Running for Your Life: Race Ahead II

It will have to wait for another year. The New York City Marathon, that is. I received word via email that my name was not picked in the lottery that determines runners for this year’s race.

And travel plans have scotched the idea of the other two races I mentioned in a post a little while ago: I will be out of the country when the Toronto Marathon and the Marine Corps Marathon are held on Oct. 22.

The training, though, starts now. With the tentative plan of being in Wellington, Ontario, for the 14^th annual running of The County Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 1.

That’s six and a half months to get my legs, and wind and head around the idea of doing this once again. Run for your life, yes, but occasionally pick up the pace and race !

Next: Running for Your Life: Run Through the Flu

Running for Your Life: ‘Miserables’ Thoughts

Next week (March 7) marks the launch of an incredible read: FSG’s “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Miserables’” by David Bellos http://bit.ly/2mLQzUD.

Yes, that’s a 300-page book about, well, a book. Imagine that happening today. Or better yet, just read this amazing account of the novel of the 19^th Century by Victor Hugo …

So many gems to love here. But here’s my current fave:

“In his youth, Hugo the royalist had been among the first to raise the alarm at the dilapidation of the city’s medieval heritage by profiteers and crooks known as the bande noire or “Black Gang. His campaign to save old buildings was crowned by [his first novel,] ‘Notre-Dame de Paris,’ which represents the great cathedral in the form that it had at the height of its glory in the late 15^th Century.”

Enter the architect Viollet-le-Duc with his vision that received enthusiastic support from the city council to . . . redo the magnificent Paris cathedral in what would incorporate the popular novel’s “lavish descriptions (based on [Hugo’s] extensive research and strong visual imagination.”

“The Notre-Dame we know was unveiled in 1862, a few weeks after publication of Les Miserables …”

Cityscapes and their economies reshaped by the persuasive power of a work of art … Read on. It’s a stunner.

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

Running for Your Life: It’s Spring Already

Hold your horses, or rather, get ’em out of the stable – It’s Feb. 28 and the latest 7-day weather forecast in Brooklyn calls for this range of daily Fahrenheit highs (68, 50, 41, 41, 43, 52, and 56).

That’ll take us into the second week in March, when we New Yorkers think spring will be just around the corner.

OK. It’s OK to be not spending the time I usually do on the treadmill. But shorts and a singlet on outdoor runs in February? I’m sorry, but that’s just weird.

Here’s a crazy thought. Imagine the new president setting aside his notes for his speech to Congress tonight and saying he’s gonna fight for ordinary Americans. He’s going to quote from this recent article by Benjamin Kunkel in the London Review of Books.

“How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic features of the problem are plain enough, when you can stand to look. Universal carbon pollution, known by the mild term ‘climate change’, is already distempering the seasons with bounding extremes of heat and cold, and magnifying storms and droughts; increasingly, it will spoil harvests, spread tropical diseases, and drown coastlines. (Less well known is the threat of more frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.​) Excess carbon dioxide in the air, partly absorbed by the waters below, turns the oceans more acid, corroding coral reefs as well as the shells of clams, oysters and other calcifying organisms. Ocean acidification, a chief cause of the Great Permian Extinction some 250 million years ago, may come to factor in the ‘mass extinction event’ – a planetary culling of life-forms with few rivals in the earth’s history – currently taking place. For now, fatal habitat loss, both underwater and on land, has more to do with local conditions becoming abruptly warmer or dryer; the arrival of unfamiliar species traveling in the entourage of globally mobile humans; and encroachment by farmland and roads. Farmland itself may be faring better than wilder and more biodiverse terrain, but here too there are grounds for concern: topsoil acreage is dwindling, as are glaciers and aquifers vital to irrigation, on a planet that must feed seven and, soon, nine or ten billion people. Most of this population is poor by European or North American standards and doesn’t constitute any automatic constituency for ecological restraint. Governments and corporations, for their part, have little incentive to slow, much less stop the general destruction. The collective activity of humanity is sapping the ecological basis of civilization – and no collective agency capable of reckoning with the fact can yet be discerned.”

I know, a crazy thought. But with March coming in like a lamb – and leaving like a lamb – I couldn’t resist.

Next: Running for Your Life: ‘Miserables’ Thoughts  

Running for Your Life: Social Media Mystique

Those old enough to remember the AIDS crisis in New York City will recall a ubiquitous public service announcement poster: SILENCE = DEATH.

The viral campaign drew parallels between the Nazi period and the AIDS crisis, declaring that “silence about oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of survival.”

It is in this spirit – if not with the same visceral threat to the spread of near-certain death (although even that may be up for debate) – that I propose a companion PSA sticker:

SOCIAL MEDIA = STRESS.

Social media billionaires would like you to think that more time online will make the world a safer, more democratic place, and lead to happier more informed social and consumer choices.

Not so. As President Obama elegantly said in his farewell address to the nation, “The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.”

Consider this from Time magazine. In an article published Feb. 17, the Old Media giant reports: “Virality is a David myth obscuring the fact that the Internet is [still] run by Goliaths.” (Those are my brackets on ‘still,’ which Time editors should have axed; I mean are we proposing that there stands a ghost of a chance that the Internet will ever NOT be run by Goliaths?)

This reportage lets print readers in on a little secret. These facts are done by social science-based (read not business, rather nonpartisan information providers who can no longer feel sanguine about continued federal funding) organizations regarding how going viral is a myth perpetrated by those who would have us devote more and more time to social media.

So look for it – SOCIAL MEDIA = STRESS. Or better yet, get your nose out of your phone and breathe a little. Like the bearded guy from those old Men’s Wearhouse ads says, “You’ll like the way you look, I guarantee it.”

Next: Running for Your Life:  It’s Spring Already 

Running for Your Life: New Leader of the Free World

When it comes to this label, I find myself thinking of one of the best tabloid headlines of the past year.

In the story about Hillary Clinton’s email kerfuffle, The Post wrote this head:

DELETER OF THE FREE WORLD

Now comes a label of an entirely different stripe. From early this month by Nicholas Kristof, about

Canada.

Here’s the link. http://nyti.ms/2le3Hoj. When it comes to “Liberty” welcoming “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door” the new world leader according to Kristof (and anyone else who has been paying attention) is the great nation to the north.

Be smug, Canadians.You deserve it.

Next: Running for Your Life:  Winter Blah-ster