Running for Your Life: The Next Race

It’s hard to believe that a year ago I was deep into training for the Nova Scotia Marathon.

Believe it or not, it has taken literally months for my body to feel that it can take the punishment that marathon training entails. It may sound like a cliché to say, but a good part of that process is to train the mind. That it can will your body through the paces.

Making the right race choice can help. Last year the Nova Scotia Marathon was part of a glorious road trip with my daughter K, this year it is Brooklyn. Backyard Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Marathon, which is run in November, exclusively in beautiful Prospect Park.

Why Brooklyn? Because unlike every other marathon I’ve ever run, the course will never have me more than a short stroll home in Park Slope: A stroll that is all downhill. (Thus, the Slope.)

I had in this space made noises about running in Albuquerque. But like Bugs Bunny, I made a turn at Albuquerque. Not a wrong one, though. And one day, I hope to run in the Southwest. Saving it up for another day, and giving it up to Brooklyn, where my friends and family will hopefully come out to party afterward.

Please, mark the date and come to visit the Brooklyn Marathon. Sunday morning through noon, November 15. It would be great to see you!

Next: Running for Your Life: I Believe in Ghosts!   

Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running?

It’s a fair question. In May 2015, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

In February, not so much.

Did I miss the memo? Perhaps, as my friend Marty Holski says, running is like skiing – or baseball, or hockey, or you name it, in terms of sports. It has a season. If Prospect Park is any guide, that season roughly corresponds with professional baseball; in a good one, you’re out there 162 times, as in the count of regular season games. That’s plenty, isn’t it? One hundred and sixty-two runs? Then it’s cold, and the runners are gone. Where, is anybody’s guess.

Now, though, everybody is running. Mothers and sons. Hipsters and creatives. Afghanistan vets and Vietnam vets. Dog owners and their dogs. They lope, they sprint, they shuffle along, alone, and in groups. You’d think every sunny Sunday in Prospect Park was a running of the New York Marathon, without the sideline crowds and festive mood. But in the park, so many faces read pain and discomfort, as if the strangers, because they are strangers to me, an all-year runner in these parts for the past twenty-three years, are here, few that show the simple pleasures of the outdoor sights, the leafing trees, the birdsong, from magpie to mockingbird to robin and redwing blackbird, and flicker, and the other day in the far, far treetops, an oriole.

I feel a stranger in the company of these runners in the park. Unless it is cold and wet, a storm coming on, that keep most of them at home, I don’t join them. Instead, I go to the gym. Run hard on the treadmill and meditate on this. Is Everybody Running? Yes. And each to his or her own beat.

Next: Running for Your Life: Next Race!

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

Had it not been for a highway accident 39 years ago next month (May), my great pal, Doug Marshall (known simply as Marsho), would still be giving me the gears -- and schooling me in lacrosse, which he succeeded in showing me a thing or two. To know Marsho was to know that he was a tiger at fighting against the odds to get what he wanted. His voice is one I hear often -- especially on those long runs that, even now, during my gray-hair days -- take me to the next plateau.

"The night is still young, sort of thing," he would say.

Next: Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running? 

Running for Your Life: Steady Does It

Maybe it’s because I consider myself an asterisk athlete. If I don’t run, my deep vein thrombosis kicks in and my left leg is prone to swelling. I don’t know how debilitating it would’ve been had I not taken up jogging in my early twenties, during the early months after I suffered blood clots in my left leg and a pulmonary embolism. In my mid-twenties, I considered myself a runner, and ran in my first 10 kilometer race, a festive international romp between Prescott, Ontario, and Ogdensburg, New York.

Slowed by my bad leg, seeing the whole practice as being more about staying healthy than being competitive, I finished well back in the pack. But I was on my way.

Since then, I’ve run in eight marathons, completed six of them. In one, the 2010 Steamtown Marathon, I finished at 3:33:08, my personal record, which I’ve gotta acknowledge will be my fastest marathon. An eight-minute mile pace comes to just under 3:30 for a 26.2-mile race. I daresay I won’t be doing that kind of thing again.

After all, I’m 60 in October. On the treadmill, I’ll average a pace of 8:30 over five miles. That seems plenty fast enough, thank you.  If I can manage a nine-minute mile pace over 26.2 miles, that’s a time of just under four hours. Will that get me back to Boston? Well, the qualifying time in the 60-65 age category is 3:55. Worth shooting for!

That is, if I go about it smartly. Steady has been my mantra for almost four decades. I shouldn't be looking to rock the boat now.

Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running?

Running for Your Life: What If the Greats Were Us Thursday

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who perished at the hands of his blood foes, the Nazis, would have us meditate on the lessons to be learned from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

How often, in these days of hate and suspicion between God fearers and liberal sneerers, between Fox believers and Comedy Centrists, do we pause and try to hear the uncluttered message of love and forbearance, of meekness and faith, what Bonhoeffer would say if he were alive today, that:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them … sound no trumpet before you.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Steady Does It