Larry O'Connor

Running for Your Life: Training, A Recap

2012-01-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the body. Not in a Golden Globe kind of way, though. As in how fabulous Jane Fonda looks or get a load of Angelina Jolie’s bone-thin arms; the supermarket tabs really do have it right, she must be starving herself, the camera cutaway to hubbie Brad, train-seal clapping at his waste-away woman.

No, the body as vessel. Something that you think you know, but is more than likely a stranger to you. It is most common to just go along doing the same things to our bodies and they, of course, do what comes naturally: adding a pound or two each year after twenty-five so that a 120-pound woman at a quarter-century is a normal-enough-looking 155-pound woman at a half-century. BMI (Body Mass Index not fab, but not obese either .¤.¤.)

As poet Stanley Kunitz wrote, “I am not done with my changes.” In the beginning, change can be hard. And, that, of course doesn’t exempt the body.

I run or stretch or work out with weights every day now. Well, occasionally I’ll take a rest day. But the Boston Marathon is about 80 days away. And thankfully the regimen I’ve been following since the summer is paying off. I’m keeping my race weight of 150 pounds. My energy levels are as high as they’ve ever been. And I’m sleeping like a baby. On a recent Tuesday I ran ten miles at a moderate pace with hills and felt like a boy.

Five years ago I would’ve just gone out the door and ran. Not given much thought about food or conditioning. At one point my wife M said I’m built like a tree. That it seemed I need only run and I would be healthy and fit, primed for years of long-distance running. That was back in the day when I started this blog, the summer of 2010. Out the door and I’d be back in two hours, red-faced but hardly winded after running not just long but hard. Thus the blog’s name, Running For Your Life.

No more. Now I’ve got a routine. With 11 weeks until race week, I’ll run 9-10 miles on a Monday, then on Tuesday, stretch-weight workout at the gym, hard-run through 13 minutes, 1.8 miles on the treadmill, and then Wednesday more weight work, stretching and more treadmill, 30 minutes, fast, most of that time either with a steepish incline or uptempo pace, sub 7-min mile. Then perhaps a rest day. The next, a longish run. Wednesday, at the 11-weeks-until-D-Day mark, I managed to run 14 miles comfortably. In eight weeks, if all goes well, with plans to increase the long run by a mile each week, I will have put in a 22-miler well in advance of race day, Monday, April 16. The idea is to run longer, faster, stronger.

More important, though, my body feels not only strong but limber.

What else am I doing differently? On the runs themselves I wear therapeutic hose, which has corrected (so far!) shin splints, a heavy-running training problem I’ve had in the past. And shoes. I used to wear snug-fitting Brooks. Thanks to a heads-up shoe saleswoman at JackRabbit Sports http://bit.ly/aQsH8 that’s changed. I went a size up, which seems to have eased the forefoot pain, which has hampered my training (and led to eventual race discomfort at the Steamtown Marathon 2010).

A physiatrist also pointed out that I’d been favoring my left leg, my DVT-affected one, so I try to be more conscious of striding out on my right leg rather than letting it be the trailer. The roomier shoe also has helped with my tendency to pronate mildly. Now I believe there’s more balance to my stride.

A stronger core also helps to lighten the impact of my footfalls; my head lifted up as if held gently by a puppeter’s string. I also like to try to cushion my strides, as in imagining that I'm running not on asphalt or a park trail but on ice.

TMI? Too Much Information? Maybe. But it’s all there in The Runner’s Body http://amzn.to/2Qp3Pr.

Which means carbing up. Drinking juice, water. No soda as a regular fluid for months now. Coffee and red wine, yes, but TRB implies that these particular beverages can actually improve health and performance. Overdrinking too has gone by the board. I can’t remember when I was last hungover, or awake in the middle of the night from alcohol rebound.

It’s been strange. And yes, it was hard to make these changes. But now, instead of seeing these practices as hurdles, I don’t even think about them. Maybe, in the beginning, I didn’t run for my life. Or I did, but in a different way than I do now.

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes from the Fourteen Miler

Running for Your Life: Key West Beat

2012-01-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

Back from Key West, the Conch Republic, where the captains who run the sunset sails thrill their predominantly Boomer fare with the knee-slapper, “Welcome to North Cuba!”, upon return in the darkness because for most of us land lubbers it’s more than a little disorienting out there, for an hour out of the sandbank and mangrove low-water keys, the Gulf Stream visible the night we see the sun sink into the horizon and the captain blows the conch so that his face glows purple in contrast to the blood-orange of the sunset, all aboard the AppleBone, as poet Billy Collins dubbed it, because it was a literary cruise, not like the Disney one, a floating theme park that moored near our oceanfront balcony, ESPN Sports Center on a giant screen topside blaring into the otherwise romantic night; shallow draught Caribbean port bruisers these beasts; how they get into the slips with water deep as elderly knickers is anybody’s guess, and a frightening thought that the town fathers have been considering allowing 10,000-passenger monsters into port (although the Italian cruise disaster may put an end to that . . .), which if that doesn’t kill whatever charm north to central Duval Street has left then I’m a monkey’s uncle, not to mention the safety of the cruise ships themselves, don’t begin to think that the capsizing of the Costa Concordia is an anomaly, the physics of these boats leaving no margin for error, turn away if you see the chalkboard math on the probability of it happening again, and especially in a place like Key West, where you do have to ask the question, “Well, how many people can drown in two feet of water?”

I didn’t see Gene Hackman when I was in Key West. Or hear about the car accident he was in. But we did see Ricky Williams and marine life:

 Ricky “The Green Mile” Williams is lifting M in the air, her left foot is eighteen inches off the ground, legs helicoptering. Ricky, now playing with the Joe Tenuto Chicago-style blues band (see them in Palm Beach area, or back in Key West, Bobalu’s on Fleming Street, the second week in February, look it up!). Drummer we heard has been in bands since he was six, but no longer practices between gigs. Ricky does. Ricky, the blind keyboardist, never stops playing .¤.¤.

 With M, watching the minnows and barracuda, pinhead pursuers and slowly, as if the late scene entrance of the graybeard theater veteran, a ray swims with a nonchalance we’ve been waiting for. We stay for a beat then hop abroard our $40-per-week bikes and leave the water’s edge, Martello Tower Museum, just east of the Key West International Airport.

Next: Running for Your Life: Training, a Recap

Running for Your Life: Quietude and Plenitude

2012-01-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

My hero Bessie Doenges didn’t live long enough to witness the cultural sanctification of Steve Jobs, the wizard god of gadgets (See previous post, “Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited”). The sole misgiving of that fact being that she didn’t weigh in on Jobs’ contribution to the affairs of women. And, baby, when it came to weighing cultural contributions, Bessie delivered the goods.

Bessie Doenges penned Bessie Writes. Well, actually, no. Bessie typed on an ancient manual Olympia her 250-word Bessie Writes columns that she then mailed (with a stamp and envelope that she bought with her writer’s wages, $20 per column) to me, her editor at The Westsider and Chelsea Clinton News, two Manhattan-based weekly newspapers that I ran in the early to mid-1990s. Here’s a sample. Not a column, but a letter to me, typed on that Olympia. I keep it in a place of honor at my desk:

Dear Larry: 10/17/94
These true stories of mine are 400 words, not 200 which you seem to prefer. I got my guts in them. I don’t write easily. I hope you’ll give them space. In our Senior Center they will be on a bulletin board with my picture next week. I love you.

Bessie
P.S. I managed to get it on one page after all.

Bessie died in her 90s – but not before she was discovered. I have all the hard copies of her column – her first weekly one in her life – after eight decades of writing http://nyti.ms/xFz0Hr. Occasionally, I mine them like rich veins. In these days of Twitter, I wonder how Bessie would respond to her fans that she needed to boil down her poetic observations of life, aging and memory to 140 characters. I dare say she would tell her Twitter editors that there was no way she could say what she needed to say with such brevity. Then, she’d sparkle: “I managed to get it into 140 characters after all.”

Consider this: A Bessie Writes tweet. (Apologies to BD purists.)

My feet go to sleep;/Must I weep?/I can’t hear;/Life’s still dear./Very gently I bite/My arm and taste/The salt.

One of my favorite expressions of Bessie’s was that in old age she sought a balance of quietude and plenitude. She talks about it in an excerpt from an Q&A article in Friends magazine (March/April 1996. Sadly this article doesn’t exist in cyberspace, or at least not anywhere where I could find it.)

“I have a motto that I live by,” she told the interviewer George W. Stone. “Quietude and plenitude. I want to be quiet, but I also want to reach out and experience life.”

Here’s a good example from a Bessie Writes column (The Westsider/Chelsea Clinton News, Dec. 9-15, 1993) of what she’s talking about:

“The lady bent to breathe in the sweet scent of lilies of the valley, those small, white trembling bells in their sheaths. She was astonished to find they had no smell at all. She inhaled as deeply as she could, only to find a cold nothing. Something had been stolen from her! Other people could smell them and she couldn’t – it wasn’t fair.

What possibly could compensate for this loss? Well, at her senior center she knew at least 200 people, out of which a few had a rather bad odor. But if everyone else could smell them, she couldn’t. She might hug them, and even kiss them, if she chose. And to be able to give comfort and affection to people who seldom get it is perhaps as rewarding a thing as smelling the small lilies.

That smart cookie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said it all when he wrote: ‘When half-gods go, the gods arrive.’ ”

Unlike Steve Jobs, Bessie doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry. Perhaps she will one day. But I think she would’ve hardly approved. Bessie was original Old School, a woman who could trace a family memory, an ancient aunt (I mean Bessie herself lived with the most active of minds until just south of a century . . .) who had overheard as a child a conversation about the killing of a president: The president was Abraham Lincoln.

I’d like to think that Bessie is hero material for 2012. (I know that she would be very excited about what the young people did and are doing with Occupy Wall Street!) But one day I would love to see her collected columns published. Of course, that would likely then merit her a Wiki entry. She may not have approved, but this Old School boy would love to see her name and work remembered in every conceivable way.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Change of Pace

Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited

2012-01-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

In the clear light of 2012, let’s return to the Jobs Front. Steve Jobs, that is. Where even today, almost three months since he died on Oct. 5 (my birthday), he is making headlines. As in, the next big buzz-busting day in the Apple universe, rumored to be Feb. 24th (he would’ve been 57 that day), the firm (today at 2:15 p.m. [Jan. 3], the first trading day in 2012, up 1.4 percent, $410.76 a share) will launch its iPad 3.

Perhaps it’s time for sober rethinking about just what the tao of Jobs has wrought. There have been pockets of other voices. Consider, the London Review of Books, “Amazing or Shit,” a piece by Mattathias Schwartz on “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson http://bit.ly/tkQcQE. In the sea of panegyrics, it is a welcome correction:

 “A talented hustler, he (Jobs as a young man) marked up junked components and impersonated a manufacturer over the phone to get free parts.”

 “He tried to deny paternity of the daughter he fathered at the age of 23, and was careful to settle with her mother before Apple’s IPO.”

 And in conclusion, drawing upon a comparison between Apple products and Zen gardens: “In 2020, making a video call on an iPad will feel about as sublime as booting up an Apple II does now, while a walk through the gardens of Kyoto will feel much as it did in 1920, 1820 and 1720. Jobs’s achievement was to make ephemeral machines and make them seem permanent.”

Not to mention, addictive – as the following post-holiday gift link from BuzzFeed makes abundantly (and distressingly obnoxiously) clear: http://bit.ly/vdX2w4

And here, to keep the clear light shining, a word from 2010. My Jobs blog post from September 2010:

*

“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in newspapers – and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic . . . . In America, cinema is true because it is the whole of space. The break between the two, the abstraction we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema.”
– Jean Baudrillard, “America,” 1989

Dear Steve Jobs:

Sir, I can anticipate your response to the Baudrillard. Point to the global sales of your iPods, and iPhones, and iTunes, and iTouches, and iPads, and soon to come, iTVs. When did Baudrillard publish “America” in America? 1989? In the digital age, that’s ancient history. Now, of course, that “sacramental mental space” in Europe subscribes to Apple Inc. What we couldn’t bring about with military or trade agreements, we’ve managed through technology and style. Indeed, space, speed, cinema and technology is culture. But not just in America. Everywhere.

Full disclosure: While an American citizen, I am culturally a Canadian. Not that that makes me any way superior. I think the social philosopher George Grant has it right. Canadians live next door to a society that is the very heart of modernity, and, given that nearly all have shown they think modernity is good ( ie, you, Steve Jobs, are god. Not God but small “g” god), then nothing essential distinguishes them from Americans, Grant wrote.

Suffice to say that I agree with you. And Baudrillard. And Grant. Where I part ways is the reaction to these truths. We each had an epiphany as young men when we saw in use our first Walkmans. I admit I come to this conclusion in an unscientific way. But we are the same age. I’ll hazard a guess that your first glimpse of a Walkman – mine happened when I was 19 in 1975 – was an important memory for you. But while my gut reaction was opposition, yours, undoubtedly, was opportunity.

Which is not to say that my reaction is any better than yours. And, as they say, money is a damn poor measure of success, but in America – and yes, in Europe and Canada too – it’s all we’ve got.

You’ve certainly got me there. What has my savage eye brought me? A lifetime of running, reading and writing. In your case, chasing those opportunities has led you to become an obscenely rich man, a god of our times.

Me, I put my inside out. You, you keep your inside in. Your mystique, your genius is in keeping us guessing as to what is coming next. Your eye’s on the prize: being the world’s social director. Leisure time is Jobs time. What did Curt Schilling say about aura and mystique? That “those are dancers in a nightclub.”

But like Curt, I’m not buying it. The ear buds, the iFocus. It may not happen right away, but there’s a backlash brewing. Think Carthage, Rome, England. Empires don’t last forever. Discover slowness, choose analog, try technology-free weekends.

*

And, while we’re at it, here’s Pico Iyer, a fellow slowness sojourner, on technology-free weekends from the clear light of 2012: http://nyti.ms/vAv55T.

Next: Running for Your Life: Quietude and Plenitude

Running for Your Life: A Look Back at 2011

2011-12-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

Is it just me or did we tire in finding an agreeable term to describe the decade(s) since 2000? A lot can be put down to synchronicity, as in 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and 12-12-12, and, yeah, that according to the Mayan calendar all will snuff out next year, in 2012, anyway (12-21-12, for the record). As if the past twelve years have all been part of a Beckett-inspired inside joke – with the important caveat that Beckett is all about going on: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Looking back at 2011, I’d have to say I’ve been impressed with its numerical coyness. I’ll miss that, from the back, the last two digits, 1 + 1, equals 2 + 0, Grade One arithmetic, its particular symmetry that I’ll miss next year with 2012, whose claim to coyness ends with the lopping of the first “2” (and, yeah, don’t you want to do that . . . I mean consider what this 2! brought us: 9/11, a second Bush term, Obama, the Tea Party, IOWA 2012, for God’s sake) to give us the Kindergarten sequence 0 – 1 – 2 . . . Oh, yeah, and the Mayan calendar end times. That will be something.

Here at Running for Your Life, though, I feel I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. 2011 marks my first year of twice-weekly blogging. I’d like to think that this practice has in subtle ways that I try to write about here but in fact can only scratch the surface of has changed my life.

I have, it is true, in the past year learned a lot about my body. Not only does it – even after the devastingly disappointing hamstring horror of February/March that caused me to drop out of the Boston Marathon 2011 – run longer, faster and stronger, but I feel that in concert with this practice of blog-keeping helped to also shape my mind. In my reading this past year I’ve been especially struck by this scientific observation from Dr. John Ratey, one of the top experts on the effects of exercise on the body, in The Runner’s Body http://bit.ly/tnoGfb: “[Exercise] makes the brain function at its best, and in my view, this effect of physical activity is far more important . . . than what it does for the body. Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side-effects.”

Strange, I never thought my cravings would be altered. But they have, and I don’t know but what to think that it has to be because of these changes. Here I think of the great American poet Stanley Kunitz, who lived to be over one hundred, writing the poem, “The Layers” http://bit.ly/PLGOY “Though I lack the art to decipher it,/no doubt the next chapter/in my book of transformations/is already written./I am not done with my changes.”

I don’t care to drink as much as I used to. Or fill up with trans fat snacks. Or drink sugary sodas. Or even Diet ones. In 2011, for the most part, I have slept like a dream. And I run, with a passion that seems never-ending.

I am blessed, too, with love. My wife M, my daughter K. Family on both sides. Fun and joy of a tireless pup, Thurb. Friends. In that past year I have reconnected with many of you, through these writings and through the stories and videos you post.

2011 was also the year of OWS. I wonder what lies ahead as much as I marvel at the hope and courage and compassion of the millions who are now engaged in a type of politics that seems different, that speaks of possibility of a new generation, of K’s generation, that maybe, among other things, will create a new way to look at our times beyond the limits of the Mad Ave naming of our decades.

Happy New Year, everyone! Go for it with gusto!

Next: Running for Your Life: Jobs, Revisited

Running for Your Life: Christmas Week

2011-12-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

“Who are those guys?”

K hadn’t seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So on Christmas Day, after a delicious late brunch of K&M-dreamed-up heuvos rancheros, modest gift-giving, a He Is Risen romp at the dogrun for Thurb, every day is present day for T-Bone, and for us we went light is right, as in an anytime Escape to New York plane ticket for K, the middle years Sam Beckett letters for me, and last and certainly not least, USB Fridge for M, good for one 8-ounce soda can (read: Diet Coke), designed in American West rustic, the surprise unanimous choice as gift of the season, what M fairly soon decided would be on its way to her Sarah Lawrence College office after the holiday break, sure to attract conversation and giggles and guffaws, and, “Ah, what a perfect husband you have who would think of such a gift,” because M loves her DC in midafternoon so I can live with the pleasure of knowing that she would be the first prof on her block to have one, although given the certain positive reaction, not for long.

Say, a half-century later, if Butch and Sundance had not been gunned down by military garrison in Bolivia, I can see them pulling beers our of an icebox in USB Fridge style (two tone, dusky red and light caramel). I was reminded during the re-watching of BCATSK (1969) how much the movie represented the end of an era. Perhaps even more than director George Roy Hill could’ve known at the time, considering that the only Westerns that still get made in Hollywood are the likes of “Cowboys and Aliens,” the flat-out bomb of 2011, so don’t expect the studios to try again until, say, maybe, 2022.

What strikes as you look at the movie now is how the freedom of the West, the open spaces, are being closed off and controlled and bought up by the encroaching robber baron railroad owners (“those guys”) as symbolized by the bicycle that B so magically rides like a holy fool about the barnyard, thrilling the third wheel sweetheart, Katharine Ross, but when change comes to her men’s lives, in the shape of the robber baron headhunting posse that will not stop until they have their heads, Butch pushes away the symbol, lets it roll and fall into the dirt, a wheel turning and turning, without end, or at least one that these two adventurous dreamers will ever know.

Symbols, what do we need with symbols, more than a century after BCATSK were killed? Women (Katharine Ross) intuit; it is one of the great wonders of women, their sight into the stupid affairs of men, their end, and in her case, KR’s, she left the men she loved to their certain end. Then it was the emerging industrial empire, the tycoons, Andrew Carnegie to JP Morgan. But now the railroad isn’t even the railroad, it’s the person, the corporate person, free to influence every wannabe BCATSK from here to Bagram, the notorious post-millennial prison http://bit.ly/sYwGno run by Robo-cops who when they return to the free world after doing what is asked of them by The Man cannot find gainful employment, the jobless rate of former vets from Iraq and Afghanistan many times that of the national average, and I’m sorry but this is hardly what you may wish to read the days before the new year: New Year’s Day only a couple of days away, the fastest week in the fastest month of the year .¤.¤.

But, hold on, here’s a gem: that drug makers (read: Congress and all the corporate lobby dollars that fund it) are hot on the trail of a new source of cash flow to replace those blockbusters whose growth is now damped by generics – i.e. Prozac, Lipitor, Zoloft, Vicodin, and, yes, Viagra – are set on filling prescriptions vials of a new mega-painkiller from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, and yeah, sure, not do a damn thing of any consequence to stop its flow into the black market to feed an insatiable need for more painkilling drugs http://nyp.st/uv5CSI, because from all accounts these babies (first in the pipeline, Zohydro) will be the juice of choice to replace the former fave of addicts (think: Rush Limbaugh), OxyContin, so-called hillbilly heroin. But hey. What better way to fill Congress’ and drug makers’ coffers AND medicate out of any sensible resistance the national adult population than to develop and distribute a drug that packs up to 10 times the potentcy of Vicodin !!

Oy. T-minus five days and counting until Iowa.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Look Back at 2011

Running for Your Life: Repetition Rant

2011-12-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

“I’d run, but .¤.¤. it’s so boring.”

If I’ve heard that line once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a point of view I’m not unsympathetic to. In the spirit of the voices that come to me on the road, it’s one I claim as my own. Honestly, I don’t know if I didn’t have my DVT health scare in the mid-1970s, whether I’d be a runner today. Word to the wise: A blessing lies in all.

The deal was, as a young man in Canada, team sports was a big part of my life: playing organized ice hockey until I was eighteen, in high school varsity boys volleyball and soccer. Summer, lacrosse, and pickup sports: touch football, softball, and sure, running games of all sorts. But all of the sprint variety. The idea of a cross-country run a la Alan Sillitoe (“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”) out of the question. “I’d run, but . . . it’s so boring.”

So what happened? Adulthood, I guess. I do wax nostalgic for game sports – and yeah, Boomer pickup softball games are played in my ’hood; it’d be easy to get back into it. For years after high school, well into our twenties, our gang in Owen Sound, Ontario http://bit.ly/ulvB9C, returned to our alma mater, the West Hill Secondary School football field on Canadian Thanksgiving to play tackle football. A searing memory comes back as I write this: my pal BA, wide open in a courtyard game at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the ball perfectly thrown, a lofter at his fingertips, but before he could pull it in, BA, his arms splitting the upright of a lamp post, collided into it with such force that he catapulted backward to the ground, near-unconscious, and we players, unable to contain ourselves, falling to the ground, pissing ourselves. Another game, years later, still in our twenties, tackle football again, this time in Brockville, Ontario, with pal MH from Owen Sound, and a senior editor at my first daily newspaper, saying: “Here we go again: Friend to OC, OC to Friend, Friend to OC to Friend to OC. Would you guys just quit it!”

It also has something to do with what I came to regard as repetition. As a married and family man, I found, what with the responsibilities of a full-time job and other imperatives, that most of my leisure time I wanted to be with my wife and daughter, I developed other sides of myself: principally, writing, reading, travel, fatherhood. It’s true that pickup sports don’t break out on the street for fiftysomethings in the way that they do for teenagers. And New York City, of course, presents its own myriad obstacles to that happening.

But running, for me, in these halcyon days. It’s never boring. Which doesn’t mean to say that each day I feel the same jump-out-of-bed urgency to put on my running clothes, lace up my Brooks Defyance and lope out the door. But once I’m going, it’s like the ignition has fired in my old Camaro. Like I’m easing into my seat and being a part of, as well as watching, the world go by, both inside and outside. It’s time travel and the birds and the cold and the soft ground, the broken cobble, the dogs, the Quaker parrots of Green-Wood Cemetery, Our Lady’s Field of Windsor Terrace. The otherworldly howl of Thurb. . . .

Where is the repetition in that?

Next: Running for Your Life: Christmas Week

Running for Your Life: December Highs

2011-12-20T11:01:00.000-08:00

As my wife M put it this week: garden trowel or snow shovel, what’s it going to be?

Almost three weeks into December, the fastest month of the year. In Canada, when I was a boy and a young man, it was the shortest month. In the US, it’s only amplified by the super-late Thanksgiving, with December days filling up with parties and family gatherings and charity events and food-buying and gift-selecting, never enough hours in the day so that about now, Dec. 20, it’s understandable that reasonable people begin to long for January, when time slows, days lengthen, and you can actually get some writing done!

Funny, how when we’re young days and months seen shorter, whereas apres cinquante, they’re faster. December the express train of the calendar year. Blink in the slanted, seemingly never directly overhead light, and it’s New Year’s Eve. The longest and most boring night of the year. (Meet us at Red, White and Bubbly, Fifth Avenue and Union Street, Brooklyn, for a bubbly tasting – and specialty locally made gin cocktails. Yum!)

So what better month to start marathon training than in December. Obviously, in the first weeks of training, faster isn’t the goal. Rather, I’m looking for easy to moderate, even slow is okay. Remember, you’re foundation-building, as in balance of muscle looseness and strength, moderate to high food and drink fueling, modest interval-running, i.e. not overdoing treadmill sprints or excessive stairwork, and mindful monitoring of bodily pains, especially in injury-prone areas (HAMSTRINGS! FOREFOOT PAIN!) So far, so good. I started the first week at my target goal, 30 miles per week, with a 8-mile long run. I plan to increase that long run by a mile every week until the mid-20s. But now, it’s go slow to December’s fast. Yin to its yang.

School’s out. And students, faculty and admin are all on my subway platform, or milling about on the street near my workday destination, just north of Times Square. Millions of them. It’s ten minutes from my Midtown subway exit to "The Tree?!" at Rock Center and fifteen mintues to the Museum of Modern Art, where the de Kooning is still on the top floor, my favorite the Woman paintings, especially one that makes me think of daughter K, “Woman and Bicycle” (did you know that Steve Jobs wanted to change the name of the Macintosh computer to Bicycle? Weird), and I’m there last Wednesday (Dec. 14). So many rooms near-empty, sliding before one after the other like an elf. Not from Santa’s workshop. But an indie.

Here’s a December High: to be blissfully free of politics. Author Haruki Murakami, as reported in the latest London Review of Books http://bit.ly/sBOvlQ, sees culture (political and otherwise) as “fake.” He told a Paris Review interviewer in 2004, “We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world.”

How else to explain the current iteration of the US Republican Party? Four years ago was bad enough, when January 2008 set off the Democratic Party presidential circus, featuring clown prince Barack Obama and wonk mentalist Hillary Clinton. But the Republicans of 2011-2012? Somehow, Haruki’s “fake” take seems a little dated. Although when it comes to the rank opposite of real, I guess we’re stuck with it. In any event, December is our last month reprieve before the dismal politics of 2012. Enjoy!

Oh, and further on the fake front; who would’ve guessed a half-century ago (1961), when Bobby Lewis’s “Tossin’ and Turnin’ was No. 1 on the hit parade, that today the nation’s No. 1 hit single with the year coming to a close would be “Sexy and I Know It” by Laugh My Fucking Ass Off?

More December Highs:

 The coat drive box in the corporate lobby with the never-old picture of the Statue of Liberty huddled in the frigid cold and snow, looking very much in need of a hooded parka http://bit.ly/s1jgPu.

 The subway trumpet busker with bowler hooked to the bell with what looks like fishing line, collecting dimes and quarters, dollars and bits and bobs after playing with a waist contraption sound system complete with a Bob Barker-like emcee introductory remark. Less than December High afterthought: Shouldn’t the MTA have metal detectors? I mean what’s to stop . . . Well, you know.

 The emptying out of alternate side of the street parking spots from Dec. 20 on.

 Sweaters and coats sales that make it very much easier to chuck out your current shapeless ones, donating to the corporate lobby coat drive box, even though in New York City, what with global warming we won’t be needing those sweaters and coats. Still, feel patriotic, doing all that’s left for us to do in the political process: shop. Spending money we don’t have (See Murakami above, re: “fake” world).

 Holiday parties (The one time of the year when people have you over and don’t expect you to reciprocate.)

 And family stuff. K, our dauther, is coming home. Tonight (Dec. 20)! And staying until well after Christmas! If that’s not the primo note to end on this holiday season, I don’t know what is!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Next: Running for Your Life: Repetition Rant

Running for Your Life: Road Home

2011-12-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

In Washington, DC, Vincent, the store manager of the K Street U-Haul, doesn’t seem to tire telling renters not be alarmed in the event that the police around the Capitol Building stop you and ask for your documents and to check inside the truck.

Early Saturday morning (Dec. 10) I’m riding K’s bike to K Street to pick up the truck. I’m here to help move K's stuff back to Brooklyn. She’ll sift through the lot and take some of it to Los Angeles, where she is living now. The rest M and I will keep in Brooklyn.

It’s about a quarter to ten and a little nippy. Street as clean as a hotel lobby. Only police in idling cars, nattily dressed joggers and their puffs of breath, brilliant blue sky. A terrorist would really look out of place here. As would an over-designed orange-strapped U-Haul Ten-Foot Box Truck that I’m to pick up.

“There was a woman here mighty disappointed that she wasn’t able to rent that pretty little truck I’d set aside for you,” Vincent tells me. I smile and nod and he goes on. “But we were good to hold it for you. You said you’d be here at 9:15, and I was giving you an hour – ”

“Well, I’m here. As you can see.”

“Yes, you are, sir. Yes you are.”

*

I’d arrived earlier that morning on the Bolt Bus. Last one to take a seat on the aisle directly in front of the bathroom. Only four empty seats, counting the one next to the young woman in my two-seat row who’s playing the odds that she’d have the row to herself, none too happy about giving it up. Thinking, note to self: Take up space in row more aggressively next time, channel meanness; the other three did, she’d noticed, and this old man didn’t choose to sit with them, did he? No sir. Uh uh.

I am without doubt the elder on the Manhattan 8:45, stop @ Sixth Avenue, between Grand ad Watts BB. We are on the New Jersey Turnpike when I snap on the overhead light. My row-mate has her overhead on too, reading a vintage literary paperback, title and author I can’t quite make out. I’ve a couple of recent “Economists” and an “London Review of Books,” with a cool take on Lincoln and liberals’ legacy of racial separation http://bit.ly/uRNWEo, can’t wait to settle in and catch up on my reading. In no time, though, my row-mate shuts her light and curls into what amounts to a ball, shielding as best she’s able from my light, not yet muttering to herself of her bad luck to be saddled with an Old School reader, at 9:15!! on a Friday night; she being in the majority of riders on this sardine-packed bus, what else makes sense but to snooze; nevertheless I keep reading for about an hour of the 4-1/2-hour trip, finally succumbing to the BB vibe and snapping off the overhead – for 45 minutes the only one left on in the entire bus (I’m in the next-to-last row, so I know). Some folks are ducked into the rolling LCD of phone screens and laptops, but mostly the place is like a suburban graveyard. In text to M, I tap: “Hushed slow roll into the dead of night.”

I do lateral leg stretches and meditate on the night. At points, radiant with electric light, scrub land of New Jersey, only pitstop a corporate Delaware one, $3 water, no drinking fountains.

Finally we pull in to Union Station, DC, well after 1 a.m., and without a cab dispatcher, one, two, three cabbies at the station spurn my paltry ride, one pointing in the distance, barking something about my destination being right there, and when I ask him to clarify, he says something like RIGHT THERE, only louder and with what seemed like anger, so I start to walk with my overnight bag, Canada Life on its side, a zipper cloth pouch of a thing that once held my gym clothes in high school, and walk the streets of Colonial Washington. Dead. Wondering if I’ll see a founding father in a powdered wig or, better yet, a young man dressed as a Trojan soldier. That would be cool.

K and I have a warm reunion over a glass of wine, then we finish the painting of the apartment walls until around 4 a.m., sack out and up at 8ish, grab coffee and croissant, and then on to K Street and Vincent.

What can I say about the road home? Hardly a hushed slow roll. Instead, we talk, for hours. Five on the way back. But we’re in no hurry. K takes a power nap, really only 10 minutes, suddenly awake to the full moon, splitting the uprights of the Verrazano as we enter our home borough, Brooklyn.

We pull up before K's childhood home and with M’s help we unload in a jiff. We’re late for a party, so I don’t stop to show M the side of the truck that Vincent very nearly let go to the disappointed woman, what seems like ages ago. It’s pitch dark so it wouldn’t have made the impression it did on K and me when we were parked on the street in Washington. Pictured on the side is a slave woman with a lantern, making her way along the Underground Railroad. And the location, my home province, Ontario. Dresden, best known for Josiah Henson, the former US slave whose life story was the inspiration for the novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” My hometown, Owen Sound, just down the road.

Next: Running for Your Life: December Highs

Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance II

2011-12-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

I dodged a bullet. Or at least that’s how it feels. Last Wednesday (Dec. 7) I was heartsick, certain that I’d set myself back in my training by a month, maybe longer. Today, though, I’m hopeful. Only three days off and I loped my way through a five-miler on Sunday. Barely feeling the muscle pull, tear in the upper thigh of my left leg, the bad one, the one inflicted with DVT, the one that swells up in the calf when I run because the vein valves are shot, the oxygen-rich blood feeds the muscles on a run, but they’re slow to return to the heart, causing swelling, no pain to speak of but an injury with this leg is especially concerning.

