Running for Your Life: The Merry Christmas Post

Christmas comes but once a year, and Hanukkah too. Before the New Year strikes, and the pressure of resolutions.

You know: to eat less, to exercise more, to read, to forgive.

Now, though, it's about family. To gather 'round the tree, the menorah. Today (Dec. 22) we light the candles for the eighth and final night of Hanukkah. Then, before bed, we'll get out our Christmas stockings to put on the mantle.

At our house over the holidays this year we are blessed with the return of our daughter, K. She and her boyfriend, C, and their two dogs, the gentle blue pit, Stella, and the drama king Chihuahua, Shoe-y. We will cook and drink and laugh and tell stories. Some about the origins of our ornaments that we've collected on our travels throughout the years.  Oh, yes, there will be some unwrapping of gifts. But the simple additional presence of K, C, S, and Sh will be enough.

Boy-o-boy, this post is about as sappy as Lox, our Christmas tree. (We added an two-footer golden pine, which we dubbed Goldie ....) But what the heck. It's Christmas.

Very best of the season, everyone !

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions, I Have a Few

Running for Your Life: The Next Marathon or Number 9 !

At the end of July I had pretty much made up my mind. No more marathons. After all I'd been happy doing my every other day running for twenty-three straight years before I suited up for Pittsburgh Marathon in May 2010.

But then, in my fourth marathon, only the second one that I finished all 26.2 miles, I managed to run the race in 3:47, and later that year, in Scranton, I literally shocked myself with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:33. Boston 2012 was my sixth marathon, significantly slower but it was 80 degrees F at start time, so just finishing in one piece was an achievement.

Then came my seventh, a return to Scranton and a modest sub-4 hours, followed by Nova Scotia in July, many minutes beyond four. It was hot that day, but I'd been hoping for better.

It was then I said, well, maybe that's enough. Eight marathons. There's the half, the 10K. Or just running. I mean that was good enough for twenty-three years, wasn't it?

Then a friend of mine said let's train for Albuquerque. In October. Starting race temp this year was 53  F; in 2013, 36 F; in 2012, 51.

That's more like it. And there's history. M, K and I lived in Santa Fe for a year in the early nineties. Bugs Bunny always took that wrong turn in Albuquerque. And the best damn TV show every made -- Breaking Bad -- was set in that town.

So there it is. The next race. And, oh yeah, I'll be over sixty, with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:55 in my sights .... !

Ncxt: Running for Your Life: Sixty years in 2015

Running for Your Life: “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard

You’re going to write a novel in six volumes about your life, 3,500 pages (in Norwegian) and call it “My Struggle.”

This is not a quick read, a palm-size novelette that flies out the door of your local indie bookstore. Or “Gone Girl” that clocks in at a breezy 432 pages. Even “Infinite Jest” is 1,079 pages. “Moby Dick?” 635 pages.

No, you’re going to write about your teenage flirtation with rock ’n’ roll, your remote father, the burying of your remote father, being a father, being in a tumultuous relationship with the mother of your children, your death-meditation being, your memory-excavator being, your bizarr-O hermit uncle and Heidegger fanatic whose only contact with people is during Christmas week when you’re a kid.

And it’s going to be a page-turner. A novel that according to Rachel Cusk, the real thing, if you ask me, is “perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our time.”

Just when you stop and think, nah, literary ambition is dead, along comes a novel like this. So far, in English translation by Don Bartlett, there are three volumes, with the fourth due in the US in June 2015.

I’m half-way through the second volume and it’s just as advertised. One of the great, great reads of my life; one that returns you to the source, sparks the mind to think that, yes, big, sprawling projects are not only possible, they are the wellspring of our reading and writing culture.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Marathon or Number 9!  

  

Running for Your Life: Simply Write It Down

You never know what will grow into something bigger.

For example: Overheard while . . .

Taking a break, sitting on the front stoop at home

“Let me call you back after I look at my phone.”

Running in the park, a makeup person in an open-air photo shoot

“My background is in pageants and porn.”

So many ideas, observations go fleeting by. Our brain is a marvelous treat of a thing, but we can ask too much of it. By keeping a record – by that I mean some kind of bound book with pages that you fill unmediated by phones or digital playthings (don’t tell me you can do anything more than tap rather than really write on any of these tablet thingees) – you will manage to hold on to ideas and observations that otherwise will be forgotten.

Besides there is truly something glorious about the feel of an ink pen, cursive writing-printing across an unlined page that is so calming, especially after a hard run as I’ve had today (Dec. 15), 35 minutes, just over 4 miles. Whatever cares I had before the run-write swept away by the neurochemicals that release, yes, in that aforementioned marvelous brain, now shooting waves of quiet pleasure to every pore, from toes to fingertips, and, yes, I still feel the swollen calf and stiff leg of my DVT (see previous post, Running for Your Life: Pascal Dupuis). But that is only as a footnote in a novel, the footnote that is part of the narrative but not the deepest part. Not even close.

Next: Running for Your Life: “My Stuggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard                   

Running for Your Life: Pascal Dupuis

Today (Dec. 9) while running on the treadmill for five-plus miles, sidewinding rain pelting the brave nor’easters outside the windows, folks I can see with their turned-inside-out umbrellas and humbled in hunkered-down hoodies, I’m thinking about Pascal Dupuis.

On Nov. 19, the hockey world learned that Pascal Dupuis, a longtime winger with the Pittsburgh Penguins, known for his on-ice prowess with Sidney Crosby, for working the power play, the penalty kill, seen by many as the sparkplug that makes this team of offensive stars go, be one of the most dominating teams in the National Hockey League had been diagnosed with a potentially career-ending condition: a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in his lung. Pascal Dupuis, like me, is a sufferer from deep vein thrombosis.

Recently, Pascal has returned to the ice to skate. That means the blood thinners have been doing their job. It’s anybody’s guess when, or if, Pascal will be able to play this heavy contact sport again. After all, the way Pascal plays the game: never at half-speed, headlong into the corners, ditching the easy way out, he runs a risk of doing great harm to himself. He, like me, must keep his blood thin by taking pills in order to best safeguard against another killer blood clot forming, this time not in his lung, but perhaps in his heart or, God forbid, his brain.

Pascal Dupuis was in his middle thirties when the blood clots came; I was in my early twenties. Pascal, I feel a lot different from that young man who was sick in bed, so frustrated with the fact that this had happened to him. You returned to the ice, I went out on the road and ran. To date, I’ve entered eight marathons, and completed six of them. It took me only forty-five minutes to run those five-plus miles. I’ve completed one Boston Marathon, and next year, a couple of weeks after turning sixty, I will be running in my ninth marathon (No. 9, your number, Pascal!) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the view of running faster than 3 hours 55 minutes, in order to qualify for my second Boston.

Keep your head up, Pascal. The way you’ve lived your life so far, the best things are bound to happen.

Next: Running for Your Life: Simply Write It Down

Running for Your Life: Not Fueling Well?

Feeling under the weather? Maybe you're not "fueling" well.

I've dug into my blog archives for a piece I wrote on proper nutrition, which is especially important to note during these days of stress posed by overindulgence and under-indulgence.

Try a New Meal. I’ve written about food here a lot, but recently I came upon something new to me: phytonutrients, natural chemicals found in a variety of plant foods. It turns out, according to a Sunday NY Times article, http://nyti.ms/13SKDLT) that they have been shown to help in the fight against the Boomer scourges: cancer, cardio-vascular disease and dementia.

Join me in building a New Meal, one that includes such foods as arugula, dandelion leaves, yellow corn, violet potatoes, wild blueberries . . .

