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 20^th 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

  

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us

When it comes to writing, the idea is to keep a diary. Why, you ask? Consider what the British poet Peter Scupham found in what the London Review of Books (Aug. 27) called “a carrier bag of diary entries and other bits and bobs.” The diary writer’s name: Avies Platt; she died in 1976. In the diary she writes about a memorable evening in 1937 when she attended a lecture of the Sex Education Society in London.

Here’s some of what she wrote in that diary:

“Two rows back stood the most striking-looking man I had ever seen: tall, somewhat gaunt, aristocratic, very dignified: a strong, yet sensitive face, crowned by untidy locks of white hair: horn-rimmed glasses, through which shone strange, otherworldly eyes. He wore evening dress, with a soft shirt. He leaned slightly forward, resting both hands on the chair in front of him, and on the little finger of his left hand was a large, exotic-looking ring.”

Wonderful. (Of course, my thought is that how special it is to be a woman observer. My wife, MM, is similarly gifted. As a man, I always feel uncomfortable staring at a person for as long as Avies must have stared to get this glorious description … )

Who was the man? None other than the poet, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939). Of course, Platt and Yeats would spend the evening together in conversation: Here’s a second gem, from Yeats himself:

“If you would write, you must get away, by yourself, into another world and write according to the vision you see there. You must write what you believe and not mind what people say. It is the only way. You know, when I come down to breakfast in the morning after writing all night, it is coming back into another world. It is as though I am not the same man, yet I am.”

Here’s a twist. Avies Platt is no longer with us. But a thoughtful poet with a great ear for a story wonderfully told has restored to us a memoir so that this amazing encounter between perfect strangers lives on, seventy-eight years after that singular evening in London, England.

Read on at http://bit.ly/1hlMofF

Next: Running for Your Life: Marseilles Mood

Running for Your Life: Paris Mood: Quest for the Hot Courgette

It is on Rue de Bretagne, a few meters from the taste prize of a Paris Sunday, brunch at Le Marche des Enfants Rouges, that we  find in a vegetable market where all the fruit and greens are gently placed with organ softness into light-weight brown bags, their corn corners spun to close them, the 2015 Courgette. In Brooklyn, they are but zucchini, but here, on Rue de Bretagne, the flesh of the courgette beneath the grape-green skin promise like the touch of a breast of a jeune fille, forbidden of course, but if the forbidden doesn’t arise on a trip to Paris then what is the point.

Three years ago we’d come to Paris, to Le Haut Marais, when there was no memory of courgettes, because while we were staying in a fine-enough apartment, the owners of the place were in Brooklyn, for two decades or more we’ve been exchanging homes in order to travel in comfort and not break the bank paying for hotels, but that trip in June 2012, we locked into an arrangement in which the couple arrived at our Brooklyn brownstone and went straight into our bedroom, shut the door, turned down the blinds and left us wondering what was next, maybe a Minotaur into the cave that they had immediately constructed in our own house, so with that image in my mind of that trip, I frankly don’t remember much about that time beyond  the purchase of slip-on shoes so pointy that they reminded me of a bully on the playground of Dufferin Public School in Owen Sound, John Adams, by name, who’d threaten boys like me that if we didn’t get out of his way or laugh at his lame jokes that he would flick his boots at us. Now, finally, fifty years later, I was ready for John Adams. He’d flick his boots at me; I’d flick mine at him.

Despite the Minotaur threat, we came back to Paris. Last month. There are other places like this, perhaps, but in Paris for those of us who love it, the sensual basics don’t seem to change. The politics, yes. The racial imbalances, yes. It was in June 2011 that we’d stayed in a small apartment in the Marais near Le Marche des Enfants Rouges. Four years later, and we’re back in the vegetable market, MM seizes on the courgettes and has the attendant pick them out, one, two, three, four and a fist of spring onions that I gather into my backpack for the long subway ride back to our Levallois apartment, plenty of places nearby to get courgettes but we feel we have the hot ones, and yes, it is now my turn at the cooking wheel, I slice off a perfect courgette oval, dozens of them and I am cooking without olive oil, with a stranger vegetal substance that I found in a plastic tub in the fridge that counts for butter and keeps heart disease at bay, an obvious obstacle to anything much happening in the pan, but these courgettes hold up, keep their form. I wheel the gas fire up and down with the burner knob, a strange jazz that seems to work, simmering in the other pot is a whole cooked chicken, where shreds of the spring onion go, the balance in the flat pan without a handle, and there is no way of knowing until all of this is brought to the table, the courgette sliced too thin, only now do I realize that I’d pressured my perfect courgette, which tasted of chicken skin and schmaltz and spring onion darkened in an overheated pot, a meal that filled our stomachs but left me aching for more. That kept me on my quest for my 2015 Courgette.

Next: Running for Your Life: Marseilles Mood   

   

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

I was too young. Just six years old. So I’m not going to make this about a personal memory. But when Marilyn Monroe died under mysterious circumstances on August 5, 1962, fifty-three years ago, The Sixties officially began. Give me the counterculture, baby, because the mainstream culture, the one that takes the life of an innocent like Norma Jeane Mortenson isn’t worth pondering.

Also in this vein, that time marked the very first televised presidential debate. The broadcast occurred on Sept. 26, 1960 and featured John F. Kennedy (“Happy Birthday, Mr. President” was sung by MM on May 19, 1962, seventy-eight days before her suspicious death) and Richard Nixon. How far we’ve come from Nixon’s five o’clock shadow to Donald Trump’s orange hair.

The Sixties, of course, are long gone. Today’s atavistic nihilism fosters a voracious appetite for the premiere of the sixth season of “The Walking Dead.” Tune in on Oct. 11.

If Marilyn were alive today, she’d be 89 years old. If only she were with us.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paris Mood

Running for Your Life: The Subway. A Public Good?

If we view the subway as a public good, what better way to spend money raised in taxes from mass transit than an underground train and a comfortable climate-controlled motorbus that for a reasonable fee takes you to distant places in a sprawling urban metropolis like New York City. And yet, for those working to provide these services, an observation:

What appears to be the indifference of scheduling that will, regularly during my daily commute, thwart a very convenient transfer when the D Train, an express line to Manhattan, arrives in Brooklyn’s Atlantic terminal less than a minute before the announcement of the arrival of the northboard local R train. The doors open for the express, then close, the R Train pulls into the station with, on average, several hundred commuters like me looking to make this desirable transfer, only to be disappointed, if not angered, by the sight of the express train pulling out of the station.

How to feel for the motorpeople and conductors on both of these trains. All day long this happens, say, in a regular eight-hour shift, in places all along the system, each time the train employees have to feel the charged energy of the poorly served fee-paying passengers. A week, a month of this kind of inhumane treatment and what results? A disrespect for the riders, the losers and poor saps. The absence of pride that comes from a job well done. At best, a sense of frustration that their bosses obviously don’t give a hoot about them, the front-line workers who must fill the impossible roles of being just cogs in a wheel that doesn’t roll as it should.

It would take only a simple tool to fix this scheduling problem, to correct it like one does a flat tire, but the bosses don’t think enough of their workers to provide them the tool. So they give up. Drive the train; open the subway doors. Collect their pay. The promise of a public good lost in the miasma of bureaucracy.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paris Mood 2015