But three days’ rest seems to have done the trick. Back to square one. Day one, week one begins Monday (Dec. 12): Target: 30 miles and the long run a tidy eight miler, a rest day of stretching-only built in. And maybe, looking for blessings, that Thurb run injury last week happened for a reason. Respect karma. It has come to me that I was meant to be “pulled” into injury for a two-fold reason: One: That I’ll set aside my running/Thurb! time until after Boston and Two: I will not only stride and strengthen but stretch. Every day.

At our Christmas neighborhood block party on Saturday night (Dec. 10) a friend told me she would be a regular reader of the blog if only she didn’t feel a sense of loss in reading about what she said she can only dream about. An avid runner for decades, A told me her body has let her down. Not every part, she says. But her back. Is there anything I can do? she asks. I would so much love to return to running. I miss it.

A recent evening a second friend about the same age as A (not so much older than me) got to talking about his relationship to running. He, too, says he misses running. But unlike A, he’s resigned to devoting himself to non-running exercises. During his running years his knees started to bother him about a decade ago, and after consulting with a doctor who advised him that the pounding of that exercise would only make the trouble worse, he bought a stationary bike and now he works out as a cyclist. The knee problem vanished, and he sees this the exercise regimen as his new normal. He doesn’t even remotely think that he will be able to run again.

Like author Haruki Murakami – who is six years older than me – I consider myself lucky. Haruki writes in “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” about how his body just keeps going. I’ve never had a running coach, or even a personal trainer. In many ways I’m not so different than the young man who started running going on four decades ago. Running just fit for me. From the beginning. And yeah I’ve had my injuries, but except for the overtraining one last March when I tore my hamstring severely, they’ve been minor: some forefoot pain, shins splints. But the knees and back, knock on wood, they’re like new.

I’ve been thinking about what my friend A said at the Christmas party. Unlike my stationary bike friend, she’s bound and determined not to take no for an answer. Or at least she will exhaust all avenues before doing so.

Short of seeing X-rays of A’s back, I’d advise core exercises. My wife M does them and they’ve made a big difference in terms of back pain relief. Specific types are available in a key stroke.

But when it comes to running exercises, one area of focus is no panacea. It’s all about striking that balance, especially for us aging runners. Aging weakens and slows our bodies, but daily aerobic exercise – whether with weights or running or biking, etc. – retards that loss. The catch is we must exercise smartly: not build up too much strength in our quads while undertraining our hammies. Core and back and upper body, Achilles tendons . . . all of them need to be stretched and strengthened.

There are no shortcuts. In your 50s, running for your life means training for your life. Want to run a sub-four-hour marathon at 60? Set aside the time every day to become fit, develop core health and good, if not impeccable, dietary habits: grains, fruit, fish and Omega III supplements.

But then D-Day comes for A. When she feels ready to try again. To run. I wish her well.

I don’t know if I believe in anatomy is destiny. But in my case it has helped. I could do upper body exercises for a year, every day with protein drinks and progressively heavier weights and still have modestly built chest and arms.

But when I run my head lifts as if on a string, I feel my ankles go soft, and when I listen to my footfalls they, too, are soft, like petals; if they feel otherwise I imagine that I’m running on ice rather than pavement, lightening the stride even more and soon I’m moving virtually soundless through the park.

Next: Running for Your Life: Road Home

Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance

2011-12-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

I should have known better. It’s against my better judgment to train with the dog. As a puppy maybe. Or when I wasn’t in training. Perhaps that was what was working in the back of my mind when I set up this 19-week Boston Marathon training regimen, that sure enough I’d do something stupid, hard-run with Thurb in the cold, pouring rain without limbering up, tense in my body over the first quarter-mile, because during that part of the run all pretense of me being in charge of Thurber is cast off, as he howls and howls and charges off like a wild horse, me holding on to the leash for dear life, and on this day (Dec. 7), as I’m yanked along, big heavy strides, about a dozen of them, before I feel something like needles digging just below the surface, upper outside thigh of my left leg, where the hamstring attaches, first thinking what the hell else do I have in my pocket besides the Snoop Loop halter and retractable nylon leash, what could be causing this sharp pain, but then I think shit, it’s a muscle tear, hard to know just how serious, but something not good, and I’m thinking that if I stop now in the cold and wet and walk home it will only seize up and get worse, if only I’d warmed up before this wouldn’t be happening now, I’m only in a T-shirt and baggy shorts, freezing, the rain really coming down, and damn, Thurb isn’t easing up one bit, this might not be such a good idea, trying to slow him down so that the pain is just a dull throb, eventually though he does as he always does, levels off into a trot, stops the incessant howling so that I too can relax, feel looser, which helps, and, yeah, keep going, convincing myself that if I get home in time before I have to gather up my stuff and head off to the newsroom that I’ll find the heating pad and apply some HIGH heat before my sedentary day gets in full swing, and worst case, ties up the muscle so badly that I’ll be taking a week of rest days, heat and cold and light stretching before I’ll be able to get back to training for the marathon; maybe I’ll be looking at a 100-day marathon training regimen after all.

Ha! And here I was looking to write something wise and enduring about how to strike a balance in a busy life. Fat chance. (Better just to quote from the recently published second volume of Beckett’s letters: “Never seen so many butterflies in such worm-state, this little central cylinder, the only flesh, is the worm. First flights of young swallows, parents who feed them on the wing.”)

Wednesday (Dec. 7) is a miserable rainy day, start my office workday at 3 p.m. and finish at 11 p.m. Before that I’d planned to take the dog to the dogrun and then do some writing on a nonfiction proposal, see a friend for lunch before my workday begins. On Monday night (Dec. 5), M and I came home after full days in our mutual non-domestic offices to find our living room furniture – well, two comfy chairs – destroyed. It appears that Thurber had gone on a rampage. Feathers were literally floating in air. Dead tired and vacuuming feathers like picking up grains of sand on the beach.

So I’ll take a break from running and hard cross-training through the weekend at least. On Thursday (Dec. 8) it seems clear to me that it’s mild, the injury. A pull or tear in the thigh muscle itself, not the hamstring. There’s swelling, and if I were at home I’d treat it with heat and cold. Failing that though, through the weekend I’ll take anti-inflammatories to keep the swelling down. And stretching. Simple stuff, yoga-like, because as M rightly points out, my muscles are hard, too hard. Wednesday’s run in the rain could’ve been a lot worse, in terms of injury. I got off easy and now I just have to be smart.

How do you strike that balance? For years – and I’ve been running long distance on a regular basis for going on 37 of them – I just went out the door and ran. Didn’t think about nutrition or stretching or cross training. None of that stuff. I’ve got a lot to learn in terms of striking the right balance so that I can run for the rest of my life; never quite like I could in sheer defiance of my body's needs when I was 25 or 35 or even 45, but I’m convinced if I make the right choices – diet and a balance of strengthening, stretching and various speeds and types of running – that I can not only continue to run long distance but to do so as The Runner’s Body says in its subtitle, stronger, longer, and faster .¤.¤.

I don’t know when I will get back to full marathon training. But I know one thing. Until April, I’m thinking I should let Thurber run with the dogs. Or the next time I go out with him and he goes dashing off so that I’m stuck with either blowing out a muscle or letting go of the leash, I’ll let go of the leash.

Next: Running for Your Life: December Highs

Running for Your Life: Mind Matters

2011-12-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

So here’s the first week’s totals: Exactly thirty miles, the long run, 11 miles on Day 6, moderate hills and hard to moderate pace. No pain, although after Day 7, an ill-thought-out cross-training/treadmill with only hamstring strengthening and 6:30 per minute pace, with not enough time to stretch afterward; hamstring and groin muscle tightening to tension. A little scare. But Monday (Dec.5, Week Two, Day One), after a easy to moderate five-miler, there is no aftereffect, only tiniest of feelings in the butt-hamstring, even the forefoot feels fly. Note to self: Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! After cross-training, treadmill or running.

Today, then, rather than writing about striking a balance, with the body seemingly in training mode, I turn to the mind. Like dance. Lead with your head.

I’m thinking Derek Boogaard. The New York Times’ Pulitzer Putsch three-parter http://nyti.ms/sRCYTm on the life and death of a hockey enforcer. Putting it out there. Hockey in rural and small town Canada, my home and native land, the most telling moment when Boogaard (part one) learns that when he’s drafted into The Show (the NHL), he’s in a dark room, showing little or nothing in terms of a reaction because he has a headache, again, one that he can’t shake.

I'm nineteen (in 1974) with wheels but modest girth, not what you need to play, to continue to play, organized hockey, where speed and playmaking, particularly for those who are undersized, don't catch the eye of Coach. Five times into the corner and, Son, can you get the puck even once?! Elbows up, sticks up, players with just enough balance to stay up on their skates but chock full of testesterone, a mouthful of Chiclets for teeth, wide gaps where they'd paid the price. Coach takes note of that ... The praise call from the Bench, not Nice Hands! or Shifty Skating! or Good Pass!, but Oooo, what a Cement Head! Man, that boy can take hit after hit and keep going. Can't wait to see how he squares off against that skilled power forward who plays for our archrival. Two shots to the head and we take out their biggest threat to score. And when their enforcer jumps in and gets in his licks, Cement Head takes it like a man. And is back on the ice five minutes later; doesn’t miss a shift! See http://bit.ly/tKrYuJ.

I used to get endorphins, the runner’s high. No more, though. Or not often. Those days are over. Now, on mild pre-winter days like these, I feel a low-level high after a week of running. My mind electric.

Which helps when you are working on a memoir. Cherchez la cliché, but now instead of a runner’ high, that periodic burst of MJ-life ecstasy, I’m very quickly when I step out into a slow-moderate 8:30ish per mile pace, looking at better than 5 miles in 45 mins, 10 miles in 90 mins, 15 in 2 hrs 15 mins, etc., feeling that my whole life lives inside me.

I’m back at the bottom of the world, the Kapiti Coast (See Running for Your Life: Runners' Journals, first in Older Posts) in October 1983, only four months after running my first marathon, drilling down, down, the darkness of the DVT days, middle ’70s, after my freshman year, at the start of my second semester sophomore year, I’m deathly ill, managing to gain sufficient credits so that the year is not lost, and then a year away from college, a gap year, they call it now, a sketch of myself that I keep at my worktable bears the date: NOVEMBER 1976, but that has for decades made no sense because the image is from another time, when I was DJing at a summer party.

But no, on my run Monday (Dec. 5), I realize that what I’d done was make the sketch from a photograph that I’ve since lost, while living in Paris, Ontario, a tiny house in a farmer’s field where the summer of 1977 we’d had the party to end all parties because I was leaving within the week for the gold mines of the Northwest Territories, or at least that was the plan; the weekend of my departure I awake with a near-ruptured appendix that requires emergency surgery, my mom and dad off to a trip down south, and I stay and sleep in the screened-in porch of my uncle and aunt’s house, convalescing, and I would never work in the mines, rather at my hometown daily newspaper, the sports beat for a summer before my third year at college, that summer (1978) in Edmonton, where I went with my college friend, Clive – again, a name lost to me but found on Monday’s run – and Stan, too, a name lost and found.

Stan, who earlier that year had heard reports of abuse of his son in clear view of people at a restaurant, and now he is asking me, his tenant for the summer, if I would accompany him to the town where his son lived with the boy’s mother, who had long been estranged from Stan and was putting the boy through hell. Or so Stan was led to believe.

I went with him, crossing the Alberta-British Columbia border to help if I could. He went to family court for a hearing to do the right thing by his son in this rough and tumble out of the way place, the Kapiti Coast of the Pacific Northwest, Prince George, a town I hadn’t thought about since I’d read the first parter in the Derek Boogaard series, where Boogaard had honed his skills as a brawler, where he would sow the seeds of his tragic end.

And an editor friend, who when told of my running and writing about it, paused and said, “That really is a body of work.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Striking a Balance

Running for Your Life: Your Immune System

2011-12-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.

*

What does a rat have to do with your immune system? Holy hand sanitizer stocks, Batman, you must be kidding. The common rat has managed as a species to adapt to its conditions in ways that makes humans look like 99-pound craven weaklings by comparison.

A rat’s life is nothing if not intense, and I know at least in the circles that I travel in that people are quick to say how “intense” their lives are. Busy, might be more like it. But how intense? When it comes to exercise, say, how much do they push themselves? Is it recreation or athletics? Does it make a difference?

The Runner’s Body http://bit.ly/sc2pC6 puts a lot of the research out there. Studies show that my (knock on wood, and yeah, everybody who knows me well hates me when I relate the fact that I’ve been pretty much cold and flu free since I began running – recreationally in the beginning, but up tempo for I’d say about 20 of the past for 37 years) better-than-average immune system may just be a factor of my intense – 25 miles to 40 miles per week, 7 to 8:30 pace, with sprint intervals built in – running life.

Consider these factors, courtesy of TRB:

 A large Swedish study found men who walked or cycled thirty minutes a day had a 34 percent lower risk of dying of cancer than couch potatoes;

 Studies show that intense exercise helps to slow, halt and reverse cancer’s growth;

 Something called heat shock proteins, boosted during training, enhances the capacity of heat shock proteins to respond to stressors, including viral infections;

 Running has been shown to change immune system components – macrophages (viral cell dismantlers), cytokines (the immune system's signal molecules) and natural killer cells (my favorite) – in ways that enable them to perform their functions more effectively.

I’m not going to go on about this stuff. But suffice to say that there is a lot you can do to boost your immune system. This is change that you can manage on your own. It’s essential for someone like myself who is trying to run stronger, longer and faster. Even at my age, at 56, I’m on my way to doing that. So it helps that I’ve learned something about inflammation, antioxidants and neurotransmitters. And when it comes to the Running for Your Life theme, there are important lessons to be learned.

For example, systemic inflammation, a condition that is closely linked to the stiffening of the arteries through formation of fatty plaques, doesn’t have a cheery endgame. Unless you do something about it, through medication (always with asterisks, if not serious risks), diet, or exercise, the possibility of heart attack and stroke is all too real. (By the way, when it comes to diet, look up something called Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which rates the antioxidant capacity of foods. http://bit.ly/sqe4L9)

But one study by researchers at Auburn University found that markers of systemic inflammation were 76 percent lower in subjects with high aerobic fitness than in moderately fit counterparts.

All the more reason to, yeah, get yourself out there. Run for Your Life!

Next: Running for Your Life: Strike a Balance

Running for Your Life: After Thanksgiving

2011-11-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is here and gone. Is there any month that goes faster, than U.S. Thanksgiving to Christmas? Well, perhaps, not so much in my case because now the sidewalks and the intersections and the plazas in the vicinity of my near-Times Square office building are shoulder to shoulder with people, the majority of whom are out-of-towners, not in any kind of hurray to go anywhere, so each day from the first workday after Thanksgiving the odds of me getting to work precisely on time rise because now between subway exit to office desk lies a route with late-minute factor of three or four or five depending on the sedimentary – no, not sedentary, I’m thinking more like a river that fills with sediment so that it no longer flows – quality from subway to office chair. Keep pouring in the sediment and the river can slow to a stop.

And now I’m finally (I can almost hear the visible sigh of relief out there) on a training track for Boston. Call it the longest drum roll in blog-keeping history, that is if you consider my endpoint the April 2012 Boston Marathon the subject matter, what else is there to turn to in this blog, twice weekly since Summer 2010? In that time, I’ve run only one marathon, the Steamtown Marathon, Scranton, Penn., in which I qualified for Boston, but then overtrained myself into injury oblivion in March 2011, so I had to postpone Boston for another year, as thankfully my Steamtown QT is still sufficient to get me into Boston 2012.

It’s 133 training days until the BM. My goal? To run a sub-3:30 Boston. Given that I managed a 3:33:08 personal record in Scranton running on very sore feet, I’m thinking that it’s a gettable goal, which also happens to be the last-year qualifying time for the New York City Marathon. If not in 2012, then in 2013.

Because what the past few months have taught me is that I’m not just a runner but a serious runner. And it’s time to put that level of seriousness to a test. As in, make the right plans. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Larry’s 133-day Boston Marathon training calendar: (Day One is Monday, Nov. 28, the first workday after Thanksgiving) ---

Well, I won’t bore you with ALL the particulars, except to say that during the next 133 days I’ll be keeping a separate journal, a little red notebook, to be specific, within which I will make notations, to wit:

Week One Day One Nov. 28

-- 4 miles (with cantakerous Thurb!) in Prospect Park
-- No interval training, ie sprints up/down Lake Lookout staircase, but better than moderate pace
-- Pain: Minimal left forefoot, mild shin splint, right leg

Week One Day Two Nov. 29

-- 2 miles (16 minutes on treadmill). Half with substantial incline; on 0.0 incline, hit my sprint pace, 7-minute mile, in five-minute interval. Medical hose on right leg to guard against shin splint.
-- No appreciable pain

And so on. Blame it on The Runner’s Body http://bit.ly/tpIv3x. It’s science for a runner of my age (which as I’ve said here so often that I have to tip my running cap [Brooklyn Public Library, with Velco pocket for house key and debit card] to you, dear reader, for your forebearance, that if I’m determined to run for my life I have to treat my body, and mind, better) that is so smart and common sensical that it now governs my training. And if you’re looking to get in shape like me, to take yourself to a new level of fitness, or use it as inspiration, to start to develop a good health program, come along.

At the end, in my case, I can’t but wish that I’ll be crossing the finish line at Boston with a smile on my face, and a sub-3:30 in my record. But we’ll see. It’s going to be fun to find out.

133 days divided by seven is the equivalent of 19 weeks. Some books will tell you that from a strong fitness place you can meet your training goals with time and energy to spare with a 100-day program. The Runner’s Body asks that we listen to our bodies, and not find ourselves – as I did last March – being forced to push ourselves too hard, because we need to “get the miles in", when we are weakened with infection, or have the beginnings of a muscle tear or surprise soreness or debilitating DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness), that broken-body feeling you have not the day after a longer run than usual, or even a short run after an extended absence, but a couple or three days later.

I’m also wary of ramping up my running too fast to 50 or 60 or 70 miles per week, as I have in the past. My tendency to rush this part of my training has been my single biggest (and most common, according to the exercise scientists) mistake. In this way, under a nineteen-week training regimen, I can slowly increase those miles. The Runner’s Body says that in serious training you should only increase your weekly load in miles and intensity by 10 percent per week, so that during Week One, if I put in a modest 30 miles, which seems about right to me, that by Week Ten, say, I will be running about 70 miles a week, and hopefully with the strength and looseness and speed that will keep me at that level for the next five weeks, at which point the tapering will begin through until race day.

Well, that's the plan. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Running for Your Life: Your Immune System

Running for Your Life: Our Pack

2011-11-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

At Milwaukee airport early on Packer GameDay, the Air Trans staff manning the gates is wearing the home green of his favorite player, No. 30, fullback John Kuhn. I’ve boneheaded my way to another travel mishap, somehow managing to mislay my driver’s license so I have no official photo ID to travel with on Sunday morning (Nov. 20), hours before Aaron Rodgers will again helm his Concussionites to victory, this time over the Tampa Bay Bucs, 35-26.

I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.

(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)

M and I travel a few times a year to Brown Deer, Wis., to visit with M’s mom, who is ailing but still feisty enough at 99. Witness:

“Mom, you have to help us put together a list of people you want to come to your 100th birthday party.”

“What?”

“You know Dad had one. And you’re on your way. He was 102.”

“He’s dead.”

“Mom!”

“He’s got nothing going on.”

And then at a lovely Thanksgiving dinner before Thanksgiving, the discussion turned to looks:

M: “And Mom, don’t you like L’s hair?”

Mom (prolonged stare): “You call that a haircut?”

M and I like to be in Milwaukee. On Saturday (Nov. 19) we drove a family car to a parking area next to the boarded-up North Shore burger and shake shop. (Milwaukee is home to a public art bronze of The Fonz . . . and turtle flavor frozen custard at Culver’s; me, I was holding out for copperhead) We’re farther north than we’d originally planned because J, M’s brother, had called to say we should perhaps alter our plans to take into account that Saturday morning the Santa Claus parade was coming to town.

It doesn’t happen often in my New York life that I think of childhood in Canada. But in Milwaukee I do. It seemed early to me, Nov. 19, for the parade. In Owen Sound I remember it fell the first weekend in December and how I cherished the first sight of Santa’s float. Never tall enough to see it as it approached, but it was the one parade float with high up on top, its color-cardboard throne, Santa perched there, with the aid of a mike, crackling in the cold, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas,” and tossing candy in plastic wrapping like gold from such hands, descending like confetti; grampa among the grandchildren, spilling his pocket full of pennies, scattering them and watching as we rug rats collected as many as we could, as much for the candy it would buy as to gain grampa’s approval.

Also the Christmas assembly. I’m six, I’m thinking. And I remember the date: Dec. 2. We’re marching to music, choreographed, the only “dance” show I would ever do, with I dunno twenty other kids, marching with colored sticks in our Sunday best, handing them off, and tossing them, back and forth, a rhythmic show, too military in style by far, wondering if the “Maple Leaf Forever” isn’t playing, more parade ground than modern dance, but it’s 1961 in rural Canada, sons and daughters of World War II vets, so what do you expect?

It’s a quiet walk. Blustery off the lake. Hardly a gull wheeling above the hard chop of Lake Michigan. M and I had coffee at our hotel so we don’t stop at Alterra, the best café in the Midwest, in the old waterworks building. Better as a summer stop anyway, so we stroll, an hour or more before we come upon the Calatrava wonder, the ship on the lake, The Milwaukee Art Museum http://bit.ly/ub5nmj, where an Impressionist exhibition is on, the Monet drawings and the asylum window with bars, bottles and jars in the foreground, by Van Gogh http://bit.ly/sVrq2I especially noteworthy, the walls loud with quotes, the one I like best is Camille Pisarro’s “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” (Degas’ “Art is vice” not so much.) Because that’s the secret, isn’t it? You have to keep doing it.

Later, I’m out for my 1:05. North of town, a mile from shore, and the ground is prairie-flat, past Brown Deer High School to a recently opened exercise-way extension of the Oak Leaf Trail, except for the beginnings of a little forefoot pain, feel that I can run forever on this gentle grade, the highlight the quiet solitude, not a soul out on this night before Packer GameDay, and finally, like thunder, the raucous sound of the blackbirds, a small cloud of them, lifting off from the hydro tower wires, thousands upon thousands of them, placing and replacing themselves on the wires.

Next: Running for Your Life: After Thanksgiving

Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel

2011-11-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

Subway Moment, midafternoon, Wed., Nov. 16:
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.

Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”

*

Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.

Which has certainly played a role in my bad cholesterol being borderline high. So, yeah, I’ve made an adjustment in my diet to address those readings, and they’ve gone down to more manageable levels. Now I watch my DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) blood composition levels, and that is all.

No, I’ve learned that in concert with an increased level of intense exercise that comes with marathon training that my body has needs that I’m only now getting around to fulfilling. The outcome? Not just improved performance on the road. But more energy. In the past few months, I’ve been noticing that I’m making do with less sleep, my mind is more active, more what I feel my body and mind were like twenty years ago. This is not just something that is in my imagination either. Doctors are only now beginning to talk about real versus calendar age. Back in parents’ day the expression was: You’re Only as Young as You Feel. Now, it’s more like: You Can Be Younger Than You Are.

At the risk of being seen as a food obsessive, consider this: With the possible exception of water, the most researched drink in history is Gatorade. And surprise, surprise the resulting studies extol the value of Gatorade for its excellent necessity at replenishing bodily fluids after strenuous exercise.

Dehydration, according to the bulk of running literature, is seen as the stalking horse to collapse, breakdown and serious injury. But “The Runner’s Body” http://bit.ly/rEwSRN, the high readable, myth-blasting book by exercise scientists Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas, with journalist Matt Fitzgerald, challenges that tenet, saying hyponatremia, or overdrinking, especially during marathons and ultramarathons, has proven to be a much more serious threat to runners’ health.

Yet, despite that, a majority of race material continues to drone away that to maximize performance, maximize drink intake. Fuhgeddabout whether you are thirsty. The authors make the reasonable point that we should follow a corporatized slogan – Obey Your Thirst .¤.¤.

But runners will tell you that they are not comfortable with that direction. That on a run they drink, not driven by thirst, but by the station-to-station availability during a race, or with carefully calibrated water-delivery systems – bottles strapped to a runner’s belt, say, or routes planned that include regular-interval drinking fountains.

This is where Thurber comes in. My redbone coonhound running partner. During our six-miler, Thurb will pad up to the doggie drinking fountain and in his way, attuned to his needs, he will drink from the fountain pretty much the same amount of water every time. About thirty seconds of drinking if I were to time it. When he’s finished he turns his head away, looks up to me as if to say, well, drink up, fella, and let’s get back on the road. Time’s a-wasting.

Philosophically, that’s what I’m talking about. Seeing and responding to the pure present. In the way that dogs do. Embracing the simple.

As I cut out unhealthy choices from my diet while keeping up my intense training program, I find that I don’t crave junk food like I used to. It’s not a schoolmarm message. Like favor whole grains over processed because whole grains promote weight loss and reduce the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes (See Subway Moment, above). As in, advocating that you taste-up brown rice so that you don’t have to choke it down. Whole grain pastas? Seriously?

No, my guess is that something happened to my body chemistry in these past two years of training. It’s not that I’m depriving myself of a sugary or salty snack, or a Diet Coke during those energy collapses I used to suffer from in the midafternoon, or that extra glass of wine at night. Rather, as I consume these treats, it’s as if my body is taking over mid-conversation. Need and want are one; I don’t need it and thus I decant the wine, return the ice cream to the freezer after only a single scoop, fasten a clip to the bag of potato chips.

It doesn’t mean that I won’t have an occasional hamburger and fries, but when I do my body responds differently to them. It doesn’t give me the sybaritic pleasures it did in the past. Who knows, the way things are going, perhaps by next year I’ll zero interest in food that isn’t efficiently transformed into fuel.

Remember, you’re only as young as you are. I know I’m not reversing the age process. This isn’t science fiction. But I am slowing it down to a Senior Olympian trot.

Next: Running for Your Life: It’s Cold Out There

Running for Your Life: Runners’ Journals

2011-11-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

It’s too patently obvious to remark that this blog is no ordinary runners’ journal. Suffice to say it is not a place to go (although in the beginning I had a sense it might be but it has evolved in its own way, a little of this, a little of that, and all me) for info on carbo-loading and shoe choice and sock preference, and interval training and I don’t know what all.

Which is not to say that Running for Your Life isn’t a runner’s journal. Rather it is a journal of a runner who also happens to be a writer. If suddenly I were no longer running I would probalby keep up the blog because the running I’ve done in the past thirty-six years would find a way into this space. It would be hard not running. But not writing? Hardest. Because I would most certainly be dead.

I’ve been digging around in my journals these past many months, working on an idea for a memoir, and while photos I’ve taken over the years and greeting cards and such have gone astray, it seems to me I can put my hands on every scrap of paper and tiny journal, the smallest thought or exclamation to issue forth from my, at times, troubled and angered and ecstatic soul.

There’s something about looking at the words written down, the appearance of what a touch of hubris allows me to say might be seen as a touch of style. Or even just to look at something that I wrote with my own hand when I was stricken and lovelorn at twenty, or alone and frantic at twenty-seven (in early September 1983, I was, due to a foolish but alarming bank-transfer error, penniless on the streets of Auckland, New Zealand, living hand-to-mouth with no idea of what would happen next.) Not just the words but the script itself. To me, these writings are treasures.

In the digital age it saddens me to think that another deeply fulfilling human custom – the keeping of a pen and journal – seems in decline. Of course, science tells us one person’s decline is a second person’s ascent. Close a door and open a window. Decline and fall of the Roman (American?) Empire. Really? You think things are bad, you ain’t seen nuthin’.

History teaches us that at the dawn of every revolution the displacement of industries and peoples leads to a pessimism among citizens and subjects. They often characterize the times as apocalyptic while the architects of the revolution, the visionaries, shed a light that eventually burns off the gloom and forms the fundaments of the new society in the wreckage.

That revolution is currently a digital-creative one. Savvy investros will tell you that that is the place were the new elites are forming. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (age 42) for president of the new USA (say about 2024, when she will be 55) and my daughter, K (she of the Pittsburgh Marathon pic at right below), her chief of staff. (Pardon the parental K-vell; but it is not such a far-fetched idea .¤.¤.)

Ahem, the topic. Journaling. It may not be for everyone. But I’ve been keeping a journal, off and on, not as regularly as running, since May 1983 when I left my friend Vida’s apartment off Bloor Street in Toronto for a yearlong trek across the US by bus and by air to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba before meeting a pilot friend and flying in his four-seater Cessna from the Texas-Mexico border at Laredo to Philly – and buses and trains eventually home to Canada.

As well, I kept paper souvenirs. One I looked at the other day: the Tour of the Kapiti Coast, October 1983. It’s funny the effect the race results printout has on me. Twenty-eight years old – half my age. The size and quality of the paper no longer in production, worthy of an early computer museum. I’m thinking Daisy Wheel (in wide use until the mid-1980s) print. Two segments, folded sheets, on old-school newsprint – a paper that’s very familiar to me from my reporter’s clippings I've also kept (circa 1979-1983). And I wish as I hold the paper that the race itself comes back to me in more than a vague memory of running along rutted roads, mountain trails, often with high above views of the South Pacific Ocean along the southwestern coast of the North Island, New Zealand. But so far, very little. Only a touch of what it felt like to finally cross the finish line: 4:38:35 after I began. In 81st place among 87 men and women finishers.

It’s only seven years after the hospital, and in May that year I’d run my first marathon, and finished not too shabby, at 4:02 and change as I remember, although I saved no paperwork from then – and wasn’t yet keeping a journal.

Kapiti, as I remember it, was ultra-marathon tough. Mountain roads like I’d seen in the Rockies, when I first started running after the hospital. I’ve blacked out the memory because it was in this race that I’d flown too close to the sun, my wings melting. I’d been running the hills of Auckland and felt myself ready for this mountain test. Others were, but me . . . I’d come out decently enough, but faded in many stages. Surely my leg protested too much. That it swelled to the point that I had to stop and walk; the humiliation of even the slowest runner passing me .¤.¤. I’d always seen myself as an athlete, as someone deserving of being in the top twenty percent of competition, simply devastated by the results of that day.

All of this beginning to emerge as I retrace the Daisy Wheel printout:
Stage 1, 6:16 (Place 70); Stage 2, 67:36 (Place 86); Stage 3, 50:26 (Place 81); Stage 4, 99:42 (Place 80); Stage 5, 54:36 (82); Total Time, 4:38:35 (81).

Which is to say, nothing would’ve been retained in my mind – or here – if not for the saved paper. I fold it up and put it away for the next time.

Next: Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel

Running for Your Life: Feeling “Occupied”

2011-11-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Trussed up with a bungee cord around a twenty-year-old street tree in Center Slope, laser-printed loose leaf sheet in a Ziploc clear-plastic envelope with a harsh message to an offending dog walker. Attached to the bungee cord slightly above the message lettering is a thin plastic sandwich bag of what looks like the hard black day-old scat of a lapdog.

*

You can’t get into a conversation in New York City today and not talk about the occupying force downtown. The protesters in Zuccotti Park. Not a single Z word that comes close. And before early October only the folks on the local community board knew that’s what that spot of green space just east of Ground Zero is called, now home to Occupy Wall Street.

OWS is a devilish venture. Before this one, the only ventures taken up in this neighborhood were real estate and financial ones. Like the spoof written by comedian Andrew Borowitz about Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs: “As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Blankfein, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain — but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.” As of this date (Nov. 10), the venture is 54 days old, and counting.

Devilishly clever for the use of the word: Occupy. The left, not too subtlely, force-feeding the idea that while America in modern times has often been viewed as an occupying force in foreign countries, it has never in its imperial history been occupied itself. On the face of it, meaning the simple truth that a challenging POV need not be one that America can submerge and control, rather that its own laws of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly afford the right to occupy a space – in this case one that is rapidly taking up not just a physical territory but mental and spiritual and digital ones, as stories and personal accounts proliferate about the free-speech righteousness of the 99 percenters.

(A tasty bit of irony: Private equity houses aren’t seeing much value in the retail space – even once-invincible Walmart’s year-to-date shares (+7.6%) are pretty pathetic – with the exception of the increasingly busy shopping destination of 99 percenters, the 99 Cent Stores .¤.¤. )

All of which is to say OWS has stoked up some talk. But a year ago last summer wasn’t Twitter similarly agog with protests about a planned mosque/education center, also at the outskirts of Ground Zero? In those days I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg was of the mind that there didn’t appear to be an endgame. That there was no telling when that fuss would all vanish. But it did. As, heretofore, has always happened in our thoroughly mediated society.

For those who lived during the Vietnam War, or during the Iranian hostage crisis, the idea of an ever-changing news cycle didn’t apply. Vietnam and Iran (for comparison, the Vietnam War lasted 19 years and 180 days and the Iranian hostage crisis: 444 days) simply led the newscasts day in, day out. News happens now in spurts: single Twitter-attention span events: Bush-Gore 2000, Shock and Awe, Katrina, BP oil spill, the Tea Party phenomenon.)

What would lead one to think that OWS will achieve even this level of newsworthiness? Aren’t allusions to Arab Spring overdone? As valid as some of the protesters beefs may be, USA of November 2011 is not Egypt of December 2010, or Libya of September 2011.

Consider the Tea Party, which earns an ever-lengthening Wiki entry for its efficacy in spurring change at the all-important electoral level. No single political movement has been as successful in exposing the weaknesses of the current administration than the vote-focused Tea Partiers.

Will the Tea Party or OWSers have a bigger impact on next year’s presidential election (341 days from today [Nov. 10])? It’s an open question now, but the Las Vegas odds makers would have to favor the TP. Absent a riot-police-dead-of-the-night attack on OWS, which today strikes me as something that would be sanctioned only by an authority with the political tone-deafness of a Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward, I don’t see OWS outdueling the Tea Party as a bigger influence in that all-important presidential vote on Nov 6, 2012. (ie, "Views From the Street, letter in the Nov. 5th edition of The Economist: "If voting worked, we would all be home right now": Brendan Burke, head of de-escalation security, Occupy Wall Street.)

In any event, it’s theater that can only start in a place like New York. And all eyes will be on that little Z in lower Manhattan to see how – and when – it ends.

Next: Running for Your Life: Runners’ Journals

Running for Your Life: NYC Marathon

2011-11-08T11:52:00.000-08:00

A beautiful day (Sunday, Nov. 6). Just shorts and a top is all you need, even in the morning on the Verrazano. Hockey great Mark Messier, in the crowd, the running crowd, that is. Any bold predictions, Mark? His first marathon, just finishing it is enough (Official Time: 4:14:21). And then, maybe a word with Tortorella, the coach of the New York Rangers, the kind of shape he’s in, and the gutsy determination of him, and he’d be a better bet than say, Wolski, or yeah, Avery.

Cross the pond and the NYC Marathon has a slot for you. Live in one of the five boroughs, where thousands race and jog and traipse through, and chances are the NYC Marathon doesn’t have a slot for you.

There are ways to get in, of course. Every year you can enter the lottery, paying a nominal $11 fee, for a chance that seems as likely as winning the Mega Millions. But if you happened to enter in this way for three consecutive years and still don’t get in, then the fourth time you’re assured entry, along with your $196 entry fee. (Well, this just in ... that entry option is, as of Oct. 12, 2011, not available, starting in the 2013 race, unless you currently have two lottery misses in the bank; I guess this option simply didn’t generate enough cash for the sponsors, the New York Road Runners Club.)

Also, NYRR members ($40) can run by completing in the previous calendar year nine of their 50-plus sanctioned races (entry fees required for each, plus an additional $1,000 donation) and volunteering for one NYRR race. There also is a charity option, in which the runner must pony up $3,500 to a listed charity, with the understanding that you will raise that money for the charity. In any event the charity has grown by $3,500 – and you have a runners’ dream, a bib for the NYC Marathon.

Another option. Time qualifying. For next year, I'm still pretty close. I have to shave 3:08 off my personal best to hit the qualifying time of 3 hours, 30 minutes. But, for the 2013 race, that all changed on Oct. 12, when the NYRR made the QTs much stricter. In my current age group, I’d need to run a 3 hour, 14 minute marathan, which is quite a long shot, in order to qualify for the 2013 Marathon. Even in four years, I’d have to run a personal best of 3:24 to qualify in the 60-64 age group.

Believe me, runners who put out on Sunday and are now dragging their lame asses around this week have earned their slots – and how! It’s a wonder that a sizable majority of local people who ran on Sunday will run just a single NYC Marathon. It’s possible the entry hurdles alone are enough to deter re-entry. Other races, outside of Boston, are easier of course. You simply go to the race Web site, submit your entry materials, do an online fee, and you’re in.

These are quibbles, of course. (And, hey, I’m nothing if not a quibbler.) The NY course is just too cool to not do at least once. One of these days I’m going to do it. April is my best bet, when I do have a bettor's chance to beat 3 hours, 30 minutes, and run in NYC Marathon 2012. Failing that, I'll have to manage a 3:24 when I turn 60. Or a 3:35 when I turn 65; or a 3:46 when I turn 70 .¤.¤.

*

I read somewhere that one percent of North Americans will run a marathon. That’s hard to believe, particularly at 9:45 a.m. (DST) on Marathon day at the Center Slope dog run off Fourth Avenue at Fourth Street in Brooklyn. Looking great the seven-minute milers and the hundreds cheering them on, not to mention the street side rock, Bruce Springsteen and Pat Benatar covers, straight ahead rock because, if nothing else, marathon running is a Straight-Ahead pursuit, a north-sound game, barreling on to the goal, a finish line 19.2 miles away.

There’s a second one percent that is getting a lot of press. (Or strictly speaking, 0.1 percent as noted by Times columnist Paul Krugman http://nyti.ms/qjPV11) Occupy Wall Street protesters, or the 99 percenters, are targeting the 1 percent of American society (between 1979 and 2007, income in this group soared 275 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office http://1.usa.gov/tWgtQb).

I haven’t crunched the data but something tells me that the marathon one percenters and the wealthy one percenters don’t overlap so much. (Although there would be nothing to stop the one percenter from setting aside the time and devoting her body, mind and spirit to running a marathon; it just strikes me as not a likely pursuit of the filthy rich.)

So if given the choice, I know what I would choose. That is if I could in only one One Percent Club. The marathon one. Or in a perfect world, first I’d join the rich club, pay off our debts and K’s student loans. Then duck back out into the 99 Percent Club, and the Running One Percent Club. That is, if it’s kosher. Usually in wishes like this there are Faustian strings attached. In that event, give me enough money for shoes and electrolyte chews, a 3:14 Boston . . . And bring on the New York City Marathon 2012!

Next: Running for Your Life: Feeling “Occupied”

Running for Your Life: Changes

2011-11-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

So, You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

A sixty-ish owner-occupier of an antique shop on Fifth Avenue pokes his head out of his front door minutes before a weekday opening. He is greeting an eager shopper. Looking at his red face, I’m thinking of the spirit of a newborn, fresh out of the womb.

*

I don’t know if I’m having a midlife crisis exactly. Novelist Douglas Coupland in his predictable “Player One” writes that once a person has reached thirty-five she’s pretty much done, as in going to have the life that’s been circumscribed over those previous three and a half decades. What’s more, he says, echoing Schopenhauer (“The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary”), what in the world were you thinking. At twenty-five, that you could be a rock star, or a power forward for the Leafs? Ha! Might as well settle in to the role of consuming our limited natural resources to negative sum game and abandon the idea that you are providing the planet any quantifiable benefits.

Bummer. Which brings me to the phrase midlife crisis. The very idea of it is this: You (in cultural terms, typically a guy) wake up one day to realize that you’ve suddenly grown old and chances are you will not realize your childhood or young adult dream that you’d thought you’d reconciled yourself, but not even close .¤.¤.

Consider yourself in crisis. What to do? Well, something that in your addled middle age you feel will balance against this gaping hole of a loss. For the romantic dreamer, an affair; for the car lover, a blood-orange Sunbeam coupe http://bit.ly/vb50R1, for the pro athlete once-upon-a-wannabe, a marathon, in each case vainly trying to fill the void. Because these pursuits-to-goals can’t bridge the existential swamp you’re feeling in your advancing age. Inevitably you’ll feel worse than before. And on the other side, the abyss: Old age.

Cultural norms are not so easily thrown off. (If the sociologists promise me a crisis, well goddammit, I’m going to have one!) Funny thing is, and maybe it has something to do with the running I do, I don’t feel these phases apply to the current life I am living. (Schopenhauer again: “The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.”) Outlook, too. But as I write these notes on the subway today (Nov. 2), a month into my 57th year, I don’t feel the age thing too harshly. On a run I did today with Thurb, at times I close my eyes and think and feel that I’m in my twenties.

Expect a lot to be written and published in the next twenty years about rites of passage. (No, not dog books by the likes of the new clueless Queen of Media, Jill Abramson http://bit.ly/rFdsqD; I just don’t know where to categorize that sucker.) And not about birth, either. Our opinion leaders are nothing if not long in the tooth (word to the wise: gums move back and teeth appear longer) and chock full of fear. About death, that is.

Such matters can be discussed in eloquence. Take James Wood’s http://nyr.kr/sHfgPK Shelf Life essay in this week’s New Yorker, an elegy, not without its unflinching opinion, that arose from Wood’s circumstances of having to manage the assessment and dispersal of a private library, one belonging to his deceased father-in-law. Here is the story of a life of books as touchstones. But, again, not in any sentimental way. Imagine a century from now. How quaint to think of a slip of paper falling out of a book held by a young literate surviving family member, one that bears the words: “He had marked the most famous places, and circled them: on the Asia Minor side, Aeolia, Lycia, Troy, Phrygia; and on the Greek side the honeyed, haunted, lost names – Illyria, Elis, Attica, Argolis and Arcadia.”

So as we grow inexorably older what do we change? Consider, of course, David Bowie: “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”

Change may indeed not be necessay. (In 2008, it was, of course. But had the damage already been done in the previous eight years by Bush and Cheney? Running up such extreme annual deficits that here we are just days away from having our total debt bigger than our gross domestic product http://nyp.st/t17TgJ; in any case, Obama, as anyone can see, has not been up to the job.)

Think of this: You see a person who you have not seen for quite awhile. At my age that can be years, perhaps even decades. More often than not we cannot think of his name, if he happens upon us out of the blue because he has changed so much that he’s hardly recognizable. (And not for the better.) They look all too often old, mirthless. What the character Rick observes in “Player One” (above).

The key point here is not, as the glossy health mags would leave you to believe, outward appearance. Rather, something inside, a light that was once on has been extinguished. Still, in conversation, that light flickers. And we, in our manner and spirit, are young again. We have in that moment, changed.

Next: Running for Your Life: NYC Marathon

Running for Your Life: Sleeping Is Overrated

2011-11-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been sleeping less. I wonder if it’s jet lag. Or stress. I had been thinking that it had to do with Thurber, our new housemate. It’ll be two months next weekend that Thurb has been with us. And I can’t help but think having a 16-month-old redbone coonhound in the house, who for the first few months as a puppy had us near-tearing our hair out, might have something to do with it. But now he’s sleeping through the night, peacefully for hours on end so there’s little merit in that explanation.

No, it could be a change of life. Earlier this month, when my brother T came to visit, he said that he gets, on average, six hours sleep a night during non-vacation time. He’s a diligent one, my younger brother, who doesn’t get up to write the great Canadian novel before work; rather he’s working out, playing squash. He plays softball in summer, ice hockey in winter. He, too, has fallen to the DVT darkside and must monitor his blood circulation so he’s gotten even a bit more serious about staying fit. Curious bloodlines, ours.

I'm thinking this is a good thing, the sleeping less. Perhaps it is my body’s way of saying, Hey there, mind, if you are going to get your writing out, run a marathon, own and care for a seventy-pound dog with the spirit of a thoroughbred horse, as well as keep up with the rest of my life, attended to as I must in order to feel good about myself, then I’m going to be needing more hours in the day. (Not to mention that as of Oct. 6 it is hockey season!)

*

Lose fifteen pounds of ugly flesh. Cut off your head.

I’ve come to think that all diets and glossy health mags that come to my office desk like duck weed to Doggie Beach (Park Slope inside joke) is best summed up by this line. Diets, of course, do have merit. But feelgood prescriptions don’t. A hundred years ago Jack LaLanne put the idea in media ad buyers’ minds that America would pay – and pay well – to remake their bodies. And yet, billions of dollars and a quadrillion of glossy mag pages later, America is fatter than ever.

Truth is the whole mind-body thing, which is at the heart of what it means to be human, is (here comes THAT word again) a complicated idiosyncratic narrative (previous word is, as noted, THAT word) that, although may be slightly influenced by such things as magazine articles and fashion and peer groups, is personal: a decision to lose weight, run a marathon, cut out the lunchtime Diet Coke is an individual decision taken by individuals one at a time.

A narrative (STOP!) that unfolds slowly. And, yes, I am a believer in stories, personal stories that can make a difference in the complicated idiosyncratic narratives of family, friends and perfect strangers, which, I suppose now that I’m writing this down, might best explain why I am keeping this blog. Alas, I’m not a big believer in national ad campaigns to promote some new and improved nutritional, dietetic foodstuff. Rather, I believe in the power of stories that in their telling can act as a worm, sinking into the intestines of the CIN that is yours alone but may just help to change the shape of it. (For the better – Think of a CIN as a virus-choked system and the worm, I’m thinking Lowly from the Richard Scarry “Please and Thank You Book,” in this case a voracious consumer of just those viruses. Burp!)

*

As to stories. What to read. I’ve been trying “Player One” by Douglas Coupland. I’m thinking TV for middlebrow liberal arts grads, circa 1990 and up. Much better is “On Canaan’s Time” by one of my favorite novelists, Sebastian Barry. He of the heart-ripping-out endings, not with OCT, but his previous, “The Secret Scripture,” left me reeling. Next, Jose Saramago, there is such freedom in the prose. “Death Interrupted.” Ha!

What books do, like running, take you away. Movies too. Not as much. Or at least with most Hollywood movies. They leave too little to surprise. Stories are meant to startle, if not surprise. Stories are even more infinite than the people alive and dead to tell them. Consider the greats and the stories that were left unfinished. With a Kindle, buy for 99 cents a public domain Hawthorne, his “American Notebooks”: a sample: “The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street-lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam” and “A lament for life’s wasted sunshine.” One man, countless stories.

Saw “Gigi” with M at Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday night (Oct. 30). The love affair between Gaston and the irrepressible scamp turned high-hump lady of feminine discretion during La Belle Epoque, only a generation before the redoubtable Marilyn, the flick to see with Brooklyn’s Michelle Williams going on in Newsweek, “She’s offering — I hate to get graphic — sex from behind,” her as-yet-seen role a sure a thing as best actress at the Oscars in many years. Not like the National Book Awards, which for some of its own peculiar wisdom throws off canon fodder, Roth, Oates, Auster et. al., for small press no-names. But that is getting off the second topic.

Which is women. The portrayal of women. The mags for and about women. For every Michelle Williams and Helen Mirren there are Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. In our male-dominated culture, women play the fool first. Anna Nicole Smith vs. Anna Deavere Smith. Ms. Magazine, as New York magazine tells us this week is forty years old http://bit.ly/vCKJsa.

Is the women’s movement suffering from midlife crisis? Certainly not one that has changed the way women are portrayed on stage and screen. But increasingly, as this article (Oct. 20) in the London Review of Books recently notes http://bit.ly/vZ6VYe, women are a force to be reckoned with in politics. Without women, the Democrats don’t have a tinker’s chance of winning the 2012 presidential election. If we men had our way it would be Republicans, not just in the White House but in both houses of Congress. As the LRB’s R.W. Johnson writes, “This would put Tea Party extremists in a commanding position at a time of American and world financial crisis; for the rest of us this would be like tightrope walking in the dark with a gorilla on one’s back.”

So get with it, guys. Show the lady some respect. Without her, we’re finished.

Next: Running for Your Life: Changes

Running for Your Life: J’ai Perdu Mon Clef!

2011-10-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

PARIS, WEDNESDAY, OCT. 19

It’s 5:30 in the afternoon when we were shopping in the Lower Marais Farmers’ Market, and through the day, M and I have been close, taking pictures and for long hours, 11:30 a.m. jusqu’a 3:30 p.m. we’re writing, eating French onion soup, two coffees for me, Coca Light, coffee for M, bread/butter and jam, mostly working by la fenetre: two tables, four chairs. I’m on a high; M too – “Pooch” and “Centipede” – very far along in the latter. Encounter with an American woman married to a Frenchman at Café Panis, near Shakespeare & Co. (it’s still there!) along the Seine, and further south, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where M will buy her waterproof pens, Faber Castell, although before that she will pick up a red wool hat for 10 euros, ridges and daisy decoration, and gloves too, a little Eiffel Tower for our pal at the neighborhood gym, then on to tourist row, a crepe beurre et sucre.

Picture High: M at a payphone (a what?), red hat and brilliant blue phone receiver, then the aforementioned art supply store, and we are on our way home. Pleuvoir and froid; it has been cold throughout but now dark clouds, wet and cold, on M’s favorite little rue in the Latin Quarter when she was here more than forty years ago, Rue de la Huchette, now a cookie-cutter corridor of OPA! Greek dining, en route to the Marais Farmers’ Market (wait for it). Along the Seine, the rain is pelting when we stop in at Shakespeare & Co., more photos, this time a quintessential one of M reading “Quiet Nights in Clichy” by Henry Miller, under a book bunk is a vast collection of pennies to support starving artists. I’m turning pages of David Mitchell, Douglas Coupland and Patti Smith (less so); it’s after 5 p.m. now, bands of sun, wet splattered roads, cobblestones very Caillebotte and the next stop: The Market, with plans to buy food for dinner, our one romantic dinner at home in our cosy Marais garret apartment.

First we buy nine euros of vegetables, haricot, and fruit, then eggs and cheese from the Cheeseman, some bottles (rosé and rouge) from a wineseller and on to the chickenman, two leg/thighs; cuisse, they say, all heaped up in bags to take home, no more than a few blocks from here, but before we arrive, we stop at the supermarket, Monoprix by name, for sundries, a big bottle of Evian.

Finally, we’re at home: our work bags, numerous plastic ones, all arrayed before the gated door in the lobby of our building. Just before 6 p.m. and I realize that no matter where I look, I can’t find the key that will allow us to pass through these gates and on to our evening in our love nest. It's not in my pocket. Gone.

Near-freezing cold is falling as M sits like a bag woman on a wooden bench where long ago (only Saturday but) we had awaited Giovanni, our flat host, and now we have no cell, no key, no way to get into our flat to use the land line to call him to get a second key. (We had earlier in the week asked for a second one and had been declined, so think perhaps there isn’t one.) M and I gather up all the bags and food and other acquisitions, and, at M’s request, set her up in a corner location of Les Philosophes, our go-to café-restaurant, and off I go, running as fast as I can, retracing my steps with hopes of finding le petit clef, a single key with a black fob.

First stop, Monoprix. To the alienanted rebel of a cashier, pissed off at the well-to-do living around here, not just foreigners but French yuppies, too, and ask for the key and she just coincidentally (I think) flashes her keys as she does something with the register. Its fob is also black, a gusher of hope – only dashed. Then I’m racing out the door, daylight fading fast.

1) Cheeseman (he of the stale joke that it is the woman who plans and the man who pays.) Sorry, no.
2) Wineseller (English is good, but alas, he has the same message.)
3) Chickenman (Not there either.)

Running hard in rush-hour traffic. Along the Seine and near the Notre Dame de Paris across the bridge, a road over too far, at the hospital, where I should be committed, I’m thinking, close to tears now, the day destroyed, the trip . . . maybe I should just leave, three days early, go home to New York. Awful, awful, awful. Finally, I see the Café Panis and with the help of manager Benjamin (bleu cravat), pushing back the table and chairs of our place de fenetre, and I am doing the talking, can hardly believe it, Je suis desole, mais j’ai perdu mon clef de ma maison cette aujourd’hui. Pouvez-vous aider moi, s’il vous plait?

Benjamin and I check the washroom where I’d tossed a drained pen in the waste basket (it was still there) and he gives me une carte, with the name of the night manager, then on to the creperie, the Eastern European woman who had served us helps me; I look into that bathroom too, but no go; seek info on how best to get to Boulevard Saint Michel from a pedestrian, and try to go there but get mixed up, a maze of streets, then see Café Panis again, and the light is near-dead, along with my hopes of finding the key. The Cambodians at the chapeau, gants et Tour Eiffel toy magasin, the man is very kind, checking for the key in a stack of garments at the cash. Nope. Then to the bookstore. They too give me a card. Call later, they say.

Defeated now, as far as I can remember I’ve left no stone unturned. (It is M, not I, who paid at Gilbert + Joseph, the art supply store, so it is unlikely the key came out of ma poche; I'm sure it was lost when I pulled my wallet out to pay for something.) Thoroughly deflated, downcast, but before going back to find M, I stop at the market and visit my friends: Cheeseman, Wineseller and Chickenman, the latter of whom is especially alarmed when he learns that it's the only key to our house, and now he's down on the wet cobblestones, looking.

Then I recall it was I who paid for the vegetables. Only a few dollars, but I had to break a twenty. So I go to the woman who had waited on us and ask if she has seen my key and she immediately brightens and goes right to the spot where the plastic bags are kept and, there, hanging by its ring, is the key with the black fob.

I am elated as she gives it to me; a little prayer, looking skyward, a jump in the air: “Merci beaucoup! Merci beaucoup!” She, mildly startled by my gestures, then I'm on to the Cheeseman and Wineseller and the Chickenman, all of whom are thrilled for me. Grinning, at the remarkable turn of events.

I sprint to Les Philosophes, in and through the door, and see that M is exactly where I had last seen her, as I dangle the key over my head. Like Odysseus home to Penelope. Or, more to the point, judging from M’s less-than-enthusiastic stare, Homer home to Marge .¤.¤.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sleep Is Overrated

Running for Your Life: Training for Boston

2011-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

So back at it. Blogging and marathon training. Not the New York City Marathon, which is only days away. (Don’t miss the excitement if you’re in the city. Last year I came home from an old boys’ reunion weekend to find a rockabilly street band still! playing at the ten-mile mark at Fourth Avenue and Center Slope three hours after the start for the walkers and the stragglers and the sheer gut-priders who were ambling past.) No, I’m up for Boston, my second attempt after coming up lame in 2011.

What better way to set the tone than training along the Seine in Paris. Mary took these shots during our one-week vacation to Paris this month. I ran twice. Once on Sunday (Oct. 16), when during daylight hours the roadway along the right bank was cleared of motorbikes, cars and trucks and again on Thursday (Oct. 20), when these pictures were taken from the Marais/Isle de St. Louis bridge. On this run in the dying light of a brilliant day I was gone for only forty-five minutes, and felt as if I could’ve been out for hours. Certainly the memories of that day will help to fill my long hours of training ahead of me.

I will not be pushing it. But I want to add a simple twenty-five minutes to my long run. So that I bump up to 1:30 from 1:05, starting tomorrow (Oct. 26). In this way, I will learn if it is true that my hamstring is fully healed, that I’ve kept to management forefoot pain. Outside of the slight and occasional shin splint pain I’ve been fit as a fiddle.

Marathon running, of course, isn’t for everyone. Despite what I’ve written here, long-distance running is the hidden sport. Few people outside the sport itself know the names of its legends. Those superhuman men and women, the top five hundred finishers, who in the next few days will be arriving to run the New York City Marathon.

On Sunday (Oct. 23) we were back from Paris only a few hours when we met an old friend in the park while we were running Thurber. Jose is in high spirits and running gear, too little clothes for the cold, and I ask how was his run. “Good, good! Fourteen today and last week, sixteen.” Why yes, he tells me he will be running New York. Then on to other matters: work, mutual friends, the weather.

Running will draw thousands to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Sunday, Nov. 4. That’s eleven days from today (Oct. 25), and just as many personal and sportive narratives. All races are run on the inside track. The triumphs, after all those hours of running and cross-training, strengthening and stretching, the exquisite solitude of it, yours alone.

But you to want to do it right. I set out on this blog, 106 posts ago, with the idea of a Boston Marathon uppermost in the mind. I’ve learned in these past months many things about myself while at the same time hearing from a good number of old friends and new friends, whether I’ve written about running or simply just written. Hopefully, there has been a lesson or two to be learned. I don’t know what I’ll do with the blog after the race in April. Or whether this Boston Marathon will be my last. Training is a helluva time commitment. And we have only so much time, don’t we?

Next: Running for Your Life: J’ai Perdu Mon Clef!

Running for Your Life: A Week’s Pause

2011-10-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

For M, it’s October study days; for me time to be with her – and myself.

To recharge, begin new work, and finish old.

At times like this I think about a little boy whose longing for travel and adventure was represented by a boy’s palm-size stone that I collected from the laneway of a favorite uncle who lived eighty miles from my hometown of Owen Sound in a splendid place called Guelph.* I put that stone atop the bureau I shared with my brother T, and more than occasionally would pick it up and rub it, thinking about travel to not only Guelph but to other places that I could only hope would be as splendid.

In the meantime, if you’re in a city that has one, visit Occupy Wall Street. Decide for yourself.

Next: Running for Your Life: Training for Boston

* This is not the Guelph of historical reference, i.e.,

Country: Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland

Ancestral house:
House of Este

Titles:

 Duke of Bavaria
 Duke of Saxony
 Duke of Spoleto
 Margrave of Tuscany
 Count Palatine of the Rhine
 King of the Romans
 Holy Roman Emperor
 Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg
 Prince of Lüneburg
 Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
 Elector of Hanover
 King of Hanover
 Duke of Brunswick
 King of Great Britain
 King of the UK and Ireland
 Empress of India

Founder: Welf I, Duke of Bavaria
Final sovereign: Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick
Current head: Ernst August V, Prince of Hanover
Founding: 11th century
Dissolution: 1918 (in Germany);
1901: (in UK and India)

Ethnicity: German, British

Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.

2011-10-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

I’d like to think that after what happened to me earlier this year that I’ve learned my lesson. In March, only a month before my first Boston Marathon, I’m laid up with the Mother-Of-All torn hamstrings. The rip’s the size of a quarter just south of the right butt-bone. Today, a half-year later and I feel only the faintest of tugs back there; my range of motion as normal as it’s ever been.

Since then, getting back on my feet and on the road in June (a year after Thurb! came into our lives), I’ve been pretty much pain-free – outside of a sizzlingly hot July day on Fire Island when after about a nine-miler the forefoot pain returned, like what I suffered at the 10-10-10 Steamtown Marathon. But months later even that pain has eased and not because I have done anything different. Rather, I’m just staying to a steady pre-marathon training regimen, running a 1:05 with Thurb and without, depending more on his schedule than mine. (We both need to run, to shake out the cobwebs; I wouldn’t be keeping this blog, prepping a book proposal, preparing for travel, if I didn’t keep up with my running. Mind and body in sync. Keeping age at bay. At this point, almost effortlessly. What I see every morning in the hound. He’s raring to go. Start the day. Get up and run. Anything’s possible. Show me.)

The next day I’m cross-training, with weights and the elliptical machine, working hard on all, ending with a hard-push through on the elliptical. Increasing degrees of difficulty until, it doesn’t happen every time but on my birthday (Oct. 5) it does: hundred calories killed for every five minutes of exercise. On this day thirty minutes and I punch the PAUSE/END, and the calorie counter clicks over 600. I’m wide-eyed and without the pounding of packed earth and pavement pain-free. Not an ache anywhere.

The next week, though, the old stickler is back: shin splints. My bad leg – the clotting one, now over-muscled after thirty five years of running – is fine, but the right one isn’t. After a 1:05 run, it aches. I would’ve liked to have iced it a little more before having to go to an appointment before work. Instead it aches, not like hell, more like a dull throb. I noose my elastic-mediband around it which takes the worst of the pain pressure off but I still feel it as I run, even in the stretch therapeutic tights I bought to try to tough out what I thought last February was a leg cramp but what was a mild hamstring pull that only worsened the more I kept trying to train my way through the pain, wearing the souped-up hosiery, fuhgeddaboudit. What I needed was forty hours a week for a month on a zero gravity treadmill, then for the Boston Marathon 2011 itself, Mercury’s wings that would keep me just above the surface of the racecourse for the whole 26.2 miles. That being the only way in hell I would’ve been able to finish.

But live and learn, as that wicked torn hamstring had me nearly blacking out in pain. That’ll teach me to keep running on it despite the pain, the warning signs that I ignored at my peril, and Lord knows I won’t do that again. (Or I hope I won’t.)

Ice helps. In fact later (Oct. 10) I’m pain-free again. I’ve taken to using the mediband over the spot where the shin splints were acting up. And, as a safeguard against injury, am factoring in time at the end of each run, 1:05 or shorter, it doesn’t matter, of stretching for ten minutes and icing both shins. At this point I know my body. What parts need more care and attention than others. And I’m not going to just blindly assume that those parts will correct themselves, especially by December, when I’m planning to ramp up my miles and cross-training in order to be ready for Boston.

That goes for my forefoot pain too. I’ve been talking to Todd at Park Slope’s JackRabbit Sports. Before buying new shoes to address the problem, Todd, the store manager, recommended that I see an orthopedist to look into the possibility that I may have a small stress fracture in my left foot. I’ll do that within the next month so that by December I’ll be in doctor’s care and hopefully in the right shoes that will take me on the final leg of this lifelong journey. To Boston. In April. Here I come!

Next: Running for Your Life: A Week’s Pause

Running for Your Life: Canada: A Visit

2011-10-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

My brother T and my sister-in-law L are visiting from Canada (Sept. 29-Oct. 2). It’s been awhile since they’ve been in Brooklyn. Certainly more than a decade, but for busy-ness, this period of time has few parallels in life. Now, though, all our kids are grown, and needing us in different ways, so during our visit to Canada in the summer (See Running for Your Life: Canada!, posted July 28) T asked what weekend would work best for them to come visit in the fall, which turned out to be the one in brackets above, a week before my birthday (Oct. 5) when the tourist buzz at Brooklyn’s TKTS is down to a dull roar so that reasonably priced seats can be had for even high demand shows like “Billy Elliot” and “Anything Goes,” L is fine to go along with whatever during the weekend, enjoying everything in equal measure but she’s the one who picks Billy Elliot, so on Saturday morning T and I do the hunting and gathering, snagging a couple pair in the mezzanine, which for a dance extravaganza like BE was just the ticket, because it was an amazing show.

T and L left early Sunday afternoon (Oct. 2) before I had to get ready for work at the newspaper, each of us saying that we would make a plan to see each other again soon because we all had such a fabulous time, and that it wasn’t right to wait another twelve or so years.

Earlier that day, the four of us are walking through Prospect Park. M and L are ahead, and my brother and I are trailing on a path, the first time all weekend we are among more trees than people. I’m telling Ted that running on these trails is essential to my well-being, that, as well he knows, I am a country kid in the city and that without these woodland paths I wouldn’t be right. Especially during my birthday month, in fall, when the air cools and I begin to feel like a kid again.

“Yeah, like the Martins’ tree,” T says.

I look at T. We spent some time together as kids, of course. But our age difference, four years, in boyhood may as well been twenty. (At 56 and 52, not so much.) I think of him, and always will, as my little brother.

“The Martins’ tree? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“ Sure, you remember. Up through the end of our dead-end block . . .”

Suddenly, it comes back to me. Stone steps up a gully escarpment, as if it were a secret garden, emerges a great lawn, rimmed with many mammoth trees. Only the maple one in front of our house on our piddly dead-end street could match them. In my mind’s eye (could there anything more telling of our narcissistic age, the one shaped by invented spelling and texting stedda spelling bee and Hardy Boys reading, than the mangling of this common phrase, seen on Facebook the other day: My mind’s I?) a place where it was always sunny, a dozen boys running, playing tackle football, sheep’s home, and never, absolutely never, a Martin in sight.

“Yeah,” I say to T, excited. “I remember.”

“You’d sit up in the crux of one of those trees. It wasn’t so easy to get up there, but somehow you did. I’d come up and there you’d be.”

“Really? I don’t remember that at all.”

“Really? Will you did. So yeah, I can see why you’d have to have trees like this around.”

To write a memoir, a book of memories, is an impoverished thing. So telling in its poverty. I don’t know why it is that I don’t for the life of me recall the sitting in the tree overlooking the great lawn of the resident absent Lords, the Martins. We are, as this charming, infused with meaning, visit with T and L makes abundantly clear, the net result of memories – shared and otherwise – of the people we love and who love us. That those collected memories may just touch upon what it means to have a soul.