Spurn mild and go for the wild. (Please note: This is written before the Reese-mad movie reviews for "Wild," the nonfiction book by Cheryl Strayed.) That seems to be the secret. Which, when you think of it, goes along with a new New Deal. As in, going off the grid. Getting away from politics and governance, where corruption is but a dark-hued storyline on stress in a land where the ultimate enemy is time, which if you allow yourself to believe in the New Meal can be caught off-guard and befriended.

Next: Running for Your Life: Just Write It Down

Running for Your Life: Eye on the Prize III

It shines for what seems a wink of the eye. So easy to miss it unless, yes, you keep your eye on the prize.

I am by no means an expert. But I know where my favorites are: On the grounds of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, down 24th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues; a pair on the wee hill at the south side of the Third Street entrance to Prospect Park, and deeper in the park, at the western porch of the Lullwater Bridge with great views of the Boathouse.

It's the late November-early December bloom of my favorite pine: the golden larch. In bright slanting sun the needles literally burn in a golden glow that is as close as I'll ever get to the riches of Fort Knox, which is okay, by my lights, because you can keep that easy money, or your Black Friday specials, the first strains of Christmas carols, the bell tolls of the churches. Stop under a golden larch and, yes, you might just say (or sing) to yourself, the best things in life are free.

Next: Running for Your Life: Simply Right It Down

 

Running for Your Life: After Ferguson

The morning after the non-indictment announcement (Nov. 25) in Ferguson, Mo., during a run along the ridge above the Vale of Cashmere in Prospect Park, I heard a staccato burst of machinery noise, immediately thinking that it must be related to some kind of racially motivated protest response to the announcement from Missouri that was coiled in rule of law while attempting to grind into pulp First Amendment expression in the form of press reports and social media opinion.

Rather, the machinery noise was arising from a squadron of leaf blowers – predominantly, if not all, blacks and Hispanics – who were working to clear the exterior grounds of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

It struck me that morning how far we have come from the Sixties. That protests have swung from the streets to social media platforms. That whites control the machinery of power; blacks, the machinery of servitude.

But, then, later that night, while dining at a Flatbush Avenue restaurant, I watched as hundreds of protesters, some carrying placards that read, Black Lives Matter, marched in the middle of the usually busy motorway at a fast pace, with some marchers coming to those of us who were cheering them on to come and join them.

It was before midnight when I started to walk in the direction of the protesters. Under the arches at Grand Army Plaza stood a small army of police; I counted a dozen 12-person vans. I came upon a second protest wannabe and encouraged him to join me in my search for the marchers. We walked a mile or more in what was ultimately a vain attempt to meet up with the Ferguson protest rovers. Two others of like mind joined us and I ended my day that started with a sense that we had come to a time in which street action – outside of Ferguson, Mo., itself, of course – was over being in a small protest march of my own making.

Next: Running for Your Life: Simply Write It Down

Running for Your Life: Eye on the Prize II

Today (Nov. 25) the winds came on a run. Thurber had the morning; I had a blissful hour before going to work. These are the days that I feel I can run forever. Brisk fall. Up and into the park, the leaves crunch underfoot. I ran – and it was beautiful – but, alas, I did not catch my leaf.

Ah, yes, the leaves. I fear another season is upon me during which I will not catch in my bare hand a falling leaf as I run through the park. Tomorrow (Nov. 26), the forecast is for a final leaf shakedown of a nor’ easter, within which I will not run because of the very real possibility of injury from fallen branches, a clearer danger now than in years past due to the decline in tree maintenance from budget cuts that swept every public department in my adopted country since Ronald Reagan and his merry men and women perpetrated the fable that government defunding would encourage private investment in job-creating capital, the bastard son of trickle-down, what was good for the billionaires was good for the nation.

All of which is to say that if I were put odds on my catching a leaf of those that will fall from near-barren trees during the days after the nor’ easter, I’d have to put it down to about one in a million.

But, in my running-for-your-life life, I like those odds.

Next: Running for Your Life: After Ferguson  

Running for Your Life: Eye on the Prize

I had just turned fifteen when the October Crisis was at its peak. In those days in Canada, I didn’t follow the news very carefully. But Prime Minister Trudeau had recently installed martial law following the kidnapping of two dignitaries. Trudeau’s response to a question on the TV news about how far he was willing to go in suspending civil rights hooked me, is the traceable starting point to a lifelong passion in public affairs.

Just watch me, Trudeau said.

That phrase returns to me often. In Trudeau’s case, he believed action needed to be taken to restore order. As he said in that interview 44 years ago, “I think the society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power in this country and I think that goes to any distance.” 

Just watch me.

We’re obviously talking about vastly different stakes, but when it comes to personal choices we have to take action. In my case, believing that moving to New York City in 1988 was the right thing, even when work and love weren’t anything but sure things. Or, on a different level, going for a run – not a light jog or a walk – but a fast-paced run every other day since I left the hospital thirty-eight years ago after having recovered from serious blood clots to my legs and lung.

Just watch me. The phrase pays for anyone. In a dead-end job, believe in yourself and follow your passion. You’ll get what you want if you keep your eye on your prize.

Whatever it is, don’t settle. Believe it or not, even though on the face of it the stakes are vastly different (martial law or not, lawyer Pierre Laporte was assassinated during the October Crisis; his kidnappers served twenty years to life for the crime), it does, in the end, come down to matters of life and death. Your life … and keeping death at bay.

Next: Running for Your Life: Do Races Matter?

Running for Your Life: “The Last of the Just” by Andre Schwarz-Bart

I admire the tells of this title, a finalty that speaks of end times – in the story of the Jews the drama never recedes. (Certainly that has been my own considerable personal experience!)

In each generation there exists, as foretold, thirty-six just souls who like a dispersed battalion of prophets submerges the self and elevates the cause; in this case the survival of good Jews who are defined by their righteous practices.

Me, I’m drawn to this book, written by Andre Schwarz-Bart, because it delivers on a message that makes sense to me on this level: karma. Acts taken now and in the past that are not visible to the naked eye; we are not so simple, we creatures. We all have been affected by those who have gone before, and those who play that special role in our lives today, and will so in the future.

It is a humbling notion to think that we are to honor the just souls, that, in the spirit of the myth given voice in this powerful novel that takes us to some of the darkest moments in human history, throughout time we will be blessed with “The Last of the Just,” the gift of their power and sacrifice.

Next: Running for Your Life: Eye on the Prize

Running for Your Life: CitizenFour CitizenFour CitizenFour

Do yourself a favor and see this movie. Think “Citizen Kane” or “Metropolis” or “Casablanca” with the thriller tempo of Wes Craven.

Better to see the scenes of fugitive Ed Snowden at the theater rather than at home. The bigger the screen the better, baby. Me, I gotta see it again just to admire the Snowden close-ups. What’s behind the headlines, you ask? CitizenFour does that tired line much better. Watching him, listening to him as the story unfolds, that is beyond words better than any of the headlines you can imagine. And I should know. I write headlines for a living.

Don’t wait. See it now. Think of it like a terrible accident in your neighborhood. Do you wait until someone gets a video of it, or comes back to tell you about it secondhand. No, you race out the door and go to the scene because it is happening now. Not next week, or next month. But now.

So go. Buy a ticket online or at the box office and see the movie of the millennium, CitizenFour.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Last of the Just” by Andre Schwarz-Bart

Running for Your Life: Fall. Because It Keeps You Going

On Marathon Sunday (Nov. 2) in New York City – with the singular menacing exception of Sandy Sunday in 2012 – brings running to the fore. On this day we are all runners.

