It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
When I started this literary notebook about my life as a runner, writer and reader I wouldn’t have thought that a year later I would’ve kept it going as I have. Except for a two-week hiatus earlier this month, I’ve been posting twice a week since last July. Such a discipline has my ass in a chair, writing daily, now in the subway, scribbling these notes by hand, have started new writing projects: a play that I’m feeling pretty good about, a return to the beginnings of a novel, and I’m rethinking a couple of movie scripts; I’ve pages for a book version of what’s happening here. Hardly the BLAH-G of jokes, at least for me. Rather, a necessity. A place to begin, where to paraphrase a quote that K has on her bedroom billboard, where anything of value begins in a place where nothing matters.
It has been quite a year. In running, after in May competing in my first marathon in twenty-three years (and finishing one for the first time in twenty-seven), I thoroughly surprised myself five months later by fighting through some very bad forefoot pain to run a 3:33:08 in the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., good enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon 2011, which eluded me because for the first time in my running life I suffered a serious and extremely painful injury: a torn hamstring muscle in my right leg. For two months, from March through late May, I was either laid up, struggling to walk with a cane, walking or light jogging. But now, for the past month, I’m back: shooting for an hour run minimum every other day, and weight training and stretching on the off day, combined with a 700-cal. hardcore elliptical session. So far, so good. In mid-September I’ll be ramping up the miles, but slowly this time, because the next six months are crucial: My next running goal is Boston 2012, which is Monday, April 16: Three years short of my sixtieth year.
In recap, I like to recall what I learned this past year from scientist Ben Rapoport, whose Running Endurance Calculator http://bit.ly/e8LXcT, which helped to banish the fears that at twenty miles I will inevitably hit the wall; (begone curse of Heartbreak Hill, although it has yet to be tested) not so, if you choose to follow Ben’s efforts to determine “safe, personalized racing paces over distances such as the marathon.”
Here are some past-year discoveries that have helped to keep me coming back to the blog, because, yes, as Saramago the blogger says, the division between actors and spectators is over:
– Running with Thurb. The O’Connor Morris coonhound mix, now roaming the urban reaches and occasionally the woodlands of Washington, DC-Maryland-Virginia, where not all denizens are prone to thinking John Wayne Gacy and John Wayne are one in the same. (Randy Bachman, please get on the horn to your namesake’s presidential campaign team [I know, I know there is an extra “n” in Michelle Bachmann’s name] and INSIST that she doesn’t buy the rights to use “Taking Care of Business” in her race to Iowa 2012.)
– Quaker parrots. These guys at the Con Ed substation, Brooklyn, near and at the Green-Wood Cemetery main entrance on Fifth Avenue, in good weather and bad are never in a foul mood. Loud and full of themselves, yes, but never obnoxious. They always make me smile.
– Ditto Our Lady’s Field in Windsor Terrace. I’ll be running past and a regularly scheduled game in the T-Ball League will be in progress. That will be it for the run! If there is one baseball game to see this summer that would be the line leader.
– Getting smart about training. Maybe just running every day is good enough for the Tarahumara Indians http://amzn.to/mhY8kz, but this cowboy learned the hard way that a 55-year-old body cannot run for its life by, well, just running. If I’m gonna get to Boston this time, it has to happen in a body that will be better built (read: stretched and strengthened).
– Making connnections. By writing this blog I no longer feel the crusty literalness of the expression from the Alan Sillitoe short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” I may run alone but by writing this blog I’ve been finding a new course, a voice and a bit of an audience for the actor/spectator I have become. Thank you for following along.
Next: Running for Your Life: Canada/Independence Day
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