It's that time. What's your deal? In my job as a New York Post headline scribe, I wrote "American Weigh" for a recent review column on the best of the get-thin-quick magazines.
That's not the cross I bear.
As I've written here many times, a substantial part of my life is divided into three pursuits: running, writing and reading -- not necessarily in that order.
Could I run more, write more, or read more? Or run harder, write more seriously, read with greater hunger to learn?
No, that's not my cross to bear eight.
Are we true to our loved ones? True enough that we don't sacrifice so much of what we hold dear to compromise that love? Do we examine the very idea of love in our life with the firm desire of deepening love? By taking the emotional risks that requires?
That's enough of Resolutionary Road for this year. Happy 2015, everybody!
Next: Running for Your Life: Cold Hard Facts
Running for Your Life: The Merry Christmas Post
Christmas comes but once a year, and Hanukkah too. Before the New Year strikes, and the pressure of resolutions.
You know: to eat less, to exercise more, to read, to forgive.
Now, though, it's about family. To gather 'round the tree, the menorah. Today (Dec. 22) we light the candles for the eighth and final night of Hanukkah. Then, before bed, we'll get out our Christmas stockings to put on the mantle.
At our house over the holidays this year we are blessed with the return of our daughter, K. She and her boyfriend, C, and their two dogs, the gentle blue pit, Stella, and the drama king Chihuahua, Shoe-y. We will cook and drink and laugh and tell stories. Some about the origins of our ornaments that we've collected on our travels throughout the years. Oh, yes, there will be some unwrapping of gifts. But the simple additional presence of K, C, S, and Sh will be enough.
Boy-o-boy, this post is about as sappy as Lox, our Christmas tree. (We added an two-footer golden pine, which we dubbed Goldie ....) But what the heck. It's Christmas.
Very best of the season, everyone !
Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions, I Have a Few
You know: to eat less, to exercise more, to read, to forgive.
Now, though, it's about family. To gather 'round the tree, the menorah. Today (Dec. 22) we light the candles for the eighth and final night of Hanukkah. Then, before bed, we'll get out our Christmas stockings to put on the mantle.
At our house over the holidays this year we are blessed with the return of our daughter, K. She and her boyfriend, C, and their two dogs, the gentle blue pit, Stella, and the drama king Chihuahua, Shoe-y. We will cook and drink and laugh and tell stories. Some about the origins of our ornaments that we've collected on our travels throughout the years. Oh, yes, there will be some unwrapping of gifts. But the simple additional presence of K, C, S, and Sh will be enough.
Boy-o-boy, this post is about as sappy as Lox, our Christmas tree. (We added an two-footer golden pine, which we dubbed Goldie ....) But what the heck. It's Christmas.
Very best of the season, everyone !
Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions, I Have a Few
Running for Your Life: The Next Marathon or Number 9 !
At the end of July I had pretty much made up my mind. No more marathons. After all I'd been happy doing my every other day running for twenty-three straight years before I suited up for Pittsburgh Marathon in May 2010.
But then, in my fourth marathon, only the second one that I finished all 26.2 miles, I managed to run the race in 3:47, and later that year, in Scranton, I literally shocked myself with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:33. Boston 2012 was my sixth marathon, significantly slower but it was 80 degrees F at start time, so just finishing in one piece was an achievement.
Then came my seventh, a return to Scranton and a modest sub-4 hours, followed by Nova Scotia in July, many minutes beyond four. It was hot that day, but I'd been hoping for better.
It was then I said, well, maybe that's enough. Eight marathons. There's the half, the 10K. Or just running. I mean that was good enough for twenty-three years, wasn't it?
Then a friend of mine said let's train for Albuquerque. In October. Starting race temp this year was 53 F; in 2013, 36 F; in 2012, 51.
That's more like it. And there's history. M, K and I lived in Santa Fe for a year in the early nineties. Bugs Bunny always took that wrong turn in Albuquerque. And the best damn TV show every made -- Breaking Bad -- was set in that town.
