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.

I’m back! Running that is. April 30, my first day in 41, and I surprise myself, not winded and not feeling any pulling in my right leg, just the barest of sensation, and, if anything, the tiniest of pulls in my left buttock so much attention in repair and strengthening going to the right side, and now perhaps in need of balance, heh, heh, six months from now I’m going to be re-registering for Boston, but until then it’s back to basics, to running, reading and writing, hold the hubris. The racer in me will have to wait. Finally, fifty-six in October, I’m learning, if I’m to keep going, to race once a year if I care to, I’m not going to be able to just run out the door. Not anymore. And here, I’m going to chart what they tell me. Because it’s possible to Run for Your Life. The thing is, though, as much as you’d like to, you can’t do it without help. Just ask M.

Slow. Being slow. The slow movement. Slow drip coffee. I’m on yet another padded bench for observation, this time by Dr. O, the rehab specialist, and she asks me to lie down, face-forward. Relax, she says, and my legs tighten, “Ah, of course,” she says, “tell a New Yorker to relax and this is what you get.” Try a deep breath, no not exactly, ramped up with caffeine and, now (May 2) taking Dr. O’s muscle relaxers, and I’m back to thinking that I have to stop, take a step backward, one, two, do yoga, stretch and strengthen. Hoping that now I’m back, this is the time, close my eyes, relax, and I go there, deep inside, in my case thirty-five years ago when I left the hospital after six long weeks, I’m one hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, a trip to the toilet in my hospital room exhausting me, can’t catch my breath, each step from here on is excruciating, pain shivers down my leg, a pull in my chest, lung blood-clotted and now you set your goals, inside, from that place, twenty years old, and now fifty-five, and not where I want to be, who was I kidding that after one run in Prospect Park, once around and up the steps to the Lake Lookout, setting goals, yeah, but realistic ones, my legs are achy and stiff like boards, it could be my imagination but now I feel a pulling, ever so slight, in my left upper hamstring. Go slow, think floor exercises, and I do them, carefully.

Am reminded by what my father-in-law told M about a dream he had. He lived another twenty-two years from that dream at eighty, how he felt that his life lived inside him, that for one glorious moment he had the sensation that all those lives, those stages of life, were there inside him, not in some chronological order like a Dickens plot, or so I imagine what he meant, but in a massive heap, like the rare genius whose desk looks as if not a paper or book or bill or love note has been filed in a generation, but our hero, when called upon, when the spirit moves her, will be able to extract the desired object out of the pile without hesitation because she knows exactly where everything is. Only a snapshot, you understand. What a paparazzi would give his eye tooth for, fast enough shutter speed to capture the jagged wound of fork lightning that illumines our backyard oak tree, what Boston Record American photog Ray Lussier http://bit.ly/kX7QHV felt when he pressed the shutter button and captured The Goal forty-one years ago on Tuesday (May 10). Hold on to that feeling, what Dad was talking about, tack it up inside; a place where you can feel it, what is a perfect moment if not the latch key that unlocks the prison of the self, shake off the blues and get at it: in my case, running and writing and reading. And this summer, getting to know Water – Rat We.

And sure it’s about doing it, and the harder I do it, the more I get out of it. But what’s the right balance? Especially when you’ve been on a long layoff. In my case, only two three- or four-milers in forty-five days. (Finished a 3.3 miler on the gym treadmill (May 4), at go-slow thirty minutes). The person I am now doesn’t sleep without difficulty. Tired, a good part of the day. I don’t recognize this non-runner person who can’t easily shrug off work hassles, who finds even a Stanley Cup overtime game lacks drama. Endorphin-less, depression sets in. I’m not as careful about what I eat and drink. We are what we do, and in many ways, these days, I am not a runner. Is Sid Crosby still a hockey player when he is on the shelf? Are you still an author when you haven’t published a book in five years? Running always has helped me set my life goals. And I’m trying to wrap my arms around this man tap-tapping into this blog, but my body, with its persistent aches and little pulls doesn’t feel like mine. I don’t know how hard I can go. Knowing that I should go slow, but finding it hard to believe any perfect moment will come along at this speed.

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals II