Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Consider this a regular feature, right here at Running for Your Life!

Today's If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday quote:

“When it comes to smartphones, I prefer to be ignorant.”
                                                                              – Sam Beckett

Running for Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs

The idea, of course, is to stay ahead of the game. Flu shot, fleece layers, wool cap, parka with Porsche price tag, long johns, lined wool socks, fur-lined waterproof snowboots. Oh, and this winter, something call Yaktrax, slip-on wire-mesh affairs that attach easily to the soles of your snowboots so that walking on ice is significantly less of a calamity than the alternative, that I swear to God are selling like hotcakes in Park Slope hardware stores.

Still, winter – this winter – can dim even the lightest bulb. This is the time to stoke your passion, to set aside time to do that. It helps, too, to see what winter looks like through other animals eyes http://bit.ly/1E6QiAs What passions? Obviously winter sports: cross-country skiing, ice skating, tobogganing. Kids get the snow. Get bundled up in all that clothing, grab a sled, and go to the toboggan hill in your neighborhood.

Or indoor stuff: Write poetry, short stories, essays – get back to that journal (see second-last post) or start a new one. Draw. Paint the drawing. I’m sitting here writing this note after having spent a day in bed with a cold and fever. As a marathoner, I can’t not be a big believer in mind over matter.

In no time I’m back to my passions: running (3.3 miles today [Feb. 17], albeit @ slow pace of 9:30)  and writing. Off to work at The Post. Back on the trap lines, and as a good friend says, looking to snare a mink.

Next: Running for Your Life: Who, What, Where and WiFi

Running for Your Life: "The Burglary" by Betty Medsger

There was a time and place, it seems so distant, like that house made of crystal in misty skies, what is now a setting in a video game or a visual logo of the next new capture-of-all-senses movie producer, when American citizens cared so much about what their country was doing in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Pakistan and Latin America that a small group of them took the grave risk of stealing government files to see if their worst fears were just that, or real. That the dissent they were engaged in had been hollowed out through the actions of a cynical web of paid informers who sold their integrity for some false nothing of what was in the national interest and what was not.

On March 8, 1971, a group of citizens in Philadelphia changed what had heretofore been known about how the secret police operated in America. Not Cuba, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Russia under Putin. But the US of A.

One brave reporter stood up and did the right thing. Betty Medsger of the Washington Post published the first newspaper account on these files, which were stolen from a small FBI office in Media, Pa., during the broadcast of the Fight of the Century, between Muhammad Ali and  Philly fave Joe Frazier. She then wrote the book.

These burglars were the Edward Snowdens of their day, urged on by a breathtaking display of social responsibility, revealing what  US government surveillance forces are doing to corrupt democracy and steal into our private lives by taking liberties that today include hacking into the technological carapaces, where we conduct the private affairs of our life, but in the days of the Media crime (you really must read Medsger’s “The Burglary” http://bit.ly/19tadhq) nothing was known of just how nefarious the FBI had become under its dictator boss J. Edgar Hoover. How wonderful it is to consider the grace and true civic power these burglar-heroes showed at a time of crisis, a moment that has near-vanished from history – and would have had it not been for the amazing work in this extraordinary document by this courageous reporter.

Next: Running for Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs     

Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?

Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.

I can remember why it was that I starting running on a regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs. Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been newspapering, editing and writing.

In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater Cessna back north.

In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It was my first journal. Christmas 1983.

I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you read in this blog was first put down in longhand.

We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger

Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness

What to say? There is something rattling around up there.

I know if I go more than a few days without running, i.e. hard running, aerobic exercise, my brain feels sluggish. How do you mind your life when your brain is dulled?

Some of that comes down to what we call spirit. But really nothing would happen if not for the release of those delicious biochemical that are stirred when the body is pushed. It’s a different result from the passion that you feel in the arms of a lover, the cut and thrust of an idea shared with your best friend, the feeling of the curtain going up on your favorite play, TV series or movie.

Which is to say that mental fitness as it relates to running is a physical thing. Feeling mildly depressed before a run and, more often than not, five miles of running – not jogging but running – and you’re feeling better. Cold and flu season? That too can knock you off your pins. Feeling a little punk before a run? Four miles on the treadmill and you can actually sense the malaise lifting, the healthy athlete’s body doing its job, ridding you of the virus that so easily enters the mind as depression in the strong cold of deep winter.

Knock on wood, but I literally can’t remember when it was I was last felled by the flu or a bad cold. Is it all because of running, this purchase I have on physical and mental fitness? Seriously, I couldn’t tell you. But I’m not about to take the chance and find out. Suffice to say that four decades ago I unwittingly gave myself a gift that I will cherish as long as it stays with me: the gift of running for my life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?