Running for Your Life: December Shorts

No, I haven’t gone out in them yet. My December shorts. But it’s been close but no.

The main reason for that: I’m still struggling with a wonky knee. More on that later. Much later. As in, not in this post.

Has time sped up for everybody? Or is it just me? I literally cannot believe that today (Dec. 28) is, well, today, as in the fourth last day of 2015.

If you are looking for some holiday reading, here’s what I’ve liked in December: Shakespeare’s Dog by Leon Rooke, House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Beatlebone by Kevin Barry. I’m currently reading and, loving, the short detective novel Equal Danger by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia.

Didn’t score big on the movie front this month. Saw Brooklyn and Spotlight. They weren’t Birdman. Made me think that I’d like to make a movie called Owen Sound. In fact, all hometowns should be made into movies. It would beat Netflix.

We have a radio. My wife, M, wanted one for Christmas. The only gift she asked for. I had a shortwave radio sitting unused on a basement shelf since we moved to our home in 1992. I bought it for $400 in 1986 and used it during my years at the Windsor Star newspaper where I worked as the assistant night editor for most of that time. The shortwave dial was shot, but one day in early December I picked it up, thinking that the FM and AM dials may work perfectly fine. It was worth a try, anyway. I took the radio up into the kitchen and plugged it in, pulled the antenna out to its maximum length, and sure enough it worked like a charm. When M came up from her home office, she found her Christmas present – and has been inordinately pleased with it through the following days of December. It was the only gift she received, one she says she will never forget.

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolution Rumblings



Running for Your Life: On the Road Again

Call it a broken record. But I’m on the shelf again.

I had been hoping to be back on the road again (as per the title here). That is going to have to wait.

Hmm, running for your life. Well, in theory, yes. I have every intention of getting back on the road again.

Biking for Your Life? Or Elliptical for Your Life? Tennis for Your Life?

Nah, they don’t cut it.

I’m convincing myself – and my friends in physical therapy – that my latest setback –  running up to 29 minutes before my cranky left knee swelled with inflammation, then following that with a few days of rest, only to re-injure same by a slow jog home from the gym – is just that. A setback. What’s required, as M and K have so rightly pointed out, is for me to just f—king stay off the knee – i.e. NOT run on it – for at least a month.

Which is what I’m doing. With gritted teeth and a snarl.

Truth is, I’m not showing my best side on the shelf. That, too, I pledge to do something about.

Next: Running for Your Life: December Shorts


Running for Your Life: Diary Food

Some time ago I was working on the subway, with my diary on my lap as is my practice, and a stranger on the train asked, while I was pausing, a pen at my lips, deep in thought, “Pardon me, sir,” in a whisper that I would charitably describe as exaggerated respect. “But are you a writer?”

Hmm, one wonders what my gentle intruder was getting at. That as an aspiring “writer” herself, she was hoping to make a casual, if not significant, connection with a more established “writer” in New York City, a place chock-a-block with “writers,” as in someone whose work she might know. Or someone simply hitting on me. Or  curious. A low-tempo busybody …

The truth is when I write in my diary on the subway I’m generally miles away from thinking of myself as a writer. It is not at all comparable to the example of running in the park, say, and a stranger hails me as I slow for a drink, or take a walking break, and asks, “Pardon me, sir. Are you a runner?”

Some truths are regarded to be self-evident. When it comes to my diary food, though, I don’t necessarily think of myself as “a writer.” It is, like my running, just what I do. I have no living clue whether it will EVER be part of what would be considering “my writing.” Snatches of it will end up as grist for stories, or a novel that I’m working on. This blog. I’ve a “running” title for something that will include drawings and captions of riders blankly immersed in social media … http://bit.ly/1P3tp5p (Don’t miss the forgoing here … You’ll get where I’m going with that.)

True to the blog title, I like to think of my diary time as part of a healthy diet. Breakfast. Diary Food. Lunch. Five-Mile Run. Dinner.

So how did I respond to the woman on the subway?  I am writing, yes. And then I put my head down and went back to work.   

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Consider Hooker, the divine creation of one prodigiously talented Canadian scribe Leon Rooke (1934-), given life in the pages of his recklessly, wantonly creative novel, “Shakespeare’s Dog (1981). With the Trumps and Clintons and Sanders and Carsons vying for our attention in sound bites that would cause our literary hound of hounds to cringe, if only a baying Hooker were alive today. Or in the best of all possible worlds, go viral! Herein is a taste, with bard, and his love Anne Hathaway playing their parts. The named “Marr” is Hooker’s comely bitch ...

“She wasn’t class, my Marr. She knelled I had a soft spot for her, and how to work it up. It was her very commonness that yanked my dogger hard – to which Will would say, “I know what you mean, Hooker, for in these woods man and dog are one.” I liked her coarse features, her hair a russet stain deeper than fox yet not quite the same mud hue. Her stink. “Oh, there’s a firebox that burns our king of log as we burn to fill it up,” is what Will would say. Or quote me more aptly yet the print-brand he meant to put on his Hathaway, as earlier in a Shottery time she had put her witch on him:

‘Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
. . . be my deer, since I am such a park;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’”

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again


Running for Your Life: All-Heart Division: Pascal Dupuis

Today (Dec. 9) is the first day in nine years that Pascal Dupuis will not be suiting up -- either in skates or in street clothes -- as a proud member of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team.

Dupuis, 36, a sufferer of deep vein thrombosis like myself, could no longer balance the risks taken in one of the most physical games with the likelihood of further serious injury. He will not play another game for Penguins. In my case, I steer away from contact sports because of the risks of internal bleeding. Dupuis, God bless him, skated full speed into the fray.

Until today. Dupuis wasn't a feared scoring threat like Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin, or an all-world goalie like Marc-Andre Fleury. He wasn't all-world, he is all-heart. A man for all seasons, not just from October until June.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday 

Running for Your Life: Guns, Guns, Guns

American hunter, bring’ em up the north side
Guns, guns, guns
Run, take the money, here’s a bullet for your boyfriend
Guns, guns, guns
Eagle all gone, and no more caribou
Guns, guns, guns
You be the red king, I'll be the yellow pawn ….

When I think of the title above, for sixty years of life – the first thirty-two in Canada – these lyrics from the Guess Who were first to come to mind. That all changed with the shocking events of San Bernardino.  My wife, Mary Morris, has done us all a profound service by saying what must be said – and helped me to the realization that we need more than the poetic resistance of rock ’n’ roll to foster real change.  Her comment, that I’m repeating in its entirety below, was posted on Facebook on Dec. 3. Since then, it has been “liked” by more than 400 people, drawn 51 comments, and sparked 39 shares. I couldn’t be prouder of Mary for speaking out in such an incredibly moving and powerful way.