This is the season that whilst running I will catch a leaf without any help but the wind, impossible to intuit, a jolt of luck, the real thing, that brings a leaf to me to be held aloft, never touching the ground, for placement on the very full of dry leaves tackboard on the wall behind my basement writing workspace.

Fall is the season, and I’ve never been able to understand why, that the second wind will come on a run. Not every time, mind you, but often enough that it qualifies as exceptional. In fall, I will more often than any other season feel that I can literally run forever, that on a six-miler, a ten-miler, a sixteen-miler, I will come up the street toward home and feel like a million bucks. No, better than that. Lots better than a million bucks.

Because it does, you know, keep you going. It’s hot, humid in July and the sweat is literally pouring, a two-miler, at times, feeling too much to bear; in early November, the chill in the air, the wind at your back and it’s all you can do to hold yourself down, to not fly like a bird.

Cool spring days have their merits, of course. But there is something about those first weeks of chill after summer’s ropy fog. The crystal blue skies, the wetness of the air, the lungs; it’s the lungs, the song they are singing that carries you along like nothing else.

Next: Running for Your Life: CitizenFour CitizenFour CitizenFour   

Running for Your Life: Love Those October Days

When it comes to running there is no month like October. Cool and wet, and when the sun comes out the light on the leaves: orange, my favorite, red, yellow (close second), and all the shades in between and beyond – burgundy ! – erupt like a van Gogh brushstroke, at least that is what counts for scenery in the park up the hill from where I live, and, yes, when I don’t run with my teeth-gnashing, drooling-mad hound Thurber, I’m on task as I run in this divine space, aiming to catch – not trap against my body – but catch in my hand one of those leaves as it falls to the ground, which I will take with me on the run, held aloft like some buried treasure relieved from its hole and on its way to its rightful place on the mantle of some medieval castle held in the family against the better judgment of the accountant but not the poet.

Next: Running for Your Life: Fall. Because It Keeps You Going

Running for Your Life: Knock on Wood Dept.

I was startled the other day, waking up with a sore throat. I can’t remember, literally, the last time I had the flu or a cold. The flu was probably my last flu shot, sometime in the previous century.

So what did I do? I drank a big glass of water with my morning coffee. Later, I ran hard, about an hour, or these days, a little over six miles. Usually I will sweat it out, the cold and flu, that is.

Still, I felt a little punk, as my mother would say. It was the weekend, so I could take it easy, and I did. Two days later (Oct. 19) I felt fine. No symptoms at all.

Running hard every other day like I do is the equivalent of having apple season three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Because if an apple a day keeps the doctor away, a run every other day does the same.

Next:  Love Those October Days

Running for Your Life: A Power Seething

Regular readers – well, actually, even irregular readers – of this blog will know that the posts here rest on three codas: running, writing and reading. There are certainly scads of the first category but not so much of the third. So, rejoice readers. This one’s for you.

The book, that is. By Julian Bell, the painter-author with the Grade A bloodlines.

It’s called “Van Gogh: A Power Seething,” a short, intense study of the massive, intense, all-too-short life of Vincent Van Gogh, heretofore to be known as my emotional anti-hero.

Even the most Philistine among us knows that Van Gogh is the painter who in a rage mutilated his ear. Never an ear bud to be stuck in his head.

Who knew, though, that Van Gogh could write. Bell, for one. And he has an ear for the Vincent Bon Mot.

A sampler:

• “One can’t present oneself as somebody who can be of benefit to others or who has an idea that’s bound to be profitable – no, on the contrary, it’s to be expected that it will end with a deficit and yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done.”

• “His (Jean-Francois Millet’s) peasant seems to be painted with the soil he sows.”

• It was only through persistent attention to nature, through a reverence for “the true, the possible,” for “a few clods of earth,” that genuine achievement might arise.

• The best hope for the artist lay in concentrating on a mere “atom of chaos,” in concretely working “to define one single thing.”

• “Pride intoxicates like drink. When one is praise and has drunk one becomes sad.”

• The painter may be in hell, but painting is still heaven.

Next: Running for Your Life: Love Those October Days

Running for Your Life: Why Race?

It’s a question I asked myself after the Nova Scotia Marathon in July. And one that comes my way pretty much every other day.

What’s your next race, Larry?

My skin doctor, a runner himself and enthusiast of those reverse-aging types like myself, marathoners who are approaching sixty (the past Sunday [Oct. 5] I turned fifty-nine), has recommended the Jersey Shore marathon (it’s flat and not in a hot-weather month) and I was impressed to see that my pal Marty and his wife Jane completed The Country half-marathon on my birthday. I would love to run The County one day.

I’m still not sure when. Maybe I’ll restrict myself to a half-marathon for a year, with the view to training for a marathon after I’ve turned 60.

When I began running almost forty years ago, I had a simple goal. To keep healthy. I was a pup, only twenty years old, when I landed in hospital with blood clots to my leg, groin and lung. My sudden decline stumped doctors. For months afterward, I was on megadose blood thinners. In those days, doctors didn’t have a great deal of experience with a twenty-year-old suffering from serious geriatric-style health problems. When I asked what I should do to improve my health, they said, Walk don’t run. Take it easy.

I didn’t take it easy for very long. I started running every other day before my twenty-first birthday. I still do that today.

But if I go three days without a run, my left leg swells up uncomfortably. It’s not about the blood clots. I haven’t had a serious clot since 2001. But my left leg has damaged vein valves, so much so that my calf, especially after a non-running day, expands to twice the size of my healthy calf. It doesn’t hurt, because I was blessed with healthy veins that serve as a bypass for the blood that doesn’t move freely through my damaged leg veins. These are called collaterals.

All of which is to say, why race? For years before I run the Brooklyn Half in 2009, it was enough to simply run for my life. Maybe I’m in transition. Race, or not race? Given my health history, this is a good problem to have.

Next: Running for Your Life: Love Those October Days 

Running for Your Life: Runners and Bikers: What's to Be Done?

When it comes to spaces like Brooklyn's Prospect Park, head for the desire paths in the woods and along the man-made waterways. Go where the speed demon bikers can't go. One mowed down and killed a mother of two in Central Park last month. So slow down, put to potential sacrifice your knees and ankles. Because when it comes to race bikers on an open asphalt roadway, they've got a potential killer under their butts.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why Race?

Running for Your Life: When Training Itself Isn't the Goal

What are we but an aggregation of our habits? We have destinies, sure. A son goes to war. A girl is born into poverty in Africa. A child is born to two Democratic-voting lawyers in Park Slope.

Change doesn’t figure in the human story quite the way we’ve been led to believe from our founding myths and fables. We mourn the warrior dead, but yet that path honors sacrifice, often, sadly, at a far too early age. In return there’s color guard burial, Arlington Cemetery in the center of our nation’s capital, still the most powerful nexus of our known universe.

So if change is hard to come by, good habits, for those of us with modest means, are not: eat well, sleep soundly, sing lullabies to babies, drink responsibly, compete hard in a sport, run for your life.

Thankfully, that’s what I’ve been able to do. Run for my life. In 2016, that will be the case for forty years, every other day, at the least, or during marathon training, of course, much more than that. Today (August 31) I ran hard, five miles in forty-five minutes, a pace I can manage these days. It was hot and humid, but I did not stop except to drink a little at a public fountain.

