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