*

Well, it’s official. The confirmation arrived via mail on my birthday. I have a place in the 116th running of the Boston Marathon on April 16, 2012. Here we go again!

Next Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.

Running for Your Life: Relativity of Size

2011-10-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

A lifetime ago, in January 1985, I'm standing among a large group of young Cuban students. The woman I was seeing at the time, a Yugoslav translator for Cuban authorities and a student of social revolutions, is running her hand casually through the locks of one particularly handsome boy in a way that seemed timelesss, without a tincture of self-satisfaction on her part, rather that it was the most natural gesture in the world.

It also was a time, the only moment in my life, in that sunny day crowd, when my less than normal North American size, 5’11” and low-150s, is well above the norm. Not just my height but my girth. I’m young myself, 29, but in this company like post-steroid Barry Bonds among his SF Giants teammates. My shoulders, hips and legs much bigger and thicker than the youngsters I see. They are skinny but healthy- and athletic-looking, slender reeds to a Louisville Slugger.

I think of that moment when I’m in the company of folks on the subway in New York. (With the exception of the guy last month [Sept. 29] at the back end of the D Train, scraping away on his beard with a dull knife for, I dunno, about half an hour. Hard to say what to think about him.)

More often, of course, in the Heartland. Last year on the road to the Pittsburgh Marathon, M and I stopped at a highway oasis that billed itself as the first such fuel-feed-and-go destination built in the interstate highway system. It was packed with cars and in the deluxe mall itself, with its myriad fast food outlets, throngs of folks, not a single non-consumer – because, let’s not kid ourselves – no one was visiting, or resting (maybe some just using the bathroom) – but mostly they’re loading up on caloric dishes, even the Starbucks where the choice du jour was large dessert-style drinks, not black coffee. And there were some mighty big folks. M and I left with only coffee, a couple packs of mints and an incredible sinking feeling.

Park Slope, where we live, has become the “butt” of jokes. (In more than a few posts here, color me guilty). Most infamously, The Post’s Andrea Peyser recently lambasted the district as the People’s Republic of Park Slope http://nyp.st/pLHXXe. That may be going a bit too far. But you get the gist.

But it’s also probably vying with Berkeley (I can’t say for sure, but I’d like to see the data) as the community with the least members of the BBC in the nation. That’s the Big Butt Club. Again, perhaps, blame the Food Co-op (see link, above) as Peyser and her minions do, because the co-op famously has no car parking (my favorite co-op feature: summer-only bike valet parking service), instead its shopper members and co-op shift workers walk in pairs, chatting amiably, across a roughly 30-block radius, the worker in a neon orange vest pushing a jangly two-tier shopping cart that’s usually full of wholesome, non-fattening food that is half to three-quarters the price of the fatty, processed, and packaged foods that form the basic diet of (I’m guessing here) about 99.3 percent of the American grocery-buying public.

That means, in People’s Republic of Park Slope, they are smaller. Butts, I mean. ’Cause walking, jogging, cycling, scootering, skate-boarding, racing-after-doggie-during-Prospect-Park-off-leash-hours is what people do. So even the fat folks don’t look fat against the really fat folks visiting from out of town. (And with the Barclays Center, home of the New Jersey Nets, we’re about to get a whole lot more visitors.)

Now to the sexual part of the post. Under such a title, size being relative, a nod to sex would seem to be called for. So, here it is. The nod. Yes, when it comes to sex, size is relative. Size is also relatives. Because it’s something inherited. So blame Dad. Or Mom.

*

Polls and economic indexes now substitute for news. Consider the Big Mac Index, which extrapolates on the economic health of the nation from the cost of a Big Mac. Or the straw polls of the current crop of Republican candidates looking to unseat the still-learning-on-the-job Dem President Barack Obama. (You’ve got to be kidding me, the lameness of this group! I hope NJ Gov. Chris Christie joins the race if only to give something that fits the theme of this post. Like being named honorary chairman of the BBC. And man, what a great matchup that would be. The boniest-ass president in American history against the biggest-ass Republican challenger in American history. Wow!)

The index I’d like to see: Rather than the cost of the Big Mac, I’d like to chart the growing use of our corner TD Bank’s spare change machine, which is free to all comers, as a measure of the hard times so many people are feeling. We recently converted all our free change to bills, and I’ve been watching a steady stream of folks, from all walks of life, doing the same these past few weeks .¤.¤.

Next: Running for Your Life: Canada! A Visit

Running for Your Life: Curse-Mudgeon

2011-09-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

Rain, sleep-inducing humidity, Thurb! training imperatives combined to keep us off the country road this past weekend. We’d planned a ride north with the hound for apple-picking and cider-sampling, the wide-open spaces of upstate New York. (Why do I keep thinking Fresh Kills but it’s Something-Kills or –Kill, not a landfill site, but maybe that partially explains why we stayed put. Inertia, ironically enough, is a powerful force, isn’t it?)

Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.

No, I’ve just lived a long time now, and thus, have formed with some claim to merit a good number of opinions. All too often the practice of what I’ve come to know fails to meet the standards of not just excellence, but of mediocrity. What’s more, society’s norms that I grew up with are the stuff of bad Hollywood movies, case in point, “Contagion” star Laurence Fishburne explaining the origin of the handshake to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention janitor’s son, who is programmatically respectful of his elders. (Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a Leslie Nielsen cockpit scene with a similarly polite kid .¤.¤.) Not so here, the boy receiving the off-the-queue life-saving nasal vaccine from LF, told by Pops to do his homework, and off he goes, uncomplainingly leaving the men alone to talk. This scene prompted belly laughs from the hoodwinked crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music cinema on Saturday afternoon (Sept. 24) because if anything lays bare the mediocrity of this movie it’s the depiction of an Ozzie and Harriet nation in our post-millennial malaise, social realism of the most reviled retro order.

Hmmm, I’m beginning to wonder about this curmudgeonism. If it’s not about aches and pains, perhaps it’s the kind of thing that erupts from the phenomenon of underemployment, or in the case of someone with creative ambitions the notion that time – we’re talking near six decades of it – has passed you by, and that while you have accomplished much, there is oodles more you feel that with each passing day the odds worsen, making whatever that better-day outcome may be less and less and less likely to happen, so while for the most part you are content and a pleasure to be around, there are times that you feel cross, go off on someone or something with pent-up vehemence that is out of line with the offence or the perceived offence, leading to at worst a whisper campaign against you, or at least a wide-berthing at home and at the office.

(By the way, this current phase I’ll feeling is making me feel the pain of the dog, Thurber, who until very recently has been prone to inexplicable outbursts. His has been diagnosed by dog whisperers as fear. Which, actually, now that you mention it, has me feeling even more in sync with Ole UnReliable, who without warning will suddenly lunge at a workman carrying a can of paint, a toddler in water wings, a gangly skateboarding teen, a colony of rug rats on scooters. Thurb, the equal opportunity lunge-meister .¤.¤.)

Of course, better to bubble over in a way that makes a good point, rather than to just draw attention to yourself. Goodness knows that when it comes to drawing attention to yourself as a primary communicative goal, the TV shouters and dinner table narcissists reign in our ridiculous age, and yes, Roz (see last week’s post), the blogger, too, as depicted by Jude Law in that horrible aforementioned movie, “Contagion,” the bete noire of the worst of the lying self-promoting obsession (Note to director Steven Soderbergh: Just what price does LF pay for the special favor he doles out to his Chicago honey? That he squirrels away a life-saving vaccine to Tiny Tim [aka the CDC janitor’s son]). And all is forgiven? Did you hear that? It’s the sound of Dickens rolling in his grave.

And just what is going on here that reviewers at BOTH the New York Times and The New Yorker fairly glowed; the Times: Soderbergh doesn’t milk your tears as things fall apart, but a passion that can feel like cold rage is inscribed in his images of men and women isolated in the frame, in the blurred point of view of the dying and in the insistent stillness of a visual style that seems like an exhortation to look. And TNY: It doesn’t take much contact to become infected in Soderbergh’s brilliant movie about a pandemic that spreads quickly and, in a few months, kills millions of people.

Sheesh, readers have cancelled their subscriptions for less, haven’t they? Shouldn’t they? (Sorry about this last wee burst of curmudgeon-i-ness. I’m working on it.)

Next: Running for Your Life: The Relativity of Size

Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast

2011-09-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

On the Manhattan-bound R Train, Union Station, Brooklyn, two elderly bookish white New Yorker women are loudly comparing the merits of two prominent Malcolm X life story accounts, the Marable http://amzn.to/dry2Jz and the Haley http://bit.ly/68w4Ha, the morning of the planned execution of accused Georgian cop killer Troy Davis, a black man widely believe to be innocent.

“THEY THREW HIM OUT OF HIS OWN RADICAL GROUP, THE NATION OF ISLAM!” one woman says (it could be one or the other of them is hard of hearing), paying no nevermind to the hard-staring young African-American man across the aisle.

Seriously, who doesn’t like Roz Chast, New Yorker cartoon chronicler of not just these tone-deaf gals on the R Train, characters freeze-framed in that gloomy nostalgic time when the Bronx and the Hudson (for context, read, “Shadows on the Hudson” by Isaac B. Singer http://nyti.ms/oYmsii,) were defined by its darkly idiosyncratic Jewishness, with more than their share of Rothian self-loathing, in her case limned with sterling wit, the cartoons, at their best, I first saw in the vein of very good Woody Allen?

Ah, but in RC’s case there is no jump to “Midnight in Paris.” Instead, we remain in the prototype apartment, say under the Brooklyn Cyclone, Mom the apron-wearing, jokester-tyrant, love-twister at the vortex, holding court, super-charging the air.

In the Sept 26 Style Issue of The New Yorker, Page 90, RC takes on the blogger. According to her “Blog Breakdown,” the blogosphere is taken up with “1/3 stories about crap somebody cooked, knitted or sewed, 1/3 self-promotion and 1/3 conspiracy theories.”

She has a point, of course, Roz does. But it’s a little out of date. Given her fixation on nostalgia that doesn’t surprise me. And, yes, her core readers of 50 and up New York intellectuals and Malcolm X book regurgitators are getting older but in their demographic, and with modern medicine being what it is, they are likely to be with us and buying The New Yorker (on subscription, if not on the newsstand!) for another generation at least, which is job security gold for RC who will be churning out her clever alter cocker (reminds of my favorite alter cocker moment, an elderly man, not looking uncomfortable in a wheelchair, sitting in a garden with some less than aware pals in what I surmise must have been on the grounds of his condo in Battery Park City. He is craning his neck at a sharp angle where he is enthralled with the view of a young, attractive stark naked couple full on in the art of intercourse, an athletic nature, multiple positions, I don’t know when our hero, the lone alter cocker, picked up on the action, but while M and I were there it had to be twenty minutes of viewing time, during which the AC never stopped grinning) material for as long as RC wants to; or as long as she can stomach the Conde Nast relocation to 1 World Trade, why I find the idea of Roz having to actually go to the office and deal with some tomfoolery Conde Human Resources mumbo-jumbo as being Grade A Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon fodder . . .

All of which is to say RC is, of course, entitled to her opinions about bloggers. But I can’t help but consider the smugness factor. Even, dare I say, more than a touch of insecurity. Better to tar bloggers with the brush that they are trafficking in self-centered cant and whacko conspiracy theories, in so doing ridiculing the very practice of online commentary that does not fit a tidy cultural norm, with the result of driving more readers to places of real substance (David Remnick, Ha!) and uncanny wit, the cartoons of RC.

I know defending bloggers is a bit like the Russians keeping the Lada factories open. Or as a twentysomething photo assistant said about a request that I made of her that she’d forgotten and needed to be reminded of. “Oh, L, that was so two hours ago.”

Blogging may be so 1999, overtaken as it’s been by Facebook, Zynga Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. But it has a place. I mean some of my best friends are bloggers. If RC were a blogger I’d love to read her stuff. Though I’d still be a big fan of her cartoons. No hard feelings.

Next: Running for Your Life: Country Roads, Finally

Running for Your Life: Birds (and 105!)

2011-09-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

I’m on a 1:05-long run when I hear the baby bird’s distress call. (First a bit about 1:05. Be patient, I’ll get to the wee bird.)

I’m in the Boston Marathon 2012. I received an email confirmation on Sept. 15th. A runner’s (in my case, since 1976) lifelong dream. And I’m determined not to do what I did last year: overtrain and injure myself. This time I’m not going to go into body-punishing training until 105 days before the race.

That means I’ve got about 105 days that, every other day, I’ll be doing my 1:05 tone-up run. In order to be strong, have a good physical base from which to ramp up in those final, critical 105 days before the marathon on Monday, April 16.

Why 105? One day M and I were walking around our new-at-the-time neighborhood of Park Slope when we each drew attention to a colorfully designed New York Fire Department fire truck with the squadron number 105 emblazoned on it.

“Wow,” I said. “Look, that’s my favorite number.”

M looked startled, disbelieving. “Really !?! That’s my favorite number.”

What are the chances? It’s not 7, or 8, or 9, 11. Even say 27, the number of the Big M, Frank Mahovlich http://bit.ly/rqS5gK, the Toronto Maple Leafs sniper who last epitomized a Stanley Cup champion Maple Leaf.

Who has 105 as their favorite number? For M (my M, that is), it evokes home, the place where her earliest stories came from. Those stories that I fell in love with as I was falling in love with her. From her early story collections: Vanishing Animals and The Bus of Dreams, a myriad stories first lived in the mind of a young girl at 105 Hazel. So for M, No. 105 has magical powers.

In my case, 105 takes on numerical and graphical dimensions. I was born on Oct. 5, 1955. 105 55 10 (the last number, the addition of single digits of the birth year, 5+5). A sequence of numbers, 1, 0, and 5 that strings out to infinity. Now consider the name, O’Connor, in which I substitute the O’s and N’s for O’s resembling 0’s, the N's, 5’s, (of the course the 1's are I's). When I look at a sea of names in a phonebook, say, or a marathon race printout, the name O’Connor leaps out as if it were 10555101055510.

Bear with this additional note of synchronicity.

M and I often differ in our literary tastes. I tilt toward novels by David Foster Wallace, Beckett, Per Petterson, David Mitchel; M: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Eliot, Flaubert. So it was a pleasure to find a decade ago that we both admired the “Ester Stories” by Peter Orner http://amzn.to/ppP16i. The same name, Orner, M realized after reading the book, of the person who bought the house that her dad built for his family at 105 Hazel, who just happened to be Peter Orner’s, dad, Ron.

Catherine, the former owner of the Community Bookstore in Park Slope http://bit.ly/9axODv, who hand-sold us the “Ester Stories,” was an early Orner booster (he later won the writer-in-residence award with the Academy of Arts of Letters in Rome, a prize M also won) and invited Peter to a store event.

We introduced ourselves at the reading, and left together for a bite and drinks. It seemed that not only did Peter live during his boyhood years at 105 Hazel, but he grew up in the same room as M. Their first stories forming in a room at No. 105, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

It was early fall, and we asked of his plans for the next few nights.

“I’ll be with friends celebrating my birthday,” he said.

“When?” I asked.

“105” he said. "October fifth."

*

I’m running down the steps of the Lake lookout in Prospect Park. Here, in fall, the birders come. It must be a migrating moment, to judge from the number of folks walking around with binocs. A family of cardinals lives in the trees here. Throughout the year I hear them. No Pavarotti, just a clear, rounded cheep, cheep, cheep. But this sound isn’t anything like that.

At my feet under a jumble of big branches, chopped-down trunks, myriad twigs, debris from the summer storms, Tropical Storm Irene the biggest and most devastating, I hear the unmistakable cry of distress. With birds you can always tell. What I’ve learned from living with one. Tessie, our African Grey parrot, who when I was gathering my things on my way to work this morning (Sept. 20), after another successful run with Thurber, Ole UnReliable, but on the park pathways with me a puppy prince, Tessie cried out loud and clear, “Love You! Bye!”, which is to say that birds live on the high note, the up and up, as M and I like to say, their calls in the wild and at home purposeful, singing for a mate, echolocation, and so often on beautiful sweeping dawns to mark a new day, what sounds more like delight than anything, which is why the desperate alarm call of what sounds to me like a baby bird saddens me so. What reminds of what Erich Maria Remarque wrote in “All Quiet on the Western Front” (wait for it, the remake, starring Daniel Radcliffe, due out in 2013, or get it on Netflix, the version that won Best Picture in 1930), the otherworldly utterances of dying soldiers on the front line, never-not haunting their former pals and ghostly survivors.

That is the connection I make because of one of my earliest sound memories. A bird is chirp-crying, strangely and insistently. I’m maybe four or five, and drawn to the terrible sound, bending down to the base of a tree, curious and alarmed, spy a baby bird, no bigger than the palm of my hand, and reach out to try to pick it up to help, when suddenly, I’m under attack. I see an adult bird out of the corner of my eye, but not with enough time to protect myself as she lands hard-beak blows on my head – one, two, three. First, I can't draw a breath, then I cry, loud and scared, struck hard with the blow of the unfairness of the world, which is what I say to myself as fifty years later I run by the dying baby bird that I can’t see but only hear because she has undoubtedly fallen into the heavy debris of the summer storms and on this brilliantly blue fall day cannot be saved.

Next: Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast

Running for Your Life: Elevators, Bathrooms, Fountains

2011-09-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

A, A young man I know confined to a wheelchair who doesn’t miss a beat in his courageous life, knows how to get to every elevator in the Manhattan section of the New York Subway system.

M will chart every urban journey across Manhattan and a big chunk of Brooklyn keeping in mind the location of every public bathroom.

I won’t begin a long run without having a mental picture of where I will find public drinking fountains, and how much I will need to drink from them, as I go on my way.

Author Paul Theroux once said urban neighborhoods are like a small section of a jungle that natives know and exploit to their needs and fashion. Beyond that section they are uneasy, out of place. Because that land is another group’s territory.

In each of these examples the constant is not solely the adventure that comes with willingly going outside a comfort zone. Many people do that. They travel, see and visit new places and then they return home.

Rather, in the case of the elevators, the public bathrooms and the fountains, these corridors make it possible to not only travel but to do so in command. To coin the pat phrase, when you travel to a new place, you always bring yourself with you. That, of course, meants that if you are unhappy or depressed or anxious, chances are you will be U, D, or A in Paris, Kiev or Kuala Lumpur.

But bring some health-providing, spirit-lifting knowledge with you, and perhaps you will find those bad feelings fading. In A’s case, that will be about the whereabouts of elevators, in M’s, public bathroom intel, and mine, public-fountain knowledge. In this critical area to our health and welfare, we will be in control, be better able to be ourselves, get the most our of our travel, whether it is to see a friend in Midtown or visit a distant neighborhood in Paris, and in so doing build self-esteem that will allow us to make the most out of what we see or do, and help to improve our focus on the non-trivial whether inside or outside of ourselves.

*

Yesterday (Sept. 14) I registered to race in the Boston Marathon, 2012 edition, seven months from now. This time I’m hoping my house will be in order. During my last marathon on 10-10-10, the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., I found myself in terrible forefoot pain through, I dunno, about fifteen miles, and still managed to cross the line at 3:33:08, more than 10 minutes faster than the qualifying time in my age group.

What will these next seven months hold? More pain, certainly. But I’m determined to make these next 200-plus days count. Last year I was like Sidney Crosby, gunning for individual records, if not Lord Stanley’s mug for the second time, injured even before the Stanley Cup run began. Sid was felled by a nasty concussion and me by a wicked ruptured hamstring. Unlike Sid, though, I’ve managed to return to training, to rekindle a dream of running my first Boston, and crossing the finish line at or before 3:30 at the biggest name marathon in the world. Sid, though, remains stuck in limbo, not able to train so that he can return to command matters as the world’s best player in its fastest game.

Yesterday, too, I returned to the road with Thurber. It’s been months since we’ve been out running together, mostly because he’s been in Washington where K lives but also because old Thurb’s lunging tic that I discussed here in an earlier post has gotten a bit more out of hand. It’s not at the point where he has bitten someone, thank God, but we’ve begun to think we want to minimize the chances of it happening, so open-park running seemed to me one of the things that needed to go.

But you can’t keep a good Thurb down. He’ll be here in Brooklyn for the next five weeks, and we’ll be back out there. When you see him, Big Red, in a snazzy stainless steel collar, pulling me along like a rookie detective on a Tennessee manhunt, give us a wave. And a wide berth.

Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated

Running for Your Life: When the Impossible Becomes Possible

2011-09-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

On 9/11/11, a Sunday, M and I, en route to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, are stopped by a German-speaking couple who ask for the closest subway. Eastern Parkway, we tell them, straight ahead. We are going in that direction, too, but somewhat slower, in deep conversation. They thank us and hurry along the sidewalk.

September 11 is always a bit hard for me, but this one, ten years after, despite the onslaught of media remembrances, has snuck up on me. The garden is our preferred public sanctuary, where we like to walk and talk about our feelings, and on 9/11/11, with no sign to indicate why, it is open free for non-members. One of the first groups we see in the garden are the Germans who stop and give us a wide smile. Hmm, it looks like they are going to spending time in the garden instead of the subway. We see them a couple of times later, each time exchanging smiles, until it is time for me to go to work where I edit stories, manage graphics and write headlines for a living.
At Eastern Parkway subway station there’s a police surveillance station, and rather than wait to be called over, I place my shoulder bag on the inspection table.

The cop behind the table looks to his colleague and says, “Did you want to see this one?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“Yer okay,” he says, pushing my bag toward me.

Sitting in the subway car on 9/11/11, I’m feeling weak, pit in the stomach. I don’t normally feel this way, and if I were to allow fear to grow, to be nourished, then the pit would bloom into something that could consume me like fire. How close we are to fire. How everyday terror is in countless manmade things. The subway itself, the lights we turn on, the computers, what is not ingrained in the DNA of the human soul, or the pit, the primitive, the pre-fire, the Chauvet caves, where there may have been fire, but it had not entered the culture beyond its simplest forms, what soldiers on the battlefield, the front-line ones, face with uncommon courage. In touch with the pagan, the animalistic. How we are all infused with that powerful, inexorable will to live.

The subway lights go out, only for a blink of the eye. And the calm, silence intensifies. You can cut it with a knife.

*

Djokovic did not just lose service. He was humiliated in its loss. Even watching at home on an old TV, the sound, the energy of anticipation from the thousands watching at Arthur Ashe Stadium, US Open, the day before the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, is palpable. Federer the Favorite, he of magazine covers, Hamptons homeboy, a Swiss who in ways is more all-American than an American, has dramatically, conclusively broken the service, and the manner in which it was done, seemingly the spirit of his worthy opponent, the No. 1 ranked tennis player in the world, Novak Djokovic (Joke-o-vich). With the score 5-3 Federer in the fifth and deciding set, Federer having won the first two, and Djokovic the next two, and until Djokovic’s shuddering collapse in the fifth set, the eighth serving game, the pair compete flawlessly, three hours and thirty minutes later, like Greek gods, it seems all too automatic now. In the ninth game Djokovic is steeled to play better and he does. But Federer sees blood, and since the match began has never served better. With a sour face and darting glances to the frenzied pro-Federer crowd, Djokovic goes down 40-15. Poised, sitting at the edge of their seats, they are near-bursting, awaiting the inevitable winning point.

Then it happens. It feels less athletics than magic, the tonic that one drinks that has the mysterious power of altering even the most certain outcome. Perfect location, 108 miles per hour first serve, and Djokovic not only gets to it but cross-courts it just inside the line, an ungettable angle, leaving the fab Federer flat-footed. The shocked crowd falls silent, and then, Djokovic, smiling like a cat who has just swallowed a mouse, still down a matchpoint at 30-40, takes several steps toward the stadium crowd at his end at the court, lifting his arms as if to say, “So cheer, already. You have seen wondrous, unbelievable tennis. Cheer!” And the New York crowd takes him up on cue; first in a smattering of applause in Djokovic's corner of the stadium and soon across the stands, the loudest cheer the Serb has ever heard at the crown jewel of the Grand Slam circuit.

Djokovic’s next point is of the more superior-ordinary category, and the crowd, as so seldom happens in sporting events of any size, at any level, is stunned silent in its neutrality, cheering not for Federer for after that magic cross-court it is he who is slightly bowed, the finest instrument jangled off-key by the Djokovic magic because at that moment all is changed. The unthinkable is thinkable, the impossible possible. Jokeovich, the Joker, to Federer’s Batman has used a trick, psyche of psychics, because the return that he made at 3-5, 5-40 was not one in a million but one in infinity. Never likely to be seen again. Although there will be other shots that will amaze and change the course of what you think is possible, not just in tennis but in all parts of your life and life itself is well worth it just to imagine that you will be a part of it again.

So what happened in the game? Djokovic breaks Federer’s serve and now he is serving 4-5. Federer will win more points but no more games. Batman will go down to the Joker, 7-5, in a tennis match (9-10-11) that will go down as the most philosophically profound event in the sports’ modern history.

Postscript: On Monday (Sept. 12), 24-year-old Djokovic handily beat an injured Rafa Nadal to win his first US Open.

Running for Your Life: Elevators, Bathrooms, Fountains

Running for Your Life: Thinking Marathon and, Yes, 9-11

2011-09-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

One week from Boston registration. Through the summer more than intact. Since this time last year, my longest training run: one hour, thirty minutes. And today (Wed., Sept. 7) I neared that, 1:25, and plenty of gas left in the tank. Months since I’ve felt even a twinge in the torn upper right hamstring, my dreaded forefoot pain has flared up only once this summer, and I’ve done nothing to medicate it, just stayed true to a regimen, using weight machines at the gym, focusing on calves, hamstrings, butt and hip muscles, a lateral/shoulder workout, elliptical, nightly pushups (one set, sixty per), the latter of which helps in balance of thrust. Feel that my strides are softer, so that aches and pains after a run are minimal. I must and will get in the habit of stretching after long runs, which really help to relieve muscle strain and ward off injury.

I’m reminded as I go about longer runs of what my physiatrist said about my favoring my large leg, the damaged one, and consciously stride up steps, and when I increase my speed, with my right instead of my left. Heretofore, I don’t just go out the door. Like everything else that is worth doing well, I’m working at it.

Running the circumference of Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, 478 acres, 600,000 graves, on 36th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway, (Wed., Sept. 7), mist now of a three-day rain, nothing but the kitchen sink, being carried by a worker along the southern sidewalk, scores of street trees freshly planted, lots already dead or diseased, and it seems to me the roadway so deserted that a landscaper should take out the living ones, oak and maple and flowering pear, and replant them where they have a fighting chance of survival. So deserted and disaffected around here that no one would raise a peep.

Later, same circumference, 20th Street, down from Bishop Ford High School, I make fleeting eye contact with a man squatting outside a hole-in-the wall mechanics shop. He’s covered head to toe with red paint, even on parts of his face that he’d covered with a mask. I can’t read his expression except to say that it is not a happy one.

Soon, again, back at fantasy central: Windsor Terrace, Our Lady’s Field, Holy Name Parish. T-ball, anybody? After the rain we’ve had, this field of dreams has never looked so good. I run along its outfield fence, and then around the block to where the players and fans come to see. And then, from there, it is a breeze, only fifteen minutes from home, and half of the trail downhill.

*
Look around you. Tributes everywhere. How they pour in. Marking ten years after. Regular readers here know that I was there that day, on the street. At one point, literally, running for my life. I have written about it, and one day that story will be told. Not just yet though. And never, no never, will I ever visit the museum. Millions will, of course. There is actually a business model for it: “dark tourism” http://bit.ly/ndMCW7. Miller-McCune, an otherwise exceptional magazine, sees the value of it. Tribute, in extremis.

I don’t undervalue the importance of remembrance. I grew up in the footsteps of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who as long as I knew him every 11/11 he brushed off his tunic from the First World War, buffed up his shoes, polished and pinned his medals, and marched in the veterans’ parade. Then I’d stand at his side at attention before the Town Cenotaph as he saluted and often cried for his fallen comrades.

Lest we forget. A phrase that gives succor to the living. I only depart in this:

Perhaps not now, but the time will soon come that we don’t forget, but rather we expand our view. Think about looking at Google Earth at only a single setting. There are others: when you feel you can, take the time and consider them, as Thomas Laqueur’s “Something Fine and Powerful,” the August 25 review of John Dower’s “Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9/11/Iraq,” http://bit.ly/nhhj1V in the London Review of Books, helped me to do.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Solitude

Running for Your Life: Back to the Fire

2011-09-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

Love the run (Sept. 2) to the phallic spear, west Fire Island, a herd of deer graze on the lawn oval, from my starting place from Dunewood, probably three miles, am thinking that I can run much farther, amazed at the lack of Irene damage, some salt water, diseased-looking trees, toppled over, some dead, undergrowth, except it seems for a tiny oasis, mosquitoes at night but not now in the breeze, nip in the air, which also helps.

Elsewhere, the breeding grounds for the Minnesota state bird expand under near-compromised homes on stilts. Remember nowhere can a basement flood here. The depth of the land itself no great shakes, literally a spit of sand in the ocean, laugh riot of a reality TV show, Survivor: Fire Island. Look for it.

Back from the run to the phallic spear, the needle, so pancake flat that you literally feel you could run all day. Rest, sit back, ice water down in a flash. Get up, get another one, and it too vanishes. Mind empties, feel the calm that comes from what you feel when through the day until now, minutes before sundown, the only food you eat is the fruit of the land and sea, cold water and juices and fried food (Yes! potatoes and clams and soft shell crab).

Or wine in oversized plastic glasses, garish colors, yellows and oranges and purples, at the sunset show at Fair Harbor, the poetic evocations, the sky for minutes every summer evening drawing young and old to the pier, standing room only: “Hey, Norm, give us a pour o’er here, wouldja, I’m down a quart.” “Sheesh, Millie, can’t ya just stifle it for once; I mean just looka that sky .¤.¤.” “Wanna buy a brownie?” “Wha .¤.¤., you didn’t bring the crumbs for the swans. I mighta known.”

At Unfriendly’s, there’s the gold standard egg and cheese and its x, y variations, even in midsummer outta the best choco-dip ice cream bars, but Labor Day fuhgeddaboudit.

A week after Tropical Storm Irene (Don’t call me Hurricane, fella), the winds on the ocean side are stiff if not killer, red flags, riptide surf so only teens with negative body fat are game to go in, and ever for them only within the lifeguard station boundaries, ranging wide of the whipping red flags and a sharp blast from the referee’s whistle cuts the wind like a chef knife, on Saturday (Sept. 3), I’m talking about, bringing the umbrella but not putting it up because of the obvious reason, the gusting wind, and not too far up the beach either because of the wash & dry layer, showing the advance of high tide, and there’s OC dog energy, old man of the sea Monster Dog http://amzn.to/d0aPaC with rusty lab mix and black shep-collie, throwing dog-catcher frisbee with the wind, thinking, I dunno, US Open for dogs, no thought in the world for the bathers trying to grab the last minutes of quiet, only a few hours of summer left, and yeah, he flings his frisbee toward two girls who’ve just plunked themselves down in a high tide zone, which is bad enough, but here come the doegs .¤.¤. flung-frisbee at their feet, sand bursts, showers upon them as the dueling mutts charge into the dirt, hit the beach, May Day, half-strawboater, half-sombrero, Monster Dog, tail between his legs, is second behind the beasts, breathless, apologies, “So sorry, so sorry,” digging the frisbee out of the sand, the half-awake sunbathers, young too, and perhaps with body issues, shy, certain, or at least considering that this unwelcome incident has something to do with the extra twenty around the middle, thinking lying prone will minimize likelihood of being noticed, not this afternoon though, sure that they are attracting negative attention, finger-pointing the fat girls on the beach, an afternoon ruined, all because of the Monster Dog, nothing but canine consciousness, remarkable his immaculate unawareness of humans, which are not in abundance, literally just random pods, think early spring plantings in a managed garden, ten, twenty or thirty times space per pod, and yet and yet, Monster Dog’s next fling of the frisbee takes his silly whirling hat on a course that ends pretty much dead center on the pot belly of the old bald fat guy on the beach, resting if not sleeping, and sure enough in bound the hounds, sand-pounding cloud that engulfs him, even shakes the old boy to his fee just as MD arrives, doing his mock-concern bit, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and I’m wishing it were Papa Hemingway who’d’ve drawn a gun on the guy for sure and then you can bet MD would feel differently about playing his games with people about, but alas, nothing, not even a holler or a finger-wag, and he’s quick to get back down into his pod and try to return to whatever quiet he had been able to find of this the next to next last day of summer.