How do you keep at it? You don’t stop. Each day I run is different. For some, I’m itching to go, others I can’t seem to drag myself up and out of a chair. Habit, though, becomes ingrained: like eating well, doing good deeds, as simple as collecting plastic bags that blow in great numbers on the paths that I run; in five miles I’ll gather, two, three, four as they dance on the ground in the wind, and bring them home to be used as pick-up bags for Thurber, our redbone coonhound. You do what you do because you have to. Because it is what you do.

What role does passion play? It’s different. It’s different every day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Runners and Bikers: What’s to Be Done? 

Running for Your Life: Important Correction

If Oak Park, Illinois, is America’s Tree City then Park Slope, Brooklyn, is America’s Discarded  Plastic Bag City; in Park Slope, Black, is, decidedly, a minority plastic.

Next: Running for Your Life: When Training Isn’t the Goal

Running for Your Life: So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

If Oak Park, Illinois, is America’s Tree City then Park Slope, Brooklyn, is America’s Discarded Black Plastic Bag City.

Overheard while walking home with two black plastic bags filled with fresh fruit, a “mother” reading in a singsong voice to a rapt toddler from what looks like either a fussy greeting card, the ones with multiple hard-board pages, or a pocket children’s book, the kind that flies out the door from the cash counter at independent bookstores, “His favorite place was Starbucks . . .”

Next: Running for Your Life: When Training Isn’t the Goal

Running for Your Life: So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

Overheard near the entrance to Fourth Avenue, Union Street subway entrance, man dressed in beachwear, flip flops, fanny pack! cargo shorts, casual-est T, “Tell me, what are we going to do with the outlets in Switzerland.”

Overheard during run in Prospect Park, “state-of-the-art barn …” (Somehow I don’t think the woman was talking about cow milking machines or the latest in latrine technology.)

Overheard at Fifth Avenue, Eighth Street Citibank branch, Caucasian man in oversized bike helmet, frumpy athletic clothes, in a loud, angry voice to an African-American bank clerk, “Fix it today or I’ll be handing over my Citi gold card!”  

Next: Running for Your Life: When Training Isn’t the Goal

Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Four or Whirligig Wonder

Only racers go to motel breakfasts at 6 a.m. Sundays; it has to be funny to see us all come in, skinny legs and all

It was a good thing K and I had been to the Barrington Rec Center the day before. No way in hell we could’ve found it before race time at 8 a.m. Sunday

Oh yes, the car’s dipstick is still showing full, not a sliver lower than at the auto show at Woodstock  

Ten minutes before the 8 a.m. start no one is standing under the banner; we are among the first to line up, the fulls, the halfs, and the 10Ks –  eventually the 10Ks are told to split up and go about a football field away where at one point the starter asks through the public address system if anyone in the 10K group can hear her. No one says a word in reply. She asks the question again, slightly louder, and a man in front (there are more than one hundred of them in the group) gingerly raises his hand

After On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! we trundle off; eighty-four marathoners, double that for halfs. K urges me to run ahead and I do, Go Dado! she says with a “Boston” look in her eye

It’s quite cool at the start but not at the finish, which is still as the Bayou. Along the way, few signs are out, not a lot of roadside cheers. “Half-Marathoners Are Only Half-Crazy,” and in front of a church beyond the twenty-mile mark, “Remember Why You’re Out Here!” (I couldn’t and stopped and walked for a spell)

The best bit: Under the burning sun at the 16-mile mark, with a hard-to-fathom 10.2 miles to go, I see along the roadside a row of handmade wooden signlets with first names printed in black block letters. There’s a slew of them and when I see the name LARRY I tell myself that they have been placed there by the Nova Scotia Marathon organizers to honor the runners, which certainly helps salve the sting of the motorist who flipped me the bird at the 9-mile mark in response to my smiling wave to him

At the 12 miles I’m making good time and begin to pace ahead of a guy I’d been running with when the fella cries to me, “See you at the hills!” “What hills?” I reply       

Finally the finish line is in sight. More than four hours, twenty-five minutes since that 8 a.m. start. I’ll have finished six of eight marathons, but this will be my slowest. K is there, though, as I manage a final kick. During the last 400 meters I make my best time of the race. There’s a medal, chocolate mile and a sweaty hug from K

She’d done OK in the half! Ran all the way, that’s my girl!

Before heading on to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and the ferry to Portland (an 11-hour trip with 5,000 Muzakian versions of “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” Word of caution: Bring earplugs!) K and I head back for an afternoon in Shelburne, our new favorite place, where on a fence-top I see it. The steely-eyed lobsterman, his wooden arms wheeling a mile a minute in the never-let-up breeze, where ten years ago the ultimately unwatchable “Scarlett Letter” starring Demi Moore was being filmed, the locals never tire of telling us, there are two lobster pots in the back of my hero’s whirligig skiff, and K and I are hooked, we later learn there is a whirligig festival in Shelburne every year and standing before the work-obsessed face of the lobsterdude we make our pledge to come back to this place, not to run a marathon, but to conceive, design and build our own whirligigs and fly them in the 16^th annual festival in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in September 2015!

Next: Running for Your Life: When Training Isn’t the Goal

Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Three

Just folks live with majestic Fundy Bay views above ferryside Saint John, New Brunswick, where towheads learn to skip stones from their pops; one father throws a sinker, then recovers, skims a seven

I try to rest on the ferry but no dice. I’ve parked the car on an incline and have visions of the deck floor being covered with slick oil from the diagnosed terminal leak and elder Yanks, South Asian families and lifetime fishermen slipping and falling on the treacherous floor surface as they try to go to their cars at the end of the trip

But no. When we go to the car as we enter the darling port of Digby, Nova Scotia, I again check the oil. The level, mysteriously and unbelievably, is still holding firm

We’re directed off the highway to the historic Acadia way where we make two memorable stops

1/ At a pier walk farmers’ market, the stalls are plank-empty and there’s nothing to buy, a toilet with paper and places to sit along the shore wall, sights of crabs scuttling in the low tide mud, rivulets pulling back to the sea, the power of nature in a thimble of water, and sandpipers, not by the dozens but enough, and KILLDEER! I forget the name but then it comes to me, like a shot to the heart

 2/ Behind a lighthouse along the coast where on a clear day you can see the spit of land where the whales come, K and I walk down to a ledge, the wind with shards of ice in late July, mind you, and covering the shore rocks like a wench’s hair is massive tresses of kelp with not a seal or a sea lion or an otter in sight

Landmark churches of Acadia, French Canada, doilies on the sofas, tea for breakfast, poutine for lunch. Even the gas bars shout stay away

The English rule in Barrington, though, where we arrive as late as is deemed prudent, 7 p.m., credential closing time for the 44^th edition of the Nova Scotia Marathon, a manila folder with our orange-hued public warning to be aware of morning drivers, a T-shirt that’s shriek-loud orange, and a raffle. We put in our names, and not even a loonie is demanded, and I wonder out loud if the medium-dog-sized rosy-red toy lobster, the marathon mascot, is the prize, and the bored teen who is alone manning the desk at the Barrington Recreation Center doesn’t miss a beat. “Just take it. Please. No questions asked

In Shelburne, Nova Scotia, we put our things in the motel room. And go to the one place where you can still get dinner at 9 p.m. on a summer Saturday night. The Sea Dog Saloon. With a red ale they call Boxing Rock

For dinner we sit by the harbor, one of the oldest on the eastern seaboard. There’s a skiff anchored with a Jolly Roger flying, and in the distance a lone mansion in the woods. K smiles under the most beautiful sunset I’ve seen outside of the Rockies and says, D, that’ll be my summer house, indicating the skiff bobbing on the gentle waves, and beyond, the house in the bush, my winter one.