“I need to say this. We are insane. You cannot go out and get married or drive a car in this country without a license, some delays, a learner's permit. Why can anyone walk into a store and walk out with an AK47? How can there not be background checks? You cannot marry ten women or have more than a certain number of DUI. It is against the law not to wear a seatbelt. Yet anyone can amass literally a stockpile of weapons intended only to kill and there's no database that red flags this and no law that impedes it. We look at the horrors all around the world and fail to fully realize that these same horrors are happening right here and that there are things that we can do to curtail them. Forgive this rant, but I find it unbearable. I am committing myself to doing something about this. Whether it is voting or donating or supporting the Everytown movement in any way I can. Because I can no longer be proud of being who I am in a country that does not stop people who are clearly mentally ill from destroying innocent people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again


Running for Your Life: December Beginnings

It's funny to think about but I came from Canada to live in the United States in December, almost thirty years ago. There are many things about the United States that is different than my home and native land, not the least of which is that the days between Thanksgiving (second Monday in October in Canada) is so blessedly close to Christmas (and Hanukkah for that matter) that I find them to be sister holidays -- one all about food and the other -- arguing what it's about.

Then there was this conversation that I overheard at PT today (Dec. 1). Believe me, this is 100% urban America ...

Young Person 1: After college, I started teaching high school.

Young Person 2: Where?

Young Person 1: In Bed-Stuy (a currently gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn). I taught there for five years. And then in Bushwick.

Young Person 2: My wife taught in Bushwick. What do you do now?

Young Person 1: I'm a nanny.

She gave the impression that she is much happier, makes more money, more time off ...

Imagine that happening in Canada? Leave a teacher's job, in say, Scarborough, and trade up to being a nanny ... The mind boggles.

Next: Running for Your Life: Diary Food



  

Running for Your Life: Slow But Sure !!

Today (November 30) marks a month to the day after I very nearly fell off the treadmill at a 8:30-per-mile pace when my left knee suddenly went lame … And I’m thrilled to report that while I wouldn’t say I’m back to where I was then, in marathon-training mode, looking to put in a sub-four hour race of 26.2 miles, I would say I have returned to the idea of Running for My Life.

As per instructions from my physical therapist, I am carefully getting back to running. I started a week ago with five minutes at a slow jog, and have been building up to today when I crossed the one-mile mark! Hardly beating any records. In fact, I ran only 12 minutes, with one minute of “cooling” down, and over that span I completed just 1.08 miles. But after how horrible I felt the day before Halloween, I almost wept when I finished that sliver of a run – and in no pain!

My goal is to keep building in two-minute aggregates, paying close attention to how my knee responds. So far, I haven’t felt but the wee-est twinges. Every other day I’ll be jogging along. Not running for my life yet, which means going hard enough and long enough that it counts as a workout and helps to keep that deep vein thrombosis bogeyman at bay. Still, I feel like I’m on my way.

Next: Running for Your Life: December Beginnings


Running for Your Life: More Beatlebone !!

More words of sighing grace from my fab read of the week (month?), all in the spirit of what this blog set out to do five and a half years ago: offer advice and words of passionate belief (if not wisdom), occasional witticisms, on the following topics: Running, ’Riting, and Reading.

This novel by Kevin Barry, “Beatlebone,” is proving to be so quotable, especially during these trying days in both the political and social arenas. How to keep your head when others are losing theirs. This is the latest in the timeless dialogue between Cornelius (Our man Friday) and his charge, the imagined John Lennon (Lennon tees off below):

I lost my father. He went away.

We all lost our fucken fathers.

I lost my mother. She went and died.

We all have dead fucken mothers.

So tell me how do you get by, Cornelius!

It’s simple, John. I listen to what’s around me.

Okay …

And then?

Yeah?

I react.

You listen. And you react.

Because everything you need in the world is there to be heard.

You have my interest, Cornelius.

You can see very little in the world, John. But you can hear fucken everything.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone !

Next: Running for Your Life: Slow But Sure


Running for Your Life: Off to See the PT Wizards!

For reasons that close readers of this blog (don’t be so naïve, Larry!) know well, my experiences have not been all that favorable on the physical therapist and massage table. The nightmare occurred in Winter 2011, when I was in the care of a physical therapist office, whose sole goal was to assess my slight hamstring tear to determine if it was reasonable for me to rest and then continue my training for the Boston Marathon of that year. But after one deep tissue massage that my therapist insisted on giving me despite my misgivings, I very nearly passed out a half-hour after my treatment with the pain of a full-blown hamstring tear while on a simple errand run in busy New York City traffic.

That was going on five years ago. Now I’m thrilled to report that I’m a PT believer. Why? Thank the good folks at NYU Langone Medical Center, who steered me in the direction of a place called One on One Physical Therapy on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

The first day going to the PT Wizards I got into a funky ’70s-style elevator – think Eastern Europe, the Cold War years – with a fellow athlete who seemed surprised when I told him to hit “6”. (He had just pressed the button for “7,” home of the athletic club in that Eastern Parkway building.) As I was leaving, he said, with all earnestness, “Good luck.”

Which, in the end, is what I didn’t need. From the moment I arrived I felt welcomed – and better than that – understood. G and the team of PT specialists did and do precisely what I was looking for and didn’t find back in 2011. They listened closely to me, to my fears, to my goals, and we immediately started to allay them, and to work toward them.

Under their careful watch, I feel a total, mid-training-style health is only weeks away. It’s been only five sessions (Nov. 24), and I’m back on the treadmill. Only five minutes, the lightest of jogging. But I’ve the tools I need, thanks to a muscle stretching and strengthening program that has me confident again – just three weeks since I thought all was lost when I stumbled home in terrible knee pain after escaping injury on a rapidly moving treadmill.

When I’m off to see the PT Wizards, it’s with a smile on my face. Which is some kind of gift, I can tell you.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Beatlebone !!  


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Missing John Lennon (1940-1980)? Trust Kevin Barry to give you what you seek -- and more -- in his new novel, "Beatlebone." Here's a sample:

"And now the fat old dog rests its chin on his [John's] knee, and he places a palm on the breathing warmth of the dog's flank, and they share a moment of sighing grace.

Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by."

Next: Running for Your Life: Off to See the PT Wizards !

Running for Your Life: Leaf Envy

These weeks of non-running have coincided with the falling of the leaves in Prospect Park.

One strong storm or blustery day and the thousands of beautiful trees in our Brooklyn forest will be more bare that leaf-filled.

For a variety of reasons – and not just injury – it’s been years since I’ve caught my annual leaf on the run. If I were to have goal, upon returning to running after my nasty knee injury, it is that next November I will have my leaf.

To explain what I mean when I say this, here’s a sample of a previous blog post about my leaf practice:

“When the leaves fall I don’t vary my route, don’t steer myself under trees to increase my chances of catching leaves as they fall, instead, I just run as I always do, don’t press any harder or, God forbid, slow down or stop, and the leaves that come to me – not trap against my body or get caught up in my clothes but rather that I snatch from mid-air with my bare hand – are mine. The ones that I’ve put up on the wall-of-progress I’ve caught only in this way. And not just leaves, but maple keys and acorns, too. Those that I trap against my body I drop to the ground. The rule is it has to be a leaf or a seed that has come falling from a tree. I then hold the leaf only in the hand it was caught in, don’t let it touch any other part of my body, and continue on, completing my route before I return home. I only tack up those leaves that have not touched anything but my hand and the wall. That have only been in air and held in my open hand.”


