Running for Your Life: Why Race?

It’s not an easy answer, this one. It’s been posed before in this space.

Truth is, for twenty-three years – 1987 to 2010 – I didn’t race. In fact, aside from the occasional tennis game in the’90s and early oughts and a memorable broomball match at Mohonk Mountain Lodge in New Paltz, NY, (our team won 2-0 and I scored both goals!) I didn’t do much in the way of competitive sports.

Instead I ran. But in the manner of Confucius, who famously said, “The superior man has nothing to compete for.” That the spirit of competition itself fouls the purity of sport.

Last week (Aug. 19-23) my mother sent a card to M and me celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary. Inside, she’d stowed a small trove of daily newspaper clippings she’d kept for me – some for as long as fifty years.

One, I couldn’t believe. In a one-column headline, set in 18- to 20-point type were my names in lower case style: Larry O’Connor. The second and third lines told readers that I’d scored a hat trick in an ice hockey game. As I recall I was probably about sixteen years old.

I had totally forgotten that at one time I had been a young competitive athlete. My mom, God bless her, didn’t forget. (Word to the wise: No one loves you quite like a mother.)

Is it about approval then? So strong is that need for parental approval. Run, sure, but race and take a chance that what you will accomplish will again fill that breast of pride, create another clipping, one that your mother will snip out and hold for you, stir the blood like nothing on Earth.

You could call it pride. Or you could call it a mother’s love.

Of course, I’d feel her love if I were to return to simply running – not racing – for my life. But frankly I’ve come to like the idea of the clipping. And if God is good, it won’t be my last.

Next: Running for Your Life: Managing Pain

Running for Your Life: California Mood

So much about life here feels like an outtake.

Scene: Rose Café, Venice:

A couple of old guys, retired, recount their pre-retirement stories; a clutch of young people, in jeans, flannel shirts, open neck, listening to a geek in a beard detailing ideals about business plans, set on charting a path away from producing things we need, rather toward purchases based on the pressure of social and personal tastes.

It is easy to fill a life with the empty, rather than the endless, why we tend to think that the endless is equivalent to the empty when in a certain frame of mind the endless is precisely what we want from life, which is what Neruda teaches us in the most beautiful line:

“Life in its jewel boxes is as endless as sand.”

What can we see in a tide pool? How does it change? How can we simulate that endlessness in what we surround ourselves with in our own lives? Must keep moving forward. Like the tide pool.

Entrepreneur table: Woman perched (see the emphasis of the perky breasts) never says a word, others lock in on “cachet,” “techno-centric,” “primal version of storytelling around the fire,” “platform toolset.”

Retired guys: Blowhard movie dude in conversation with the RG Woody Allen-sighting anecdoters, tells some kind of story that involves Gettysburg (Civil War?) and then in what seems way too scripted receives a cell phone call (loud ring); looks at the screen, and yes, acknowledges to the cronies that with mild regret he must take the call, walking away in a tone of voice that is both loud and important-sounding . . .

*

On to, well, Week 9A, of Steamtown Marathon (Oct. 13) training. In the interest of keeping body (if not mind) in order, I’m taking a second relief week before Week 10, and my longest training run (now planned for Friday, Aug. 30) of about 20 miles. Steady as she goes, folks.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why Race?

Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down

It’s Week 8 of my 15-week training program that will end in my entry in the 2013 edition of the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from my teaching days (and with living with M) is that you don’t keep going back to anything unless you’re learning something new.

So it goes with marathon training. The Sunday, October 13 running of Steamtown will mark my seventh entry in this bruiser of an event, a 26.2-mile foot race. In the previous six, I’ve finished four of them. (In 2011, I was forced to pull out of the Boston Marathon due to injury … I’m not counting that one because I didn’t make it to the starting line.)

What I’ve learned – especially as an older than average marathoner – is that my body will not do what it used to in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Despite my best efforts to counteract those aging effects through attention to diet, anti-inflammatory meds and foods, stretching and strengthening.)

More than anything, as I crest the hump of my 100-day training program (Aug. 6 is Day 51), I am facing my Achilles Heel – So, ease up, already, OC!

