Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

Okay, so these shoes (see second last post) have changed everything!

Heretofore I’d been writing that winter running poses too many risks for a runner in his sixtieth year, i.e. icy pavements, black ice on asphalt, wet slushy corners, especially those of the calf-deep variety that come about in the too-soon thaws that follow a blizzard, leaving streets with gallons of mud-colored soup at the lip of every sidewalk cut made to advantage the disabled, who you have to wonder where the disabled have gone and how they’re faring in the days (weeks!) it takes for Brooklyn sidewalks to be clear.

Which means the big outdoors, cross-country skiing in Prospect Park, and running ! in my new shoes, the ones that promise sure footing and relaxed spring, that somehow, miraculously, have helped to calm the fat leg from my DVT I’ve been feeling in recent weeks, worrying me some but, then, in these new shoes ! the feeling is just as it should be, and I’m back, right where I want to be, floating along these hard and too smooth surfaces.

Back to looking around as I run in the cold and on the snow and ice, falling into meditation. Second winds coming when they should, actually back to the sublime idea that I will go on a run; in winter, or summer, the season doesn’t matter, all with that indescribable feeling that I could run forever.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff

Running for Your Life: "Red Army" by Gabe Polsky

You don’t have to be a fan of hockey to like the movie “Red Army,” a captivating fill-in-the-blanks feature-length interview between filmmaker Gabe Polsky of Chicago and Slava Fetisov of Moscow, Soviet Union.

Watch Slava sit and watch the critical play-by-play segments of the astonishing Miracle on Ice triumph by the US men’s hockey team. The outcome wasn’t so miraculous for the Soviets. Players were purged and those who remained – Fetisov among them – were relegated to punishing training methods (where did they get the footage!) that would bring low the sternest Spartan warrior.

Watch how Slava snaps at Gabe, who chooses the word “power” to describe the sudden ascension of Victor Tikhonov to the helm of the Red Army, the Soviet men’s national ice hockey team, over beloved, fiercely dedicated to the players, Anatoly Tarasov. It is “system,” Fetisov scolds. Tikhonov was KGB. He is only an empty suit. A stooge. What power is in that?

Watch and marvel at the best top five that will ever – argue here if you will, but with the advent of salary caps and front-loaded contracts, you will lose – play the game. Kasatonov, Fetisov, Larionov, Makharov and Krutov.

Ah, Krutov. You will love him. If there is a man to limn the soul of ice hockey, the glory of the team above all else, it is Krutov.

Sense the no small bit of Putin in our Slava. This man who brandishes his cell phone like a gun, his easy arrogance, his withering glare at the inferiors around him. No Esposito showman, Beliveau nobleman, Howe great uncle. There is more than a little of the Russian dictator in this man who after hours of being interviewed by Gabe doesn’t show him the courtesy of even remembering where the filmmaker came from. As if a California boy, as Fetisov calls him, could have come up with what northern boy Gabe of Chicago has managed to do.

The Soviet Union may be dead, but it is very much alive here in the story of the Red Army and Slava Fetisov, in fact it smolders in the death-stare gaze of this amazing man who doesn’t stint in telling a story of great drama, a story that seems so long ago and far away but that crackles in the telling.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

Running for Your Life: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” Vol. II (and New Shoes!)

Volume I ends with the burying of the father, begins with a Proustian meditation on death.

Enter Volume II. Our hero doesn’t care what he eats as long as he has fuel for writing … then, with no explanation, he, a bitter-ish house husband, is planning and buying food at gourmet shops for elaborate meals. There are long, amazingly authentic sounding, all-inclusive literary, intellectual and philosophical eruditions between him and Geir, his close friend. Deeply personal, if not intensely intimate, details about the dark psychology of his one true love, his wife Linda. Being a parent. A bad one. Having one child and what she is about, how very early she is free and apart from him in her judgments and needs and preferences. There is a second child. A third. No wonder birth order matters. It has to. It’s “Your Struggle.”

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New shoes! New shoes! New shoes! I have been out for the second time in them. The first outdoors (Jan. 29) in the Asics Gel-Kinsei 5, a neutral bomb of a shoe!

You forget the difference new shoes make. Must mean I’m back in marathon-training mode. (Or could have as much to do with the Blizzard of ’15: I neglected to pack my running clothes and my old Brooks Bangers when I was tapped for an overnight emergency stay due to the surprise closing of the subways, and I bought them at an athletic-wear store not far from my Times Square area office building. Note to crowd haters: shop in the hours before a New York blizzard hits. The combined forces of a paranoid media and power-mad despot politicians keep people indoors. The usually jammed store was blissfully empty.)

Do yourself a favor and check out these beauties. If nothing else, just a walk around the shoe store floor. Asics Gel-Kinsei 5. This longtime Brooks believer is suddenly feeling like a convert!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

    

Running for Your Life: After Snow Day

It’s the day after the blizzard (Jan. 27), and, with more cold and snow on the forecast for Friday (Jan. 30), there will finally be an abundance of snow cover in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Time to get my cross-country skis going. Out with the Thurber, our Redbone Coonhound, who lives for Snow Days. Paws gripping the ice and climbing through undergrowth. So much ahead that excites. Life is short and in few places that I know of does that show as clearly as in the bounding clammer of a coonhound in the woods covered in snow and ice; like that of a dog bred for water work, say, in Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes.

Color me northern, but it thrills my heart to see this dog of the Ole South, of Tennessee and Georgia, in post-blizzard winter. To me, in day after day of heat and humidity, where is the fierce glow of life in that?

Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Vol. II 

Running for Your Life: Snow Day

For all intents and purposes, boys, we may as well be living within twenty-five miles of the Arctic Circle.”

– History teacher Don McLennan, circa 1969-71, West Hill Secondary School, Owen Sound, Ontario

Mr. McLennan’s chatty rejoinder didn’t do more than serve as mock fodder for the balance of my high school days.

But Mr. McLennan’s nerdy wisdom has stood the test of time. I can’t begin to think of what it was we “boys” were talking about that day, but I’ve never forgotten Mr. McLennan’s message.

As I write this (Jan. 26), the blizzard of the century – wait a minute, maybe two centuries – is churning toward us here in Brooklyn. We have our emergency supplies stocked and I’ve packed an overnight bag with the idea that I may not be able to get home to Brooklyn from Manhattan tonight. They are calling for as much as three feet of snow before it’s all over. When it comes to newspaper work, I’ve always been essential personnel.

What’s it like to be twenty-five miles within the Arctic Circle? When the wind howls, the snow swirls, step outside and within a New York minute you’re disoriented. You’ve lost your easy landmarks, and footing is potentially treacherous under all that snow. You can turn an ankle; if your bones are brittle, they can break; bad falls like cracks on the sidewalk. Inevitable.

So unless you’re essential personnel – police, fire or media workers – you stay at home. Read. Laugh. Drink. Play Yahtzee. Write.  Or if you’re born in the late ’90s or early ’00s, waste your youth as elegantly imaginable, the video games and social media apps have become so tantalizing.

But the power could go out. A centuries storm and you’d best be prepared for that. Lanterns. Flashlights. Candles. Plenty of batteries, kitchen matches. Then, you’re down to: Read. Laugh. Drink. Play Yahtzee. Write.

Through it all, you’ll talk. And hopefully not about the weather. But on days like this, that’s okay. You’d want to remember this day. It’s amazing what comes back in memory of those Arctic Circle-like times: 1966, 1996, and with luck, 2015.

After all, everyone is entitled to their own Don McLennan moment. It has been a delight for me all these years.

Next: Running for Your Life: Knausgaard Vol. II