In 2016, I will be in Leaf Envy no more, I trust.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday


Running for Your Life: The Long, Hot Stretch

So, yeah, it has been, what?, seventeen days (Nov. 16) since my-day-before-Halloween knee injury. The closest I’ve come to running – outside of twice at the Y pool – has been an ill-advised hustle across Broadway after a dance party on Saturday night (Nov. 14). And, yes, I did dance … Although the knee didn’t twinge exactly when I crossed the street, it didn’t feel at all right either.

And, of course, all this is written after the Brooklyn Marathon (Nov. 15), which I trained for but did not compete in.

Which brings me to stretching. Heretofore stretching to me meant a half-hearted half-hour every other day – and less during heavy running weeks. Now, with the help of one full session with an athlete-focused physical therapist, I’m on it with the long, hot stretch. What’s required is to loosen overly tight muscles from the calves (all that foot pain) to the IT bands (which my physical therapist has re-diagnosed as the cause of this race-ending injury), and that means doing the stretches for longer periods of time than I’m used to, and to doing a lot more stretches than I’ve led myself to believe would be enough so that I could continue with my plan to run for the rest of my life.

And I scrupulously set aside time for the long, hot stretch. Each day at a minimum of 45 minutes, with two hours per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) devoted to work with my therapist one-on-one so he can assess my strength – and readiness for return to the road and the treadmill.

So my advice to runners after injury or feeling too much tightness: Be patient. Don’t skimp with the floor routines. Love the long, hot stretch, the latest and currently greatest tip I have for those a little older – and yes, even those a decade or two or three younger than me – who are determined to run, to get on with reversing that age …. !

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf Envy



Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

There are times when you read something about a person who deserves a wider audience that it takes your breath away. That happened to me recently while reading my go-to journal, the London Review of Books, the Diary entry of Oct. 22, by Linda Matthews.

The photographer is one Vivian Maier. Steal a moment and read this piece, and wonder to yourself, who is our next Vivian Maier? How important are the observers who don’t draw attention to themselves, who see the things in ways we can’t possibly see?


DIARY

By Linda Matthews

The photographer Vivian Maier worked for me for three years in the early 1980s, though no one knew she was a photographer then. She was in her late fifties, I was in my late thirties. I had a big house in Chicago, a busy husband, two children of six and eight, and a five-month-old baby, and I wanted to go back to work. It seemed to me that a live-in nanny might simplify our lives and so when I saw her ad in the local paper, I phoned her.

Running for Your Life: Water Walking to Running

Don’t laugh … Here’s the deal, in order to get back to pounding the pavement (I know, not a great idea, what are you some kind of masochist?) I’ve taken, thanks to my dear wife and great swimmer, M, to water walking at our neighborhood Y.

I tried on Monday (Nov. 9) and there I was … non-swimmer nonpareil in, from top, bathing cap, pink-colored pool noodle strung between my legs, these cool baby bluey barbell-floaters tucked under each arm, a baby blue back floatation vest strapped firmly at my waist … water walking. For thirty minutes.

M, the dear thing, kept careful watch on me. Like the runt of a less-than-thrilling litter. But I made it, in and out of alive, with this as a surprising finale – to M in any case: I water-jogged along the side of the pool into the deep end, which is where I clambered out of the pool.

And the results? Fabulous. I really think this water walking is the way to go for those with knee, back and ankle issues. Any kind of  joint pain. Take it from me, the least likely person to ever be seen in the heretofore scary regions beyond the kiddie pool, add it to your training regimen …

I am not exactly pain-free, after suffering a bad knee sprain on Friday, Oct. 30, but I’m so happy to report that I’m on the mend. Oh, and I don’t care how many smirks the inflatable me evokes at the Y pool. It’s taken me almost thirty years to get there, but this is New York, damn it. The place where people dress up in Elmo suits, sing Spanish dialect opera while striding down a crowded Midtown street, where women “wearing” nothing but painted stars and stripes lewd around in Times Square getting people to pay THEM to have your picture taken with them.

My business at the Y pool is the wee-ist of humiliations compared to all that …

Next: Running for Your Life: The Long Hot Stretches


Running for Your Life: So Slow That Everything Changes

Some times injury can lead to rare and beautiful things.

Let me explain:

On Friday, Oct. 30, I suddenly and frighteningly felt something snap in my knee, at the outside edge of the patella while running at a training pace on a treadmill at my local gym. Luckily, I stopped immediately by straddling the fast-moving track, escaping further certain injury.

I hobbled home and for that night and the next day left the house only to see a doctor on emergency call. He hesitated to say what was wrong, noting that I could bend and extend the leg without pain. But when I put any weight at all on that leg, the pain was fierce. The doctor prescribed an MRI, which I had on Monday.

Early Tuesday I went out for a walk. Using a cane I was able to make it slowly up our Brooklyn block to a place where M and I typically stop for coffee before continuing on up the street in order to give Thurber, our cantankerous coonhound, a morning run in Prospect Park. The road to the park from my house earns the neighborhood’s name, Park Slope, to a considerable degree, especially noticeable when the best you can do is put about ten percent of your bodyweight on one of your legs.

So on this day M continued up the vertical street, and I stayed behind with my coffee and cane, sitting on a wooden bench fashioned around a street tree.

Suddenly, my heart filled with the promise that comes of seeing beautiful things in a brand-new way. I had never in my twenty-five years that we’ve been living in Park Slope noticed the feathery glory of a mature exotic cedar that grows across the street from our habitual café at First Street and Seventh Avenue. The tree glowed a golden-crimson, the needles in the autumn light the texture of angel hair. Not the pasta but the celestial wonder. Red bricks on the building behind the tree reminded me for the first time in ages of our year in Santa Fe, when we traveled to see the ancient structures of the Anasazi, the dance rituals of the Hopi.

For the first time since I heard and felt that troubling knee-snap, I smiled without irony, without a sense that my running days were numbered.

I’d like to think that the days that followed form a direct line from that upbeat insight. My injury turned out, remarkably and gratefully, to be a bad sprain. I will miss the Brooklyn Marathon this Sunday (Nov. 15), but I suspect I will be running again before the snow flies.

And I hope that I’ve learned a lesson. Not so much about training and how to do it with more patience and awareness of what my six-decade-old body can or can’t do (although, I promise to try). But more about the rewards that come from truly slowing down, and seeing and taking in the beauty that is all around the all-too-busy you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Water Walking


Running for Your Life: Hubris Handicap II

Pigheads don’t fly!

Last week, I had a sore heel. This week, after running far too hard and too long in order to try to get myself ready for the Brooklyn Marathon on Sunday, Nov. 15, I learned I have a partial tear of the medial meniscus of my left knee.

My current knee pain overtook that heel bit … Funny how a new OW-EEEE ! will supplant the other. Foot pain? It’s nothing compared to how my knee feels.

