Running for Your Life: Leaf Envy

These weeks of non-running have coincided with the falling of the leaves in Prospect Park.

One strong storm or blustery day and the thousands of beautiful trees in our Brooklyn forest will be more bare that leaf-filled.

For a variety of reasons – and not just injury – it’s been years since I’ve caught my annual leaf on the run. If I were to have goal, upon returning to running after my nasty knee injury, it is that next November I will have my leaf.

To explain what I mean when I say this, here’s a sample of a previous blog post about my leaf practice:

“When the leaves fall I don’t vary my route, don’t steer myself under trees to increase my chances of catching leaves as they fall, instead, I just run as I always do, don’t press any harder or, God forbid, slow down or stop, and the leaves that come to me – not trap against my body or get caught up in my clothes but rather that I snatch from mid-air with my bare hand – are mine. The ones that I’ve put up on the wall-of-progress I’ve caught only in this way. And not just leaves, but maple keys and acorns, too. Those that I trap against my body I drop to the ground. The rule is it has to be a leaf or a seed that has come falling from a tree. I then hold the leaf only in the hand it was caught in, don’t let it touch any other part of my body, and continue on, completing my route before I return home. I only tack up those leaves that have not touched anything but my hand and the wall. That have only been in air and held in my open hand.”

In 2016, I will be in Leaf Envy no more, I trust.

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

Running for Your Life: The Long, Hot Stretch

So, yeah, it has been, what?, seventeen days (Nov. 16) since my-day-before-Halloween knee injury. The closest I’ve come to running – outside of twice at the Y pool – has been an ill-advised hustle across Broadway after a dance party on Saturday night (Nov. 14). And, yes, I did dance … Although the knee didn’t twinge exactly when I crossed the street, it didn’t feel at all right either.

And, of course, all this is written after the Brooklyn Marathon (Nov. 15), which I trained for but did not compete in.

Which brings me to stretching. Heretofore stretching to me meant a half-hearted half-hour every other day – and less during heavy running weeks. Now, with the help of one full session with an athlete-focused physical therapist, I’m on it with the long, hot stretch. What’s required is to loosen overly tight muscles from the calves (all that foot pain) to the IT bands (which my physical therapist has re-diagnosed as the cause of this race-ending injury), and that means doing the stretches for longer periods of time than I’m used to, and to doing a lot more stretches than I’ve led myself to believe would be enough so that I could continue with my plan to run for the rest of my life.

And I scrupulously set aside time for the long, hot stretch. Each day at a minimum of 45 minutes, with two hours per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) devoted to work with my therapist one-on-one so he can assess my strength – and readiness for return to the road and the treadmill.

So my advice to runners after injury or feeling too much tightness: Be patient. Don’t skimp with the floor routines. Love the long, hot stretch, the latest and currently greatest tip I have for those a little older – and yes, even those a decade or two or three younger than me – who are determined to run, to get on with reversing that age …. !

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf Envy

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

There are times when you read something about a person who deserves a wider audience that it takes your breath away. That happened to me recently while reading my go-to journal, the London Review of Books, the Diary entry of Oct. 22, by Linda Matthews.

The photographer is one Vivian Maier. Steal a moment and read this piece, and wonder to yourself, who is our next Vivian Maier? How important are the observers who don’t draw attention to themselves, who see the things in ways we can’t possibly see?

DIARY

By Linda Matthews

The photographer Vivian Maier worked for me for three years in the early 1980s, though no one knew she was a photographer then. She was in her late fifties, I was in my late thirties. I had a big house in Chicago, a busy husband, two children of six and eight, and a five-month-old baby, and I wanted to go back to work. It seemed to me that a live-in nanny might simplify our lives and so when I saw her ad in the local paper, I phoned her.

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Running for Your Life: Water Walking to Running

Don’t laugh … Here’s the deal, in order to get back to pounding the pavement (I know, not a great idea, what are you some kind of masochist?) I’ve taken, thanks to my dear wife and great swimmer, M, to water walking at our neighborhood Y.

I tried on Monday (Nov. 9) and there I was … non-swimmer nonpareil in, from top, bathing cap, pink-colored pool noodle strung between my legs, these cool baby bluey barbell-floaters tucked under each arm, a baby blue back floatation vest strapped firmly at my waist … water walking. For thirty minutes.

M, the dear thing, kept careful watch on me. Like the runt of a less-than-thrilling litter. But I made it, in and out of alive, with this as a surprising finale – to M in any case: I water-jogged along the side of the pool into the deep end, which is where I clambered out of the pool.

And the results? Fabulous. I really think this water walking is the way to go for those with knee, back and ankle issues. Any kind of  joint pain. Take it from me, the least likely person to ever be seen in the heretofore scary regions beyond the kiddie pool, add it to your training regimen …

I am not exactly pain-free, after suffering a bad knee sprain on Friday, Oct. 30, but I’m so happy to report that I’m on the mend. Oh, and I don’t care how many smirks the inflatable me evokes at the Y pool. It’s taken me almost thirty years to get there, but this is New York, damn it. The place where people dress up in Elmo suits, sing Spanish dialect opera while striding down a crowded Midtown street, where women “wearing” nothing but painted stars and stripes lewd around in Times Square getting people to pay THEM to have your picture taken with them.

My business at the Y pool is the wee-ist of humiliations compared to all that …

Next: Running for Your Life: The Long Hot Stretches

Running for Your Life: So Slow That Everything Changes

Some times injury can lead to rare and beautiful things.

Let me explain:

On Friday, Oct. 30, I suddenly and frighteningly felt something snap in my knee, at the outside edge of the patella while running at a training pace on a treadmill at my local gym. Luckily, I stopped immediately by straddling the fast-moving track, escaping further certain injury.

I hobbled home and for that night and the next day left the house only to see a doctor on emergency call. He hesitated to say what was wrong, noting that I could bend and extend the leg without pain. But when I put any weight at all on that leg, the pain was fierce. The doctor prescribed an MRI, which I had on Monday.

Early Tuesday I went out for a walk. Using a cane I was able to make it slowly up our Brooklyn block to a place where M and I typically stop for coffee before continuing on up the street in order to give Thurber, our cantankerous coonhound, a morning run in Prospect Park. The road to the park from my house earns the neighborhood’s name, Park Slope, to a considerable degree, especially noticeable when the best you can do is put about ten percent of your bodyweight on one of your legs.

So on this day M continued up the vertical street, and I stayed behind with my coffee and cane, sitting on a wooden bench fashioned around a street tree.

Suddenly, my heart filled with the promise that comes of seeing beautiful things in a brand-new way. I had never in my twenty-five years that we’ve been living in Park Slope noticed the feathery glory of a mature exotic cedar that grows across the street from our habitual café at First Street and Seventh Avenue. The tree glowed a golden-crimson, the needles in the autumn light the texture of angel hair. Not the pasta but the celestial wonder. Red bricks on the building behind the tree reminded me for the first time in ages of our year in Santa Fe, when we traveled to see the ancient structures of the Anasazi, the dance rituals of the Hopi.

For the first time since I heard and felt that troubling knee-snap, I smiled without irony, without a sense that my running days were numbered.

I’d like to think that the days that followed form a direct line from that upbeat insight. My injury turned out, remarkably and gratefully, to be a bad sprain. I will miss the Brooklyn Marathon this Sunday (Nov. 15), but I suspect I will be running again before the snow flies.

And I hope that I’ve learned a lesson. Not so much about training and how to do it with more patience and awareness of what my six-decade-old body can or can’t do (although, I promise to try). But more about the rewards that come from truly slowing down, and seeing and taking in the beauty that is all around the all-too-busy you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Water Walking