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

How about this famous quote from Mickey Mantle, who died too young (63) and famously (and wisely) said something that rings true for so many today:

“If I knew I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

Of course, that’s for those folks who consider themselves getting on in age. Not liberals, though. As Paul Rudnick rightly (and hilariously) tells us in this week’s (June 1) New Yorker: “All liberals are young. Just ask one.” http://nyr.kr/1epL35X

Next: Running for Your Life: Yes, Cross Train!  



Running for Your Life: Summer Pace

The heat is on – and with it a strategy to begin to put in some serious miles, with the Brooklyn Marathon in November, the carrot on the string.

With age, one slows down. In my case, after a hamstring injury in 2011, true to the warning of a doctor treating me at that time, I’ve never been able to get back to sustaining an 8:30 pace over 20-plus miles.

So, I slow down. Marathons at 4 hours-plus seem more likely than in the 3:35 hours -to-3:50 hours range of just a few years ago. Although for Brooklyn, I’m hoping I can get under 3:55. That’ll get me back to Boston.

Such a pace is just right for summer. Slower, that is. And not just on runs. But morning dog walks. Backyard chores. Dining outdoors. Fresh fruit for breakfast. French bread, toasted with jam and a touch of agave.

Am thinking about what I’ve written about on his blog, the Discovery of Slowness. I mean, what’s the rush, anyway?


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

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

If Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, were still alive she would make for the perfect running mate of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the longest serving independent politician in Congress.

Here’s what blessed Dorothy believed, according to friend and author Robert Coles:

“For Dorothy Day, anarchism meant increased responsibility of one person to another, of the individual to the community along with a much lessened sense of obligation to or dependence on the “distant and centralized state.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Summer Pace


Running for Your Life: Invest in Sweat Equity

When it comes to traditional investments, I’m pretty low-key. I’ve done none better than join with my wife M in buying a brownstone in Brooklyn in June 1992.  (She had some inheritance, I had just been hired by Birnbaum Travel Guides, a HarperCollins  imprint.) The rest is plain vanilla: a sliver of a company pension, a medium-risk 401(k), an M&L IRA. Stuff that rarely comes up in conversation – even with my wife !

As for risk, I invest in sweat equity. The charts tell me I run hard for my age. About 25 beats per minute above the top target range of 136 BPM. While training for Brooklyn 2015, I’ve been doing a hard run of 45 minutes on the treadmill. I’m sweating pretty good at twelve minutes. By the time I’ve crossed the tape at 45 – or about 5.2 miles from the first stride – I’m drenched.

And for hours afterward, feeling fabulous. Investing in sweat equity clears my mind, helps my appetite (for fuel foods like bread, nuts and fruit, pasta), pumps me up with energy, lightens my mood, contributes to my lights-out/without meds sleep history.

This might not be the kind of risk you want to take on in your portfolio. But if you do, and do it smartly, you won’t be sorry. If you ask me, it’s the key that turns the engine of a well-rounded investment strategy.

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


Running for Your Life: Knausgaard, Some Notes

So much of what we have in Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” are sketchy figures acting on Karl Ove – Snoopy, of the serious literary set – not Charlie Brown because that figure turned what Charles “Sparky” Schulz did in the spiritual realm in a way that Knausgaard never truly develops. Knausgaard stands on the edge of that, surely. But in the end he is always the man – the father’s son – in his rants and rages and anxieties, while making no attempt to adopt the Dietrich Bonhoeffer message of service and sacrifice, what Sparky does with Charlie Brown, never being able to kick the football that Lucy (Lucifer) puts down for him, the triumph of humility that is never to be found, I daresay, in the six volumes of “My Struggle.”

In Volume I, the young Knausgaard fails in his attempt to swim in deep water, but yet we know he will not, in the end, be humiliated by that, or by the premature ejaculations of Volume IV. Here is where the Mein Kampf feels too close. Knausgaard as sensitive, superior white man, in his needs, his wants, his choice not to embrace any other idols but his own, the one that he has created and in that there seems precious little difference in intent than Hitler’s book of the same name.

Here is what Jeff Eugenides says in the April 23 edition of the “New York Times Book Review,” about Volume IV: “That you never wish to relinquish the perspective any more than, in your own life, you wish to stop being yourself.”