But not looks. Thankfully there is no swelling and what seemed to be sure-thing surgery may be less than that. Physical therapy and anti-inflammatories, rest and who knows I may just be back out there before the snow flies.

There. Well. To the chalkboard. Trained for eleven marathons. Finished six. Injured for two (Boston 2011, Brooklyn 2015). Forced to cancel for person reasons for one (Rome 2008). Injured during the race and unable to finish for two (Ottawa 1985, Windsor-Detroit 1987).

A wise person (my wife M, in case you're asking) would say that would be just enough of the marathoning thing.

I don’t know. My darling daughter K has arranged a hockey evening (Islanders at home to play the Canadiens!) this month to help soothe may marathon-missing blues. As to the idea of letting this pastime fade into history, well that ship has yet to sail. But one thing is certain: I’m determined in the months ahead to go back to running for my life.


Next: Running for Your Life: The Long, Hot Stretch   

Running for Your Life: Hubris Handicap

When it comes to being pigheaded, runners training for a marathon win the prize.

How else to explain the way we balance pain (garden variety or thin edge of horror-type) and the base fitness level necessary to run 26.2 miles at one time and not fall apart at Mile 16, or hit the wall at Mile 20.

From that first marathon when I was twenty-seven in 1983, training with my pal JM from Brockville, and running too with my childhood friend GD, we often mentioned that we had to get the miles in the bank. No excuses.

So I sit on the subway writing this (Oct. 27) with not just a sore heel – as described in this space last week – but with a diagnosis of mild cases of both Achilles tendonitis and plantar fascia. My right foot doesn’t hurt flat as they are on the floor of the subway. But when I get up and walk around, go up subway stairs. Oweeee !

When it comes to running (and races) I favor doctors without borders. My kind podiatrist has me with a PT program that rocks – and a pledge to shoot these dogs with steroid painkillers in the event the condition doesn’t settle down by race day (Nov. 15).

In the meantime, that means exercises as prescribed by my doctor and my new physical therapist, and running when the pain subsides some. Otherwise low-impact cross-training. At night, massage the bottom of my foot with a tennis ball, treat the inflammation by step-and-roll on a frozen water bottle.

All for the race. My hubris handicap? Maybe. But how do I know? Being pigheaded has its advantages.


Next: Running for Your Life: The Long, Hot Stretch   

Running for Your Life: Roman Mood

Back from a best time of your life family vacation in Rome. We’re talking walking, eating pasta and drinking wine and amaro. Below is a taste of what we found:

Imperial Past I

This place Roma is one in which
People resist the other
While kissing her on both cheeks
And then a third time
To seal the illusion.

Imperial Past II

When you are so long gone
From being the Imperial
What to do but cling to
Your exception, no maps will
Mark the spot, find the center,
Your desire on terms of the ancient conquerors,
A mind game that isn’t tied to rules
You can possibly understand
And that, best of all, are so
Pre-digital as to make even the squarest
Disciple bow in disbelief.

Imperial Past III

We’re on board Alitalia, the nine-hour flight home. The plane so tight there is no extra room, a knee-crusher, and me with my deep vein thrombosis concerns. It’s been more than fourteen years since I’ve popped a blood clot, but the fear of spitting off a new one never leaves.

K is sitting across the aisle, trying to read “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, but when she presses her “light” button on the handrest nothing is illuminated. In her row at least. A light in Row 34, directly in front of hers, does go on. She then turns to the fellow passenger behind her in Row 36 and kindly asks him to touch the lightbulb graphic on his handrest. He does so and Kate blinks out of darkness and into her “Wild” reading.

M and I notice later that in each of the four-seat middle rows to the bulkhead, the light switches work – but for the row directly in front, not overhead.

M presses her flight attendant button and when our assigned person comes by in due time, M tells her about the malfunction. People have also complained about hardly working entertainment systems. Mine is out for four of the nine hours, except for the channel that offers the slow narrative of the tiny white plane and Western world graphic whose 1980s Atari-style technology offers nostalgic comfort.

The flight attendant tests a few of the lights to see if what M says is true, and sure enough, it is.

“I’ve never seen that before,” she says with a Mona Lisa smile. Then she shakes her head and goes back to wherever it was she came from.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hubris Handicap



Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

For reasons that I won’t go into now, I’ve recently taken up with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). It’s curious to think in these hyper-political days during the run-up to next year’s presidential election that are ninety parts promotion and 10 parts substance (I’m not looking at you, Bernie Sanders!) of an American great who, according to Malcom Cowley’s introduction of the 1948 Penguin edition of “The Portable Hawthorne,”  “was reserved to the point of being secretive about his private life, and yet he spoke more about himself, with greater honesty, than any other American of his generation.”

More important to me – and I would imagine to all writers and would-be writers – is this quality, as described by Cowley:

“If Hawthorne in his later years had a better, more flexible style than any other American author of his time, the fact was easy to explain: he had learned to write, first by reading, then by talking to himself, and most of all by writing a great deal.”

Here is a national treasure who talked about himself with greater honesty at the service of art as he sought a deep understanding of the American condition. Hawthorne strived to write his books so that ever sentence “may be understood and felt,” so he said.

“There is nothing too trifling to write down,” he said in a letter to his friend Horatio Bridge.

So put down your smartphone and read a little Hawthorne. From a book. And then go ahead, talk to yourself. Could be, before long, you’ll be writing a great deal.

Next: Running for Your Life: Roman Mood


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

It’s been awhile – January 2014, to be exact – since I’ve written about the importance of stick-to-it-ness. When it comes to running for your life – in your sixties, no less – it’s a lesson that deserves to be repeated.

As time goes by, so does the relatively pain-free aspect of high-mileage training. In July, while running in France, I pulled a hamstring muscle. Luckily, it wasn’t a severe strain. It slowed my training schedule, and did heal in time. These days, well into October, it feels like new.

Now it’s my right heel that’s inflamed. One of the things that I’ve written about in this space is the importance of knowing your body. When need be, I stop road training and switch to the low-impact elliptical machine. I’m deep into marathon training so as part of my regimen I’m taking anti-inflammatories for the residual pain. If the pain persists (it is a dull one when I run, on a scale of 1-10, a 2 to 3), I’ll be seeing my podiatrist before the marathon on November 15, just in case …

All of which is to say that despite the aches and pains (and an energy level that isn’t exactly what it was, say, ten years ago), I don’t miss a day of running. Or of cross-training.

Last week, our family went to Rome. The heel was sore, so instead of doing a long run, I did 20 reps up and down a 40-step staircase. Up on my toes where the inflammation didn’t hamper me. I did run through the pain, and have been running and doing low-impact workouts since we got back.

If you are going to run for your life, pain management is crucial. As is stick-to-it-ness. It’s hardest to do when you are not at your best physically. But the benefits are worth it, believe me.

Next: Running for Your Life: Roman Mood   


Running for Your Life: Canada Votes

In the United States, Harper’s is a respected progressive magazine. “Harper’s” has an entirely different connotation in Canada, my home and native land. For the past decade, Canada has been Harper’s. Stephen Harper’s, that is.