Here Uncle Rupe’s mini-cooler is inaugurated with jumbo shrimp salad ($1 per JS) from the Pioneer Market, Fair Harbor, stone-cold bagel and long swallow of Adirondack Seltzer.

Then, a sun umbrella, two weeks after TSI, yellow and red and blue, is doing cartwheels in the wind, up and over the fencing, into the dunes, and . . .

Running for Your Life: Thinking marathon

Running for Your Life: Discovering Derek Parfit

2011-09-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long, long time since I got so much out of a single New Yorker http://nyr.kr/otYONF. (Talking magazines, not my daughter, she of the powerful intellect http://nyp.st/ielb6l and perfect-pitch loyalty, that’s her. In case you’re wondering my wife M lives in New York but is as Midwestern as Fitzgerald; and yeah, nods to Paul Simms and “God’s Blog” http://nyr.kr/oAzqQX)

Back-to-back wonders, the undressed-down, let-his-story-tell-the-story style of Larissa Macfarquhar’s “How to Be Good” profile of the heretofore unknown to me philosopher Derek Parfit, and the crystalline father and son story, “Town of Cats,” by Haruki Murakami. Seems the work of a single mind. Our heroes, Parfit and Tengo, find joy and passion in both science and literature. This from “TOC”: especially in “TOC”: science on the one hand and literature on the other:

“While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him, their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth.”

Tengo, the hero of Murakami’s story, could be an acolyte of Parfit’s. Or a younger version of the man whose life is so deftly limned by Macfarquhar that it’s a pale imitation for me to try to do it justice here. Just read it, the Parfit profile, on newsstands now. (There is a free link the Murakami story on the current New Yorker site http://nyr.kr/mYqYKJ, but not the PP.) Better to have a hard copy of this one. Or iPad. Or online archive. Whatever. And Parfit’s books. If you’ve got the money, make the time.

How these works converge. Parfit and his distant relationship with his father. Enough to question the very paternity of the father. As does Tengo, the younger. Murakami’s Tengo is at an age when he very much could take the moment at the end of the story and find his way to the life that Parfit leads. (Parfit, as described by Macfarquhar, seems like someone only Murakami could imagine.) Both fathers so coarse, so raw, yet so powerful, so looming with might in the heart and minds of their superior sons, that the brutes’ tears have our heroes shaken to the core.

The philosophy of life itself intersects in these pages. The “vacuum” that the father describes in the harrowing climax of “TOC” is a Parfitian transitional moment. The self is leaving and what replaces it? Either the void or a greater understanding, an acknowledgment of the virtue of selflessness, that holding on to self is to embrace the fear of death. Will Tengo go back, visit his father again soon? Perhaps, if he does, fear will lift from his father before death falls.

Here is the premise that Parfit believes is the holy grail, that will help to answer the burning question that retired and aged Private Ryan in the Spielberg film, tears in his eyes, asks his wife before the thousands of war dead in an American military cemetery in France: “Am I a good man?”:

“An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific (leading to the best results), uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.”

He calls it the Triple Theory because the principles “were conceptualist because they would lead to the best results; Kantian because they are universally willable; and constructualist because no person could reasonably reject them.”

If you imagine the blank, blink-blink face of aged Private Ryan, perplexed as to just what Parfit is getting at, you’re not alone. At his age, Ryan has an excuse not to spend the time and effort and read Parfit, to gain a deeper understanding of that simple yet critical question.

What’s mine?

*

I'm hoping this year is optimific. As far as running is concerned. On Sept. 14, I will be re-registering for the Boston. To recap, last March I blew out my right hamstring less than a month before my first running of the Boston Marathon. And I'm out. Down too. But this summer, I feel, I've been a little smarter. What writers need to do when the block comes: stop, assess.

As with running, reading and 'riting, my 3 R's, this summer I went back to the source. It was terrible blow. But one that caused me to think what I could have done differently. The strength of my body has been a gift, one that running has helped to shape these part thirty-plus years.

But running can't do it alone. This summer I've become an advocate of cross-training; twice, three times a week running, and twice, three times a week in the gym. In my case, I focus on hamstring, calves and hips. Heavy on the ellipical machine, if I have the time. After a long run, fifteen minutes of mandatory stretching. As regular as prayer. So that in April I will be ready to do like I've been telling you. To run for my life.

Running for Your Life: Back to the Fire

Running for Your Life: Raining Cats & Dogs

2011-08-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

What is it about a dog? What New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik found http://nyr.kr/n2ITT7, that dogs are man’s best friend in large part because life on the farm is better than life in the woods.

Think pioneer days – Kansas, Missouri, Manitoba – scads more wolves than dogs. What was to stop them (the dogs) from running off and joining a pack of wolves? What Farley Mowat, the beloved Canadian writer and conservationist, author of “Never Cry Wolf” http://amzn.to/ofrush (it may not be “true,” exactly, the wolf experts say, but what the hey, it’s a great yarn) brings alive.

Catch a glimpse into the eyes of the stubborn breeds, top of the list, Redbone Coonhounds, that’s right, Thurb, and see into a wolf’s soul. Send a shiver down your spine.

Wolves and men, no parallel lives there. Same with tigers and bears, lions. If I weren’t allergic to housecats, I’d probably have a similar sense about them. Surely I did when Callie, our calico Maine Coon, was alive. She was a wild one, direct line to the jungle.

What do we keep in ourselves that’s wild. Our uncanny sense of when we are being watched. Erich Maria Remarque writes in “All Quiet on the Western Front” http://bit.ly/pGKNBN, that if front-line soldiers under fire didn’t have a nth sense then there wouldn’t have been a single survivor left to tell the tale. It’s untested, but anecdotally, far and away more women sensed the 5.8 Richter Scale earthquake that rumbled through New York City this month. A holdover from the cave, women are hyperalert to threats to the flesh of their flesh. How do we know that someone is staring at us from behind? When I was young, my mother used to say when I’d feel a shiver that she was told that a person in the future had stepped on my grave. That always creeped me out, but part of me still believes it. We are wild and pagan, certainly deep down; it has not been bred out. Perhaps it can’t be.

Then a week later, Irene. The Return of Thurb! Delayed until today (Monday, Aug. 29), a blog post interrupted by a hurricane taking its sweet time wreaking havoc, hardly ever causing the interruption of previously scheduled programming, and, sure, the media did a good job of reporting and then exhorting recalcitrant citizens to leave flood-prone areas, the best of them showing hand-held electronic images of that indelible watery disaster, Katrina, when the poor and the uninformed and the sick and the old and the just plain stubborn refused to evacuate, and then were left to swim or rooftop-scream for their lives as the waters kept rising, or how about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, whole blocks of humans submerged and carried away by rushing waters.

What does it take for you to believe that this should be worth your shaking yourself out of your normal routines? Hats off to these broadcast reporters, part of the team of pre-disaster responders who made it possible for millions of people to get to safety. Homes can be repaired. But souls .¤.¤.

Where, though, once the danger is past, or can reasonably be seen to have diminished, is the equivocation? How likely is such a report, a consistent, reliable, publicly responsible report that would fly in the face of the previous evidence that is preparing us for only one thing – a direct hit on New York Harbor, winds gusting to a devastating near-80 mph, pushing storm surge waters, dangerously high, up the Hudson, where landfill residents of Battery Park City have been evacuated. Expect rushing water on the streets of lower Manhattan as never before. More after the break.

Prepare for the worst but hope for the best, Mayor Bloomberg says. But with no equivocating state media, one free from ratings pressure, private newscasts keep pushing the worst, never balancing with the more likely, running with the angle that Irene is losing steam, with new facts yielding a decidedly different outcome. How do you keep people watching, and advertisers happy, if at one point you declare a state of emergency, the next a state of rapt attention .¤.¤.

Of course to follow the story, track the unexpected, would require real budgets, so we would not have the same disaster report over and over again, scripted for those who live in a 50-block radius around Rock Center. But rather would provide a real public service that such an event deserves, controlling for bias against sensationalism, not just kowtowing to the urbane well-to-do.

Case in point: that hurricanes often present much worse flooding from fresh water sources than from the dreaded but overreported “storm surge” of oceanfront property (read: media elite bias). And who lives along these fresh waters (Catskills, Vermont, lower Westchester County, Staten Island, New Jersey lowlands) but the poor and the vanishing middle class who would do well to track other reliable sources for news, if they can find them, than the clarion call of the tail-chasing, mogul-deferring broadcast networks .¤.¤.

Next: Running for Your Life: Discovering Derek Parfit

Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead

2011-08-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Walking Prospect Park’s Picnic House path at the Nethermead corridor, arrayed along the northern side, through chain links of the unscaleable fence are a queue of mothers pulling like galley slaves at rower rings attached to high tension rubber bands affixed to the fence, their respective babies (I’m guessing here) in strollers facing them, leaving just enough room for an elder women walking group to march through, heading toward to M and me, clapping and urging on the mothers: “Go! Girls, go! Keep it up!” One mother smiles. Not ironically.

It’s funny how people fall into their lives. What I find compelling about the title of Anne Tyler’s “Accidental Tourist.” How folks are following, have run to a path whose destiny is purely objective. Accidental. In my case I’m convinced that if I had not suffered life-threatening blood clots so early in my life .¤.¤. I’m twenty and a half with few burning priorities beyond sex, ice hockey and witty repartee with friends. But during one particularly unlucky winter thirty-six years ago, clots riddled my body for weeks refusing to leave and for long, dark nights I found it near-impossible to draw a breath. I survived, but more than that, set a course toward being a different person. Corny yes, but, in a way that I don’t fully understand I pledged to myself that I would make the most of whatever time I had left on earth. To safeguard my health, I’d run, which I have now done twice-weekly since I was able to hobble along a mountain trail the summer of 1975. I’ve strayed some, but I’ve never stopped writing.

Less than ten years after the “accident,” I pulled up what little stakes I had and traveled, first to Tahiti, then New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, and Mexico, where I met a Cessna pilot, hitched a ride, airborne, visual flight rules en route to Philly on a set date from Nuevo Laredo, Spring 1984, a wondrous trip where in the Many, La., airfield one morning we are minutes away from takeoff when four police cruisers come barreling onto the field, and yeah, from a quarter-century away I think what if, what if this near-perfect stranger Cessna pilot has unbeknownst to me stowed drugs onboard, and Whoa! that would have been it, what C.S. Lewis says, “A stone may determine the course of a river,” instead, though, the cops tear apart the plane, taking seats out, throwing our bags and knapsacks on the ground, then ransacking, digging into ever crevice and corner of the Cessna four-seater, finally coming up empty-handed, and sure they could have planted drugs on us (one cop did point out what looked like a bullet hole in the underside of one of the wings!), it would’ve made the outing worthwhile, my pilot friend breathing a sigh of relief because to look at me: long unwashed hair, baggy jeans, white shapeless sweater, leather bolsa, beaten-up highway backpack with ratty Canadian maple leaf, he had to think that I had at least a little weed or hash, some contraband. But no, that wasn’t my thing, and the cops, slowly, reluctantly, left, their keys to the Many, La., lockup unused that morning, and up we went, the two of us, wordless into the clear blue sky, pointed toward Philly but in no hurry to get there, and besides, in any kind of cloud cover we were grounded, reduced to VFR.

Later, I’m in New York City for the first time. Still Spring 1984. Nothing summer about those days. Staying with a friend, longing for a woman I’d left behind. Four and a half years before I would be back to the Big Apple to be with my wife and daughter for the rest of my life until now. This fall marking my twenty-third consecutive fall in the city. When the air is cool and fresh, and yes, this marks the tenth anniversary of that especially ill-fated day in New York, 9-11-2001. And yes again, I was there. Not in a Tower, but close enough. On the ground, a pathway at the Hudson River, looking up precisely when the first skyscraper began its terrible collapse, and I’ve thought for years, literally, that nothing would be the same. And I was right. But not in the way that I thought at the time.

Surely its okay to talk about, now that ten years after is upon us. To not begrudge the overused references to that time, especially for those New Yorkers and non who were in and around the city that day. When it comes to news and commentary, in this nation, a ratings prison, which must program content to the imperative of viewer interest, there is no more obvious fallback than to measure all deviance from normality – hurricanes, rising floodwaters, shaking high rises – against the day the Twin Towers, attacked by hijacked planes, thundered to the ground in a way I know that I and millions like me will never forget. The horror. A tiny piece of every September day when the sky is beyond blue and you say to yourself, because you do, we all do, that such a day may never come again.

Next: Running for Your Life: Return of the Thurb!

Running for Your Life: Fire Island, Late Summer

2011-08-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Last weekend in Dunewood, Fire Island, C, who I never did see so I have come to think of her as Goldilocks, slept in G’s bed; G doing her first shift as hostess at Le Dock in Fair Harbor, FI, the next town over, the place with the grocery that sells a boxlet of dryish blueberries for the equivalent of a quarter apiece, G (our host’s daughter) not getting home until sixish in the morning because she too had slept over at a friend’s, Goldilocks gone in the morning before M and I get ourselves together after having tied one on (What I say to M as we make our way to FH from D when we arrived by ferry on the bay side where the waters are receding, “Let’s tide one on!”); Goldilocks is off to the wedding, what I first hear as her uncle getting married that I later learn is less wrong than incomplete, the reason she couldn’t sleep in her own bed the previous night because her uncle’s family and friends had taken up residence there for the weekend, but then, much later, when we are sunbathing on the ocean side, I learn that it’s G’s (Goldilocks’) uncles who are getting married. Her uncles taking advangage of the Great Cuomo Summer Triumph, getting gay married.

It is M and my anniversary that day (August 20), twenty-two years to the day before the uncles’ nuptials so we pick ourselves up from under our umbrella and sand-laced reading materials, sun block and go to check it out because G (our host’s daughter) says they are getting married in a ceremony right on the beach, only a short walk away, and sure enough, we see a chuppah, a traditional Jewish marriage canopy made of wooden sticks, topped with leafy branches on each end, and gauzy curtain whipped up in the late afternoon ocean breeze. Six green straight-back chairs are arranged facing the chuppah; there is a sign nearby but no people, but M says it looks like it is one of the ubiquitous “Don’t Walk on the Dunes” signs, not one that announces that this is the place of Fred and Jim’s wedding.

We don’t wait to see if the grooms are coming. Instead we walk back to our tidy little encampment for more sunbathing before a quick dip in the bay and then dinner.

*

Okay, the US government is cutting and will cut programs. Get a load of this. It would have Richard M. Nixon turning in his grave (if you wonder why, read this piece by Kurt Anderson) http://nyti.ms/ocm64D, but there is a Web site started this year with taxpayer money, courtesy of the of the Department of Agriculture, that shows that 10 percent of country is now a food desert http://1.usa.gov/kJcR1U. What’s that? Well, any census area where at least 20 percent of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live more than a mile from a supermarket, The Economist, July 9, 2011, http://econ.st/oaduow.

And guess what, as The Economist report points out, Americans are making “good food” progress, according to the site, with the number of people living in a food desert declining to what seems a reasonable 13.5 million people, from when the site opened in May, to 23.5 million in 2009. Closer inspection shows that this reflects bureaucratic fudging of numbers and doesn’t represent, as The Economist writes, “a single additional banana bought or soda shunned. So what’s the takeaway? The Economist’s conclusion:

“The unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to. Over the last four years, the price of the healthiest food has increased at around twice the rate of energy-dense junk food. That is the whole problem, in an organic nutshell.”

This in a country in which, as Harper’s Index reports in a recent issue, about half of American households do not earn $2,000 during a thirty-day period.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead

Running for Your Life: The Movie, Continued

2011-08-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

We pick up in hospital, with establishing shot: L is feeble, his leg raised high and strapped in some contraption so that it doesn’t rest on bed, or even have sheets drape on it. It just hangs there in air, lathered in white goop, monstrously big thing. He is surrounded by medicine drip bags of many types that are needle-syringed in multiple places on his body.

Closeup. He is with the nurse, but we can’t hear, with benefit of subtitles, we read, “Where’s Sam?” Nurse touches him in a motherly way. “He’s gone. This morning.” L exhales, head back heavily on pillow. “Gone. Where?” We see a touch more of the hardened look that we saw at the opening.

(If there was a love interest, it develops it here. A docudrama would demand it, otherwise it’s just too slow. Where’s the tension? Even a documentary needs relationship tension. Especially one about a young man who has lost his looksk . . . and his way.)

Flash forward. Beautiful sunny day. Sound of seabirds. L with a cane coming up to the door of a man with an apartment to rent. His house is romantically located on the shore of the majestic St. Lawrence River in a the quiet town of Prescott, Ont. L raps on door. No answer. Notices that door is slightly ajar and pushes it open. Stairs ahead, and we see him struggling with his oversize leg. Grunting, obviously in pain and discomfort, taking one step at time. After one, two steps, jump-cut to top of stairs where L., adjusting to sudden gloomy interior, sees a shadowy figure, standing in the middle of the room. The owner, Mr. Night, is a sight, think gentleman’s club, “Howard’s End,” in sear sucker suit, spats, hand-woven expertly fashioned thin blood-red bow tie, straw boater and ebony cane with ivory knob, the shape of the lion, king of beasts.

Camera slowly pans the room, heavy furnishings with ancient-looking leather bound books on every surface, skin of dust on all, except for those in standing cases, dark wood with glass doors and more books, rows and rows of vintage titles, the spines we see are the complete Dickens and seafarers adventures and Melville and Conrad, the camera pans back to Mr. Night, we see him sitting in what seems an easy chair twice as large as he needs, he is every inch a Henry James, from the tip of his toe to the cane of his lap, except when the camera lands on his face, and this time, in is obv. L’s POV, we don’t see the face of Mr. Night. Rather it is Sam’s, again. His exact expression of alarm and concern that we saw in the opening scene and we hear a thud, as L lands hard on the thick Persian rug of Mr. Night.

L and a couple of college buddies on their way out West the summer after the hospital. L in the back seat, lying down, his bad oversized leg elevated to the passenger seat. He takes a swig from a canteen, pops pills as he winces in pain. Rubs leg with free hand. Sighs. General hilarity in the car. Hubbub of conversation in background, but L’s POV is hollow as if in a tunnel, the words English but he hears them as a foreign language. It is cramped in the back with luggage and junk food bags, half-empty sodas, and L is having trouble moving so to get the attention of the driver he takes his cheap cane and raps the headrest of the driver’s seat.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“Can you pull over soon?”
“Yeah, will do.”

Outside shot. Beaten up hatchback sedan comes to a stop, noisily in gravel. We see L struggle mightily to get out of the car. Then loud step in thick gravel. L walks around the car. We follow each step, but at a distance, as the camera follows L around the car we see two guys in front seat, paying him no attention, laughing at something. A million miles away.

Closeup on L’s pained face as he resumes his place in the car. Big sigh. Slowly comes back to the same position he started in, grabs the cane and taps the headrest this time.
“Where to, sir,” the driver says, turning back to face L.
“The Rockies, Rick,” L says. “And step on it.”
“Righti-O, sir.”

Flash forward. L on a Rockies trail, snow-capped mountains, blue jays in pines, squirrels. He is alone on a steep stony trail. Wearing shorts, wife beater, sneakers. Very pale and skinny. Terribly unhealthy looking. But he is running. Hobbling really. Think Chester in “Gunsmoke” chasing down Marshall Dillon in an emergency. But for L there is no emergency. Or none that we can see.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead

Running for Your Life: The Movie

2011-08-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

On black screen the sound of hospital machinery, beeps and whooshes and splunks. As if from a deep murky well, a face appears. An old man staring down, noise of a buzzer, then immediately a female voice, “Yes, Sam?” “Get in here quick; he’s stopped breathing.” Then, a young woman in nurse cap replaces old man’s face, she too staring down, noisily fiddles with something and then as loud as anything yet we hear the sound of a heartbeat, then the gasp of a single breath. Then another.

Fade. Slowly developing image of young man in ill-fitting hospital gown. Scraggly beard. He is at the window and places hand on glass, makes for a palm print on the icy pane. Nurse comes in and calls his name. “Larry, over here, time to take your pills.” L looks up and into the glass, starts a bit, as if for the first time he sees himself as he is, wasting away, as if he has been a POW in the South Pacific, hint of being hardened to his fate but then something sad comes to mind, and he bows his head, body shuddering, weeping.

Black, then image appears of a ice rink, younger and athletic version of L is vigorously playing hockey, collides hard with a defenseman in the corner, separates his rival from the puck, closeup shots so that we sense the micro, not macro, of an intense young athlete, then pan back, our hero with his stick raised high, the puck, in a perfect pass, sails to him and he is in all alone on the goalie, fakes a deke and snaps a shot to low stick side, not hard but ideal placement, goalie feels as if he’s got it but the puck zips through, buzzer and elation, L is surrounded by fellow victors, what feels like a goal of a lifetime.

Back to real time. L is in a college cafeteria with his tray; he has not come with his friends, is alone, attractive girl on the cash, you can tell that in another time they may have flirted with one another. But when the skeleton of after-hospital L raises his head, the cashier girl looks away, pregnant pause in the food line. L looks easily five to ten years older than everyone else, decrepit and without a single sympathetic outlet. Jumpcut to him at a table alone, one of the last diners in the place, picks at a plate of food that’s hardly eaten, good-looking students take their trays past him, giving him a wide berth . . .

This movie is being interrupted by an important social commentary. Please be patient .¤.¤.

As if modern society weren’t uncivil enough, witness family and nonfamily gatherings across classes, the slipping away of conversation as an art, the loss of those deepening personal relationships through a mutual sharing of meaningful observations, loving touches as those primarily Under Forty (Take note New Yorker) stare into their gadget screens and thumb their way into self-sensory oblivion, beware the next phase. The thought came to me yesterday (August 15) as I was finishing up a tidy 3-miler, not an idea triggered by the deaf runners in Prospect Park (See R4YrLife: Running Without Headphones, Aug. 25, 2010), of which there are not many when I get out between 11 and 11:30 a.m. these days. Rather it struck me as I was coming upon a place where M and I saw a worker drop an oversized lightbulb that shattered, creating a public hazard on a Park Slope sidewalk. The worker didn’t stop to pick up the pieces, or try to sweep up the big shards at least, even though included among the items he was carrying was a broom. M kicked herself, saying that she wished she had the whole thing on video, possible because her camera does have such a function. Yesterday, though, I thought in the not too distant future we will have wearable computers (computerwear, the new product category), which will undoubtedly have fine quality and extremely easy-to-use cameras that in the young company I keep that seems to be the obsession, taking pictures, moving pictures of the most banal events: dining, stopping for coffee, applying makeup at Sephora, the sum total of the technology’s use to document the self and its activities, however everyday.

Yet imagine the self-glorification of these wearable computers, a bit of necklace, say, that can with exquisite resolution snap and create moving pictures of you and your loved ones, moment to moment, and when it comes to the uncivil bit, obtain perfectly clear evidence when you are the victim of an actionable slight: say, rude behavior on the street, or if you see what seems a criminal act between a parent and a child, or to go back to the example of the worker and the lightbulb, to shame, perhaps lead to the loss of the worker’s job because his action was caught on computer high-def video, now evidence for ambulance chaser lawyers, wearable computers, read: 24-hour personal surveillance video.

So don’t look up from your portable screen. Maybe we can have them implanted so that all – not just the majority – of urban pedestrians will literally be in their own screen- (read corporate-, don’t kid yourself) directed world. Better that way, minus the uncertainty, the sense that you may just make eye contact, maybe even share a casual hello, with a perfect stranger. Or that you may be aware that someone has thought to keep a door open to a shop for you, to have the presence of mind to smile and say “Thank you.” Or maybe even, “Very kind of you.” Because a relationship-enriching conversation isn’t going to break out in a void. The void that is taking over, as we all become, increasingly, strangers to everyone but ourselves, perfect and otherwise.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Movie, Continued

Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

2011-08-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

I’d like to think that I’m keeping this blog in balance: reading, writing, running and yeah, riding (subway). Because five days a week I ride to work; that is when I write, often about running, but equally about my other practices. Because my message is embedded there, in these ways of being.

Recently, I received the official publication of the Boston Marathon 2011: Racer’s Record Book. The race that I’d trained for but didn’t run. I was a little surprised to see that of the 26,907 runners who entered, only 1,719 were men in my age group, 55-59. That’s 6.4 percent. And of those men who but did not race I was joined by 156 others, or 9.1 percent, of the group members who made it there for the 115th running of the world’s most famous race. Certainly it is a young person’s game. It’s not as though a 56-year-old man is going to win. As if winning counted.

Ah, but the age group that caught my eye: men, eighty and over. Three started and two finished. The winner: Clarence Hartley, 81, from Georgia, Official Time: 426:25.

I’ve only twenty-five years to go. And a lot of miles. Just ask Clarence.

*

It’s not as though you should be crazy about balance. That would just set the wrong tone, wouldn’t it? Or boring either. To say everything in moderation doesn’t, or shouldn’t, suggest middle-management accountancy. Or to say nothing in excess. (Careful how you say this one, though. Once, my father-in-law, who in his nineties was looking thirty years younger, advised a 50-ish women to this end a number of years ago; she couldn’t believe her ears, calling her friends over to where Dad was sitting. She thought he had said Nothing to do with SEX! Boy was she relieved to hear that he didn’t say that .¤.¤. )

I manage to find not only pleasure in balance. But a life force. And energy. The alternative, in the end, not something I’m interested in.

Here are some areas of balance to think about:

Activities: I write to excess about how I find balance in writing, reading and running. And art. And politics. And economics. An insight: In my senior year in college, I chose business as my specialty reporting area. I knew next to nothing about business and the economy. So that’s what I studied and I’ve never regretted it.

Love: Self-explanatory. Devote yourself to its many non-X-rated and non-self- and non-home-destructive forms.

Food: We are what we eat. No need to be holistic here. But for goodness sake cut down, if your budget allows, on fast food of all types, read meat and supersize faux-natural fruit drinks at McDonald’s, have a glass or two of red win at night, cook with fresh ingredients. Tomatoes! And curb your snacking at your desk and everywhere else for that matter. Drink water and farm fresh and squeezed juices. And coffee. Omigod, like you can live without coffee? Fuel yourself right and you’ll be surprised with the balanced energy all day long.

Exercise: Ten minutes on the subway platform I do simple leg stretches and body torques. If I miss that workaday exercise I’m a little put out. If the train is late, I’ll be a little late for work. But I don’t stress. Rather I just expand the exercises I do while I wait.

Workout And Run: This combination is a new one on me. But after my bad hamstring tear last spring, I mix running and working out. After decades of resisting, I now belong to a gym. I will work up to upper body training. But now I do hamstring and calf and hip sets and burn 400 to 1,000 calories on the elliptical one day, and run for an hour or so. I’m happy to say; so far, so good.

*

Three years ago I got an email from a writer who didn’t like something that appeared in The Post. I work there, the New York Post, newspapers, for good or ill, have always been a big part of my life. Ink in the veins, that’s what a newspaperwoman at my hometown paper once said. Hardly original, but say it out loud now and I’m with my pal Greg, helping him with his paper route, after school delivery of the Owen Sound Sun-Times, folding them and stuffing them in his cloth bag, twice the size of him, I’ve a paper route, too, The Toronto Telegram, long-defunct, trucked up from the Big Smoke, most folks taking just the Saraday Telly, less for the news of the week than the sports coverage of the Maple Leafs and the section’s beloved writer, George Gross. But that wasn’t what I start with. Rather it’s the smell. The whiff of that paper room at the Sun-Times. Dozens of cubbies piled high with that day’s final edition. In summer, winter, it didn’t matter. That ink on paper smell, musty and old and wise and sexy, what it feels like when you have ink in your veins, which I must have since I’m always around them, papers, like an earlier generation the smell of horse and stables in the dairy yard, shoe leather and hot metal at the neighborhood cobbler. Something to tell the grandchildren, maybe one who will have a poetic bent to listen. Anyway, the writer from The New Yorker, Paul Simms, said in the email he disagreed with our review assessment of his humor piece, that it “lost steam,” implying he wasn’t the only person to hold that opinion, nevertheless, he showed how big he was about it by saying he would continue to follow our magazine reviews, that is if they didn’t “lose steam.”

In the past five years I don’t think they have. And neither has the work of Paul Simms. For his latest in The New Yorker, check out, “God’s Blog” http://nyr.kr/oAzqQX. You won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Movie

Running for Your Life: The Play’s The Thing

2011-08-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

Four shorts, loosely classified one acts, heavy and dark and deep and funny, hilarious, East Side but the bearable type with an after-theater bar where the cast will stop by for a drink, well at least some did on Friday night (Aug. 5), except for the underage girl actors (Avid Theatergoer and Family Friend: “Has anyone told you, well, I’m sure they do, but has anyone told you that you look just like Faye Dunaway? UGA: “Who’s Faye Dunaway?”) in “Carrie and Francine” http://bit.ly/p4LWwv, the winning playwright of this summer production, 17-year-old Ruby Rae Spiegel, chosen from an open competition against young and experienced alike, trenchant and wise beyond her years, and introducing Lydia Weintraub (she of the Faye Dunaway line and the delightful, talented daughter of good friends of ours) and equally gifted pal Louise Sullivan to audiences everywhere, see it if you can, it rhymes: Series A through Labor Day, you won’t be sorry, and you may even be inspired to write, because these plays are being staged as part of a one-act competition: an East Side Manhattan Fringe, Check out “Summer Shorts 5” at 59E59 Theaters http://bit.ly/dblPp5.

I wrote my first play as a grownup. Finished it last month and now I’m on to the next one. A one act. Maybe I’ll write about it here. When I get a little farther along. When it comes to art, drama is my first love. But only in the past few years have I felt the work itself take shape. Not just characters but stories too. So much of art coming out of darkness, what Henry James says, “We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art.” Here’s the first bit of “You Know We Will Be Here:” A taste:

YOU KNOW WE WILL BE HERE

A play in three acts
by Larry O’Connor

CHARACTERS, in order of appearance
MOTHER (MILLIE)
FATHER (ROLF), her husband
DAUGHTER, their daughter
HOWIE, Rolf’s cousin

The play takes place in a living room that gets dingier, slowly so. There are two main characters, Mother and Father, the latter of whom has a nominal speaking part and is primarily seen in two ways: reading a tabloid newspaper and, in some extended sequences, only the projected image of his giant slippers and spotty feet are visible.

As the audience files in, the room is spartan except for Mother’s comfy chair, lined with a well-worn afghan, and old but clean and presentable hassock. Background soundtrack is a simple ditty, like an early television theme song, with a many voiced chorus singing, “You Know We Will Be Here.” Stage left is Father’s LazyBoy, where through most of Act One he is seen reclining. A less comfortable chair – not hardback – but equally old is on the other side of a ribbed throwrug. There is also a coat tree. Arrayed behind on shelving are literally hundreds of photos in all shapes and sizes, most not large enough to be visible, even by those sitting in the front row. There also is a gaily-looking bottle-shaped package in flower-design-wrapped plastic and a pink bow, beside it a thick plastic, long-stemmed wineglass and a first-generation but still-working telephone answering device; oddly though there is no phone, not that we can see anyway.

Twenty seconds before Mother enters the stage, the picture of a boy, ecstatic face, as if caught by a camera mid-ride at a carousel, looms super-size on a scrim. It is an otherworldly beautiful shot. It abruptly goes to black and Mother and Father are now on dimly lit stage. Father does not look even remotely like Son, but Mother is a remarkably similar-looking, older version of him.

ACT ONE

Mother is in an orange and black dress, oversize buttons. About 40. She is poured into the dress, big lipstick and hoop earrings. Looks great. Father is in a dress cardigan and bow tie, subdued, librarian-handsome, reading the newspaper. Not a local broadsheet, but a well-thumbed tabloid. He is distractedly paging through, stopping only for pictures of scantily clad women, of which there are many.

There is a faint knock at the door (which is on a wire, think Monsters Inc. Also onstage is an old-fashioned window on a wire).

MOTHER. Do you hear that? Do you? Come in. Come in.

*

Plays connect in ways that other forms don’t. There is something about the stage. Singing, say. Take the funniest scene in Michael Hoffman’s film, “The Last Station,” Count and Countess Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren) as cock and chicken. His cock-a-doodle-doo, antics in bed, the sheer gaiety, what my beloved one-time nonagenarian columnist, Bessie Doenges http://nyti.ms/qHdcsV wrote about one especially wondrous week, quoting W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress .¤.¤.”