Next: Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Four   

Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Two

K and my unforgettable motor trip last month had less to do with the big race, the 44^th edition of the Nova Scotia Marathon along the exquisite blue coastline of Canada’s most picturesque province. Rather, it was a marathon of stories, of moods, of laughter, of drama, of infinite surprises.

Consider:

Lunch at Dinosaur State Park, Rocky Hill, Conn., next to the butterfly bush garden with a butterfly caution sign

On an jammed but fast-moving interstate north of Boston, with the car windows open because K and I both detest A/C, a rogue wind literally ripped the only map we had that took us from Massachusetts to the Maine-New Brunswick border, and whipped it out the open passenger window. It did not land on a windshield of one of the cars behind us. Thankfully

Under a shade tree in the Shaker Village near Gray, Maine, we whiled away an hour in adjacent Adirondack chairs. We admired a cat – and we don’t like cats

Hours later we realized from looking at the $#@&&^ Mapquest journey printout that a significant part of our trip required that we take a car ferry, upon which we had not made a reservation. Heretofore, we thought there was a bridge between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia that linked Saint John to Digby. That would a 49-mile-long bridge. The longest in the world is the Quindao Haiwan in China at 26 miles.

“Good afternoon, yes, can I help you?” the chirpy sales clerk at the ferry service said to K, calling from her smartphone.

“We’d like to book a spot on your ferry,” K said.

“Do you have a car?”

“Yes.”

“What date were you looking at?” the clerk beamed. It was late on a Friday.

“Tomorrow morning?” K asked sheepishly.

Amazingly, on a Saturday morning in late July, the height of tourist season, they had space. Not much. But enough

Two miles inside the Maine-New Brunswick border we stopped at a visitors center that was minutes from the border. K wasn’t keen; she wanted to put some serious miles behind us. But we had no maps, and the car … In the past couple of years or so it has been reliable, and a week before had been given the all-clear by my trustworthy mechanic, but it was emitting a strange smell. Like burning rubber.

In Maine it was 5:55 p.m., but in New Brunswick, we lost an hour; it was almost 7 p.m., closing time at the visitors center when we left with stacks of maps and brochures.

In the parking lot I had a thought before getting back on the road … I checked the oil. To my utter dismay the dipstick was bone dry. K and I stood dumbfounded, alone in the empty parking lot, staring at the thing. Now what do we do?

“Car trouble?” said a middle-aged man, the manager of the visitors center, in a heavy French accent. I guess the open hood and our long faces were a dead giveaway. He had driven up behind us without our noticing.

“Yes, oil, we –  ”

“Here, maybe this will help,” he said. The man must have anticipated our problem because before approaching us he had grabbed an extra quart of oil that he had in his trunk.

After I put his oil in my car engine, the man gave us complicated-sounding directions, half-French, half-English, to the nearest auto repair shop. We blinked at him million-mile stares, and he said, “C’mon. Follow me.”

We did, of course. The Canadian Tire was open for business. Brady, at the emergency bay, put her up on the hoist, and then, shaking his head while wiping his hands with oil that seemed to be just about everywhere on the underside of the car, delivered the news: the rear engine mount seal was gone. The engine wouldn’t stop leaking. Eventually it will have to undergo a car-killing overhaul, but here, try some heavy oil, it won’t leak as fast, you know; yeah, four quarts at first, and use this seal repair additive, check the dipstick every one hundred miles or so, and hope for the best. Good luck

K and I drove on toward Saint John. At the first fifty miles, I checked it. The oil level was holding firm.

Starved, we looked for something, anything open at 9 p.m. in Fredericton. Out on the Trans Canada, there’s a 24-hour Tim’s, of course. But we needed a real meal. Spotted an A&W, shrugged, the drive-thru would have to do, but in trying to turn in was so tired that I missed it. Instead, we found ourselves in the parking lot of the Hilltop Grill, a steak and fern bar. Live music on Saturday, but it was Friday and there was still some action. Here, K would have her first Moosehead ale on tap. I daresay, after the day we had, the memories this trip will deposit in our brains, it won’t be her last. I can’t remember when it was I enjoyed an ale on tap as much as that first sip of Moosehead with K on the night road to Saint John.

Next: Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Three

Running for Your Life: The Horror

 Public notice in the Etats-Unis/US waiting room, Terminal Three, Lester B. Pearson International Airport :

All passengers are invited      

      to enjoy our enhanced seating and iPads

while waiting for a flight.

                                     Restaurant purchases are not required.

Next: Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Two

Running for Your Life: Sometimes Not There!

Boston Marathon race bibs are brought to you by John Hancock.

Steamtown Marathon (2013) race bibs are brought to you by Subway restaurants.

Nova Scotia Marathon race bibs are brought to you by … folks, just folks.

In our personalized race envelopes, along with that uncluttered race bib and an Orange Crush-colored T-shirt, was tucked these gems, the second and third of seven bullets of essential information before we started on the Sunday morning race of 26.2 miles (that’s 42.2 kilometers in Canada):

SAFETY FIRST   

• This is not a closed route – PLEASE WATCH OUT FOR Church services, Tim Hortons and McDonald’s runs for morning coffee drinkers, men driving from wharf to wharf!
• Shoulders on road – sometimes not there!

Next: Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood, Part Two

Running for Your Life: Light in August

After a marathon, the pause. And in it, falls light.

Training, in its obsessive preoccupation, is akin to grief. The person who deeply grieves goes away. She leaves the equivalent of the dishes from two meals in the sink, doesn’t dust her things or clear clutter from tabletops and counters. You may even seem the same to others on the street who aren’t privy to your personal life. But what’s around you, when you emerge from your “away” state, has altered.

That’s how it feels now for me, after having completed the 100-day before-and-after training for the Nova Scotia Marathon. Like waking from a 100-day sleep; in my case though, a slumber of my own making.

Crossing the finish line of a marathon, especially with a loved one there to greet me, is an indescribable feeling. That’s why I suppose in the past I have found myself back in a training head before too long. I’ve found that that feeling is worth every minute of the training, and the “away”ness that goes with it.

Because now it’s Light in August. Not just William Faulkner, the author of that title, a favorite of mine, but my own writing and “My Struggle” by Knausgaard, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki” by Murakami, “Subtle Bodies” by Norman Rush, Anything by Anne Carson, “Ecstatic Cahoots” by Stuart Dybek, art by Ai Weiwei and Sigmar Polke.

There has been a surfeit of running; now it’s a glorious time, in the Light of August, to restore and revive in the “home” – to read and write and sometimes, run.

Next: Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Mood

Running for Your Life: Nova Scotia Marathon

K and I did it! My daughter ran every step of the half and I “cruised” (ran-walked) the full in what was bar none the most memorable marathon of my life. Just when I thought “the marathon” stirs the predictable along comes the pristine, no frills, no chip-time run of a lifetime, the 44^th annual Nova Scotia Marathon.

Photos to come in this space. Now, though, it is time for this: love and admiration for my road darling daughter that I shout from the Brooklyn rooftops. She (the young woman on the right side panel of this blog) who greeted with a proud, joyous smile when I needed it most back at the 17-mile mark during the Pittsburgh Marathon in May 2010. A runner. Just like her pops.

To be with her at the start, with only two hundred and change runners in tiny Barrington, Nova Scotia, at 8 a.m. July 27, among us, and then hailing me at the finish line at Barrington Passage at the finish line on that hot sunny day more than four hours later, cheering me in our identical subway-chair orange marathon Ts, is a memory that will always stay with me. K was no bystander this day, four years after that rainy day in Pittsburgh, but the effect on me was just the same, pushing me to finish on the run, the hardest and happiest that I can remember.