Today, Canada is voting, and if there is any social justice in the world, the country’s voters will vote Conservative Party Prime Minister Harper out of office.

I wish I were there to cast my vote for either the Liberals or the New Democratic Party. Not because I’m a big believer in politicians, or the idea that, as Lewis Lapham writes in November’s Harper’s, we – regular folks in Canada or the U.S. – can't realistically expect our vote to matter in terms of choosing democracy over concentrated wealth.

I would back the Liberals or the NDP because it would at least FEEL like the side of a civilized approach to government and public problem-solving is in charge. What a luxury to imagine the word citizen as a possible construct in a conversation. That would count for something.

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

From the master of the acerbic putdown, Evelyn Waugh, (1903-1966), best known as the author of “Brideshead Revisited,” whose work critic V.S. Pritchett remarked will delight long past his death for those who honor “the beauty of his malice,” words to borrow when you’ve been invited to something that, well, you just don’t want to attend:

“YOUR NAME HERE deeply regrets that he (she) is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.”

If only Evelyn Waugh were here to deliver on how best to skewer Donald Trump – and keep him skewered. Sigh. This from humorist Nancy Mitford: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.”


Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday

There are more than a few reasons behind my October-love. It’s when baseball suddenly becomes real, like a favorite uncle who eleven months of the year is on the road, but every October he returns, refreshed with new and wildly entertaining stories to tell. I’m a Pirates fan (by default after my beloved Expos folded) so tonight (Oct. 7) is the night, which will be no horrendous loss if they fall to the Cubs, because, for God’s sake, they’re the Cubs! How can you not root for the Cubs in part of your heart – or your gut – for all those following the latest developments in the world of superorganisms http://bit.ly/1LiEgYL. This is a dated article from Michael Pollan but you get the drift …

Today also marks the opening of hockey season. In past years that delightful event has occurred on my birthday (Oct. 5), but no matter. It’s my birthday week, a Wednesday, and the Rangers are playing the ’Hawks. If only my Penguins were on against the ’Hawks, then it would make for a Pittsburgh-Chitown double-header. In any event, drop the puck. Let’s get it on!

Oh yeah, the birthday thing. Sixty. My seventh decade. On Nov. 15 I will be running in the Brooklyn Marathon, my first shot at qualifying for Boston in the 60-64 age group. I’d be in range to qualify under ideal weather conditions: 45 degrees F with a 20-mile-an-hour swirling wind that miraculously is always at my back.

I know this blog can at times sound eye-rollingly upbeat. So, cynics, pass by. This decade promises to be the best yet! Hope the same is true for you, dear reader. I know I believe it, and there is power in that.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday




Running for Your Life: Marathons and War

Not so long ago I wrote about Tony Judt (1948-2010) who coined the phrase the crappy generation, whose members “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, either economic nor political.”

I had Judt in mind when I was talking to my friend J last month over cocktails. When J and I get together for Hendricks martinis and dinner on the side, we often talk about running.

One thought I had during out last session was that as a member of the crappy generation I had no mass, or national, war to occupy my body and mind. So, as a way to compensate for this deficiency (after all, we are talking “crappy” here), I run marathons.

How are marathons like wars? As a group, we marathoners struggle and suffer through months of basic training to bring ourselves up to the standards of road “combat,” which is running continually for 26.2 miles. Out there on the course, we urge each other forward, like mates in the trenches. We understand, as best we can, the common enemy (especially at mile sixteen or mile twenty when we are convinced that we have nothing left.) Along the course, the civilians cheer as if to the soldiers on march to harbor and their troop ships, saying reassuring war-years-like things: “Looking great!” “We’re proud of you!” “You’re all so amazing!”

At the end of race, we have a memory and a medal to show to those at home. And, after our marathoning days are over, we put the medal in a drawer for safekeeping. When we take it out we will handle it carefully and memories of our own sacrifice and those who shared it will come flooding back.

There will be no marathon cenotaphs, no memorials built for the nameless marathoner. It is, I’m sure you agree, better that way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday!
    


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) grew up breathing the air of southern Georgian Bay as I did a half-century later. In Canada, Thomson is known as the Great Outdoor painter who got away, the northern magus, the promise of a singular vision at a time when the nation itself hadn’t fully formed. His sudden, mysterious death by drowning occurred as the Great War was raging in Europe, when Canada was earning its stripes as an independent country, removed from England and distinct from the United States in the increasingly modern world.

This founding artistic father of Canada has always been a kind of spiritual brother to me … So, in some respects, this great is always with me. Here’s a sample meditation:

"It’s not like we have many letters from Tom Thomson. Not like Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) a generation before, a loner of an entirely different type, Vincent, whose shouts and sighs and embitterments seem mixed in the thick paint itself and is why I can stand before the paintings of his later years, or the other that started the thrall, “The Potato Eaters,” and if I’m still enough I can shut out the phone-snappers and loud, hard-of-hearing visitors, the ghouls who step right in front of me.

With Tom, you have to fill in the blanks. His paintings, say “West Wind” or “Jack Pine,” don’t shout or even mutter. They are like the place of his birth, Owen Sound, and the bush beyond, the bird-wing and tree-crack, the crunch of dry, hard leaves underfoot – and when Tom could he’d seek out the muddy shores and hear the sound of the loose suck with each step of his bone-dry hunting boots, think of the men at war.

Even in the trenches of Passchendaele, the Canadians don’t shout or mutter or cry of their lot. Tom didn’t go to war and at no point in his few letters and cards home and to friends does he say why. The papers, of course, wrote of nothing else. With photos too. So when he sought out the mud it was to pay homage to his fellow Canadians, those who didn’t rule men but felt the pull of the factory, the farm, the mine and, for Tom, the fishing hole. When he paints the browns, dull grays when the scene demanded something brighter, blame the war. What drove him even deeper into himself, brought a darkness to light."

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War



Running for Your Life: Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Couple That You Should Know About

Their names are Christopher and Regina Catrambone, two thirtysomethings who live in Malta, who founded the dark niche of all niches in today’s grave new world: a war-zone insurance company, Tangiers International, that provides kidnapping, terrorism and death and injury coverage to journalists and military contractors.

They also have been in the forefront – before the headlines of the past several months – of a consciousness-raising high-energy civilian approach to the migrants-at-sea crisis in the Mediterranean.

You might miss their story. I would have, if not for a random reading of Outside magazine. Typically, the magazine is not for me. Too much about mountain climbing, extreme sports, pricey and wonky gadgets that, if anyone has read even a shred of this blog will know I don’t cotton to the high falutin when it comes to exercise or fitness.

Occasionally, though, Outside will surprise you. With articles like this one by Joshua Hammer, whose “The Bad-Ass Librarians to Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts,” will be published by Simon and Schuster next April. See this link: http://bit.ly/1FDwnwt.