Instead though I continue to run – even during my long, over 15 milers – at my marathon pace, or about eight minutes per mile. Or train on the treadmill at fast speeds, rather than slow ones.

The manual I’m using, Joe Henderson’s, Marathon Training, The Proven 100-Day Program for Success http://amzn.to/15DmV56, is very helpful at instructing me to alternate long runs with shorter runs (as well as take plenty of rest days and cross train).

But how to throw the body into that lower gear. Currently it is taking me a day or more to recover, with stiff muscles and soreness, tender hammies. I’ve been bound and determined to get close to a New York City Marathon qualifying time of 3:14, a 19-minute lop from my first Steamtown in 2010. It’s doable. But this week is a critical one. On Thursday, as per Henderson’s manual, I plan to run a 10K race simulation. But otherwise I’m going short and slow, with days of rest. At the end of the Week 8, or Day 56, I’ll have only put in about 20 miles. With the view that during Week 9, I’ll have paced myself enough to resume harder training.

Next: Running for Your Life: California Mood

Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth

(Diary entry, 6/20/13)

Sitting here at the MoMA sculpture garden, I am thinking of Europe. Both America and Europe yield public space to those poor unfortunates who beg for food and the basic necessities; but in America, there is a SELF-clarion call that roots in those indenturing individual rights and freedoms, which, of course, is why the homeless are more prominent outside these cloistered walls. Remember, fifty percent of the world’s welfare subsidy payments are doled out in Europe, which has only nine percent of the world’s population. *

That will change but not soon. Europe will remain a place where the espresso and croissant flags the battalion of the AMERICAN breakfast, “Yo, bitch! This is America!” So quaint, this tidy power. If there is a single luxury that I would husband for myself it is to prolong my visits to this bygone place, where the political economies cannot sustain themselves on the weakening productive capacity, or through the antics of aging leaders misguiding young people. See and feel it now before the inevitable change sucks the air out of what we’ve come to know and love. Time will kill fantasy like rising saltwater does the roots of even the grandest oak.

* Harper’s Index

Next: Running for Your Life: Just Try to Slow Down

Running for Your Life: Steamtown: Week Five

Now in the fifth week of a 100-day training program for Steamtown 2013, on October 13. So far, so good, thanks to Joe Henderson’s “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success" http://amzn.to/15DmV56

To date, on Day 30, as for longish runs, I’ve managed only an 11.8 miler (in part because the temps in late June and through mid-July have been too brutal for pushing any harder) and a simulated 10-K race, which in my neck of the woods means twin revolutions of the roadway in Prospect Park.

It seems odd to be marathon training again since my last one was Boston 2012. Training to finish is one thing – for me and my outsized goals (3:14 for the New York City Marathon and 3:40 for the Boston Marathon) it’s something else. But I think if I run a smart race in Steamtown (Scranton, Pa.) both could very well be a reality. (Well, New York City may be a stretch … but if I run Steamtown 2015, then at 60! the QT slims to 3:24 …)

Given the October race day temps aren’t likely to be anywhere near as punishing as they are now – closer to 100 degrees under the sun than 90 – I’ve been doing a lot of treadmill training at the gym. It’s important, as I’ve learned in training for previous marathons (on the morning on October 13 I will be at the starting line of my seventh 26.2 miler) to get in the miles, but not at the risk of affecting your overall health or, heaven forbid, losing training time to injury. Pushing yourself in the heat and humidity will do just that.

Henderson’s manual is BIG on rest days and alternating hard days with easy days. In the past, I haven’t been very good at that, and, instead, tried to take the course straight up to the mountaintop rather than via the slower and smarter switchbacks: that meant every week I’d just get tougher and tougher on myself, without going easy, and without taking day breaks, or cross training days. This time, though, I've been much more conservative: through the first four weeks, I’ve run the following totals: 27.3 miles, 29.2 miles, 28.6 miles and 29 miles.

Tomorrow (July 17) it’s forecast to be close to 100 degrees at midday, and I still plan to put in my longest run yet – 14 miles on the treadmill of my local gym. It’s hot and humid, baby. Fine, for a two, three, even six miler, but anything more grueling and I’m opting for the indoor (i.e. air-conditioned) track.

Next: Running for Your Life: Our Minutes on Earth