What, I ask, is better than that? Outside of celebrating a certain 25^th wedding anniversary next month, it beats me. It sure as hell beats me.

Next: Running for Your Life: Light in August

Running for Your Life: Days Before the Race

Nova Scotia here we come!

It’s hard to imagine but race day is just about upon us. K and I. On Thursday morning (July 24) we’re heading out, from Red Hook and Park Slope to Nova Scotia. And on Sunday, the Nova Scotia Marathon along the southern coast!

Neither of us has been to the province, home to the Bluenose http://bit.ly/WDigSI and Sidney Crosby http://bit.ly/1tAVaH9. For me, it is particularly gratifying to be on home soil running my eighth marathon. Back in the distant early and mid-'80s, I ran the National Capital Marathon in Ottawa and a border one – Windsor-Detroit. But this is my first one in the Maritimes.

While I’d like to think I will again qualify for Boston (which, at my age requires a minimum best time of 3:40), my goal isn’t so precise. Rather, only that I enjoy each and every moment with my daughter, and on the course, stay within myself, feel the succor of those miles and hours of training, the days of stretching and weight training, the benefit of the bread (thanks C and K!) and pasta and cakes and cookies I’ve been chowing down in these final days before the gun goes off in tiny Barrington, Nova Scotia, the Lobster Capital of Canada.

If you think of it, send a prayer or a thought balloon for K and me this weekend. It’s going to be a blast !

Next: Running for Your Life: Light in August

Running for Your Life: Treadmill Time

There was a time not so long ago when I avoided the treadmill like a cold-fingered dentist. What was up with that? Running like a hamster in a cage when I could be outside. Especially on brilliant June days like the ones we’ve been blessed with this year.

Now – and it’s funny that word, isn’t it? Now carries with it such weight. Imputed is the idea of change, before and after. We like to think of our early self as being available to us. But no. It’s an illusion. We have only impressions of what we believed, or were feeling; some of us, of course, are pretty damn certain they would recognize, maybe even embrace, that early self if by some trick or fantasy they were to encounter her, on the subway, say, or in line at the bank.

Me, I’m wary of the trusting and prideful.  Truth is, I’ve only got a fleeting sense of the now. And I consider myself a thoughtful person.

After all that – Now, following decades of running, I’m not the guy who started, just out the door, in shoes with worn soles, an ill-fitting cap, ratty T. Now, I’m in runner shorts, a tank top in summer months, a cap that soaks up sweat at the brim, compression calf socks to ward off shin splints, patella stabilizing Velcro pads below my knees, lightweight runner socks, newish Brooks neutral-strike running shoes, which inside contain custom-made orthotics for recurrent left foot pain during extra-long runs, each item of gear like sacral garments that I put on slowly, like a priest does as he begins the day, putting on the layers, moving through the rhythms that hold the meaning that comes from a devotion to time-tested repetition.

It’s why sometimes it’s not the outdoors I need but the treadmill. It never used to be the case, but now it is. I’ll need to put in, say, six miles, and even if it’s beautiful and not stinking hot and humid out as it has been this last week or so (July 10 through 16), I head to the treadmill, ramp it up to, say, an 8:40-per-mile pace, about twenty seconds per mile faster than I intend to run a week Sunday (July 27) at the Nova Scotia Marathon, and run. I don’t listen to music, let the strings of earbuds dangle at my side. I run with that fleeting sense of now, the past, and yes, the future.

Next: Running for Your Life: Days Before the Race!

Running for Your Life: Over the Hump

When it comes to marathons, you never know, but with fewer than six weeks to go before the big day (Sunday, July 27, Barrington County, Nova Scotia), so far, so good.

What I’ve come to know about running in marathons (completing five) since I began this relatively crazy pursuit is that it predictions are of little merit.

Suffice to say that for this race I’m pretty much on schedule. Long runs? I did run for going onto three hours three weeks ago in Barcelona, a city of beaches where I loped along the Mediterranean to a development known for its giant solar panel, along a boardwalk with a slew of nightspots and pier prix-fixe seafood restaurants out toward a patio-stone esplanade (pretty much empty of runners except for the occasional clutch of American ex-patriots who I swear exult “USA! USA! USA!” as they fist-pump along in red, white and blue bandanas) and on to the spinnaker-shaped W Hotel, then back to Olympic Park Village, named for the wondrously strange failed Catalan utopia of Icaria, to Ciutadella Park where the minstrels and jugglers and gymnastic partners and piñata-punishing children delights as the tourist with a touch of class wend their way for hours in the waning sun.

Those seventeen miles went by relatively easily; it’s flat in that part of Barcelona, like the Nova Scotian coastline I’m be running along in six weeks, similar again to my next long run and walk, a minimum of eighteen, out along the Hudson River Park in Manhattan planned for Thursday (June 19); I’m training differently this time, with intermittent one-minute walk breaks because at fifty-eight it seems advisable, especially given the title of this blog – Running for Your Life – and I’d like to not repeat my experience in Steamtown last October, which wasn’t a fun time. At the sixteen-mile mark I started to break down and the next ten miles, well … Not pretty. Am hoping this easier training regimen will make it better for me. But as I said, you never know. You just gotta get out there, get the miles in ….

Next: Running for Your Life: Treadmill Time 

Running for Your Life: Road Warriors

Runners are weird. Deeply. If we miss, say, two days in a row we’re not fit for human company. Or dogs, for that matter. Cats, sure. Cats don’t give a shit. They’ll hang with ax murderers.

So imagine how I felt Saturday when on a loping run in party-choked Prospect Park my right foot landed awkwardly on a root and twisted under my full weight so that for a millisecond all that force came down on the outside bone/muscle of my ankle. I winced with terrible pain that shot up my leg and – kept on running. For another three miles.

Not a good idea, right? Still, after about forty years of running you learn a thing or two. Or hope you do. Hope that your body keeps healing like it has pretty much from the beginning.

Like a quality car that gets road time and good maintenance, a well-conditioned and fed body can take a beating and keep on shining. As a driver we know how far we can push that car, in my case a late-model Volvo. It will be taking K and me to Canada next month for the sea views of the running events during the Nova Scotia Marathon in Barrington County.

Runners, crazy runners, know what we can get away with. In my case, my ankle ballooned with a sprain. My wife was alarmed with the sick look of it. It was wrapped with ice when I called the Belmont Stakes winner (Tonalist – I don’t bet, but in the prance to the starting gate I do have a knack of calling long-shot winners). The next day I wrapped the ankle with gauze tape and danced the night away at the wedding of beloved young friends, iced it again on Monday before work and on Tuesday (June 10), I ran and felt no pain. The base of the foot is black and blue but the swelling is down – and I loped for thirty minutes and felt great while making these track notes.

To run a marathon is to adopt this mentality.The road warrior mindset. No one can train for a marathon without pain. It happens. And unless we break bones in essential limbs, we keep going. That’s the nature of this beast of a task: covering 26.2 miles in the most efficient, and least body-breaking way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Over the Hump 

Running for Your Life: Track Work!

Thought of the day, from thirty-five minute cruiser training run:

Today’s most accomplished hand-eye coordinated experts can speed-walk and text on a busy urban street without causing serious harm to themselves or to other similarly occupied passersby !

The blog title above might suggest advice on how best to gain strength and speed by incorporating track-style training in a marathon regime.