This could stand to reason why women I know seem less into Knausgaard than men. In the life of Western women, a norm (female teen suicide phenomenon) is that women are unfamiliar with the feeling – or a girlfriend’s feeling – that you never wish to relinquish the perspective (K’s solipsistic I) any more than, in your own life, you wish to stop being yourself. Well, women have wished and some continue to wish they could stop being themselves (ie, body image, pay inequity, domestic designated worriers …)

So, yeah, Knausgaard is an acquired taste. Women critics, too, have sung his praises. But I suspect these women, as girls, played well with boys. Shucks, they probably still play better with men than their fellow women. But that’s just a hunch …

Which doesn’t mean I’m not deep into the guy universe of this smart northern fella who blesses my own memories of a red-blooded boyhood to late adulthood. It’s just that I think I’ve framed a fair idea of why the average woman may not feel the same away about this writer's “Struggle.”

Next: Invest in Sweat Equity


Running for Your Life: I Believe in “Ghosts”

Maybe there is a better post-Shakespeare interpreter of the human soul than Ibsen. The rime of the ancient northerner. But I’m at a loss to know her. Cold and wet and how can we feel God, when the spirit rises, the wicked lays bare in adultery, philandering, incest and alcohol abuse, all in stark relief against the unpromised land, ridges of fjords where the light of Paris, the lamp glow of London is but reflected in tortured memory.

So Madame Alving believes in “Ghosts,” as she says near the end of Act One: “Ghosts – Those two in the conservatory – Ghosts – They’ve come to life again!”

Madame Alving must believe in ghosts in order to follow through with what her destiny – not fate, she has taken too much of an active hand in events – is to be. (Spoiler alert: No, I won’t tell you the ending here!) In the minor art of TV, it is like Betty Francis (Draper) of “Mad Men,” whose choice in the penultimate episode also is stark but certain.

I believe in “Ghosts,” the play by Henrik Ibsen, in ways that I believe in “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, his fellow Norwegian. They do not spare us. By my lights, great art should not.


Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard, Some Notes  

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

When it comes to writing craft, to the heart of darkness, Henrik Ibsen would find a way to connect to young and old alike, consider these "Ghosts" pearls strung in the voice of the tragic Osvald Alving:

" He called it 'Softening of the brain' or something of the sort. (With a sad smile) Charming expression! It makes one think of cherry-colored velvet curtains -- soft and delicate to stroke -- "

Next: Running for Your Life: I Believe in Ghosts!

Running for Your Life: The Next Race

It’s hard to believe that a year ago I was deep into training for the Nova Scotia Marathon.

Believe it or not, it has taken literally months for my body to feel that it can take the punishment that marathon training entails. It may sound like a cliché to say, but a good part of that process is to train the mind. That it can will your body through the paces.

Making the right race choice can help. Last year the Nova Scotia Marathon was part of a glorious road trip with my daughter K, this year it is Brooklyn. Backyard Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Marathon, which is run in November, exclusively in beautiful Prospect Park.

Why Brooklyn? Because unlike every other marathon I’ve ever run, the course will never have me more than a short stroll home in Park Slope: A stroll that is all downhill. (Thus, the Slope.)

I had in this space made noises about running in Albuquerque. But like Bugs Bunny, I made a turn at Albuquerque. Not a wrong one, though. And one day, I hope to run in the Southwest. Saving it up for another day, and giving it up to Brooklyn, where my friends and family will hopefully come out to party afterward.

Please, mark the date and come to visit the Brooklyn Marathon. Sunday morning through noon, November 15. It would be great to see you!

Next: Running for Your Life: I Believe in Ghosts!   


Running for Your Life: Is Everybody Running?

It’s a fair question. In May 2015, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

In February, not so much.

Did I miss the memo? Perhaps, as my friend Marty Holski says, running is like skiing – or baseball, or hockey, or you name it, in terms of sports. It has a season. If Prospect Park is any guide, that season roughly corresponds with professional baseball; in a good one, you’re out there 162 times, as in the count of regular season games. That’s plenty, isn’t it? One hundred and sixty-two runs? Then it’s cold, and the runners are gone. Where, is anybody’s guess.

Now, though, everybody is running. Mothers and sons. Hipsters and creatives. Afghanistan vets and Vietnam vets. Dog owners and their dogs. They lope, they sprint, they shuffle along, alone, and in groups. You’d think every sunny Sunday in Prospect Park was a running of the New York Marathon, without the sideline crowds and festive mood. But in the park, so many faces read pain and discomfort, as if the strangers, because they are strangers to me, an all-year runner in these parts for the past twenty-three years, are here, few that show the simple pleasures of the outdoor sights, the leafing trees, the birdsong, from magpie to mockingbird to robin and redwing blackbird, and flicker, and the other day in the far, far treetops, an oriole.

I feel a stranger in the company of these runners in the park. Unless it is cold and wet, a storm coming on, that keep most of them at home, I don’t join them. Instead, I go to the gym. Run hard on the treadmill and meditate on this. Is Everybody Running? Yes. And each to his or her own beat.

Next: Running for Your Life: Next Race!