Which brings to mind a piece of dialogue between M and myself. Funny how I’ve taken on these past many months the worldview of a man’s hair product commercial, you know the one, it shows on sports channels, girls, shows an older man with a hot-looking young thing who isn’t wise to her companion’s secret, his advanced age and sapped energy level because his hair is immaculately treated with the hair product: “Live Forward,” the ad says, so yeah, I’m of the mind that I’ve nothing but time, that what will be will be and the work that is to be will be done, as long as I “Live Forward,” which was why what M had to say to me did catch me by surprise, that at times we need our loved ones to set us right, and more important, that we should heed that advice, meditate upon it and if possible change (insert Serenity prayer here; me, I’m partial to the Sinead O’Connor [no relation] version):

Me: “When it comes to work, I think I’ve got to start hitting the dartboard.”

M: “Hon, you should start by aiming for it.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

Running for Your Life: Summer Reading, Part II

2011-08-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

Today (Aug. 3) I am interrupted on my final kick of a 7-miler, forced to stop at an intersection in Central Slope. In 85-degree heat a man in a heavy orange vest (sensible shoes, shorts and sandals) is walking ahead of a young woman pushing a cart full of food from the Park Slope Food Co-op http://bit.ly/rfTUOX, both of them blocking a turning Crate & Barrel delivery truck, the target of disapproving glares from some patrons at the outdoor seating area of Connecticut Muffin.

Okay, I read “Moby-Dick,” swallowed hole, word for word. I would like to say in awe of it, to shout from the rooftops to its glory. Rather I am in awe of me for finishing the novel. It is one thing for an angry, embittered writer, fated to near-penniless means to pour forth angst and anxieties in such jumbled paragraphs of darkness and doubt, never knowing in his lifetime that his work, the overwrought perils of life and death aboard the equally glorious and lowly miserable whale ship Pequod, would be regarded a century hence as having written the greatest, the first and foremost, American classic novel. Lo, I would fain submit if I were to be offered to chose only one of two scenarios: the first, a journey aboard a similar vessel, setting sail from some woebegotten harbor on a mission as long and as treacherous and devoid of urbane comforts, the second, a re-reading of this novel, “Moby-Dick,” I hasten to declare that I would prefer the former.

Next on the list (Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List), the novel, “Caribou Island” by David Vann. I suspect I will finish it within the month. So far, I don’t find the unexpected pleasures, the rapt wisdom of his book of collected stories, “Legend of a Suicide.” Could it be that we have all watched too many TV movies? I mean that character, Monique? As to full and complex fictive women, I’m stumped at thinking of American male writers toiling above the Mason Dixon line who can deliver the goods. Faulkner, Reynolds Price and, of course, Tennessee Williams, yes. But sadly they’re all dead. Lo, it is not for this that I did not care for Melville. He certainly didn’t watch TV movies.

It is funny the idea of summer reading. To believe the pop mags, which I read religiously as part of the work I do for a living at the New York Post, then there are books you read in summer – and books you read the rest of year, ie, summer is for mysteries, romance novels, baseball and celeb biographies, graphic novels, chick lit. Light is right.

One of the best books I’ve read in the last year I discovered on a pile in our friends’ house in Dunewood, Fire Island. “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell. A coming of age novel that makes notice of a monstrously talented author. The mark of this book is that the first time I tried to read it I couldn’t find my way in. That was true the second time, as well. The third time lucky. I was spellbound and scenes play in my mind yet; since I’ve read “Ghostwritten,” his remarkable book of connected stories. Next, after “Caribou Island,” I’m going to read “Cloud Atlas,” a winner of the Booker Prize.

Which is to say I don’t cotton to the idea that some books are to be read in the summer. To me, “summer” is a casual adjective when modifying the noun “reading,” denoting only the time of year not the content itself, sort of like March weather, Monday Monday or winter solstice. It is just the books (hardcover and soft; no, I don’t own a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad, “e” in e-reader stands for emergency, meaning I will look into one if it is a matter of life and death but not for enjoyment or education) I happen to getting around to because I don’t take a vacation like normal people, spending it on the beach or swinging in a mountainside hammock or a Parisian café (well, sometimes here but not like it’s a vacation; it seems that M and I are always working) reading books that I’d set aside for that purpose.

But if I were to be that kind of person, here are some books that I’d recommend:
 “Revenge” by Mary Morris: Okay, okay, full disclosure. This is the afore- and oft-mentioned M. A great, suspenseful read. With a devilish twist of an ending.
 “Legend of a Suicide” by David Vann: Magic prose. Grim subject. But, hey, contrast is the way I roll, baby.
 “Out Stealing Horses” by Per Petterson: Goodness, this is starting to show a trend. Bleak but oh so beautiful.
 “The Secret Scripture” by Sebastian Barry: All right, this guy can write. Especially when it comes to the old woman protagonist. (He’s Irish, in case you’re wondering about my earlier comment.) Plot to die for. One and only book that had me weeping (in a good way) at the end.
 Anything by David Foster Wallace. That is not a title. Stop and salute when you see someone reading “Infinite Jest” on the beach.
 “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami. I like “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” but “Kafka” is the bomb. Also beach salute-worthy.
 “A Heart So White” by Javier Marias. Slow beginning, but well worth staying with. Great plot twist.
 “Death With Interruptions” by Jose Saramago. Love him, this literary comic genuis. RIP. The title wouldn’t suggest “summer reading” in the classic sense. Funny just how redemptive and beautiful this book can be.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Play Is the Thing

Running for Your Life: Dog Day Delights

2011-08-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

“When did it turn?” I’m talking to my friend D at the annual memorial barbecue for the great and underappreciated cartoonist/filmmaker and my very great friend, Mickey Siporin http://bit.ly/qG4Fp4, now in his early 70s, he knew Mick when they were art student freshman college roommates in Carbondale, Ill. D grew up in The Village, in the heyday of The Cedar Tavern, Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. If aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Midnight in Paris) saw Paris in the Twenties as his ideal place and time for artistic imagination, then The Village in the Fifties and early Sixties works for me. D was in his twenties then.

So I ask him, “When did it turn?”

“When I saw my first bottle of economy-size Coke,” D says.

“Wow!” I say, ‘that’s –”

“You’re a writer. Feel free to use that.”
*

Today, it’s August. Six weeks from Boston registration day. Then I’m on the clock. The slow climb toward the marathon.
Funny, this blog began with many surfaces: as a lifestyle diary, a writerly echo of the purely physical, a twice-weekly recitation of the inner life of a runner, a reader and a writer. In part, what Haruki Murakami did in “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” which of course is a nod to Ray Carver’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Love.” How in my case there is but a thin membrane’s difference between the three practices. And for the past many months, riding. Because that is when I do the writing on this blog. On the subway, on my way to work. Because in the morning, I write other things. To see exactly what, please check out http://bit.ly/p60UFV.

Favorite Dog Day Runs:

1. Sauble Beach, 2 miler: I joined with K – she of the Pittsburgh Marathon touch on the right panel – for a run along the hard-pack sands of my home and native land (See Run4YrLife: Canada!). We didn’t have much time and both of us were as keen for a jump in the refreshing, shallow waters of the multi-sandbar, perennial best beach in the province of Ontario, K, usually not one to race into the surf and dive in does so upon my dare after our two-miler, while I watch as she swims as hard as she was running, this time toward her mother who is swimming on Sandbar Four, barely visible on the horizon.

2. Fire Island, NY, 6 miler-plus: To The Lighthouse and beyond. From Sandpaper Lane in Dunewood, in August, this wide sidewalk to Fair Harbor is chock-a-block with children in bikes, men pulling red wagons laden with beer and barbecue fixings, Enfamil; tweenie girls flirting with boys, thinking Justin Bieber; clusters of oldsters, talking. But a half-mile along and past the long straightaway en route to Kismet, the crowds thin, a stray cyclist pushing a fat-tire relic through hot, blazing sand, the footing is tough on the ankles, but ahead is The Lighthouse, and even in the heat, under the searing sun, The Lighthouse beckons and beyond to the dune walkway where seagulls wheel and so graze the deer, seen as pests out here, beware the ticks, lock up your garbage for they are everywhere but nowhere running as I do, along the pathways at the state beach, named after Robert Moses, who is at least responsible for a small but elegant green space with public fountain, Joseph Mayrose Park (1.34 acres), with an entrance off Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, taking shape above the Prospect Expressway, which made it possible for people living in close quarters in the sweltering city to consider buying further out on Long Island, and commuting to the city, instantly revving up the noise factor, which I don’t think about in the quiet of Fire Island. I go for a mile or more along the Atlantic shore before I turn around and head for home, out an hour-plus, then a jump in the ocean before beer and barbecue.

3. Millbrook, NY, 6 miler: Timothy Leary’s band of merry folk holed up here, a place of gentle rolling hills, a Saturday’s farmers market, no country for ocean swimmers, or lake swimmers, for that matter, rather for porch swings and old Victorian houses, and a run along a river gorge into woodlands, aka gunshot alley during hunting season, a backroad that says Woodstock (or maybe it was Kingston, two places along the Hudson Valley that I frequently confuse.)

4. Rensselaerville, NY, 2 miler: Now that’s a mouthful. From the historic Willow Glen, all the roads are uphill, am thinking Tarahumara Indians and the book, “Born to Run,” as I scale them and wish to God that I was in better shape, these Catskill hills will test you. So better to start at the town pond, off Pond Hill Road, where a trail around the swimming hole is alive with the trill of birds and, in this part of the world, scampering deer, on this run (July 29) I can see the white of its tail bobbing ahead of me, as I put on my final kick toward the grass of a bathers’ slope, just as the rain begins to fall.

Next: Running for Your Life: Summer Reading, Part II

Running for Your Life: Canada!

2011-07-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Sign in Hepworth, Ont., ten minutes drive from my parents’ year-round home at Sauble Beach, often voted as the province’s best beach, seven miles of brown sugar-pack sand, its texture ideal in summer for sculpture, our favorites on Friday, July 22, is Ella’s Mermaid with sea turtle neighbor and a smooth-skinned nude sand goddess torso done by a blond-haired, blue-eyed male sculptor in his early thirties, even feathered the ribs under her perky breasts, head slightly turned away, looking toward the entrance, a flirt, thinking a brown sexpot, say Brad SandPit, will arrive anytime now, and yes, it reminds of Winterbourne, a blonde beauty herself, but oh so real, and oh so long ago, who has chosen me, a boy three years her elder, the privilege of putting tanning lotion on her back and thighs, my homeboys watching as I slather the lotion on my hands then press them down on Winterbourne’s shapely back, moving up and around when suddenly she shrieks and darts out of my grasp like a fish, shouting, “L! What are you doing? That really hurts! . . . Let me see your hands.” Well, yes, they were full of sand, and her back where I’d massaged her is beet red from the coarse rub she’d suffered from the boy she’d no longer have anything to do with; our friend the sculptor, though, is much older than I was then, and by the looks of him, keen to reel in some lovin’ of his own, perhaps one of the Winterbourne-like girls who are standing around, chatting him up, struck by the sly wonder of the sand goddess, maybe, one asks, Will you do a sculpture of me? Yes, he says, I will. But please, first, come to my place, I’ll need to make a cast. That is what I did to make this one. It won’t take but a minute . . . “Save Our Jails,” the hand-written sign says. “Save Our Jails.”

M and K and I are traveling to my childhood home in Grey-Bruce counties in southwestern Ontario. Home to Alice Munro fiction (well, Huron County, but it’s the spirit of the place), the nature abstract artist Tom Thomson, underappreciated outside of Canada, http://bit.ly/qYnLBI, born and raised in Owen Sound, the World War I flying ace Billy Bishop, without whom Snoopy wouldn’t have had a model from which to draw his Red Baron dogfight fantasies, and the food truck of food trucks, Eighth Street Chip Wagon, where for generations Owen Sounders have been dining out on deep fried potatoes, doused with salt and white vinegar, a stone’s throw from the public library and the art museum devoted to the work of Tom Thomson, tragically dead during that Great War years, hard-pressed to think of what to say about Owen Sound since then except the advent of the Ginger Press, a bookstore and publisher of histories that otherwise would’ve been lost except within the talkative families of which there are very few, and the organic prepared food and baked good delights of Market Side, where the greens and ingredients come – a good deal of them anyway – from where I once stood looking down at snails criss-crossing the lane into the wet grass (see Running for Your Life: Week Two, Sept. 1, 2010), now the urban garden where the green beans and lettuce and tomatoes and bean sprouts grow to be chopped up and served in delicious dishes for sale at the Market Side on main street, proprietor of the former O’Connor homestead. Where so many of these blog-dreams began.

To be in Grey-Bruce is to not just feel the past. But to live in it alongside the present. As Faulkner said, “The Past Isn’t Dead. It Isn’t Even Past.” Perhaps it’s why Munro stays. Memory springs from taste: in my case the French fries on Eighth Street, the sugary-goo of butter tarts (NO RAISINS!), dental ID in every bite, throw a wrapping in the ditch by the side of the road, and it’s there next year, the year after, in the shade and depending on the weight, the inorganic quality of the wrapping, say, the shiny metallic of an Oh Henry! bar and it may never vanish. A state of decay, the farmhouses, abandoned barns still standing but barely, how long, pray tell, can they do this, a place so steady in its decomposition that it defies the laws of physics, enters the realm of philosophy, what is the language of the place, where every signpost and red brick is just as it’s always been.

I’m tired, a poor night’s sleep yesterday (July 21), anticipating, excited, longing to just be in Grey-Bruce, to live moment to moment because it won’t be long, only a couple of days really, no time at all, as I invited myself and my wife and daughter into a world that is never-changing. Owen Sound. The Centennial Tower, where my pals and I from its parapet for not often, or not so measured against a working life of daily train rides from Brooklyn to Midtown, coming on twenty years now, but those nights in the open-air tower, one built as part of a school project in my time http://bit.ly/qWZB8G, boundless energy and laughter and serious talk, wise before our time, we felt. It’s all coming back to me as we drive by the tower, when we raced down the stairs after singing at the top of our lungs a ditty from a TV and radio commercial for the soda bottler Pop Shoppe, and it seems those spirits are still racing along the wooden walkway to waiting getaway cars, thrilled at the prospect of another night on the run.

Next: Running for Your Life: Dog day delights

Running for Your Life: A Summer Run With Thurb

2011-07-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.

The other day M and I, while writing and reading on a knoll in Prospect Park, are interrupted by some movement in a stand of trees. Whatever it is has caught the attention of a gaggle of people in ear buds with iPods, standing on a trail, the group of them wearing what looks like marathon bibs with No. 262 on them. A close look and I can see an athletic-looking woman is running this way and that in the bit of woodland, striking angular poses, at times like a bird at others almost simian, until she bolts away, and down the knoll past us, sprinting. After an awkward pause, the group carries on after her, doing their level best to keep up. *

Last week (July 17), Thurber and I went on a run together. Outside of a leash-pull interest in a passing jogger and a near-lunge at a leggy Rollerblader who veered a tad too close to us as she was whizzing by (note to athletes/exercisers who are passing people with big dogs: Don’t crowd them) it started okay. It’s been months since Thurb and I were last out together, given my hamstring injury in March, and caution these past few months not to go too hard with my running/strengthening, but we soon fall into an easy pace, and I favor the woods to the athlete-packed roadways, where there are too many fast-moving bikes, riders who seem to get something out of treating the park drive as their own private racetrack, beelining to patches of daylight between joggers and walkers with dogs and nannies with prams as if the place is not an open air public backyard, but a giant riding video game constructed for their testosterone-charged amusement.

In any event, it makes sense for me to take it slow with Thurb who K says has been acting out lately, sometimes during the day but worryingly at night when in his new hometown, DC, it is not uncommon for him to lunge at passersby, especially those who loom barely seen in the shadows, his genetic coding firing, because as much as we’d like to think that Thurb’s a sweet-mood mix of hound, each sub-breed canceling out the next so that he just gambols on, happy to be fed and watered, lying docile at your feet, he’s not. He was bred to tree raccoons. At night. So when the sun goes down, Thurb, the howling hound gets a-going. And people – more often than not – they just get in the way. So off we go into the park, along desire paths and up and down The Lake lookout steps, six sets in the heat, and Thurb is good for it, never pulls on the leash to stop, and makes me smile when we get to the spot, a half-hour later, a pathway not visible to the naked eye but one that Thurb and I took for weeks when he was a pup as he turns into it before I do. In fact, after that lunge toward the Rollerblader, Thurb doesn’t show any interest in others – dogs or humans. It is just the two of us, running for an hour before finally heeling at our favorite bench, from where I palm treats into his open mouth, and praise him to high heaven: “Good running, Thurb. Good running.”

Prospect Park notes

 Every summer that I can remember – we’ve been in Park Slope since 1990 – The Lake has waterfowl of many types: swans, mallards, seagulls, terns and Canada geese. This year more often than not the lake surface is empty of any winged creatures. And yes, the city Department of Environmental Protection says, http://bit.ly/qL6kyo. But where are the swans and the gull? It is strange, the void of birdlife.

 A park staffer with a “Woodstock” coiff leads a crew of primarily African American young people dressed in green. For the most part, they cut grasses and weed, and distribute wood chips on trails, trimming bushes. One day Woodstock is displaying a weed and talking about its medicinal purposes, saying that if you were to exact the benefits of each of the plants that naturally grow in the park, you’d never until your very old age have anything to do with manmade medication. If this guy doesn’t believe in societywide use of medical marijuana and in the open study of natural hallucinogens, then I am Thurber’s uncle. A wise retired doctor told us early this month during M and my visit to Milwaukee to see and hold Baby Leon, the drug companies, because they do not and cannot hold these patents, will litigate to their death in order to block further research and study of natural-grown herbs and remedies that have been shown to be effective in treating drug addiction, say. But don’t expect that to get around. Heaven forbid. Better to have ObamaCare than that.

 A drinking fountain, a strategic place for me to get water on training runs, across from the park carousel since the end of winter, the bitter cold, and, yes, The Blizzard and the Buddha (See Running For Your Life, Jan. 4), has except for a couple of weeks been dry. It is a relatively new fountain; I’m guessing about ten years old. At first there was no sign to alert thirsty citizens that it was not working. Finally in May, a green “No Smoking Within the Park”-like sign appeared saying it was temporarily out of order. That sign remained for about a month, and when I saw it was gone I tried to take a drink. But the fountain was still dry. I can only assume someone liked the sign and took it. The fountain remained signless for a couple of weeks, and one especially warm day I stopped on the off chance it was working. It wasn’t. About two weeks ago a temporarily out of order sign was back. I can’t be sure if it is the same one, but it is spiffier. Perhaps the person who pinched it, after a dose of guilty conscience, buffed it up and brought it back. I don’t think I’ll be drinking from that fountain this season. In any event, I don't think I'll be fooled again, Mister Mayor.

Next: Running for Your Life: Canada!

* Endure: Run. Woman. Show. http://bit.ly/pWx1ag Brought to you by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (think, Tar Sands http://nyti.ms/oc5kdt).

Running for Your Life: My People, Part Two

2011-07-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

A woman (summer visitor?) in Windsor Terrace, a stone’s throw from the borough-famous Farrell’s Bar (and critical supporter of the original urban field of dreams, Holy Name ballfield) says to me as I run past, forty-five minutes into my Green-Wood Cemetery-plus training run:
“You look like you are ready for a marathon.”
Speechless, I smile in response.

I told M that during her time away in Italy that I would check in with Eddy to see about my bike, the Red Citizen. The first week came and went, and neither of us called. He had my cell phone number, and he had expressly said that he would call when the bike shipment arrived. Finally, with M's return imminent, so I stopped in to Dixon’s to see about my new bike.
I inform the clerk at the counter that I bought a bike and was wondering if it was in.
Blank stare.
“I talked to Eddy,” I volunteered.
“Eddy!” the clerk yelled.
Eddy came out from the back. We exchanged a word or two until he looked at me in a way that made me think that he might just recognize me. I said my name, then he went to the order book, one of those wide-ruled notebooks with the maze-like black and white covers.
“Yeah, it’s like I thought,” he said. “We got a shipment and they only had Black Citizens, no Red. Is Black okay?”
I had my heart set on Red, and it didn’t seem now that M and I, two weeks after our staycation, would get a bike excursion on tap, so I thought I could take the time to get what I wanted.
“No, Eddy. I want Red. A Red Citizen. Can you reorder me a red one.”
Eddy nodded, then began writing something in the notebook.
“Would you like a desposit? Anything?”
He shrugged and shook his head no, then for emphasis: “No, don’t worry about it.”

I can be a little relaxed. At least when it comes to being compared to a typical Type A New Yorker. M likes to tell the story of how one day early in the winter holidays during a visit to the American Museum of National History she went in search of the ladies room while I said to her, fine, just meet me here at the Origami Christmas Tree. I’ll have to take her word for it because to my mind I had traveled deeply but calmly across miles of beautiful and unique terrain, but when M returned some time later I was literally in the same spot. Yet looking refreshed as if I’d just been walking in mountain mist.

Soon after she arrived back from Italy, M, a tad more Type A than I, asked me if I’d called the bike shop while she was away.
“They were to call me,” I say.
M looks at me and shakes her head.
“Did you give them a deposit.”
“No, he didn’t want one. He knows where to find me.”
“He’s more resourceful than I am.”
“Huh?”

Two weeks pass. Eddy doesn’t call. So, one day after a run, I drop in to Dixon’s to pay a visit. It’s not so busy, only a couple of gearheads.
“Is Eddy here?”
“In the back,” the man at the counter says. “Eddy!”
No response. I wonder if anyone has dusted the bike relic since it was put up there at least twenty years ago. It’s like a shrine (see My People, Part One). Bits and pieces get added to it. Like my bulletin board above my worktable in my basement office. Talismans and keepsakes and totems of all types, from dessicated leaves to carved handpainted hummingbirds dangling from string.
I pause in my daydream. Eddy’s there. For I don’t know how long.
I tell him my name again because he looks as though he doesn’t recognize me. But when I say it, he dives into the notebook, right to the place where my name and facts of purchase are scribbled.
“The bikes arrived all right. But they are all black.”
“Are they not making red anymore”
Eddy shrugs.
“Okay.” I think for a minute. “I’ll take the Black. The Black Citizen.” I did into my pocket for a check I’d brought along. “I’ll give you a deposit.”
“No,” Eddy says. “Don’t bother. We need to assemble it. We’ll get back to you.”
“Okay.”

In the meantime, M and I travel to Milwaukee to see M’s mom and Baby Leon (Running for Your Life: Holidays and Hamstrings). From Milwaukee, I make a date by phone with Eddy for the following Monday at 10:30, when I would be fitted for the bicycle seat, but something comes up and I’m forced to cancel for Wednesday. I call to let Eddy know that I won’t be coming. While the phone sits on the counter I hear a loud discussion about mustard. And roast turkey. Finally, Eddy comes to the phone. I tell him I won’t be able to make the appointment on Monday, that I would be by the same time on Wednesday instead. I know just from the sound of his voice that he can’t believe he was called out to the front for this phone call. He doesn’t make any notation in his book, hangs up the phone, and I’m certain, goes back to talking about mustard.

“You need a kickstand. It will only take five minutes.”
I’m back on the Wednesday, as planned. It’s David, this time. A manager at Dixon’s. The Black Citizen is so beautiful that I almost forget that it’s Red I want. The seat is wide and soft and the handle bars upright. I imagine riding it I will look like a Dali, minus the baguette.
It takes ten minutes, or more, so much so that I will be late for work. And I don’t see Eddy. I pay David for my bike, accept my receipt and prepare to leave.
“Come back in a two weeks for a tune-up. Okay?” David says.
“Okay,” I say, with a smile, as I wheel my Black Citizen to the street. “I’ll be back.”

Next: Running for Your Life: A Summer Run With Thurb

Running for Your Life: My People, Part One

2011-07-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”

In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
“I want to buy a bike,” I tell Eddy, the sales clerk and cycle guy. We are standing in the middle of the cement floor. Above us, arrayed like sides of ham in Parma are what look like new and used wheels.
“What price are you thinking?” Eddy says.
“I don’t know. But I think I want a new one.”
“We don’t have any for sale.”
“Huh?” I say.
“We sold out over the Memorial Day weekend. Really busy. . . . I can order you one, though.”
“Great, let’s do that.”
I ask Eddy what kind of bike he could see me on, and he says a Citizen.
I nod, thinking, yeah. If I am to get a bike it wouldn’t be a Racer, or Pacer, or Athlete, or Transformer, or Tiger, or Iron Horse, or Trickster, or Prancer, or Vixen. Citizen. That sounds about right.
“Black or Red?”
“Red,” I didn’t hesitate. Red Citizen. In Park Slope, the spiritual home of the Red Diaper Baby, what could be better?
“OK, how long before it arrives?” I say, excited. We are at the counter and he writes down my name and cellphone number in a lined notebook.
“I’d say two or three weeks.”
“THREE WEEKS!” a man, who I assume is Eddy’s superior, calls from the customer free zone in the back.
“We’ll call you,” Eddy says.
Above the counter and about a foot above Eddy’s head is a seen-better-days racer with various attachments: a “Peugeot” paper tag, a dark-wood toilet seat, bicycle rights editorial cartoons, a 60s-era thermos bottle, totems of all sorts.
M is surprised when I come out of the store bikeless.
“What are we going to do? We were going to go riding up the Hudson – ”
“I know,” I say. “That’s the best we can do. Three weeks. If we are really determined to go biking, we can always borrow one from a neighbor.”
M gives me a resigned look. “Yeah, I guess so.”

As luck would have it, the heat rises and our staycay bike trip goes by the boards. I continue to run, of course (See R4YrLife: Staying Cool). In fact, am maintaining my pre-marathon training schedule, following the half-Murakami regime, at least a one-hour run every other day, with hamstring- and calf-strengthening exercises on most off-days.
I’ve never been an avid biker, see it as purely recreational, maybe something to stay loose when I ramp up my miles in the fall, pre-Boston. This time I’m going to be ready, I tell myself. I haven’t run a marathon since October 2010. Monday, April 16, 2012, the next running of the Boston Marathon, will mark eighteen months between races.
After the staycay M is off to Italy for a trip. Me, I’m at home, watching the Bruins win the Stanley Cup! Running, working out and off to The Post, where I edit for a living. From time to time I think of Dixon’s and my Red Citizen, with a shiver of delight.

Next: Running for Your Life: My People, Part Two

Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules

2011-07-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.

It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.

Now, though, tobacco is en route to extinction, the economy of this country at one time afloat on its trade, courtesy of the invisible hand of the market, the very same that has created the opportunity for made-wealth like that of Mike Bloomberg, the mayor with the Napoleon complex, never forget how he abandoned New York City taxpayers on the Boxing Day snowstorm (See Running for Your Life: The Blizzard and the Buddha, Jan. 4), and now he’s telling us that the smoking of lit rolled tobacco sticks is forbidden in parks, like Prospect Park in Brooklyn, whether on a bench within the park or on a stroll with a friend, or in the many gazebos, by the Boathouse, by The Lake or atop the hill overlooking the Long Meadow.

Smoke and face the consequences. The health effects of secondhand smoke aren’t to be scoffed at. And, yeah, it makes sense that I shouldn’t have to breath in someone else’s smoke when I’m out to dinner or at a concert. But the open air?

Sure, some open air laws make sense. At 10 p.m. on July 4, while walking up to meet me at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, M very nearly had to hit the deck when a middle-of-the-road fireworks show was ignited by someone in a crowd before an apartment building. There’s a reason that in-street rockets are against the law. And sidewalks. They are for people, not SUVs. And the idea of not putting on a seatbelt before turning the key in the ignition doesn’t occur to me. But legislation so that people cannot smoke a cigarette in a place the size of Prospect Park (585 acres). That’s unimaginable.

I get it that the first taste that Baby Leon (See R4YrLife: Holidays and Hamstrings) should not have – legislate that Bloomberg and imitators – is a fleck of gold leaf tobacco, (but then what of the duplicity of the Anheuser-Busch family which introduces their newborn scions to droplets of beer? Certainly open containers of booze are as flagrant an offense as public smoking, but that’s another matter) or that deli managers are subject to fine and face license removal for repeatedly selling cigarettes to minors (see my friend Ben Howe’s wonderful memoir, “My Korean Deli,” http://nyti.ms/eNrUq3). Or the argument behind SIN taxes, as regressive as they may be because the bite gouges poor folks, far and away the biggest consumers of cigarettes. (I also get the idea of fair-taxing the rich, but, alas, that too is another matter.) But no smoking in Prospect Park? Lucky that architects Olmsted & Vaux are long dead. Think Michelangelo, if, say, the Italian government decreed that because of human-borne agents to the Sistine Chapel, heretofore visitors will be required to don surgical masks, plastic gloves and Sistine disposable gowns.

“No Smoking Within the Park,” the signs says on the grounds of the park’s Litchfield Villa. Very interesting. As if a guy like Bloomberg, the consummate businessman, more private master than public servant, the very idea of the other beyond a citizen-subject, a target to be lectured to and commanded, unthinkable (the tao of useless stereotypes http://nyti.ms/ovwQnY, simply brilliant, if you haven’t seen it!) wouldn’t choose his language very carefully, everyone in his inner circle graduates of law school, at least, and no, the sign doesn’t say “No Smoking on the Grounds of the Park,” which make dubious at best the legality of puffing on a Marlboro or a Camel or a Parliament on one of the park benches that line the wide pathway exterior of the park, because as designed, the park, like Central Park in Manhattan, has very distinct entrances, the space itself as walled off as the ancient medina in Fez, Morocco, or the Gates of Jerusalem.

To smoke cigarettes just beyond the main entrance at Grand Army Plaza is surely a provocation worthy of being cuffed and perp-walked (“If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime,” Bloomberg on the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn), but what of a stogie lit up while you’re sitting on a park bench beyond those walls? Hardly clear cut. I can envision a Park Slope standoff in the future, placard-carrying anti-smokers converging on a smoke-in of stogie puffers not “within the park” but outside it. What to do then, who wins?

This is hardly the New York of Frank Serpico. Imagine Paco in plainclothes, perhaps the great Hasid getup, remember, on cigarette-lighting detail for the 7-8. Paco’s partner pocketing, say, $100 per smoker. Paco refuses. Rather he collars the stooge and brings him in. Or more likely walks away from police work. New York in the late 1960s, yeah, that made sense, then there was real work to be done. Now in the 7-8, it’s bike-lane vandals and cigarette puffers. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Next: Running for Your Life: My People

Running for Your Life: Holidays and Hamstrings

2011-07-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

From my perch at the gym, the manager’s lookout when this place was a bank, I can see the lobby television which today (July 5) is playing a video loop of baseball highlights. With hockey over, a part of my brain, like metal filings slowing shaping around a magnetic gnat, attaches to my distant second sport, baseball, and in July the lobby TV favors ESPN and baseball highlights.

I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.

That is what takes me away, the simple pleasures of watching the count, the pitch selection, where the catcher sets up, how the pitcher pauses/stops, a rhythm frozen in time, just as he did in Little League, Coach helping him, then it’s muscle memory, as likely to balk, even with runners in scoring position, as launch into moon orbit.

Instead though ESPN serves up what isn’t baseball at all, rather the highlights: circus catches, hotdog homers, 100 mile per hour fastballs, and more and more these days the strange, excruciating sight of players bizarrely forgoing muscle memory while beating out infield hits, and instead of running through the bag as every Coach since T-Ball has told them, they suddenly pull up short and then hop around in killing pain while grabbing the back of their leg, and everyone from the hotdog seller to the dreamy kid with his mitt knows that the base runner just pulled his hamstring, a nasty injury that could nag him for the rest of the season.

Last weekend it was the Mets’ red-hot Jose Reyes. Thankfully a Grade 1 strain, the least worrisome. But now he’ll have to watch it. Ideally, Reyes should take more than just a few days, and not risk the injury worsening, work with a physical therapist on stretching and strengthening exercises. Which is what I did, with not terrific results. In my case, after what I’d describe as a Grade 1 strain in February, I didn’t take care of myself, and re-injured it, the second time so badly, an MRI showing a nasty tear of the right hamstring, that I was not only forced to drop out of the Boston Marathon, but for the next two months was on the shelf, the first week needing a cane just to get around. Now I’m back at it, pre-injury training and long-distance running. But you have to watch it, Jose. Don’t push yourself.