Not this blog. For me, track work refers to the writing and drawing I do while commuting by train to my office job five days a week. (That workday starts at 12:30 p.m. when the NYC subway is blissfully peopled so I don’t have to share a seat on a bench ninety percent of the time.) I pull my journal from my bag and write. Sometimes blog entries like this one, sometimes dialogue from stories or novels that I’m working on, poems and pen sketches I do of my fellow train riders. Watch this space for examples of my track work, which I’d like to post here during the weeks leading up to K and my dream marathon in Nova Scotia this July.

Track work because as I work I hear the sound of the steel wheels on the track. It’s funny but as the days pass – not as I get older because I reject the inherent limit of that construction – I find that I work to fill moments with something that nourishes. In my running, that’s a natural predisposition to eat carbs, gorge on fruit and enjoy the delicious homemade juices that M has taken to make for us, or following closely the training regimen that has me walking and running in these early days. I’ve written a lot in this space about listening to your body. Now, at fifty-eight, I feel I’m actually doing it.

Track work is the mental side of that equation. Writing and sketching in my journal settles me for the workday ahead. I am ready to change gears and do my challenging, creative work at the New York Post. As always I’m energized by my running, my writing and my reading (currently the “City of Ambition” by Mason Williams http://nyti.ms/1uC1PT4  about the dual New Deal accomplishments of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; massively relevant to today’s stasis in matters of public philosophy) and now, for the better part of a year, by my Track Work! as well. (Images to come!)

My advice? Honor that special place where you go to plug in, re-energize. For me, it’s always been primarily connected to words, and lately, the lines that I put down in my journal.

Next: Running for Your Life: The First Fourteen Days 

Running for Your Life: A Very Special Marathon

Next stop, Nova Scotia.

K and I are set on running the Nova Scotia Marathon along the southern sea coast of that marvelous province on Sunday, July 27, my mom’s and K’s gramma’s eighty-second birthday. O boy! Is that an exciting proposition!

The 100-day mark measured out to include a recovery week into the first week of August begins Monday (April 28).

For K it will be her first 26.2 miler, although she has been running for many months now on a regular basis, often with her lovable blue pit Stella at her side. It fun to think of running with Thurb and K running with Stella. Soon, we will be all in the same ZIP code, but that, as they say, is another story.

So soon the stories from weeks of training will be documented here. Do yourself a favor and run, or jog, or walk along with us as we make our way to Barrington, Canada’s Lobster Capital, Nova Scotia in July. I am so psyched to say that K is a chip off the old block, while I’m feeling chips in the old knees.

It will be interesting to see how it all comes out. But I couldn’t be more proud and happy to have her very special company for this race. Are we thinking Boston this time? Hardly. Just joy. Pure and simple joy of running for your life, 26.2 miles of it, along the seashore of my native land with K.

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work! 

Running for Your Life: So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

“You keep an open mind long enough, your brain will fall out.”

–        Kirk Nicewonger

Paid poster at R Train, Manhattan-bound station:

Sizable image of a mixed race boy (think African American/Jewish) with mop of black curly hair, million dollar smile, one pointed tooth, eyeglasses with tiny hearts on frame corners, writing with a pen before open books and papers in blurry foreground:

Words: Where can you learn Mandarin in kindergarten, study Logic in 7^th grade and Economics in 8^th Grade?

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work!

Running for Your Life: Reverse Age That Body

I’ve written a lot in this space about turning back the clock. You’d think in the years that I’ve been running for my life there has been some slowing down. And, yes, I suppose that’s true. I’m unlikely to test that Steamtown 2010 time of 3:33:08 ever again. But when it comes to reverse aging that hardly matters. Performance is not measured in time alone.

Two days after April Fool’s Day I woke early from persistent jet lag. (M and I returned March 31 from a two-week trip to Hong Kong and Thailand, more on that at another time.) For about a week after arriving home, I found sleep difficult. Two, three hours of hard sleep and then I’m up, wide awake at 2 a.m., 3 a.m.

I manage four hours of deep rest, but at 6 a.m., it was all over. Soon I was out with T, did errands of various sorts, fixed myself a little breakfast, and then, exhausted, went back to bed at 9:40 a.m. I went out like a light but was up again at 10:20 a.m. Why? Because my body is attuned to run at that hour. Even dead tired, barely able to life my leg up and out of the covers and over the side of the bed, I wasn’t going to miss my run.

I did it, a modest 4.5 miles, and I felt writing in the subway afterward like a young man. Hardly slower, hardly weaker. In fact, if as my mother and father, who are a healthy 82 and 84, respectively, were once fond of saying, You’re only as young as you feel, this running for your life deal hasn’t failed me when it comes to living that saying out loud.

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work!

Running for Your Life: March!

There comes a time when all good people tire of putting on Canada Goose down coats (like, really, in my neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, Canada Goose are everywhere – I wouldn’t have a clue where they were being sold – Macy’s? Certainly not in this ZIP code) and knit caps and lined gloves and thick woolen scarves and hideous Ugg boots. Off we March! to the subway, the only year in twenty-five that I’ve been in New York City that it rolls around to the month of March and this notion of an enforced troop action in this puffy uniform has occurred and I accept it like a slap in the face from an aggrieved stranger, someone, who, and this has happened to me, or more to the point feels like it is happening often enough that I’ve imprinted it as a memory strikes out at me solely because they don’t like the look of my face, they think that my impolitic smirk is meant for them when it’s not, it’s meant to convey how fed up I am with this practice of putting on ALL these clothes in the fruitless attempt of keeping warm in this f—ing winter that just doesn’t end, which brings me to a video that was posted on a Facebook page from snowbound Watertown, New York, by Brian Ashley, my childhood pal from Owen Sound, Ontario, where we both saw snow to last a lifetime. This winter, though, Brian and I are over it. So with a tip of the toque to Brian, here it is, the last word in the winter that never ends: http://bit.ly/1lzbwi6.

Next: Running for Your Life: Track Work!  

Running for Your Life: Rock 'N' Roller

Twenty years – no, thirty years – ago this message had one tell. Music and dance. “My Own Way to Rock” by Burton Cummings, “Old Time Rock and Rock” by Bob Seger, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets. Rock! Rock! Rock!

In those days I never gave rolling much thought. Or any thought for that matter. What was it that rolled? Your ankle bone in the socket? Your head on your neck? Your stomach on the floor? What?!

Rock, though, that made perfect sense. When Burton Cummings belts out “My own way to rock!”, I get it in every fiber. But when he follows that with, “My own way to roll!”, I’m puzzled. He’s into baking pies?

Happily, after thirty years, I’ve found it. My own way to roll. If you are a runner of a certain age, you gotta roll. On a roller, that is (see at right). Three decades of running leads to muscle tears, pulls, damage of all types, and fifteen to twenty minutes a day of rolling those muscles (hammies, calves and groin) does absolute wonders in repair, making it possible for you to not only run every other day but to build the foundation for training another marathon. For me, that’s July 27, my mom’s birthday, with K! at the Nova Scotia Marathon.

So join me on the road, sure. But don’t scrimp on the roller. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what your age. Find Your Own Way to Roll!

Next: Running for Your Life: March !

Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

People will ask me why I don’t wear headphones when I run. Part of the reason is that when I began running, portable music players didn’t exist. Believe it or not, the first Walkman didn’t infect public space until 1979. I’d been a regular runner for four years before that.

The answer comes down to mental space. How during the time that I run every other day – be it twenty-five minutes, a half an hour or an hour – I want, no, need, to clear my mind. That means it is free to wander to the beagle straining on a leash that I see from the treadmill window of our neighborhood gym, or to a long-suppressed memory about home that surprises, or the mood of the walking public (are they as collectively depressed as yesterday, and if not, why not? . . ..) I feel that bordering the experience with a soundtrack invades the marathon mental space that is the drug of my addiction.

A word about time. I was greatly moved by David Grossman’s latest novel, “Falling Out of Time http://bit.ly/1e4LPx8,” which goes to the heart of how time need not be how we normally experience it. I find in the quiet of a run that time will fall away. There is something about practice here. If the body is being fed, rested, the muscles relaxed and supple from stretching, the conditions are right for that slipping away. On the treadmill that doesn’t mean you look at the readout clock and – Shazam! – five minutes vanishes into thin air. Rather the pace, the miles traversed, and the clock become like water not stone, the body in command as the mind follows in the flow, I trust, without any regard at all to what has happened before the run or what will happen after. I am in, a pitman drilling down his personal mine.

Running for Your Life: Rock ’N’ Roller

Running for Your Life: Polar Vortex Morning

Cardinals at the base of a young tree splaying branches, no seeds or fruit that I can see, at least four red-headed adult males and their mates, at first indistinguishable among the more common-looking birds, but the gals too, amaze in the brilliant, sparkling white, hard crust of ice and top layer of snow, too thin to hold a human, but these birds, the male cardinals, most especially, flit and skate under the cover of this nondescript little tree, never moving beyond its circumference, as if the space is an ice rink and they are players, training for tonight’s match.

Further on in the treetops are other flashes of darting red. Errant kites caught and hanging there, evidence of a time in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, before the snow and ice, seems a distant dream in this, the dead of winter, rustling in the frigid wind. As cold in those leafless trees as it will be all year. At ground level Thurber bounds ahead, jacketless and heedless to the deep cold and the terrain that is virtually unwalkable for us two-legged beasts but home to this mountain dog, the prime reason I am seeing these wonders. It is a gift he gives me, although some mornings it doesn’t wax quite the way I’m putting down here.

Thurber, a skiff of snow on his nose. What kind of dog is he? He waits at the curb with such a gentle pose. No anxiety. What has shaped his life that he need not wonder what is happening next. He knows it will not be long and we will be on our march to the park. To a place where he will sit on command, graciously accept his meat treat. Four in June, and he looks so spry, so full of life. Great expectations are those of a dog bred to run and hunt if each day begins with a walk in the woods.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips

When it snows and blows and ices up like it has been during the past month or so, it’s easy to be coy and say, as I did in this space a few weeks ago, that to keep in running trim, you should put on your T and shorts and running shoes, cover up with zipper leggings and a warm jacket, walk or light jog to your neighborhood gym, take off your cover-ups and run on the treadmill for thirty minutes. There you have it; all the winter training tips you need.

It is true to a point. As I wrote about in this space, I suffered my worst injury by attempting to hard-train through similarly blizzard-like conditions during the winter of 2011. In February that year, I was on a cold-weather run in Prospect Park when I pulled a hamstring muscle. A month later I was near-hospitalized when my hamstring tore painfully and forced me out of the 2011 Boston Marathon. I came back to run Boston the next year, but I’ve since been shy to train in cold weather. In part because that blown hamstring muscle has never really felt like it did before the injury …

All of which is to say, when it comes to winter training tips, this runner goes back to basics. Call me coy, but I’d like to start training for my run with my daughter this summer. That means, for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be doing most of my running in the gym, on the treadmill. If you're training, or about to start a training regimen, and have any concerns about tight muscles, I'd advise you to do the same.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathon Mental Space

Running for Your Life: Next Race

It's decided. K and I will jointly run a marathon together. On Sunday, July 27, in Barrington County, Nova Scotia http://bit.ly/1d8jtBK. Now comes the months of hard training, and the reward, a coastal route marathon around Cape Sable Island... Looking forward to that day, only six months (and many, many miles!) away.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Winter Training Tips  

Running for Your Life: Sticking-to-it-ness

This time of year there’s a lot of talk about resolutions. In our, yes, notoriously self-centered culture the most common resolution is improved fitness. Enter the ad in this week’s New York magazine Jan. 20-27 for the overnight paperback bestseller, THE POWER OF HABIT http://bit.ly/1eKE2c4, that boils down to sticking-to-it-ness – three simple stages: Pick the cue; Choose a reward; Execute the routine.

Makes sense, no? I get the cue and routine. But reward? All too difficult to isolate for most good-intentioned people who are clamoring to embrace sticking-to-it-ness and get into better shape.

That’s because, by my lights, in a typical middle-class life we are showered with rewards, i.e.,     the smartphone, game apps, Instagram, Facebook, a myriad instant gratifications available to all with a mobile platform. And the apps only get more and more seductive with each passing day.

I was reminded of this during a morning with Thurber this week (Jan. 15). Two joggers were slowing near me in Prospect Park, and on cue, as they came to a stop, both pulled out their mobile devices and stared at them. I thought a running app, something that would parse the data of that day’s run. Or maybe some other reward that had little to do with their just-completed exercise.

I’ve been running on a reward principle for thirty-five years. In the early days there was no such thing as a wearable music player, much less sophisticated running apps, so what served as a reward upon returning home after a run was a favorite song or two on the record player, if it was in the evening, a mug of cold ale.

I still run on this principle, with the idea true rewards are only possible if there is a clear separation, that the routine itself does not involve a reward. (Running with headphones, say.) That the routine is not some negative experience that needs the reward as compensation, but a positive one that is lived deeper with the addition of a simple reward.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: Once Your Break a Knuckle by D.W. Wilson

What a eulogy to place – and the people who rise out of a place that is so harsh that there are more commonalities to the brush and wild animals, the smells that pepper this nasty, short and brutish life, one a-glimmer throughout with the promise of the human spirit, not only of the child, the emerging man, but the fathers, the brothers, the elders, less so the mothers and sisters but there is a warmth and nonobjective quality to the women in the writing of Wilson, the most masculine of stylists, proof that REAL men writers need not remove women from their world to the point that they are less than the ideas the pugnacious male characters punch around like so much guff, a nod to the Normans – Mailer and Rush – who also serve women in a different way than Updike, Roth and Ford, the old men of American fiction and their shibboleths of jism-spurting palliatives; can we, the male writers in America, envision the woman who is “real” – a third “N” writer did, Nelson Algren, regardless of the narrowness of the vision -- what does it take for men novelists, those who build a world, are their own gods, as we are when we create a novel, to put both man and woman at its center. That is what Wilson has done. No mean feat. http://bit.ly/1bWcg7f.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race

Running for Your Life: One Hundred Years

Thank God it has come to this. Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen … There is power in numbers, and post-2000, those blandly insignificant numbers, not meaningless but freighted with false importance that leads to soporific if not vacuous reflection while now, on the one hundredth anniversary of the twentieth century truly beginning in Sarajevo and the archduke terrorism assassination that helped set off the Great War, the one my grandfather, my first memories of him, his arm scar with the shrapnel still inside, the hard bit you could feel, the world a century ago that is brought forward to me as something so real that I can touch and smell it, grampa’s pipe tobacco and Amphora brand smoke, flakes of Sunkist skin, faint urine, black tea leaves. What is the English staleness that tilts toward death at all ages, but never mind because my grandfather is with me as I write this on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War, the one where his stories, and by extension mine, come from.

That’s what it is in, then. Why the past, 1999-2013, fourteen years yield little in comparison. That in stories we begin with reflection and until this moment in 2014 there wasn’t a root to grow from, a place from where a hundred years is yours, that you can live for a hundred years in a single moment.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race