So there it is. The next race. And, oh yeah, I'll be over sixty, with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:55 in my sights .... !
Ncxt: Running for Your Life: Sixty years in 2015
But then, in my fourth marathon, only the second one that I finished all 26.2 miles, I managed to run the race in 3:47, and later that year, in Scranton, I literally shocked myself with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:33. Boston 2012 was my sixth marathon, significantly slower but it was 80 degrees F at start time, so just finishing in one piece was an achievement.
Then came my seventh, a return to Scranton and a modest sub-4 hours, followed by Nova Scotia in July, many minutes beyond four. It was hot that day, but I'd been hoping for better.
It was then I said, well, maybe that's enough. Eight marathons. There's the half, the 10K. Or just running. I mean that was good enough for twenty-three years, wasn't it?
Then a friend of mine said let's train for Albuquerque. In October. Starting race temp this year was 53 F; in 2013, 36 F; in 2012, 51.
That's more like it. And there's history. M, K and I lived in Santa Fe for a year in the early nineties. Bugs Bunny always took that wrong turn in Albuquerque. And the best damn TV show every made -- Breaking Bad -- was set in that town.
So there it is. The next race. And, oh yeah, I'll be over sixty, with a Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:55 in my sights .... !
Ncxt: Running for Your Life: Sixty years in 2015
Running for Your Life: “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard
You’re going to write a novel in six volumes about your
life, 3,500 pages (in Norwegian) and call it “My Struggle.”
This is not a quick read, a palm-size novelette that flies
out the door of your local indie bookstore. Or “Gone Girl” that clocks in at a
breezy 432 pages. Even “Infinite Jest” is 1,079 pages. “Moby Dick?” 635 pages.
No, you’re going to write about your teenage flirtation with
rock ’n’ roll, your remote father, the burying of your remote father, being a
father, being in a tumultuous relationship with the mother of your children,
your death-meditation being, your memory-excavator being, your bizarr-O hermit uncle
and Heidegger fanatic whose only contact with people is during Christmas week
when you’re a kid.
And it’s going to be a page-turner. A novel that according
to Rachel Cusk, the real thing, if you ask me, is “perhaps the most significant
literary enterprise of our time.”
Just when you stop and think, nah, literary ambition is
dead, along comes a novel like this. So far, in English translation by Don
Bartlett, there are three volumes, with the fourth due in the US in June 2015.
I’m half-way through the second volume and it’s just as
advertised. One of the great, great reads of my life; one that returns you to
the source, sparks the mind to think that, yes, big, sprawling projects are not
only possible, they are the wellspring of our reading and writing culture.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Marathon or Number 9!
Running for Your Life: Simply Write It Down
You never know what will grow into something bigger.
For example: Overheard while . . .
Taking a break, sitting on the front stoop at home
“Let me call you back after I look at my phone.”
Running in the park, a makeup person in an open-air photo
shoot
“My background is in pageants and porn.”
So many ideas, observations go fleeting by. Our brain is a
marvelous treat of a thing, but we can ask too much of it. By keeping a record –
by that I mean some kind of bound book with pages that you fill unmediated by
phones or digital playthings (don’t tell me you can do anything more than tap
rather than really write on any of these tablet thingees) – you will manage to
hold on to ideas and observations that otherwise will be forgotten.
Besides there is truly something glorious about the feel of
an ink pen, cursive writing-printing across an unlined page that is so calming,
especially after a hard run as I’ve had today (Dec. 15), 35 minutes, just over
4 miles. Whatever cares I had before the run-write swept away by the
neurochemicals that release, yes, in that aforementioned marvelous brain, now
shooting waves of quiet pleasure to every pore, from toes to fingertips, and,
yes, I still feel the swollen calf and stiff leg of my DVT (see previous post,
Running for Your Life: Pascal Dupuis). But that is only as a footnote in a
novel, the footnote that is part of the narrative but not the deepest part. Not
even close.
Next: Running for Your Life: “My Stuggle” by Karl Ove
Knausgaard
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