*

Baby Leon is wearing a blue one-piece with a lion insignia in the living room of Grampa J and Gramma G’s in Milwaukee, where they invited us to come on the Friday of Independence Day weekend, which this year falls on Canada Day; so that afternoon instead of prepping the barbecue and putting a few dollars down to support the Canadian Legion in exchange for a Canadian flag lapel pin or a stick with a plastic red Maple Leaf attached, I am holding my great nephew Leon, only three weeks old, and thinking of my dad’s beloved older brother Leon, who died a few years ago and now as I whisper sweet nuttin’s into the blink, blink, blinking eyes of Baby Leon, whose name was one that Baby Leon’s mom and dad, G and M, chose because they simply liked it, there being no obvious antecedent, so I’m filling in with my Uncle Leon, Great Uncle Larry holding Baby Leon, thinking there must have been a day, although I have no photo record of it, (although now there is more than one photo of me and Baby Leon to pass down!) when Uncle Leon was holding Baby Larry, his beloved brother’s first-born son, staring down into my eyes and whispering sweet nuttin’s to me, more than a half-century ago, or so I tell myself, closing my eyes as I continue to hold Baby Leon, and then say to both G and M that I can’t thank them enough for being here, and to Grampa J and Gramma G for their invitation to share Baby Leon as we are doing, with no one rising to take him from my arms. Eventually I get up, cradling his tiny, tiny head, a perfect fit in my palm and put him into the waiting arms of Gramma G during the first out-of-hospital visit to family that Baby Leon has ever had.

Baby Leon was not even grasping for my fingers, he’s too young for that, does not even know that he has fingers, or toes for that matter, think spider on its back, so calm in its helplessness, we were all this way once, so dependent, what comes to mind is the Proustian phrase, that perfect moment of music that repeats, that will soothe even the most savage beast, like the gorilla mother in the Chicago area zoo who came to the rescue of a little boy who fell into its enclosure and wouldn’t let any harm come to him.

And I hold that thought. That it’s not about personal ownership. Rather it is like music; something that takes us away to the most beautiful and enchanted of places, one that if we close our eyes, let ourselves go, will come back to us at a later time.

If only men can bring themselves to hold a baby, truly hold one that is not theirs, they will embrace a deep part of themselves, throw off that impulse to celebrate only themselves in the way that sports and advertising would have us think that that is the only way for a real man to be.

Next: Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules

Running for Your Life: A Year of Blogging

2011-06-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)

Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.

When I started this literary notebook about my life as a runner, writer and reader I wouldn’t have thought that a year later I would’ve kept it going as I have. Except for a two-week hiatus earlier this month, I’ve been posting twice a week since last July. Such a discipline has my ass in a chair, writing daily, now in the subway, scribbling these notes by hand, have started new writing projects: a play that I’m feeling pretty good about, a return to the beginnings of a novel, and I’m rethinking a couple of movie scripts; I’ve pages for a book version of what’s happening here. Hardly the BLAH-G of jokes, at least for me. Rather, a necessity. A place to begin, where to paraphrase a quote that K has on her bedroom billboard, where anything of value begins in a place where nothing matters.

It has been quite a year. In running, after in May competing in my first marathon in twenty-three years (and finishing one for the first time in twenty-seven), I thoroughly surprised myself five months later by fighting through some very bad forefoot pain to run a 3:33:08 in the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., good enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon 2011, which eluded me because for the first time in my running life I suffered a serious and extremely painful injury: a torn hamstring muscle in my right leg. For two months, from March through late May, I was either laid up, struggling to walk with a cane, walking or light jogging. But now, for the past month, I’m back: shooting for an hour run minimum every other day, and weight training and stretching on the off day, combined with a 700-cal. hardcore elliptical session. So far, so good. In mid-September I’ll be ramping up the miles, but slowly this time, because the next six months are crucial: My next running goal is Boston 2012, which is Monday, April 16: Three years short of my sixtieth year.

In recap, I like to recall what I learned this past year from scientist Ben Rapoport, whose Running Endurance Calculator http://bit.ly/e8LXcT, which helped to banish the fears that at twenty miles I will inevitably hit the wall; (begone curse of Heartbreak Hill, although it has yet to be tested) not so, if you choose to follow Ben’s efforts to determine “safe, personalized racing paces over distances such as the marathon.”

Here are some past-year discoveries that have helped to keep me coming back to the blog, because, yes, as Saramago the blogger says, the division between actors and spectators is over:

– Running with Thurb. The O’Connor Morris coonhound mix, now roaming the urban reaches and occasionally the woodlands of Washington, DC-Maryland-Virginia, where not all denizens are prone to thinking John Wayne Gacy and John Wayne are one in the same. (Randy Bachman, please get on the horn to your namesake’s presidential campaign team [I know, I know there is an extra “n” in Michelle Bachmann’s name] and INSIST that she doesn’t buy the rights to use “Taking Care of Business” in her race to Iowa 2012.)

– Quaker parrots. These guys at the Con Ed substation, Brooklyn, near and at the Green-Wood Cemetery main entrance on Fifth Avenue, in good weather and bad are never in a foul mood. Loud and full of themselves, yes, but never obnoxious. They always make me smile.

– Ditto Our Lady’s Field in Windsor Terrace. I’ll be running past and a regularly scheduled game in the T-Ball League will be in progress. That will be it for the run! If there is one baseball game to see this summer that would be the line leader.

– Getting smart about training. Maybe just running every day is good enough for the Tarahumara Indians http://amzn.to/mhY8kz, but this cowboy learned the hard way that a 55-year-old body cannot run for its life by, well, just running. If I’m gonna get to Boston this time, it has to happen in a body that will be better built (read: stretched and strengthened).

– Making connnections. By writing this blog I no longer feel the crusty literalness of the expression from the Alan Sillitoe short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” I may run alone but by writing this blog I’ve been finding a new course, a voice and a bit of an audience for the actor/spectator I have become. Thank you for following along.

Next: Running for Your Life: Canada/Independence Day

Running for Your Life: Staying Cool

2011-06-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

A pause to kvell. Kate, my daughter, she of the Rosa Luxemburg-like sensibility – “Enthusiasm combined with political thought. What more could we want of ourselves!” http://bit.ly/mIqiTV – burst onto the national opinion-making scene on June 17 http://nyp.st/ielb6l. That’s my daughter! Rosa’s letters, new ones recently published by Verso in English translation, cut to the heart of what I am talking about. Another quote: Attacking the decision by her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, which voted in favor of the munitions budget in August 1914: “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat.” Thank God Rosa wrote these letters – and that her friends saved them. Kate, I’m proud to say, is cut from this kind of cloth.

I’ve been on the cusp of many an addiction, never dangerously so. During the year after 9/11, I think of myself as never not being on a caffeine high due to lack of sleep during working hours or an alcohol buzz for low level depression at home. It’s not the same certainly, but in those years I feel I got a taste of what it means to be at war. Not Rosa-variety, but I did survive being at Ground Zero that day, and never went back to our offices that were badly damaged in the attacks.

Now, though, and I know this will sound hopelessly crunchy granola high-minded, but if I am addicted to anything now it is exercise. I am, if nothing else, an enthusiast, prone to spilling over to excess in food, drink and action, but these past eighteen months something happened. Calling it body chemistry is too simple, but I don’t know what. But I must have exercise. And like an Oxycodone addict, “I need my pills! I need my pills!” http://nyp.st/lnwojZ, I’ve got to get my exercise high. Every day. Whether it’s a one-hour run, with up-and-down-staircase sprints, or a minimum 700-calorie killer on the gym’s elliptical. Whatever feeds the addiction: pasta, plenty of water, natural fruit juices, coconut water, fruit and nuts, electrolyte chews, because it’s funny, if I were to eat and drink like I did before this new normal I wouldn’t, couldn’t keep it up: the running, the weight work, and yeah, I find myself on the subway platform correcting my posture and doing Tai Chi, and hamstring and quad stretches.

Even my writing revolves around exercise, movement, can actually convince myself I can feel the chemical changes taking place, memories come to me, and not just what’s spurred from the gym soundtrack, “Play That Funky Music (White Boy),”by Wild Cherry, in a sleeping bag on the floor in Sarnia, Ontario, almost forty years ago, or a Molson Export ice-cold going down listening to Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” my reward for a long run, training for the Windsor/Detroit Marathon in 1986, not the easy ones, but in the throes of this addiction, cardio exercise, I literally am that eleven-year-old boy on the playing field – baseball, lacrosse – and when it’s cold enough the ice rink that my dad made on our side yard, the inspiration for my memoir, “Tip of the Iceberg” http://bit.ly/kQTAdK, skating, the last scene before the hospital in “Love Story,” Ryan O’Neal (Preppy) skating like a kid, what Ali MacGraw (Jenny) wanted as her last perfect moment on Earth.

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Here, in point form, is what you’ve got to keep in mind about hot weather running, based on thirty-five summers of running past people shaking their head, some doing tiny circles with the index finger at their temple:

 Before, drink water. At least eight ounces. If cold or inactive beforehand, do sets of calf, hamstring and quad stretches. If not, don’t bother

 Carry electrolyte chews or candy in your pocket

 Choose a route with SHADE. In my case, trying to keep my “Boston” on, I like to combine shade and hills – the first ten to fifteen minutes in heavy heat, slow down, especially in the first mile, work your wind and race the heart, but at a slower than normal pace. I find the leg muscles in hot weather will take some time catching up. Know your route, the times when shade patterns are best. I know, for example, that during the late morning the shade along the western edge of Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, floods the sidewalk, and if there is any breeze it will be blowing there. It’s about a mile into the run, and in that deep shade I will either make up some time or conserve energy in heavy heat, because the southern perimeter is a climb and in full sun. Wear a peak cap

 Run on woodland trails, if possible, and, when ready, include sprints – in Prospect Park I like to do sprints up and down tree-lined steps, a place where you’re joined by small animals, robins, cardinals and squirrels, say. If a runner’s high is coming it will be here: when the summer run becomes not about exercise, the benefits of health or weight loss or getting ripped, but the stuff of addiction. Where fresh memories live

 Run where, say, two or three miles in, even further when your fitness steps up, there’s a drinking water source. Reduce style points for running with one of those wide elastic belts with water-filled bladders attached, but in summer don’t run dry. And pause to DRINK, not just wet your lips

 Smile. Believe it or not that’s the key. You made it. You’re out there. You might be sweating your ass off, and pushing yourself perhaps a bit more than you’re used to. But don’t let the other guy know it with a sour, pained face. Besides, if you look like you’re enjoying yourself, you may be making a convert without even knowing it

 Before going out in the blazing sun for your run, set aside some reward or other for when you return. It doesn’t matter what it is: a glass of sparkling cider, hoppy ale, a favorite dance number, an ice cream bar. Whatever. While you’re gutting it out, the idea of rewarding yourself in sweaty glory will help sustain you.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Year of Blogging

Running for Your Life: Finding the grove

2011-06-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

Back at it. In the groove. Running, that is. (And twice-a-week blogging!) Feeling a touch of “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami, his groove being a daily hourlong run without fail, a baseline to ramp up in training, but I go Haruki half-better, an hourlong run on alternate days, alternate day at the gym, hamstring strengthening and ellipitcal machine, not just marking time in these forty-five minute workouts, and so far, so good. On track for Boston, folks. Here I go again.

Three months I’ll be doing this routine so that by mid-September I’ll be re-registering for the Boston Marathon 2012. This time I tell myself. Go slow. And still (Running for Your Life: Discovery of Stillness). During the worst of my hamstring tear (which now doesn’t register, not even a tightness or a long-day tenderness, knock on wood ...), I had no idea I’d be feeling this fine, a week less than three months today (June 22) since the injury. Taking it day by day, I tell myself, so that by April I’ll be ready. I’m not going to say that it will be my last Boston Marathon but it will be my first. Not many fifty-six year-olds can say the same, not that I’m in it for that, for the privilege to make that claim. Rather I’m doing it for myself. Four short years before turning sixty I want to be in that crowd in Boston, ten months from now. That’s the goal.

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A handsome man in dreads – orange shirt, blue jeans, red sneaks – waves me away from my intention to sit next to him on the subway, pointing to what looks like a sticky mess on the seat. Chocolate sauce or purple goo of some sort, the size of a baseball. I say thanks and instead sit next to an Hispanic family with a year-old boy in a stroller. His father opens a small plastic case, and offers a would-be sitter, a well-put-together African-American elderly woman, the family's last baby wipe so that the elegant stranger can clean up the mess and sit down. The woman smiles and gently declines, pulls from her purse a piece of paper, which she lays on top of the offensive spot while walking away to take a seat in another part of the subway car, saying in way of explanation, “I couldn’t take the baby’s wipe; that was so sweet.” The Hispanic family, at no point, shows any visible reaction.

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Just how do you begin to explain the wall paintings in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” showing near-literal movement of beasts three times the size of the artist(s) upon uneven, concave and convex walls, how the results shown in the movie by Werner Herzog bring to mind what the best of the modern-day tattooists attempt when they put their work on the uneven flesh of people; the woman on the little balcony here at Root Hill coffee shop in Brooklyn doing her homework, a classical music score that is flat and lifeless but yet it could be so much more if the artist had have been imbued with whatever was the spirit of the life and times of the Chauvet artist(s).

Why tattoo if not to reject what is outside, the commercialization of space. Could it be our only public palette – not the walls like the Chauvet cave, the places where our human forebears gathered – is our back and legs and arms and belly, and yes, even our face. Tattooing may be the only thing we do to ourselves that shows that despite the dehumanizing of space wrought by commerce, people are still able to feel what it means to connect. Or perhaps more so to rebel. Consider the work of Oscar Kokoschka’s notorious play, “Murder, Hope of Women” (1909) whose two heavily tattooed main characters, according to the text of the current German Expressionist exhibit at MOMA, signified “primitivism, criminality and degeneracy.” http://bit.ly/dqJ840

Could it be we’ve come to feel that our bodies are the last frontiers, all else conquered by the bondholders (why does Lester Holt on the NBC evening news do an infomercial for Google [June 9] except to draw attention to the monolithic corporate entities, Google and Comcast, please tell me there is an owner more deserving of being tarred as a modern-day robber baron than the cable company manager, holder of the license to print money with government assent, at least GE builds nuclear reactors [goodie!], but Comcast, Lester’s boss, wouldn’t know a Chinese wall from a Chinese doll, so we need to be good friends with Google so that, let’s posit: NBC does the infomercial and the network rides higher than its rivals on Google search results, say, for “Weiner” and “sexting,” so bring it on, Lester, more Google bits, less hard news. Hey! How about a series on being unemployed in America; how Google News and HuffPo, say, by not paying for their news impoverish not only traditional media like newspapers and radio and broadcast reporting, but have drained hundreds and thousands of jobs from news businesses because that’s where people go to be informed, even Lester Holt!) and the political corporate elite.

If only tattooists could channel the spirit of the Chauvet cave, where on the never-flat walls of the cave the images are the very spirit of the animals taking flight; the walls being as essential to the full expression as the choice of the animal depicted. We modern humans are much lesser creatures than we were then because the Chauvet horses, the running, whinnying horses, are Picasso-like superior, even after thirty-two thousand years of the first appearance, than anything coming out of our tattoo parlors. Yet should they be any less amazing than what the world’s most able tattooist could do after studying the contours of an upper back, say, and painting wild horses there?

But we are no longer one with the animals. We don’t run with them. We can only dimly imagine what that animalistic, unconscious life was like.

(If I were to have a single score on my back it would have to be the original introduction to the “Hockey Night in Canada” theme song; that or the Piano Sonata in B Minor by Franz Liszt, please see Mary’s post on why at http://bit.ly/jZEoBL)

Next: Running for Your Life: Staying cool

Running for Your Life: Summer Road

2011-06-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

The day before The Rapture (May 21) M dreams about being taken. She is invited into a church and she wakes before making up her mind about whether to go or stick around in hell with me.

It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!

We’re at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, milling about mobile food trucks. There are hundreds of people who come and we are hungry after buying our farmers’ market food, funny how now with two marathons behind me since early last year, and in that time I’ve changed, what food and drink I crave, no simple thing really but for thirty-plus years I was a recreational runner who had attempted three marathons in my late twenties and early thirties, finished one, at a post four-hour time, a drinker, on non-workdays multiple beers a day, always a beer reward after a run, hamburgers, French fries, fast food of all types – Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King. Now I will eat the occasional Wendy’s burger and like their French roast coffee, but in the past year my taste buds pop for what we select in the farmers’ market; today (May 22) apple cider, hand-rolled pasta, fettucine and orzo, sweets made by a Brooklyn chocolate maker, tuna and skate off boats in Long Island, kale and strawberries, boxes of them, there is nothing as heavenly as strawberries in season, is there?, a three-set of organic nuts, asparagus too because in May in New York City the farmers’ markets roll with swords of asparagus that M prepares just so with a mustard-lemon sauce, and with strawberries for dessert is earthbound Rapture, so if are going to start our descent to the End of the World (Oct. 21, don’t forget!) let it be with the third week May taste of yellow-sauce asparagus, Primavera-inflected orzo with skate in a puttanesca, Provence rose, not overly chilled, with a chunk of baguette.

Why, if the faithful calibrated wrongly and the world will not end in October, sixteen days after my fifty-sixth birthday, then I seriously think that the way I eat and drink now, not overdrinking, even Diet Cokes I’ve given them up, now I mix seltzer with my apple cider. I’m stumped as to why, except to say that I guess I listen to my body, this body that since last winter I’ve taken on a different route, an athlete’s path, if you will. And now, especially after my hamstring muscle tear in March that forced me out of the Boston Marathon, the athlete mind has taken over. I need to run, yes, but I also need to train, to build up my strength and endurance so that I can run not just once around Prospect Park, but twice, three times and the muscles are stretched and strengthened so even that March tear isn’t bothering me. With my hamstring fully healed, I want to keep it that way. But I don’t work at it exactly. It just is. My life, the new normal in running for my life, for the next thirty-five years, which begins this year, my fifty-sixth.

I’m certain, feel that there is no reason that failing being run over by a bus, or losing my job and thus am not able to afford this healthy eating and drinking lifestyle then I will be still running, out there legging it out, not at a 8:30 pace as I do now, but I’m thinking 10, or even 10:30, that would be okay, to be in my ninety-first year and running, still seeing in mid-May the gorgeous blooms in the park: this year because of the plentiful rain, absolutely otherworldly, the flowers of the dogwoods, the blooming chestnuts in the grove were we placed the ashes of my beloved father-in-law Sol, who lived until he was one hundred and two and was a tower of strength until the very end.

“Stand clear of the closing doors . . .”
Memo to self: How do you bring the death-edge spirit of the nineteenth-century whaleman to the everyday pension-tuned life of the MTV subway conductor survivor?
If adventure = quality of life, how does the conductor do it? If our work is our life, what we bring home every day, how does that fill the contours of our dreams, the empty, flat sound of that announcement, “Stand clear of the closing doors.”
It’s not the recorded one, the man’s voice, lively, friendly, when he gets to the “please” of his “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” it lifts us passengers a wee bit, or perhaps more important doesn’t deepen our frowns, which is something, Mr. Conductor, not a walk on a whale’s back, a harpoon slung into a leviathan the size of a small skyscraper with a prodigious memory, so best to make that harpoon count, or consider the middle ground, say, the ten-passenger ferry with captain in Basque Country, across the ancient harbor of Pasai San Pedro, Spain, a two-minute trip for locals and visitors alike, sixty cents one-way, or maybe it’s seventy now, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been on that little boat. Can we see adventure in the uniqueness of our vision .¤.¤.? The way we bring it, even in the announcement, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please?”

Next: Running for Your Life: Finding the groove

Running for Your Life: Love the Rain

2011-05-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

Whoa! It’s been a long road, and one, if I’m true to what will be my destination, and what it might be a surprise to a casual reader to realize given that these past months of non-running, working through injury, that destination being, Running for My Life, that the road is not so flat and true, this body cannot just on its own, through running alone, and yeah, I’ve done some strengthening and stretching since returning to running marathons, my first in twenty-three years was Pittsburgh 2010, in the months before did a bit of core, flat-on-my-back leg raises, three sets of ten, and sit-ups, sixty at a go, and a slow pace, but now after the hamstring pull in early February, it was, more than three-and-a-half months ago, those days are gone even though I feel as good as I did before the injury, I’m changed. Think of the road as being changed: No longer flat and smooth, but pot-holed, chopped up, a mountain trail versus a high school track and for my body to continue on its way on the road, and not just for this season but for all seasons, or at least from now through the next thirty-five years, I have to change what I’m doing.

I’ve never put it out there before now but here it is: This year marks my thirty-fifth year of identifying myself as a runner. I’m halfway there. And heretofore, I’m going to be smart about it, in training, going slow when I need to, tailoring my goals so that the difference between reality and expectation is better managed. It’s not that I won’t get injured again; that would be foolish to suggest, but today I want to make a pledge. If I see my running life as a marathon, beginning when I was twenty years old, only a few months out of hospital, where I barely survived a bout of blood clots, a severe pulmonary embolism, then I am at 13.1-mile mark. I’ve another 13.1 to go. I’m going to be a runner for another thirty-five years, when I’ll be jogging along, I kid you not, at the ripe old age of ninety.

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A dot-com diary (diarrhea?):
mymtaalerts.com
myspace.com
myverizon.com
myohmy.com
myyouareanarcissisticsoandso.com
callyourmother.com
And the most thoroughly un-my universe Web site,
getyourheadoutofyourass.com

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Before Running for Your Life I kept a blog for awhile. It’s funny how this space works, digital storage, that is, and those words that I wrote in a late-life Mark Twain sort of way are still out there, not like that Sixth Grade short story I wrote, the teacher Mr. L saying we could choose any topic under the sun and in my memory of an eleven-year-old L I recall asking for clarification, something about hearing it twice made it real, and yes, Mr. L left no doubt on what was expected so sure enough I wrote, “Dracula Meets Mr. L,” and being a bold and strangely-certain-of-my-comic-powers kind of kid, I was first to implore Mr. L to read “DMML” to the assembled class, which I did, antically playing out the parts, and gosh, and part of me wishes I still had that story to wonder at its sheer balls, or more likely, wince for poor unsuspecting Mr. L, my most poignant memory of that episode after I have finished my reading and resumed my seat, Mr. L is sitting at his desk, face-forward on his crossed hands on the tabletop, a posture he kept for what I remember was a very long time.

Those, I dare say, were paper days. Now the words never fade, and who but the most backward Luddite in 2011 leaves their work only on paper. Even the squiggles and words, no way without a magnifying glass can you tell the difference between the original and the copy of a page of writing and doodles, say, that has been scanned by an off-the-shelf machine and digitized so that everything, all words and images can be downloaded onto an iPad or a PlayBook (Isn’t it time that all words are mid-framed with a Capital letter? As Schopenhauer tells us that human beings may have the capacity to think, but they don’t, they accept) all there in its entirety, no reason not to have that Sixth Grade story that had the class at first in nervous laughter then in eerie silence as my first public reading went on to the point where, if memory serves, not a single person made a sound; I’m reading the last few bits in jaw-breaking silence because any sign of support is likely to be viewed as complicit, corporal punishment de rigueur, Principal H, one time I’ll never forget, letting me have it more than once with a whipping fast ruler across my open palms, but not this time, no, Mr. L just had his head down on his hands, not taking me to task for what I’d done because he’d asked for it, given us the freedom to write anything and I did and today forty-four years later, if I'm true to myself I'd have to say that I'm glad I can’t just log on and read what I wrote because this written-down memory seems so much more alive, and is why this writing on the page, in my case in a journal on the subway, with pen and open notebook feels to me the only way to retell this tale, to bring it alive in ways the already-existing everywhere-existing cyberstories simply can’t.

Love the rain! Not the forty days and nights Noah-like deluge, which I found myself in the other night (May 18). Ha! That’s what God was talking about, rain as heavy as a Victorian cloak, seconds in the outside and you’re wearing it, soaked to the skin, how the Earth could be covered in deep water (Rat We!), and sure for years I comforted myself with the thought that Noah is the saint of the non-swimmers, first hint of Apocalypse, the “Water World” variety, and he’s not practicing the breaststroke, obsessing about his center of buoyancy, but building the biggest F-ing boat he can so that he’ll be so high up and off the waterline that he doesn’t have to THINK about swimming in it.

Now, though, I’m in the swim. Thankfully, on May 18 there was only an hour or so of the Victorian cloak rain. Not forty days and nights. Not now in any case. Not before I get to know water later this summer.

Next (in mid-June): Running for Your Life: Summer Road

Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List

2011-05-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

The publication of the moment has got to be Mark Twain’s autobiography. I confess that I missed the reviews when the first volume came out last fall, but recently both Harper’s and the London Review of Books http://bit.ly/i1YEja have done due diligence: in Harper’s the ever-readable Lewis Lapham weighs in. Check them out. Or if you are to buy one book this summer make it Twain: no one says it better and Lapham nails his quotes like a champion skeet shooter, especially the bit about the writer and the Mississippi River boat captain and his take on patriotism, as apt as any comments I’ve ever read on the American life – and what it means to be an American. (And not, primarily, because we persevered in the execution of an arch-enemy of the American way.) Ponder what Twain would say. On patriotism:
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”

It’s summer. Today (May 11) makes the end of M’s classroom responsibilities as a writing teacher (student evaluations, to be sure, are another matter . . . homework, in other words, has just begun). From now until Labor Day, three and a half months when reading is not a coerced affair, when she can read what she wants to: me, that’s a year-round condition, the one truly great thing about not being graced with an academic schedule, when in the next days and weeks our many teacher-friends will be off to literary retreats, summer houses and various travel (that is, once the evaluations are done).

This summer I’ll be at home, writing and reading. Here’s my summer list. Not a long one, but realistic. Why? In R4YrL: Discovery of Stillness (early April), and earlier still R4YrL: Getting Started: Part One (July 2010) I wrote about the Discovery of Slowness. Summer in New York. Gotta work overtime to take it slow, but if I’m going to keep within myself, to run long distances this summer as my hamstring tear heals, I have to rediscover slowness. To not race, even in reading:

1/ Caribou Island. David Vann’s most recent novel. In spring, I read “The Legend of a Suicide,” amazed at its spare prose that seems to effortlessly find the right word, the beat falling just so, in service of a plot as old as the hills, but in Vann’s hands as new as a winter morning. In summer, I like cold in my reading. And Vann, man, he can do cold.

2/ Moby-Dick. Full disclosure: the last English lit class I took was in ninth grade, books on the curriculum: “The Eagle of the Ninth” by Rosemary Sutcliff, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” neither of which I read (cramming plot summaries for tests), I have, of course, since read “Gatsby,” but “TEOTN,” fuhgeddaboudit, didn’t take a book with me onto our sideyard rink, the baseball field, or the rustic woodland trails of my boyhood home, a hoot and a holler from the Bruce Trail, which runs from the tip of the elephant tail http://bit.ly/kowV5E in one direction, the thundering falls of Niagara in the other, didn’t settle into a chair or a couch (there was Strat-O-Matic Baseball, the pre-Internet fantasy game that literally occupied me and my pals for hours, weekends at a time, our hopes and dreams rising and fading on the dice-determined destinies of flamethrowers Sonny Siebert and Jerry Koosman, the glove of John Boccabella, speed of Maury Wills, and homerun prowess of Washington Senator slugger, running 1-to-8, needs a two-bagger, even a triple to get to first base if it’s hit anywhere near the place where Rusty Staub can get a handle on the ball, Frank Howard) until I earned my first paycheck in my chosen profession: reporter. And thankfully but not inevitably I took to it, reading, that is, my first books the Russians, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, everything by D.H. Lawrence, “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen, “Wuthering Heights,” but not the big American classics (a hangover from “Gatsby” guilt?) and truly if there is a big-book antecedent to the rawbone masculinity of Vann it is “Moby-Dick,” loving the Penguins Lives bio http://bit.ly/lUFTCX by Elizabeth Hardwick, and through reading about a writer, the bulk of whose books were never appreciated in his lifetime, so much of it great stuff inside and outside, unflinching, and yes, this is my summer of Getting to Know Water – Rat We – and I’ve acquainted myself with big-book Conrad but not “Moby-Dick,” call me Ishmael, the name of the Abraham child, leader of the Bedouin tribes, Herman Melville, an American writer, as American as Twain, whose autobio will have to wait. This summer I devote to Ishmael, Queequeg and the incomparable Ahab, in search of the great white whale across the bounding main

Next: Running for Your Life: Love the Rain

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals II

2011-05-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

In the late 1990s I shared a stage with writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, the program dictated, would read immediately before me at a book event that had drawn hundreds of listeners. Being relatively new to reading my work in front of a big crowd, I was nervously re-reading my essay in “A Few Thousand Words About Love,” http://amzn.to/kKnnmc, the anthology we were promoting. Next to me, though, Joyce was writing. I swear, it seemed to me at the time, that Joyce had written a few thousand words while we snaked through the alphabet of authors to the O’s. She read what she called her fiction-memoir flawlessly, and then as I rose shakily to do my bit, she gave me a little smile of support, just the jolt I needed to not only get through the reading, but to do it with a touch of confidence. When I returned to my seat Joyce was still at it, working to finish her scene, or note, or whatever it was because that's what writers do, they answer the call when it comes.

Today (Cinco de Mayo) Mexican Saint Paddy’s and on the subway platform, thank God, there are no drunks tagged with Irish buttons and tall felt hats, primed with vulgar stories of sexual exploits, a tin whistle or a fiddle as likely as a rat on its hind legs playing “Danny Boy,” no tourists on Cinco de Mayo either, because finally the Europeans have left New York for home after Semana Santa, but Cinco de Mayo is for Mexicans and they are in the city’s restaurant kitchens and deli basements, the two guys in our vegetable and fruit market smile when M speaks her nuanced Mexican Spanish, wishes them well, saying she’ll mix margaritas and bring them over later, but they shake their heads, tell us that they have to work, and so do I; do all the drunks on St. Paddy’s Day – not all Irish, puh-lease – have the day off, yeah, ill by alcohol, but the Mexicans don’t. They’re working. Maybe in a hundred years, when they’re as rooted in the city as the St. Paddy’s partiers, the transit platforms on Cinco de Mayo will be lousy with witless revelers. Somehow, though, I don’t think so.

A tortuous day, when fives are wild, there’s a synchronicity to 5-5, 1-1, a bit of a double hour, my birth date (Yes, I have the certificate, Canadian, I can never run for president, would never want to run for president) is 10-5-55, or 5+5-5-55, and I believe in judgment days (lower case, that is) – did you know that May 21, 2011, is a prophetic day when a global conflagration is to coming that will unsettle all life http://huff.to/hUm0Le with The End of The World coming on October 21. Before the Boston Marathon 2012. Which, I suppose, given my luck with training for the Boston Marathon 2011 might be a good thing.

If I can say anything to those who are still running, at any age, what comes to mind when I sit down to write, that these sentences may not speak to every reader, far from it, but they are not without foundation of practice and passion, and at times all writers aren’t feeling it, but as Conrad Knickerbocker, a fiction writer who left us too soon, once said, Apply ass to chair, and write. Every day. First memories, then ideas, stories, work is shaped and how is it that running and cardio exercise is any different, a practice that yields results only in a calculation of how much work you put in.

Shit happens, life is about percentages. You may not run a sub-three-hour marathon at thirty, a sub-3:30 at fifty-five. But do the right thing and you’ll be in the ring. Trading punches. Going for it. Because if you give your all you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a base that you grow from. Toward your own judgment day.

*

It’s Friday (May 6)* and M and I are on a writers’ picnic, a bite and the newspaper, a journal, a couple of pens, tasseled blanket, all stuffed in an oversized bag, off to Prospect Park, where eventually we settle in the grass, half-sun, half-shade, what is it about this season and this week, splendid day after splendid day, the two times in the calendar year around M and my birthdays, hers in May, mine in October, (Rapture and World’s End months, hmmmm) when the day is sunny with a touch of cloud and cool breeze and at night cold enough to easily slip into sleep, depression during days like this after the bitter freeze of this past winter, the wicked wet and damp of early spring a special torment, the splendidness has even gotten into the ducks at the north corner of The Boathouse Lake .¤.¤. Not our usual Mallards, the comely pair on Marathon Sunday (See RRYL: Setting Goals), but larger brown ones, what M learns when she goes to the Audubon Center that they are the result of Mallards breeding with White Domestic Ducks (Aflac!), thus the milky coffee color, and it’s a raft of them, not in feeding frenzy but in the first few minutes of watching, all it takes with wildlife is just to take the time and observe, and sure enough they soon become comfortable with us only a few feet away from the bank, M, of course, doing her, “Quack! Quack! Quack,” and yeah, give her an audience like that and she’s at it quacking, just can’t seem to help herself, but these ducks don’t pay her any mind because they’ve got sex on their minds, or at least the boys do, in the water and on the land, in the drakes’ POV it doesn’t seem to matter, but the conquest, the duck, that’s another matter, in water there is nothing pleasant, or seemingly so, about being bitten and held behind the neck so that your beak and head are held forcibly underwater while the drake mounts you as best he can, the times we see more successfully on the water (UNDER! for her, for one-two-three-four- .¤.¤. ten counts; She can’t even be seen!) than on land where perhaps because she is freer to move, the drake tumbles off before he finishes, a pratfall like Laurel & Hardy or Chaplin, and we’re laughing even as the drake does his victory laps, once, twice, circling his dazed conquest and that too reflects better on him in water where he’s more Speedboat Charlie than the Harpo Marx he is on land.

