Running for Your Life: Spring Tickets to Nowhere

Here we go. Spring !

Well, actually summer.

I can’t believe that just a week ago I bundled myself into a long winter coat to attend an evening wedding in Jersey City.

Today (April 11) is hot in New York City. Summer. And the puck has yet to drop on the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Talk about climate change.

This is not the first time that we New Yorkers have gone flush into summer from winter.

Okay, okay, I’m exaggerating. In the United States, we’ve got climate change deniers in the White House, so a denial-impulse has to be acknowledged.

On the face of it, doesn’t it make sense to say that in the parts of the US Northeast, famous for their four distinct seasons (mud season being the fifth in some), in which we lose a season, say, in this case, spring, that it amounts to a change?

Me, I’m all Annie Proulx (Barkskins) when it comes to climate change. I’ve just turned the final page on this magnificent novel, as Sapatisia Sel, descendant of Rene Sel, the protagonist whose second impression of New France (Canada) was: “a dark, vast forest, inimical wilderness,” demonstrates “the female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature.”

What’s in fashion this spring? Climate change protests, that’s what.

Next: Running for Your Life: Maigret in the USA

Running for Your Life: Hockey Hockey Hockey Hockey

The Mercurys did it the last time in 1927: won the Memorial Cup for an Owen Sound team.

Now, 90 years later, the Attack is on.

The Owen Sound Attack, that is.

This year marks a special moment as a hockey-loving Owen Sounder. The Attack, the junior club that has distinguished itself in competition in recent years is seen as being a genuine contender for the Memorial Cup, the trophy signifying supremacy in Canadian junior hockey.

The Attack is down 2-1 against the Soo Greyhounds, a team known for graduating a gangly kid from Brantford, Ontario, to the WHA, and then the NHL, back in the spring of 1978. (Yeah, Wayne Gretzky). But its next game is on Tuesday night in Owen Sound.

I’m counting on the Attack coming back strong on Tuesday, a day before the Stanley Cup playoffs open.

Most years at this time my focus is on my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. And the Canadian clubs: this year a good crop: Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and TORONTO !!

But, for now, that’ll have to take a back seat to the Attack. 

I mean when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, they ended a 54-year drought. When it comes to major junior clubs, it has been ninety years for Owen Sound. 

Time to put another team in orbit. Go, Attack, Go !!

Next: Running for Your Life: Spring Tickets

Running for Your Life: Beware the “Confidence” Man

I’ve been in this country long enough to comfortably make this observation below. 

I hope for a lot of people searching for answers about the current US leadership, concerns in their school and workplace, it will explain a lot:

Confidence on display in men who know less than nothing is a variant of American power.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey

Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees

Having been down this road before, I’m a little shy in putting this out there.

After all, I’ve not run in a marathon or a half marathon since July 2014. In those near-three years, my training has been interrupted by injury. The worst being a running-stopping knee crusher around Halloween 2015, just two weeks before the Brooklyn Marathon. Then the following “fall”, on the Thursday before the Bay Ridge Half Marathon, I literally smushed a faceplant, suffering minor concussion symptoms and a bloodied lip and face cuts.

Sweet, it hasn’t been.

Now, though, as I ready myself to start training for The County Marathon in Eastern Ontario in October, I want to say a word about knees.

Time will tell, and it could be these 40-plus years of running on these knees have taken their toll. That my next injury is just around the corner. Better, if I were smart enough to admit it to myself, that I should be happy to just jog three-, four-, five-, and at the outside, six-milers and be done with that.

Thing is the knees. They’ve never felt stronger. That is since the knee crusher in 2015, I’ve been strict in doing these exercises: lunges, squats and leg raises. We’re talking compression socks and patella bands to manage the shock of the street-pounding. This greater core strength actually has me sitting back in my stride a bit more, allowing my more muscled self (knees, quads and butt) to better absorb the shock and literally take the pressure off the knee.

It can be done. Meaning, you can train for a big one, and get stronger, rather than weaker as you put on the miles. Given my experience with sickness and health, the body is amazing. The older you get, you just have to treat it with a bit more respect.

That’s the theory. Time to put it in practice.

Next: Running for Your Life: Beware the “Confidence” Man

Running for Your Life: Running for Your Life

There have been many times, I have to admit to myself, over the past five decades when I say to myself, How about easing up on this running thing. In fact, the two most typical questions I’m asked during social occasions are:

“You still use a flip phone?” (This usually with a degree of scoffing disbelief)

and

“Are you still running?”

It would be fair to say that often I’ve used this blog to answer those questions – for myself, but also in terms of what it may say about the research and thinking in these areas in the hope readers will benefit from what I’ve written here as they seek answers for similar questions in their own lives.

Which brings me back to Running for Your Life. As in easing up on that.

Well, something happened recently that has finally put the question to rest. I will, as long as I am able, be running for my life. Now I have pretty clear evidence that that choice has saved mine.

I won’t go into all the why’s, the therefores, the subplots. It’s enough just to say this:

As regular readers of this blog know, I began running for therapeutic reasons. When I was 20 years old I had a near-death experience due to a blood-clotting horror. When I left hospital a shadow of my former self in 1976, I promised myself that I would get back to where I was before I’d been felled by a freak condition for someone as young as I was at the time.

I started by walking (referring to myself as “Gunsmoke” Chester, because my damaged leg moved like a wooden one), then jogging. Before the end of that year I was running every other day (daily and the leg-swell was too bothersome) and taking blood-thinners.

And so I have done. Faithfully running every other day for 41 years, through five decades. (For a long time I did stop the blood-thinners, but resumed taking them in 2001 (Subplot 1).

Fast forward to Saturday, March 18. I learned much to my considerable dismay that I’d been accidentally overdosing on my blood-thinners (Subplot 2). So much so that I was in real danger of internal bleeding (NOT good for the brain). In a Brooklyn emergency ward, doctors flocked to me. One kind doctor told me the health of my heart, my liver and kidney were extraordinary. Off the charts, he said. He didn’t say so, but he didn’t need to. The health of my organs saved my life.

And that can be traced back to running. I’m not an expert, but I firmly believe that.

So, yeah, here I go again. Running for Your Life.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees