless to the deep cold and the terrain that is virtually unwalkable for us two-legged beasts but home to this mountain dog, the prime reason I am seeing these wonders. It is a gift he gives me, although some mornings it doesn’t wax quite the way I’m putting down here.

Thurber, a skiff of snow on his nose. What kind of dog is he? He waits at the curb with such a gentle pose. No anxiety. What has shaped his life that he need not wonder what is happening next. He knows it will not be long and we will be on our march to the park. To a place where he will sit on command, graciously accept his meat treat. Four in June, and he looks so spry, so full of life. Great expectations are those of a dog bred to run and hunt if each day begins with a walk in the woods.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips

When it snows and blows and ices up like it has been during the past month or so, it’s easy to be coy and say, as I did in this space a few weeks ago, that to keep in running trim, you should put on your T and shorts and running shoes, cover up with zipper leggings and a warm jacket, walk or light jog to your neighborhood gym, take off your cover-ups and run on the treadmill for thirty minutes. There you have it; all the winter training tips you need.

It is true to a point. As I wrote about in this space, I suffered my worst injury by attempting to hard-train through similarly blizzard-like conditions during the winter of 2011. In February that year, I was on a cold-weather run in Prospect Park when I pulled a hamstring muscle. A month later I was near-hospitalized when my hamstring tore painfully and forced me out of the 2011 Boston Marathon. I came back to run Boston the next year, but I’ve since been shy to train in cold weather. In part because that blown hamstring muscle has never really felt like it did before the injury …

All of which is to say, when it comes to winter training tips, this runner goes back to basics. Call me coy, but I’d like to start training for my run with my daughter this summer. That means, for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be doing most of my running in the gym, on the treadmill. If you're training, or about to start a training regimen, and have any concerns about tight muscles, I'd advise you to do the same.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

Running for Your Life: Next Race

It's decided. K and I will jointly run a marathon together. On Sunday, July 27, in Barrington County, Nova Scotia http://bit.ly/1d8jtBK. Now comes the months of hard training, and the reward, a coastal route marathon around Cape Sable Island... Looking forward to that day, only six months (and many, many miles!) away.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips  

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