Running for Your Life: Love the Rain

Whoa! It’s been a long road, and one, if I’m true to what will be my destination, and what it might be a surprise to a casual reader to realize given that these past months of non-running, working through injury, that destination being, Running for My Life, that the road is not so flat and true, this body cannot just on its own, through running alone, and yeah, I’ve done some strengthening and stretching since returning to running marathons, my first in twenty-three years was Pittsburgh 2010, in the months before did a bit of core, flat-on-my-back leg raises, three sets of ten, and sit-ups, sixty at a go, and a slow pace, but now after the hamstring pull in early February, it was, more than three-and-a-half months ago, those days are gone even though I feel as good as I did before the injury, I’m changed. Think of the road as being changed: No longer flat and smooth, but pot-holed, chopped up, a mountain trail versus a high school track and for my body to continue on its way on the road, and not just for this season but for all seasons, or at least from now through the next thirty-five years, I have to change what I’m doing.

Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List

The publication of the moment has got to be Mark Twain’s autobiography. I confess that I missed the reviews when the first volume came out last fall, but recently both Harper’s and the London Review of Books http://bit.ly/i1YEja have done due diligence: in Harper’s the ever-readable Lewis Lapham weighs in. Check them out. Or if you are to buy one book this summer make it Twain: no one says it better and Lapham nails his quotes like a champion skeet shooter, especially the bit about the writer and the Mississippi River boat captain and his take on patriotism, as apt as any comments I’ve ever read on the American life – and what it means to be an American. (And not, primarily, because we persevered in the execution of an arch-enemy of the American way.) Ponder what Twain would say. On patriotism:
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals II

In the late 1990s I shared a stage with writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, the program dictated, would read immediately before me at a book event that had drawn hundreds of listeners. Being relatively new to reading my work in front of a big crowd, I was nervously re-reading my essay in “A Few Thousand Words About Love,” http://amzn.to/kKnnmc, the anthology we were promoting. Next to me, though, Joyce was writing. I swear, it seemed to me at the time, that Joyce had written a few thousand words while we snaked through the alphabet of authors to the O’s. She read what she called her fiction-memoir flawlessly, and then as I rose shakily to do my bit, she gave me a little smile of support, just the jolt I needed to not only get through the reading, but to do it with a touch of confidence. When I returned to my seat Joyce was still at it, working to finish her scene, or note, or whatever it was because that's what writers do, they answer the call when it comes.

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals

M and I had no idea the Aflac duck job was up for grabs. The Sunday of the Boston Marathon we were resting on a park bench in the dappled sunlight of a floodplain mini-park in Bronxville, New York, a few dog walkers braving the soggy ground, near the banks of a surging river, no place for a Mallard couple that waddles, the female leading, toward M who is quack, quack, quacking in such a way that the couple makes a beeline for her, and it’s not until the two of them are about twenty feet away that they come up short, like children fooled until the last moment by a dead-ringer for their mother, but they don’t leave, M’s sotto voce quack, quack, quacking settles them as they both snuggle into the grass, only a body-length away and spend the rest of the afternoon with us, so don’t tell me that M wouldn’t have been a better choice to be the Aflac duck than a radio sales manager from Minnesota. If only we had known.

Running for Your Life: Getting to Know Water

Dr. O’s diagnosis, dated April 27, 2011:
Lumbosacral Spondylosis (ICD-7213)
Myofascial Pain (ICD-729.1)
Lumbar Disc Displacement, W/O Myelopathy (ICD-722.10)
Hamstring Strain

Precautions:
NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS

Prescription:
Modalities, Massage, TENS unit, Ultrasound Electrical Stimulation, Gait and Balance Evaluation and training, Stretching and strengthening of L/S paraspinal and abdominal muscles. Stretching and strengthening of lower extremities muscles, ROM of L/S spine and lower extremities joints, Lumbar Spine stabilization exercises, Theraband exercises for strengthening of rotator cuff muscles, proper posturing and body ergonomics training. Teach home exercise program.

And here, silly me, I thought Dr. O was going to launch into a praise-Larry soliloquy, drawing attention to my hard work since the injury, exactly one month ago today (April 28), and that sure I should, could continue to follow the able advice of my physical therapists not computer-tap a jargon-filled prescription to be filled by whom? A physical therapist who will have me doing body realignment and – gasp! – suggesting yoga for full-body health and renewal or face what Dr. O called not once but twice the “dangerous” consequences of following the path that I’m currently on, so I ask myself the question as Dr. O’s prescription includes, NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS, shouldn’t I just take this prescription and put it a little too close to a flame and watch it burn to ash, and go about strengthening on my own terms because, baby, I got to this season not by listening to doctors, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and if there’s one thing to come out of my session with Dr. O it’s that she convinced me that whether I start the blog, “Knowing Water,” or not that I continue this summer with the plan of getting into Water – Rat We – relaxing, let it lift me up and turn a weakness into a strength.