Chris, of Louisiana, and Regina, of Italy, might not have everyday routines like you and me. They live millionaire lives on an island in the Mediterranean. But they couldn’t stand by and watch as the crisis worsened in those waters. The Catrambones should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize because they answered the call, the one we all feel when we see the pictures on television and ask how in the world can we ever get ahead of this crisis, or even make a little bit of a difference. I mean it’s all in the article, including their self-financed 131-foot rescue vessel MV Phoenix, but here, to me, is the moment of truth. From whence Nobel Peace Prizes are born:

One day near Lampedusa, an Italian island south of Malta that has become a  purgatory for tens of thousands of migrants, Regina was sunning on the top deck  [of their yacht] when she noticed a winter jacket bobbing in the water. The Catrambones asked their captain, Marco Cauchi, a search and rescue commander moonlighting from the Armed Forces of Malta, about the incongruous piece of clothing. It was, he replied, almost certainly the jacket of a refugee. Cauchi told them how, during one military rescue, he’d watched a migrant sink beneath the waves a few feet from him. “There were 29 people on this boat that capsized, and most could not swim,” he told them. “I saw those big eyes open, and I saw him go down so fast. I couldn’t reach him. It stayed with me always.”

 As Hammer tells the story, the Catrambones refused to look back. They jumped on board and since that day in July 2013 have worked to save thousands upon thousands of these desperate souls. These are the kinds of actions that should be more widely known. A Nobel Peace Prize, an evening’s visit with Stephen Colbert. Couldn’t we just dream of a world in which “Keeping Up With the Catrambones” was must-watch television?

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

A little while ago I wrote about Roberto Clemente, my favorite baseball hero, in this space. Today, let’s honor someone I never saw play: Satchel Paige.

First off, folks like me, who carry the idea of being an athlete into their silver years, admire Satchel Paige for being the oldest major league rookie (42) while playing for the Cleveland Indians. He played in the pros until he was 47.

But here, I want to write about these lines that are attributed to Paige:

Work like you don’t need the money.
Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody’s watching.

These words come to mind because of something that happened about five years ago. Like we’ve done for years in our married life, M and I went for a morning walk. She was glum, upset about the lack of progress she was making in her writing. Many years before, K, our daughter, had printed these lines, with a credit to Satchel Paige, on a bulletin board in her bedroom.

It was in the spirit of Satchel Paige’s quote that I said to M, if it’s possible, why don’t you try to write stories from the place of excitement and wonder that you did when your first stories appeared years ago. She took my advice to heart and did just that with the superfine result that Narrative magazine would soon publish her story “Standards” http://bit.ly/1gRSKCy, an MM classic, if you ask me. And she has not looked back since.

M got word of acceptance from Narrative on Yom Kippur, and this week, ironically, I too was rewarded on the Day of Atonement with some perseverance of my own, with after years of false starts and promises surrounding work short and long, fiction and non-, I received word that a story of mine has been accepted for publication at a journal that deserves the respect that it has among writers. Today I’m feeling as M did when “Standards” was taken, not looking back on what has been.

So do what Satchel says. You can't go wrong.

Next: Running for Your Life: Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Couple That You Should Know About




Running for Your Life: Power of Tides

A simple idea came to me recently. M and I were enjoying the hospitality of our friends who own a second home on Fire Island. Life on Fire Island, no more than a giant sandbar of scrub trees and marsh off the Long Island shore, is by definition relaxed. There are no cars. No roadways. Big tire wagons and balloon wheel bikes account for non-pedestrian traffic. Speed limit signs say 8 MPH.

It is a strange and hypnotic stasis here, day after day in the summer, I imagine, really felt it on Sept. 12 as we strolled along Holly Walk to the Atlantic Ocean side. Here are several simple cottages, vintage-looking, with wide open doors and windows, there is nothing about these places that would suggest that any time had passed from the days they were built after the Great Hurricane of 1938. God, do you feel it. The people here move about, manage their time in leisure like their family members have been doing for decades.

Like the tides. People here are but organic matter, not cement or mortar, we yield. And if the dominant presence is the tides then they will hold sway on all the living things touched and held by them. We cannot do otherwise. That is the why of these people coming back season after season.

Which reminds me of a story by Alastair MacLeod, “The Road to Rankin’s Point” http://bit.ly/1KtlBI9. How touching are they – grandmother and beloved grandson. There are the precious few who allow in the other (tides) to a place where it becomes something more than we can know, and is given voice. How we interpret that voice is up to us.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday


Running for Your Life: Cruising to Brooklyn

It’s not likely to be pretty, but I’m in. The Brooklyn Marathon 2015 http://bit.ly/1VXZSx7. That’s Sunday, Nov. 15. And no I haven’t put in enough miles (but I’ve got 60 days to rectify that somewhat.) I tried a less demanding “cruising” training program last year in preparation for the Nova Scotia Marathon in July. It didn’t work for a terrific time – my slowest since I got back on the marathon kick five and a half years ago with the Pittsburgh Marathon. But I finished, and damn it that’s what I’m going for this year. In Brooklyn, my own backyard.

Training is going much better than I expected – considering the hamstring pull that flared up during our July trip to Paris and Marseille – so the marathon plan is back on in earnest.

Brooklyn 2015 takes me around my regular jogging route, the round interior pathways of Prospect Park, but instead of, say, going around two times, I’ll be going six times, as well as other shorter laps that’ll get us up to a Boston Marathon-qualifying 26.2 miles.

As for being Boston strong … Well, as of Oct. 5 I’ll be sixty, so that’ll help some – I need to get a finish time of 3:55. We’ll just have to see. As to the New York City Marathon, I would need to hit a time of 3:34. Which is just not going to happen. (My PB is 3:33:52 at 2010 Steamtown Marathon of Scranton, Pa., when I'd recently turned 55.)

So, yeah, here goes nothing. My ninth marathon, sixth since Pittsburgh in May 2010. And if you’re in the ’hood on Nov. 15, c’mon out to the park. When you’re running around in circles, chances are you’ll see me. More often than perhaps you’ll like.

Next: Running for Your Life: Power of Tides    


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

When I traveled by airplane to Managua, Nicaragua, in the summer of 1985, there wasn’t much in the way of post cards. (Yes, that’s what we did in those days, send post cards home.) I bought a few that I did find and didn’t get them in the mail because they showed the landscape devastation of the Managua earthquake of 1972. Not exactly what I wanted my mom and dad to see before I got home that year.

That year we lost one of our great ones. Roberto Clemente, who died on a humanitarian flight to Managua the last day of 1972. Before the appearance of my beloved Expos in 1969, I was a fan of Roberto Clemente and Pirates. (And since the demise of my Espos in 2004, the Pirates are my team again.) Clemente's last baseball game in his 18-year career was two days before my 17th birthday. It was director John Sayles who said, “Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.”

Consider this. Career batting average: .317; total hits: 3,000; home runs: 240 and RBIs: 1,305. While Clemente didn’t play on the perennial champion Yankees, those stats compare more than favorably against the Great Derek Jeter, born after Clemente died in the plane crash. Jeter’s numbers in his 20-year career: .310, 3,465, 260 and 1,311.

