Running for Your Life: Road Warriors

Runners are weird. Deeply. If we miss, say, two days in a row we’re not fit for human company. Or dogs, for that matter. Cats, sure. Cats don’t give a shit. They’ll hang with ax murderers.

So imagine how I felt Saturday when on a loping run in party-choked Prospect Park my right foot landed awkwardly on a root and twisted under my full weight so that for a millisecond all that force came down on the outside bone/muscle of my ankle. I winced with terrible pain that shot up my leg and – kept on running. For another three miles.

Not a good idea, right? Still, after about forty years of running you learn a thing or two. Or hope you do. Hope that your body keeps healing like it has pretty much from the beginning.

Like a quality car that gets road time and good maintenance, a well-conditioned and fed body can take a beating and keep on shining. As a driver we know how far we can push that car, in my case a late-model Volvo. It will be taking K and me to Canada next month for the sea views of the running events during the Nova Scotia Marathon in Barrington County.

Runners, crazy runners, know what we can get away with. In my case, my ankle ballooned with a sprain. My wife was alarmed with the sick look of it. It was wrapped with ice when I called the Belmont Stakes winner (Tonalist – I don’t bet, but in the prance to the starting gate I do have a knack of calling long-shot winners). The next day I wrapped the ankle with gauze tape and danced the night away at the wedding of beloved young friends, iced it again on Monday before work and on Tuesday (June 10), I ran and felt no pain. The base of the foot is black and blue but the swelling is down – and I loped for thirty minutes and felt great while making these track notes.

To run a marathon is to adopt this mentality.The road warrior mindset. No one can train for a marathon without pain. It happens. And unless we break bones in essential limbs, we keep going. That’s the nature of this beast of a task: covering 26.2 miles in the most efficient, and least body-breaking way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Over the Hump 

Running for Your Life: Track Work!

Thought of the day, from thirty-five minute cruiser training run:

Today’s most accomplished hand-eye coordinated experts can speed-walk and text on a busy urban street without causing serious harm to themselves or to other similarly occupied passersby !

The blog title above might suggest advice on how best to gain strength and speed by incorporating track-style training in a marathon regime.

Not this blog. For me, track work refers to the writing and drawing I do while commuting by train to my office job five days a week. (That workday starts at 12:30 p.m. when the NYC subway is blissfully peopled so I don’t have to share a seat on a bench ninety percent of the time.) I pull my journal from my bag and write. Sometimes blog entries like this one, sometimes dialogue from stories or novels that I’m working on, poems and pen sketches I do of my fellow train riders. Watch this space for examples of my track work, which I’d like to post here during the weeks leading up to K and my dream marathon in Nova Scotia this July.

Track work because as I work I hear the sound of the steel wheels on the track. It’s funny but as the days pass – not as I get older because I reject the inherent limit of that construction – I find that I work to fill moments with something that nourishes. In my running, that’s a natural predisposition to eat carbs, gorge on fruit and enjoy the delicious homemade juices that M has taken to make for us, or following closely the training regimen that has me walking and running in these early days. I’ve written a lot in this space about listening to your body. Now, at fifty-eight, I feel I’m actually doing it.

Track work is the mental side of that equation. Writing and sketching in my journal settles me for the workday ahead. I am ready to change gears and do my challenging, creative work at the New York Post. As always I’m energized by my running, my writing and my reading (currently the “City of Ambition” by Mason Williams http://nyti.ms/1uC1PT4  about the dual New Deal accomplishments of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; massively relevant to today’s stasis in matters of public philosophy) and now, for the better part of a year, by my Track Work! as well. (Images to come!)

My advice? Honor that special place where you go to plug in, re-energize. For me, it’s always been primarily connected to words, and lately, the lines that I put down in my journal.

Next: Running for Your Life: The First Fourteen Days 

Running for Your Life: A Very Special Marathon

Next stop, Nova Scotia.

K and I are set on running the Nova Scotia Marathon along the southern sea coast of that marvelous province on Sunday, July 27, my mom’s and K’s gramma’s eighty-second birthday. O boy! Is that an exciting proposition!

The 100-day mark measured out to include a recovery week into the first week of August begins Monday (April 28).

For K it will be her first 26.2 miler, although she has been running for many months now on a regular basis, often with her lovable blue pit Stella at her side. It fun to think of running with Thurb and K running with Stella. Soon, we will be all in the same ZIP code, but that, as they say, is another story.

So soon the stories from weeks of training will be documented here. Do yourself a favor and run, or jog, or walk along with us as we make our way to Barrington, Canada’s Lobster Capital, Nova Scotia in July. I am so psyched to say that K is a chip off the old block, while I’m feeling chips in the old knees.

It will be interesting to see how it all comes out. But I couldn’t be more proud and happy to have her very special company for this race. Are we thinking Boston this time? Hardly. Just joy. Pure and simple joy of running for your life, 26.2 miles of it, along the seashore of my native land with K.

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work! 

Running for Your Life: So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

“You keep an open mind long enough, your brain will fall out.”

–        Kirk Nicewonger

Paid poster at R Train, Manhattan-bound station:

Sizable image of a mixed race boy (think African American/Jewish) with mop of black curly hair, million dollar smile, one pointed tooth, eyeglasses with tiny hearts on frame corners, writing with a pen before open books and papers in blurry foreground:

Words: Where can you learn Mandarin in kindergarten, study Logic in 7^th grade and Economics in 8^th Grade?

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work!

Running for Your Life: Reverse Age That Body

I’ve written a lot in this space about turning back the clock. You’d think in the years that I’ve been running for my life there has been some slowing down. And, yes, I suppose that’s true. I’m unlikely to test that Steamtown 2010 time of 3:33:08 ever again. But when it comes to reverse aging that hardly matters. Performance is not measured in time alone.

Two days after April Fool’s Day I woke early from persistent jet lag. (M and I returned March 31 from a two-week trip to Hong Kong and Thailand, more on that at another time.) For about a week after arriving home, I found sleep difficult. Two, three hours of hard sleep and then I’m up, wide awake at 2 a.m., 3 a.m.

I manage four hours of deep rest, but at 6 a.m., it was all over. Soon I was out with T, did errands of various sorts, fixed myself a little breakfast, and then, exhausted, went back to bed at 9:40 a.m. I went out like a light but was up again at 10:20 a.m. Why? Because my body is attuned to run at that hour. Even dead tired, barely able to life my leg up and out of the covers and over the side of the bed, I wasn’t going to miss my run.

I did it, a modest 4.5 miles, and I felt writing in the subway afterward like a young man. Hardly slower, hardly weaker. In fact, if as my mother and father, who are a healthy 82 and 84, respectively, were once fond of saying, You’re only as young as you feel, this running for your life deal hasn’t failed me when it comes to living that saying out loud.

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work!