Running for Your Life: It’s the Core, Stupid

When it comes to, you know, running for your life, as in into your sixties, seventies, and dare I say it, eighties, you’ve one job.

Call it boring, pedantic, mind-numbingly sensible, it’s all the same to me.

But take care of your core.

I don’t know how many former runners I talk to who say they stopped running  because of joints: knee pain, ankle stress, hip injuries.

In the past ten years, as readers of this blog might know, I’ve had my setbacks, most significantly, a wicked knee injury and a massive hamstring tear. After the hamstring tear, one doctor said I could forget about running again.

That was seven years ago. And I continue to run at least three miles every other day.

The older you get the more attention you should spend on stretching, yes. Outside of daily Achilles tendon stretches and some basic calisthenics,  I’m not that person. But what I have done that seems to work is pay attention to core strength and, as important, running posture.

Be strong in your core, and you will put less strain on your joints. Next time you see runners look at their posture. Does their pace allow for their buttocks to vertically align with their foot strikes rather than chest-forward? The latter posture exposes knee joints to gravity and pavement-pounding stress in a way that the former does not.

What’s more, a strong core makes for lighter foot strikes, and less wear and tear on joints. I also run with patella bands and in compression socks, which mitigates the negative effects of pavement-pounding on joints.

So what do I do for core? Not much really. Since 2011, 60 nightly pushups, and tai chi, which is gentle way to build up core. Then when I run I move a lot slower than I used to, and more vertical in stride so that the strain on joints, etc., is minimized.

So far, so good. Try it, and you might like it!

Next: Running for Your Life: Touches of Tennessee

Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

What stupefies in Magda Szabo’s “The Door” is how fresh and original is the imagined character, Emerence.

Crazy, contradictory, needlessly hurtful and harsh. Uncompromising to a fault.

How unconventional to choose to base a novel on an anti-hero upon whose first impressions we feel are so disjointed, let alone unsympathetic.

There you are: a cacophony of “un”s. By rights, she should be toxic to readers. Offer nothing.

Here, though, is the genius of “The Door.” Emerence proves that we are never free to judge what constitutes the human spirit.

What is one person’s toxicity is another’s purity. Emerence, like common humanity, is unknowable. She is someone we will never fully understand – nor forget.

Here’s the takeaway. Life is richer when we don’t rely on feeling superior to others for our sense of well-being. Emerence just is and that’s good enough.

Most fiction these days relies too often on the genius authorial, the post-modern wink, meism of one stripe or another.

Magic is in the point of view that shatters the self, that the reflection of the so-called superior other looms overlarge in the shards.

Next: Running for Your Life: It’s Core, Stupid  

Running for Your Life: “Instagram” poems

What’s hard is soft

In an urban

Space fingers

Taper to tap

Never ever awash

In head-butting spores

Boy staredowns

Fingers clench

In fists, strike

Face bone, nose

Cartilage, contours

Of what it used to mean

To be a man, soil-stirring *

Deep, gone, gone, gone

In an Instagram minute.

Miss Lonelyhearts

Can’t think of his name

The writer fleeing the East

Nathanael West, he says,

Can there be a darker

Story? What she wants,

Needs elude her,

Miss Lonelyhearts

Adam’s rib flung

At unmade bedclothes

Fierce and hollow eyes

Leave but a dull note

On me as a woman says to

Her friend-captive over

Barbecued kohlrabi

Gowanus-style:

“My DNA is on Instagram.”

* Yes, I meant soil not soul

Next: Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

Running for Your Life: White Working Class Notes

Justin Gest’s book, “The White Working Class,” subtitled “What Everyone Needs to Know,” published by Oxford Press, is not to be missed. I’ve been reading an advance copy but it’s out in June.

Generally these nonfiction subtitles miss the mark by a million miles.

Not so here. Gest earns it by putting down a tightly researched, fluidly written argument, backed up with myriad charts and graphs (OK, so I’m not a big fan of the data overload), to explain just how we got to this particular moment in American political, social and economic history.

Russian meddling to get Trump elected? Ex-FBI Director Jim Comey’s weird-ass public announcements in 2016 regarding Hillary Clinton’s e-mail morass?

Life does not conform to the simple narratives that dominate most of our bookshelves and certainly clog the I’m-With-Stupid internet.

If you are looking to get a handle on just what the hell is going on, then do yourself a favor and read this book. Yep, it’s What Everyone Needs to Know.

Next: Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

Running for Your Life: Old School Tech

I thought came to me Tuesday (April 10) while watching (without sound) the hours and hours of testimony before Congress of one 33-year-old American, Mark Zuckerberg.

Good for Zuckerberg, I thought, to do the right thing and answer the call as a responsible citizen and face questions about the code and conduct of his company, Facebook.

With the sound off, I imagined my own script.

How about a return to a personal technology that offers zero threat to democratic elections and would restore a community of informed citizens that even a wooden fella like Mark Zuckerberg could enjoy?

As in, books. You know, old school technology, the printing press. The magic that a book can be.

Something like, say, GATEWAY TO THE MOON, by Mary Morris https://amzn.to/2H8Ckr0.

Just a thought. To leave Silicon Valley for the Promised Land of books.

Let Mark and Co. trade that data.

Next: Running for Your Life: White Working Class Notes