But it was the grace of him that I remember. In many ways, the young outfielder Andrew McCutchen reminds me of his grace in the field, his determination at bat. His demeanor is reminiscent of Clemente, who as the Pirates make their way to their third consecutive postseason appearance, I can’t help but think how much Clemente would be a part of these exciting days. If he were alive today, he’d be 81 years old.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cruising to Brooklyn



Running for Your Life: Yankee Haters Dream Team

I was ten years old when the Yankees did the unthinkable – finished 26.5 games out of first place, with a 70-89 record. Ah, those were the days. Now, of course, the Yankees win. Pretty much every day and night. The season is winding down and they are in the playoffs, as per usual.

Time to dream a little. By offering up a Yankee Haters Dream Team. Let’s call them the lovable ones … Some unsung, some associated more with losing (think every other MLB club, with the exception of the Cardinals) than winning. Here’s my version of, yes, the Yankee Haters Dream Team.

Pitcher
Catfish Hunter
Color me nostalgic for the 1970s, and names like Catfish stedda letters

Catcher
Jake Gibbs
Because I’m a believer in strength of character down the middle … And Jake was a member of that losing 1966 Yankees squad that went 70-89. Losing builds character. Good times, times

First Baseman
Marv Thorneberry
Marv broke in with the Yanks in 1955, then proceeded to spur even the most humorless fan into uncontrollable laughter as the starting first baseman for the expansion 40-120 New York Mets, 60.5 games outta first place. Errors that year (1962): 17!

Second Baseman
Horace Clarke
How can you not find lovable someone by the name of Horace? Yes, 1966! Strength down the middle! (70-89!)

Third Baseman
Charlie Hayes
He WAS the unsung hero of the 1996 Yankees, the only iteration of pinstripes except for that unforgettable 1966 squad that actually didn’t/doesn't revolt me. Why? Because of Charlie Hayes, without whom the Yanks would not have won, yet all we heard (and still hear about) were/are Jeter, O’Neill, Williams, Strawberry …

Shortstop
Tony Kubek
Because he had a cool broadcast voice. And he seemed like a relatively nice guy.

Right Fielder
Jesse Barfield
Because he was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays. (One of the myriad reasons I identify as a Yankee Hater is that my folks at home in Canada cheer for the Blue Jays)

Left Fielder
Tim Raines
Because I am a die-hard Expos fan. (No, I don’t cheer for the Nationals  -- did true-blue Brooklyn Dodgers fans pick up and cheer for the LA team … I don’t think so)

Center Fielder
Roger Repoz
He didn’t patrol center field for long for the Yankees. But man, those were the days. (Yes, 1966 rules as the year of years for Yankee Haters … when they languished with that 70-89 record !


 Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Nonracial Politics Power

Sometimes you find inspiration in unlikely sources. Take “Citizen: American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine, winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. Rankine’s poetry sheds light on the great racial divide in America and is justly rewarded for her work by this country’s literary elites, who on a daily basis shudder with shame as yet another atrocity inflames this space and deepens the divide.

I say unlikely sources, not because I disagree with Rankine’s politics. Quite the contrary, in fact. Rather it is the lesson I learned about running for public life in YouTube America from those who feel persecuted by a society perversely conditioned to these atrocities that did come as a surprise to me. 

I’m referring to the following passage, in “Citizen,” page 23:

Hennessy Youngman aka Jayson Musson, whose Art Thoughtz take the form of tutorials on YouTube, educates viewers on contemporary art issues. In one of his many videos, he addresses how to become a successful black artist, wryly suggesting black people’s anger is marketable. He advises black artists to cultivate “an angry N exterior” by watching, among other things, the Rodney King video while working.

With respect Jayson, I’ve got a wry suggestion for both blacks and whites looking to be successful politicians. (I haven’t yet posted my videos on this …) Cultivate a simple, nonliterate exterior. For example, say you are running in a neighborhood with high dog ownership combined with a high percentage of porn consumers (when it comes to the latter, every ZIP in the country). Cultivate a simple, nonliterate exterior. Change your name to Dogget. Don’t campaign, don’t write anything down that could even remotely be defined as a position. Simply leaflet your district with the simple, nonliterate message. Do It Dogget Style. Vote Dogget.

Next: Running for Your Life: Yankee Haters Dream Team


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Some time ago we were in Freebird Books, a gotta-check-it-out used bookstore on Columbia Street, not far from Brooklyn Bridge Park. While browsing there, I found and purchased a treasure: the “complete stories” by one of my favorite authors, Alistair MacLeod, published under the title “Island.”

A few months before I was saddened to read that MacLeod had passed away. It was at least fifteen years earlier that I’d first heard of MacLeod from my friend Ray Smith, who with his wife Joyce Carol Oates ran the powerfully good literary journal, Ontario Review, until his untimely death in 2008.

At that time I got a copy of “The Last Salt Gift of Blood” and was amazed with the quality of the stories. I am not alone in thinking this way. In fact, and Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil included MacLeod in their book “The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. “Knowing that I could tell other readers about [MacLeod] was the high point of The Modern Library Project for me,” Toibin said.

What a gift MacLeod has at describing a boy’s regard of his father: the proud working man. Here’s a sample, from the story “The Vastness of the Dark” …

“As long as I can remember [Father] has finished dressing while walking, but he does not handle buttons or buckles so well since the dynamite stick at the little mine where he used to work ripped the first two fingers from his scarred right hand. Now the remaining fingers try to do what is expected of them: to hold, to button, to buckle, to adjust, but they do so with what seems a sort of groping uncertainty bordering on despair. As if they realized that there is now just too much for them to do, even though they try as best they can.”

Alastair MacLeod: definitely a great who is missed. Get thee to bookstore and find out for yourself.

Next: Running for Your Life: Back On the Beam




Running for Your Life: Endless Summer

Here it comes, a New York City-style heat wave: 94 degrees Tuesday; 94 Wednesday; 97 Thursday and 88 Friday.

What to do as a runner – Get out in the early morning? Or late at night when the temperatures dip into the low 70s?

Well this runner heads to a treadmill in my neighborhood gym, where the temperature is always in the 70s. From here, because the machines face picture windows that look out onto busy Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, I watch the foot traffic go by. The endless summer of young ladies in too-short shorts, children during their last days of no-school freedom on skateboards and scooters, my elders shuffling along in the punishing heat that is demonstrably too much for them, BFFs on their way to coffee or an early lunch.

If I’m to be in the city (and not at the beach!) during this early September heat wave, here’s what I do to cope (and keep up a semblance of training for that mid-November marathon in Brooklyn): treadmill-run, dine in AC comfort and if the spirit moves, put a little Beach Boys on the stereo !

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday  


Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

 In the pages of the London Review of Books (August 27) is a thoroughly wonderful essay titled “The Sound of Cracking” by Pankaj Mishra in review of two books: “The Age of the Crisis of Man” by Mark Grief and “Moral Agents: Eight 20th Century American Writers” by Edward Mendelson.

In the essay, Mishra quotes a third author, Tony Judt (1948-2010), the European historian and brilliant essayist. Yes, if only this great thinker were with us today!

