A, A young man I know confined to a wheelchair who doesn’t miss a beat in his courageous life, knows how to get to every elevator in the Manhattan section of the New York Subway system.
M will chart every urban journey across Manhattan and a big chunk of Brooklyn keeping in mind the location of every public bathroom.
I won’t begin a long run without having a mental picture of where I will find public drinking fountains, and how much I will need to drink from them, as I go on my way.
Author Paul Theroux once said urban neighborhoods are like a small section of a jungle that natives know and exploit to their needs and fashion. Beyond that section they are uneasy, out of place. Because that land is another group’s territory.
In each of these examples the constant is not solely the adventure that comes with willingly going outside a comfort zone. Many people do that. They travel, see and visit new places and then they return home.
Rather, in the case of the elevators, the public bathrooms and the fountains, these corridors make it possible to not only travel but to do so in command. To coin the pat phrase, when you travel to a new place, you always bring yourself with you. That, of course, meants that if you are unhappy or depressed or anxious, chances are you will be U, D, or A in Paris, Kiev or Kuala Lumpur.
But bring some health-providing, spirit-lifting knowledge with you, and perhaps you will find those bad feelings fading. In A’s case, that will be about the whereabouts of elevators, in M’s, public bathroom intel, and mine, public-fountain knowledge. In this critical area to our health and welfare, we will be in control, be better able to be ourselves, get the most our of our travel, whether it is to see a friend in Midtown or visit a distant neighborhood in Paris, and in so doing build self-esteem that will allow us to make the most out of what we see or do, and help to improve our focus on the non-trivial whether inside or outside of ourselves.
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Yesterday (Sept. 14) I registered to race in the Boston Marathon, 2012 edition, seven months from now. This time I’m hoping my house will be in order. During my last marathon on 10-10-10, the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., I found myself in terrible forefoot pain through, I dunno, about fifteen miles, and still managed to cross the line at 3:33:08, more than 10 minutes faster than the qualifying time in my age group.
What will these next seven months hold? More pain, certainly. But I’m determined to make these next 200-plus days count. Last year I was like Sidney Crosby, gunning for individual records, if not Lord Stanley’s mug for the second time, injured even before the Stanley Cup run began. Sid was felled by a nasty concussion and me by a wicked ruptured hamstring. Unlike Sid, though, I’ve managed to return to training, to rekindle a dream of running my first Boston, and crossing the finish line at or before 3:30 at the biggest name marathon in the world. Sid, though, remains stuck in limbo, not able to train so that he can return to command matters as the world’s best player in its fastest game.
Yesterday, too, I returned to the road with Thurber. It’s been months since we’ve been out running together, mostly because he’s been in Washington where K lives but also because old Thurb’s lunging tic that I discussed here in an earlier post has gotten a bit more out of hand. It’s not at the point where he has bitten someone, thank God, but we’ve begun to think we want to minimize the chances of it happening, so open-park running seemed to me one of the things that needed to go.
But you can’t keep a good Thurb down. He’ll be here in Brooklyn for the next five weeks, and we’ll be back out there. When you see him, Big Red, in a snazzy stainless steel collar, pulling me along like a rookie detective on a Tennessee manhunt, give us a wave. And a wide berth.
Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated
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