Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the thin anklet socks. One layer long sleeve and unlined windbreaker. Thankfully there’s no wind to speak of. But plenty cold. From my “cattle” stall, the eight-plus-minute milers, I can see the CNN sign south in the pre-dawn light: 14 F. The same temperature as two years ago for the Manhattan Half, two loops of Central Park. In 2009, it did warm up to 18 F by 10 a.m., said S, a Park Slope neighbor who traveled with me to the 8 a.m. start. To the east, across the Sheep Meadow, the sun is finally rising. How freezing it must be for the young girl her voice trembling as she sings, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” S and I exchange “Good Lucks!”, she in a scarf and three layers of long sleeves and waist-hugging thermal windbreaker, setting in her earbuds, turning on her iPod, saying she’s off to her zone, and we slowly move along in the mass of 4,358 runners, it’s long past the official starting line before we pick up any pace at all, and I lope ahead because I could have stood waiting for the start in a stall for faster runners but I was enjoying S’s company, but now I’m in my zone, a 13.1-mile race in cold like I haven’t been in since I ran in North Bay, Ontario, twenty-four years ago.
Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run II
So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard on Seventh Avenue and Prospect Place, “Okay. I’ll pick up the poop, you park, then call me back.”
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Mapquest and Google Maps and every other free online trip detailer must be in cahoots with GPS makers because these Web services flat out do not give directions that can be followed by a reasonable person making reasonable decisions based on the breadth of useless facts and scarcity of essential information they come up with.
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Mapquest and Google Maps and every other free online trip detailer must be in cahoots with GPS makers because these Web services flat out do not give directions that can be followed by a reasonable person making reasonable decisions based on the breadth of useless facts and scarcity of essential information they come up with.
Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run
“You training it? Or perhaps running?” (My friend J’s e-mail message about a planned trip to Washington to see K and J.)
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It’s a joke, of course. Not one that makes me laugh, but intuitive of J, and the truth is, as I wrote in RFYL: Mental Landscapes, I do look at roadscapes differently when I’m driving. With M still in India, I’m alone on my way to visit K and J in their new apartment in D.C., (It is a thrill to think that I will be my daughter’s first visitor to her new life with J!) and, yes, J (my friend) I do imagine myself on the highway, running. I’m
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It’s a joke, of course. Not one that makes me laugh, but intuitive of J, and the truth is, as I wrote in RFYL: Mental Landscapes, I do look at roadscapes differently when I’m driving. With M still in India, I’m alone on my way to visit K and J in their new apartment in D.C., (It is a thrill to think that I will be my daughter’s first visitor to her new life with J!) and, yes, J (my friend) I do imagine myself on the highway, running. I’m
Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons II
Today (Jan. 11) is 1-11-11. Embedded here is the failure to label the post-twice-millennial decades (The Aughts? The Tens?), have to wait nine years, until 2020 before we enter The Twenties. Life is binary. Digital. Attention spans a blip on the screen.
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Overheard in that three-plus minutes of time when the NYC subway trains cross the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge span, and people on their cellphones are free to talk:
Girl (excited): “Seriously I walked into the room with my drink, and they were everywhere. Snooki lookalikes. I couldn’t take a step without bumping into one.”
Pause
Girl (annoyed): Of course it was hilarious! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
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Overheard in that three-plus minutes of time when the NYC subway trains cross the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridge span, and people on their cellphones are free to talk:
Girl (excited): “Seriously I walked into the room with my drink, and they were everywhere. Snooki lookalikes. I couldn’t take a step without bumping into one.”
Pause
Girl (annoyed): Of course it was hilarious! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons
Old Boston Garden. Bobby Orr. Noel Picard. Did you know “The Goal” was scored on May 10, 1970, almost 41 years ago? If I want to think of how old I am but not how old I feel, I remember what it was like at 14 years old, a Bobby Orr fan, if not a Boston Bruins one, that’s another story, to exult as Orr is in the act of scoring, upended by Noel Picard, soaring in flight over the ice as only he would, as only he could, and the shot by Ray Lussier, staff photographer of the bygone Boston Record-American, captures something of that moment but not it all because I close my eyes and I can still see him, as if time stands still, and Orr is suspended there, an angel, not a hockey player, this Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, on the other side of Georgian Bay, under the elephant’s tail (see RFYL: Why Run III), a place, home to another boy’s fancy, a Grade Eight speech in 1967, Orr’s rookie year in Boston, and a quote that resonates even now, and why I sit to watch, even the most banal of games, the Rangers vs. the Hurricanes, the Devils against the Wild, Islanders/Coyotes because there on that ice is a piece of home, where as a thesis graduate of Carleton Journalism, I return again, this time to write the script for a radio broadcast on the retirement of Boston’s hockey idol, Bobby Orr, with a memory of his brother, Ron, aboard the Zamboni, cleaning and flooding the rink at the Bobby Orr Community Centre in Parry Sound, and even in these mid-season games, the players show it to me again and again, so that if I can I won’t miss it; the quote: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” You’ll see what I’m talking about when he shoots and scores. The boy in the sideyard rink that my dad made. Shooting, then leaping as Orr did. Again and again and again. He shoots! He scores!
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