Here’s the money shot as they say in my line of work:

Though doused in Saigon in 1975, a retro 19th-century craving for universal mastery and control was rekindled in 1989 among many members of what Tony Judt called the ‘crappy generation’ – the one that ‘grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political’. Judt’s indictment extended beyond Bush, the Clintons, Blair and neocon publicists to intellectuals at the ‘traditional liberal center’ – the New Yorker, the New Republic, theWashington Post and the New York Times – who, he wrote, had turned into a ‘service class.’ Researching his book in 2003, Greif seems to have been troubled by this spectacle. Liberal intellectuals who might have been interested in his book about the crisis of man were, he writes, ‘busy preparing the justification of the US invasion of Iraq … on the basis of a renewed anthropological vision of “who we are” [in the West] against a new “they” figured as totalitarian.’ 

A chillingly great essay by Mishra. Something for those of you out there looking to be great. Check it out! http://bit.ly/1LyF0rk

Next: Running for Your Life: Endless Summer



Running for Your Life: Don't Stop for Nothing

Overheard recently (Aug. 25) in Prospect Park, from a high school running coach in conversation with a 40ish-year-old running enthusiast, who I’m assuming was seeking pointers about how to get more out of her relatively newfound pastime.

“Build in speed portions in your workout. If your jogging pace is a 10-minute mile, do some interval sprints. You want to regularly go twice that fast, if you looking to run stronger and faster. So bring some speed intervals into your practice.”

Oh, boy. If words alone could stretch hamstrings (for miles and years accustomed to a go-slowish pace) to the breaking point, those would be the ones …

That being said, I am a firm believer in doing things differently, to testing yourself. But, please, for your own health and safety, consider your running goals carefully: how fast, how far, how long. As my recent hamstring injury has taught me, there is no shame in going slow.

My rehab is thankfully going pretty well. I’m scaled back from doing hills, and staircase intervals on long runs. The longest run I’ve put in since my injury more than a month ago has been 45 minutes. I didn’t make the five-mile mark, but I also didn’t feel any muscle pain, or even soreness.

So, I’ll keep it slow. I haven’t given up on the Brooklyn Marathon just yet. After all, as the subject heading says: don't stop for nothing. But, when you get a little older, or if you’re just starting after an extended layoff, take it slow in the beginning and build up only bit by bit ...

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday


Running for Your Life: Sixty? Really?

In my previous post I wrote about the first anniversary of our Neath family reunion of August 2014. Reunions connect us in ways we can't begin to imagine beforehand. In my case, the playground that was the summer backyard of my Uncle Rog's and Aunt Wilda's, taught me many lessons. Here's one that I carry with me that was both stated and shown in the childlike play by everyone -- children to elders -- during those glory days:

You are only as young as you feel.

I don't think about that saying very often. But it does show in my life. In pretty much every avenue of my life -- home, working, writing, reading, and running -- I don't feel any differently than I did in my thirties. Sixty? I'll be turning sixty in October. I'm blessed by a loving wife and daughter, work that matters to me, and yes, running. Running for my life.

Sixty? So far, it's just a number. Like Forty was before. And Fifty. Seventy? Really? Will that be just a number? Time will tell, but I'm liking the pattern from 1955 to 2015!

Next: Running for Your Life: Stop for Nothing

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

During my coming of age years, my idea of greats pretty much were defined in the sandy backyard of my Uncle Rog's cottage in Sauble Beach, Ontario.

That's where we played, the Neath clan, which celebrated a family reunion in that special space a year ago in August. Thinking today of cousins Gary and Lynn, in particular, for hosting us that day, including my mother, the youngest of the nine elder Neaths.

This month marks the birthday of my late aunt, the beloved Dell, an incomparable wit and champ leg-wrestler. Here was the space where daredevil badminton was played by my dad and Uncle Bob. There were horseshoes and barbecue burgs.

All because the elder children and their kids came to see the patriarch. My grandfather, Sam, whose picture is on this link on Facebook page, and on Twitter.

A year after the Neath reunion, I remember the greats of my coming of age. My aunts and uncles and my grampa.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sixty? Really?

Running for Your Life: Easy Does It

I've begun notes for a piece of writing: Rime of the Ancient Marathoner.

It seems apropos these days. Especially after having tweaked a hamstrung muscle in my right leg while training in the Bois de Boulogne last month.

A week later, after it seemed much better, I reinjured the same muscle running Sur La Grande Jatte.

Since then, while I should've been doing physical therapy in the hopes of building up my miles in the way that I need to in order to run in the Brooklyn Marathon in 88 days on Sunday, Nov. 15, I've taken to managing my training on my own.

Not wise, maybe. But I'm taking it easy. Slowing down to a 10-minute mile pace on the treadmill, gradually going up to 9:30, 9:20 ...

So far, after almost a month since the Bois Breakdown, I'm back up to 35 minutes. At about a 9:40 pace, more or less.

Slow but sure.

As will be that writing project: The Rime of the Ancient Marathoner. A poem, perhaps not a race.

Time will tell.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday




Running for Your Life: Marseille Mood

Making notes on board the high speed train to Paris, after six days in Marseille:

Three hours and twenty minutes, the perfect length for a video music composer, with the digital camera attached to the train outside, directed so that the sky takes up two-thirds of the frame. Because there is so much to love about the changing skies; Marseille, brilliant hot sun, cloudless blue sky, the lovers kissing on the platform at Avignon, the light as it plays on the plains, all the way to the outskirts of Paris, where the chill shows on the timeless fields, the clouds fill the sky with a near-London muscularity. Composers, complete your grant applications, file to Je t’aime, Paris …

Don’t miss the visit to MuCEM, only open for two years, a blink of an eye of Marseille’s mad history, and enter for free the wonder of its façade, the promenade within that encircles the massive cube space, ascending in an ever-so-gradual way, the late-afternoon light on the harbor water, how many times reflected in the space, outside, inside and all – at one time, I will show the photo story I took of MM’s slow walk ahead of me into the narrows of darkness. She is all white, a perfect contrast in the shadows of this extraordinary space.

The Vieux Port may have been redeveloped on the backs of mega-millions, but dashes of life – the skinny boy with the sunken chest plays at showing he can be like his friends, the boys he views as his betters – feel unchanged. (His betters are running and leap-frogging from harborside into the sea, choosing a place where dangerous-looking breakwater rocks are directly below, and where they are guaranteed of gathering a crowd to watch, because who can resist a daredevil show?) A cute, athletic girl has screwed up her courage – perhaps to leap the breakwater rocks for the first time; her jump does have that hope-against-hope arc to it – and she makes it, and in her first action afterward, she is flailing her arms, coaxing the boy with the sunken chest to try. He seems as determined as ever and to our horror he dashes up to the edge. Then stops. There are so many false tries. And each time he doesn’t do it.

Destinies are shaped during moments like this. For close to an hour we watch the boy, until he finally gives up, and sits at the harbor’s edge, his skinny legs dangling far above the inviting waves.

Next: Running for Your Life: Easy Does It