* So you want to live in Park Slope Dept., the defense heard from: Later on Friday, an off-off-off-off Broadway troupe delivered a absolutely winning rendition of Moliere’s “A Doctor in Spite of Himself,”steps away from The Boathouse Lake at the Prospect Park music pagoda, where a generation ago even hardened criminals dared to go. Check out this company; http://bit.ly/mj5oID you won’t be sorry.

Next: Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals

2011-05-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

M and I had no idea the Aflac duck job was up for grabs. The Sunday of the Boston Marathon we were resting on a park bench in the dappled sunlight of a floodplain mini-park in Bronxville, New York, a few dog walkers braving the soggy ground, near the banks of a surging river, no place for a Mallard couple that waddles, the female leading, toward M who is quack, quack, quacking in such a way that the couple makes a beeline for her, and it’s not until the two of them are about twenty feet away that they come up short, like children fooled until the last moment by a dead-ringer for their mother, but they don’t leave, M’s sotto voce quack, quack, quacking settles them as they both snuggle into the grass, only a body-length away and spend the rest of the afternoon with us, so don’t tell me that M wouldn’t have been a better choice to be the Aflac duck than a radio sales manager from Minnesota. If only we had known.

I’m back! Running that is. April 30, my first day in 41, and I surprise myself, not winded and not feeling any pulling in my right leg, just the barest of sensation, and, if anything, the tiniest of pulls in my left buttock so much attention in repair and strengthening going to the right side, and now perhaps in need of balance, heh, heh, six months from now I’m going to be re-registering for Boston, but until then it’s back to basics, to running, reading and writing, hold the hubris. The racer in me will have to wait. Finally, fifty-six in October, I’m learning, if I’m to keep going, to race once a year if I care to, I’m not going to be able to just run out the door. Not anymore. And here, I’m going to chart what they tell me. Because it’s possible to Run for Your Life. The thing is, though, as much as you’d like to, you can’t do it without help. Just ask M.

Slow. Being slow. The slow movement. Slow drip coffee. I’m on yet another padded bench for observation, this time by Dr. O, the rehab specialist, and she asks me to lie down, face-forward. Relax, she says, and my legs tighten, “Ah, of course,” she says, “tell a New Yorker to relax and this is what you get.” Try a deep breath, no not exactly, ramped up with caffeine and, now (May 2) taking Dr. O’s muscle relaxers, and I’m back to thinking that I have to stop, take a step backward, one, two, do yoga, stretch and strengthen. Hoping that now I’m back, this is the time, close my eyes, relax, and I go there, deep inside, in my case thirty-five years ago when I left the hospital after six long weeks, I’m one hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, a trip to the toilet in my hospital room exhausting me, can’t catch my breath, each step from here on is excruciating, pain shivers down my leg, a pull in my chest, lung blood-clotted and now you set your goals, inside, from that place, twenty years old, and now fifty-five, and not where I want to be, who was I kidding that after one run in Prospect Park, once around and up the steps to the Lake Lookout, setting goals, yeah, but realistic ones, my legs are achy and stiff like boards, it could be my imagination but now I feel a pulling, ever so slight, in my left upper hamstring. Go slow, think floor exercises, and I do them, carefully.

Am reminded by what my father-in-law told M about a dream he had. He lived another twenty-two years from that dream at eighty, how he felt that his life lived inside him, that for one glorious moment he had the sensation that all those lives, those stages of life, were there inside him, not in some chronological order like a Dickens plot, or so I imagine what he meant, but in a massive heap, like the rare genius whose desk looks as if not a paper or book or bill or love note has been filed in a generation, but our hero, when called upon, when the spirit moves her, will be able to extract the desired object out of the pile without hesitation because she knows exactly where everything is. Only a snapshot, you understand. What a paparazzi would give his eye tooth for, fast enough shutter speed to capture the jagged wound of fork lightning that illumines our backyard oak tree, what Boston Record American photog Ray Lussier http://bit.ly/kX7QHV felt when he pressed the shutter button and captured The Goal forty-one years ago on Tuesday (May 10). Hold on to that feeling, what Dad was talking about, tack it up inside; a place where you can feel it, what is a perfect moment if not the latch key that unlocks the prison of the self, shake off the blues and get at it: in my case, running and writing and reading. And this summer, getting to know Water – Rat We.

And sure it’s about doing it, and the harder I do it, the more I get out of it. But what’s the right balance? Especially when you’ve been on a long layoff. In my case, only two three- or four-milers in forty-five days. (Finished a 3.3 miler on the gym treadmill (May 4), at go-slow thirty minutes). The person I am now doesn’t sleep without difficulty. Tired, a good part of the day. I don’t recognize this non-runner person who can’t easily shrug off work hassles, who finds even a Stanley Cup overtime game lacks drama. Endorphin-less, depression sets in. I’m not as careful about what I eat and drink. We are what we do, and in many ways, these days, I am not a runner. Is Sid Crosby still a hockey player when he is on the shelf? Are you still an author when you haven’t published a book in five years? Running always has helped me set my life goals. And I’m trying to wrap my arms around this man tap-tapping into this blog, but my body, with its persistent aches and little pulls doesn’t feel like mine. I don’t know how hard I can go. Knowing that I should go slow, but finding it hard to believe any perfect moment will come along at this speed.

Running for Your Life: Setting Goals II

Running for Your Life: Getting to Know Water

2011-05-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

Dr. O’s diagnosis, dated April 27, 2011:
Lumbosacral Spondylosis (ICD-7213)
Myofascial Pain (ICD-729.1)
Lumbar Disc Displacement, W/O Myelopathy (ICD-722.10)
Hamstring Strain

Precautions:
NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS

Prescription:
Modalities, Massage, TENS unit, Ultrasound Electrical Stimulation, Gait and Balance Evaluation and training, Stretching and strengthening of L/S paraspinal and abdominal muscles. Stretching and strengthening of lower extremities muscles, ROM of L/S spine and lower extremities joints, Lumbar Spine stabilization exercises, Theraband exercises for strengthening of rotator cuff muscles, proper posturing and body ergonomics training. Teach home exercise program.

And here, silly me, I thought Dr. O was going to launch into a praise-Larry soliloquy, drawing attention to my hard work since the injury, exactly one month ago today (April 28), and that sure I should, could continue to follow the able advice of my physical therapists not computer-tap a jargon-filled prescription to be filled by whom? A physical therapist who will have me doing body realignment and – gasp! – suggesting yoga for full-body health and renewal or face what Dr. O called not once but twice the “dangerous” consequences of following the path that I’m currently on, so I ask myself the question as Dr. O’s prescription includes, NO SIGNIFICANT MEDICAL PROBLEMS, shouldn’t I just take this prescription and put it a little too close to a flame and watch it burn to ash, and go about strengthening on my own terms because, baby, I got to this season not by listening to doctors, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and if there’s one thing to come out of my session with Dr. O it’s that she convinced me that whether I start the blog, “Knowing Water,” or not that I continue this summer with the plan of getting into Water – Rat We – relaxing, let it lift me up and turn a weakness into a strength.
When I was a boy I was buried up to my neck in the backyard of my uncle’s cottage. In those days the sand as I remember it was like the Sahara, in color and texture, feet sinking in to the ankles and for hours on summer weekends my brother, sister and scads of cousins and I would play, diving in a sand-spray at badminton, shaping forts for war games, or digging down as far as we could, visions of China on the other side of the world, so it was the most natural desire for me to want to be buried to my neck in sand, indeed I implored my dad to do it and he complied, planting his first-born son with the strange passions like a farm chore and then leaving, in my memory to the rolling waves of Lake Huron for a swim but likely as not a place at the table in the cottage, thick with cigarette smoke, a dart game going, once seeing Uncle B – pretty much all my uncles and aunts gone except Mom and Uncle M, her second-oldest brother, Momma next year will be eighty! – throwing to my amazed eye three consecutive triple-twenties, Ka-Chunk, Ka-Chunk, Ka-Chunk, Uncle B and Dad diving headfirst in the sand to retrieve the birdie in badminton, a crowd gathers to watch the battle to the finish, Gordie Howe versus Bobby Hull, Hockey! Hockey! Hockey! Hockey! Dad playing cards, Bug Your Neighbor, rules a blur to me now, dollar bills and quarters on the table, snub-nose beer bottles and highball glasses with scantily clad silos of attractive women on the side, written sayings (Champagne makes you see double and feel simple) up and down the side, mostly Canadian Club and Coke, Dad, though, only pop, a glass of flat cola, all a poor second to the game, the prospect of winning at all costs save cheating, never exercise an unfair advantage, the room loud with shouts and laughs, my grandfather, Mom’s Dad, the center of the goings-on, he’ll die when I’m eighteen and the cottage bacchanal dies too, but this day it’s going strong when my little cousin Bruce, a toddler, squirts out of the smoky den through the rap-rapping screen door and blinks once, twice as he sees me in the sand, my head drooped forward, dead to the world, all color out of my face, heartbeat dialed down to hibernation but I’m not a bear or a squirrel but a little boy whose breathing has slowed so packed with sand it is around my sides that my ribcage can’t expand as it should and yes, thank God, Bruce doesn’t just go about his business, after all he’s only three but rather returns inside and alerts the grownups to what he’s seen and next thing I know my arms are nearly being pulled out of their sockets as my Uncle B tries to lift me out of the sand hole like I’m a stubborn horseshoe peg, thinks better of it and with others start digging furiously with their hands and fingers so many grownups on all fours, or so I was told because I was out and didn’t recover until later on a pullout couch off the games room, Father sitting with me for awhile, seeing that I’m okay, watching for me to sit up on my own before he goes to resume his place in the game, his cards tight to his chest like a derringer.

That’s about non-swimming, right? A near-drowning experience in a sand hole in the ground in bluewater country, my homeland a paradise of swimming holes at the base of the Mill Dam in Owen Sound, Ontario, a weedy but blissfully calm Kelso Beach in Georgian Bay, countless creeks, and streams and rivers, a community pool in the Scenic City’s Harrison Park, all around is water and pals who learned to swim, no easy excuse that I grew up in urban squalor, say, the pool a place of switchblades, drugs and childhood cruelty, rather, in Owen Sound, it’s more American Dream than America, more Norman Rockwell, or better yet, Sam Clemens and Tom Blankenship, think Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn http://bit.ly/i1YEja, a non-swimmer in this scenario as ostracized as a platypus in a fox den, and how else can I come to terms with this than to purge it in this way, through confession and knowledge, what will come from finding my center of buoyancy in a dead man’s float?

Next: Running for Your Life: Finally, Setting Goals

Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal II

2011-04-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit D:
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope

I’m getting ahead of myself; I’ve yet to see both my medical specialists on Wednesday (later April 27) and tomorrow, so it’s hard to set running goals just yet. Look for that post next Tuesday. Now, I’m en route to a new hospital, this one for Vanya, my Volvo 850, the star of two posts (See, R4YL: Keeping a Journal and R4YL: A Congressional Run) with hopes that I can begin to set new goals with Vanya, not in the crazy-car owner way but summer’s coming and after a year of living with a zippy sedan that will suddenly, inexplicably die in what I have to feel I’m testing the outer limits at this point, like I’m on a Park Slope suicide mission, the car F-F-F-ing out on a shoulderless stretch of the Hutchinson Parkway, say, boxed in by small nation-sized SUVs hurtling at light speed, fear like that month-old feeling, killer spasm in my right leg, and yeah I’m upset and frustrated, a hard PT session yesterday (April 26), more strengthening than light stretches and now I get it, a particle of what Sid Crosby must've been feeling before the Pens were eliminated last night (April 28). I can walk around like a normal person but can’t yet do what is Beshert – meant to be – get up in the morning, throw on my running clothes, and go out the door, but no I’m standing on this subway platform, making my way to V, getting ahead of myself, literally this time, taking the Coney Island express N for two stops too far and now I’m waiting with the Fort Hamilton Parkway locals, at least it’s an outdoor space . . . inside the train now and late for what I’ve got to do, scrub away at that V fear, my new best friend, N, at Bay Ridge Volvo, saying he’s isolated the flaw: the fuel pump relay that he says doesn’t show any telltale breaks but they’ve ruled out everything else and the FPR is original equipment, been around since we bought our house in 1992, so just exactly what do we use for almost twenty years that’s mechanically essential, not the TV, don’t tell me, because outside of Stanley Cup hockey season and Mad Men, The Good Wife and The Killing (sorta), a TV is as essential as a water vac in the Gobi, and now, soon because thank God I found my way to the R Train, the one that will soon plant me in the general vicinity of the new and improved V, N saying BRV guarantees its work so if wily old V chooses to M-FUCK me on the way home, he’ll be right back in the shop – and lo and behold, loyalty’s a wonderful thing but stupidity’s a nasty burr – and I will post his sorry ass (V’s, that is) on Craigslist and let him be someone else’s problem.

So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit E
11 am. Wednesday (April 27)
“VAULT BOOK”
– A three-sided label-sign before two petite women working at a conference table near the floor-to-ceiling glass window of a bank that has a reputation for being the most frequently robbed bank in the 11215 ZIP.

I can’t recommend more highly a memoir by my friend, Ben Ryder Howe. “My Korean Deli,” http://nyti.ms/eNrUq3, it’s called. Ben, who is descended from the Plymouth Rock European Americans, goes leagues beyond the droll sense of humor that typically characterize the “parachute trooper” genre in which writer-observers of privilege touch down into foreign territory and proceed, some more successfully than others, to detail to other members of the privilege class what curiosities they have found. Here, in “My Korean Deli,” my pal Ben, who an original Vanya fuel pump relay ago worked for me as a Hell’s Kitchen intern reporter for a Manhattan-based newsweekly, was someone then – as he is now – who gave off none of those airs. Rather, it was as though he were campaigning in a VW bus, a sign on the back: Richly Documented Histories of Esteemed Ancestors Don’t Tell the Whole Story. Inquire Within. Imagine a place as common as a corner deli seen as Schopenhauer wrote, a liberation of knowlege that “lifts us as wholly and completely above (our everyday miseries) as do sleep and dreams.” Read “My Korean Deli”; you’ll be amused and impressed, and feel not only that you too know my friend Ben, but trust me you’ll be wondering why more writers don’t seem to be capable of constructing a world on the page that is even remotely as self-effacingly aware as Ben’s.

If I were to start a second blog I would call it, “Getting to Know Water.” More later on my appointment with Dr. O, my rehab specialist, but yesterday (April 27) she convinced me that we all came from water and this moving-erect-through-air business, particularly when injured (me, thirty-five years ago and again last month), is a dismal second to moving in water. The premise of the blog would be that rather than fear water as I, a non-swimmer, do, I would finally commit myself to getting to know it because Dr. O tells me there is no better exercise for the total body than to run in the element that we came from, what should not be feared if you are to live the fullest life. WATER, Read: WE RAT. Swim, yes. But learn to run in water too.

Received from the Boston Athletic Association, with 44-cent post mark, April 22, 2011:
For Larry W. Oconnor
Overall Place 0 of 0
Gender Place 0 of 0
Age Group Place 0 of 0

Next: Running for Your Life: Setting goals

Running for Your Life: On Beshert

2011-04-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

M’s mother Ro doesn’t bring much Yiddish into my life. But a long time ago she said that when a Canadian drives an unairconditioned car from the north into a heat wave in the US South and meets the girl of his dreams, the only non-southerner at a Richmond, Virginia, writers’ conference, it’s Beshert: Meant to be.

Ro never wavers in that belief, in that support of me. And I can only hope that I have, perhaps even in ways that she never at first imagined, carried that as a promise, never a burden. I know that now I think of her, finally a little feeble in her 98 years, that she has bestowed many gifts on me in my life, but perhaps none as generous and meaningful as that one. As that folk-pure belief in me.

The night (April 18) I was to have been recuperating from the Boston Marathon has me thinking of Ro. Earlier M and I and three young friends are celebrating the first night of Passover with one of our friends’ family members in Long Island. The evening is grandfatherly replete with respectful readings and a post-toddler decorated Haggadah, a service advertised as a thirty-minute Seder that passes an hour and M and I and J, an exchange student from England, the true visitors of the evening, don’t flag in our interest, our pleasure; there are many toasts, heartfelt and warm, and as visitors we feel none of the complicated emotions that come with family, all is exceptional on its surface, genteel and polite, the code observed so much so that there are the inevitable cross-table meaningful glances, in which I plead not guilty because on this night, the first night of Passover, the visitor is royalty, in this case of a formal type, which is why it is right and appropriate that M asks J, whose company at the Seder we find more than amenable, to join us at our home in Brooklyn for a nightcap, which he does and then the night is Beshert, the Ro moment, J and M and I (And this only strikes me now, that K is in a relationship with a good man, also J – J, K, L and M, any further names to come on the letter line and I muse, Isaac or Ian, or say Nina or Noreen .¤.¤. Nimrod? Not!) talking, laughing, sipping whisky, shards of ice cooling our glasses, books and authors, the value or friendship among writers, French movies and mentors, turning us on to memories of Haruki Murakami, our beloved novelist friend with the jazz touch, J quoting the final line of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:” In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment, How so few books yield payoffs as this does for being, at times not so blissfully, inside the story, because here is reading for a love of reading. And it was Ro who taught me what was Beshert. Which was what this was, a marathon talk about writing, reading and the importance of being earnest (If only this bit were funny, I could earn that .¤.¤.) One that lasted probably as long as it would have taken me to finish the race earlier that day. A second reason to not ever forget this night. Or Ro’s phrase: Beshert.

I don’t have a coach, but I’ve a friend at Total Game Plan who is a good one at http://bit.ly/hRtDDq. Like Dan Bylsma, my current hero in sports. Pittsburgh Penguins’ head coach, who if you can believe half of what you see in a public persona, really does believe that it is best to consider the long term, the next fifteen seasons, God willing, of being able to watch if not coach a young athlete by the name of Sidney Crosby, the best all-around professional hockey player in the world, who since early January has not been on the players’ bench in a game situation, a nod from Bylsma and Sid’s over the boards, changing the course of the fastest, most exciting game on earth, but Sid’s concussed and Bylsma’s not going to take a chance on forcing the issue and perhaps endanger the health of a player for the glory of now, his team of lesser players taking the source of that wisdom and respect to heart and playing the games of their lives, now (midday April 26) miraculously still among twelve teams in the Race for the Cup, playing heroically against a more talented team, the Tampa Bay Lightning, contrast that to the story of Pedro Feliciano, http://bit.ly/gNvwRl, out indefinitely, where’s the compassionate coach in that? (From the Times’ Ben Shpigel piece, “Two weeks ago [Yankee GM Brian] Cashman said the Mets had “abused” Feliciano by pitching him so often. On Thursday [April 14], Cashman took umbrage with criticism he condoned bullpen overuse by the Yankee’s previous manager, Joe Torre, who, after identifying a reliable reliever would pitch him frequently),” which gets me to Coach Tully and Total Game Plan. Where in things sports and training – and personal winning – I turn to because now, thirty-seven days after my last run, I’m beyond antsy to get back at it, to start running again but rather than doing that I’m taking to heart Mike’s wise writings, and the example of Sid Crosby and Dan Byslma, and this week I’m saying little prayers for the Penguins who face a seventh and deciding game against the Lightning (April 27) and Pedro Feliciano, whose shoulder rehab I hope is successful, and frankly I hope that when he returns he rejects the Cashman doctrine (“Can he come back and be ‘Pedro Feliciano? I couldn’t tell you yet.”) and embraces the Bylsma one. Come back, Pedro. But take your time. Don’t be rushed, as I’m trying to learn. Return on your own terms.

Next: Running for Your Life: Setting Goals

Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal

2011-04-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember when it was I started writing in a journal. Certainly not in childhood. That would be too much like school. Even in university, where I chose journalism – the science of journals? hmmm – as a course of study, not because I was especially taken with the idea of being a newsman, or had a strong desire to express my opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, I was first inclined to take up acting, but when I learned that greater than ninety percent of professional actors were out of work, the very idea of college as a place to find, feed and care a passion, if not more than one that you will cultivate for the rest of your life, maybe even make a living out of, all central to the experience, the college years as Odyssey, discovery, a track as foreign to me as cricket. In my case, think table hockey, a narrow shallow slot from center to just below the faceoff dot, no surprises; go to college with a task in mind, a job at the end, and although Carleton University journalism was nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary, I entered its halls with no illusions: come four years and I’d be working in a job, and sure, let it be writing and reporting, and no it couldn’t just as easily have been computer programming, or accounting, or surveying, not anything further afield because my mind was made up, like the right wing riding up and down the table-hockey slot, just staying the course, the very idea that there was anything more to say about what I would do with my life not exactly a sacrilege because I didn’t prejudge myself, didn’t allow myself the luxury. In small-town Canada that greater sense of self, or a higher destiny, might suit in a confession to a girlfriend, or in my best pals from childhood, but any specialness like that had best be hidden away, you didn’t write any of it down in a journal, because to do so, to feel that you were worthy of such consideration could only mean one thing, the dreaded: Who do you think you are?

*

“Well, you could take up hand-rolling pasta.”

– K, when presented with my impression that it’s long since past the time when I should be expecting to elicit any sympathy from the retelling my injury tale of woe, and the concomitant mental anguish, and that if only I were to put my mind to more productive pursuits, (read JOURNAL WRITING!), particularly given that my body may be broken but my mind is whole, so consider a hobby why don’t I? Something that I can do now, yes, and maybe even the rest of my life, a building block for the me who may just have to consider not running in the way that I’ve become accustomed, and anyway isn’t that a limiting, reductive vision, one seen through a runner’s high, a me-filter in which I may not be expanding and growing like I would if I were taking Italian, or studying cosmology, or learning to swim, or volunteering at a hospital for sick children, or much more to the point, picking up the phone and talking to my parents, K’s grandparents, in Canada, and not just once in a blue moon but at least once a week because I love them and they’re no going to be around forever.

*

It didn’t just rain last night (April 16). M and I started out in Vanya, my 1993 Volvo 850 sedan that has a notorious tic, like a lovely but impishly unpredictable uncle who in polite company will blurt out in extremis and without warning, “YOU STUPID M-FUCKER, HATE YOU AND YOUR ASS IN THOSE TOO-TIGHT PANTS. WHAT IS THAT GET-UP? tic, tic, suddenly and inexplicably Vanya is dead in driving rain, a wind tunnel ahead, the rise up to the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan now an infinity beyond the East River as I stare at the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree, M her hand to her mouth in fright, snap on the hazards because the tic is infrequent but not unknown to me (See, R4YL: A Congressional Run), and the hazard-snapping-on gives time for cars behind me because up until now at least in New York this tic, a year-old this week, but every time Vanya’s M-FUCK’D me it’s been remarkable, almost uncanny, how it’s somehow manageable considering the sudden stall-outs have happened in almost every conceivable circumstance – at 70 mph, idling at a red light, pulling up to the entrance to the Goethals Bridge, a quarter-mile from the US border crossing the Thousand Islands, and here, at the widest expanse, the eastern porch of the Brooklyn Bridge, where because of the near-zero visibility drivers are crawling their way forward so it’s Vanya’s loud, dirty joke to stall-out here, where odds are M and I won’t be rear-ended and if so at such an impact that it’s not likely to kill us, although if I am any kind of a lesson-learner it’s fair to say that this kind of fatalist thinking reminds of what was going through my mind about my tight hamstring muscles, and how it made sense to that then-runner-fatalist to just gut it out, run through the discomfort because I had a history of running without pain, was “Born to Run” wasn’t I? and what better strengthening was there than a six-mile run one day, a thirteen the next, then a quick tune-up sprint on the third day, once around the outside of Prospect Park, and now (April 17) here I sit at a desk in Sarah Lawrence College library, M doing a make-up class, Easter Monday will be four full weeks since I did anything cardio, and don’t you think I shouldn’t be playing Russian Roulette with a car that can stall out anywhere, like a shoulder-less parkway, the FDR, every other car hurtling by, tons of weight and force that could very easily if Vanya M-FUCKS us once and for all, really make us pay. The idea of not-running the very least of my worries.

I’d like to think, of course, that Vanya has a mind of its own, that he wouldn’t be a party to harm. But those are thoughts I can ill-afford. I do believe you make your own luck. The Boston Marathon (April 18) has come and gone and I can’t even run to the corner. This season I’ve learned there is a very thin line separating luck and folly. Don’t mistake it; pay attention.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Beshert

Running for Your Life: Beginner’s Mind

2011-04-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

They’ve redone the paving stones along the walk from the southeastern entrance to Central Park, today (April 9) finally a day that makes me think of summer, which if you were to ask me if that were possible last time I was here, Saturday, January 22, no one out the frigid morning of the Central Park Half-Marathon except us, rogue runners, the hardcore, in the many hundreds, I’d have to say it was unthinkable, and now as I sit here, finally not feeling sorry for myself, embittered by what seemed so certain to me once, the culpability of the physical therapist who worked on my hamstring muscles only twenty minutes before The Event, two weeks ago tomorrow, a grudge that’s vanished, as foreign in feeling to me as if it happened to someone else, this me on a different path altogether, not a runner’s one alas, instead, memory lane, the sun’s warmth, winter like a icy remote island, its ferocity past, truly past, a young man dressed all in brown, Kiplingesque braids, sweeping away the bits of trash, the evidence of now, so that as M and I go back in time, from the Strand book kiosk entrance at East 57th Street, behind us The Plaza, the scent of horses, birds chirping, the murmur of balloon-shaping clowns, a puppeteer, an Arab man sizing us up as tourists, declaring, “You are here!”, pointing to an illustrated map that opens before us like an accordion, and M, the more instinctive New Yorker, counters, “We live here,” and the man harrumphs as if to say, “Well, make it more obvious, would you, you’re wasting my time,” refolds the map as I feel only a twinge in my leg under the miracle Tiger Balm patch, a mental-reminder to buy stock in its maker, and try in the thickening crowds to keep an even keel so that we don’t talk about The Injury, engage instead the Beginner’s Mind, when each moment is lived as if it's the first and that is what we think, M and I, we think, “Where did all the time go?” We both feel and probably always will feel like young parents when we’re on these trash-swept-clean paving stones, “Where is she, Kate? Did she run off ahead of us.” Those years we would always come here, even the years after we moved to Brooklyn, M, L & K in Central Park, the animal musical band of the Delacorte Clock; here at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9, a half-month of Saturdays since the day of the freezing race, and off they march with their instruments, the Penguin drummer, the Bruin cymbalist, my faves, also the Hippo playing the violin, best seen in profile as it rounds the carousel and M sings the final note of a number that is being chimed, something from “Oklahoma!” that in the sun’s warmth comes flooding back to her from the first movie she’d ever seen on the silver screen.

*

I had hoped, from the account in the Times, http://nyti.ms/ed0qiD, that “Rooms With a View,” through July 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would be benighted in stillness, uber-reviewer Roberta Smith, exulting: “Artworks permeated for the most part by a luminous light and concomitant clarity of vision that regularly translates life’s daily pleasures – starting with looking out windows – into images of surprising formal vigor and emotional weight.” Alas, we went. Word of warning: When a good reviewer takes pains to write passionately about the chosen color of an art show’s walls that’s as good a sign as any that the show may be the assigned section cover but STAY AWAY .¤.¤.

*

How to get there? The Beginner’s Mind? It is to be both inside and outside. Quietly Observant. Today (April 10) I feel the penetrating heat of Tiger Balm patch at the muscle tear, what was almost three weeks ago, imagine a swelling the size of a lemon where the top of the right leg and buttock meet is now aglow with elastic remedy, before me are four subway passengers as I write, one holding a paperback and a box of Girl Scout cookies, the caramel-colored ones with lacings of chocolate, across from me a woman in ear pods, natch, and zebra-striped backpack, flanking her a boy in a muffler, also entertainment-embedded, the other side a reader, ballpoint poised to annotate, and now the zebra bag is reading, unbeknownst to me if the pods stream music or language exercises, or nothing at all. I look up, the train is rumbling on the Manhattan Bridge, the letters and numbers, PIER 17, no-name glass towers, a green capstone, and wondering if it is the Woolworth’s Building, not it suddenly appears further along, rising above the tenements of Chinatown, and now in the tunnel, but the landscape remains and sure I would still like to be seeing it, on a long run, preferably across the Brooklyn Bridge, but instead I’m sitting, and, eventually, yes, walking, and who knows how long it will be before I can run. Again. Yesterday in my stocking feet in the closet before the mirror on my toes, and there is no pain, and I think Grade Eight, Dufferin Public School where the playground was rutted dirt, pebbled hardtop that sheered off kneecap skin with the barest friction, in the school basement doing calisthenics, running on the spot, one-two-three-four, counting it out and feeling no pain, but stopping anyway, trying not to cry. To hold on to what I’ve got. What my pal Mike says, Consider Sid Crosby, the best player in the world, the Stanley Cup playoffs now on, and he’s not been right for months, concussed since early January, and, with any luck, the Penguins my team since I was eleven years old, will still be playing in May. Like they were last year when I was running the Pittsburgh Marathon, the race a dream come true, sometimes we forget to embrace what has been. Because we always want more, don’t we? Is there anything wrong with that? Isn’t that what the very idea of the Beginner’s Mind is all about? Put judgments aside; life is wanting more.

Next on Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal

Running for Your Life: Discovery of Stillness

2011-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

Wednesday (April 6) makes ten days from The Event, the injury, enough time to reflect on something central: that I’m lucky. What happened to me when a muscle in my right leg spasmed, my upper right hamstring (Torn Hamstrings: don’t you think that makes a great name for a Boomer garage band?), my PT specialist B said it was remarkable that I didn’t, under the circumstances, fall backwards and down the stairs. I had a partial blackout, so I wouldn’t have been able to protect myself at all, I’m on blood thinners, wear a Medic Alert bracelet, I had only four basement stairs to fall down, but I’d be lucky to come out with only one broken leg, my head cracking the hard lino-cement floor and, considering I’m a bleeder –

Instead on April 6 I’m slowly walking up the broken escalator in the subway at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue, and I feel only a slight tug in my leg, much, much better, back to work now at The Post for two full days, but halfway up, I can’t believe it, but I’m feeling winded. Unfit. For the first time in I don’t know how long, and it has been only ten days from TE, progress I’m making, yes, but I can’t imagine I will be suiting up for a run until mid-June at the earliest. What kind of condition will I be in then? How in the world am I going to manage not-running for so long? I’ve been doing it virtually every other day for more than thirty-five years. Yeah, slowness is one thing, and yeah, I will be able to some basic stretches and strengthening, but cardio? Fuhgeddaboudit. Even the stationary bike, at the baby gear; on April 8, I’ve been cane-free for four days, and I’m ten days from what would have been my first Boston Marathon. But that’s done; finished. Funny how I’ve changed, how if I’m true to myself, and finally, finally, listening to my body, which in a eleven short days has slipped from supper to sapped, last Sunday (April 3) struggling to get to the Brooklyn Fifth Avenue farmer’s market every step a wincer, better with the cane but thinking I should go one better, dig M’s crutches out of the basement because with each step with my right leg the pain in my butt, radiating to the knee is killing, what’s ahead for me, thinking, a smile on my face that at this rate – slide-stepping to that early memory of mine, the boy-remembrance of standing over snails moving across our concrete lane from the wet grass (See Running for Your Life: Week Two), amazed by their slow yet determined pace, getting there, but at their pace – I won’t be running until the fall.

*

When I was a kid in the summer my father cut my hair. Once a year when the hot weather came and stayed. The do-it-yourself box lid sat open to the words, “If You Can Comb Hair, You Can Cut Hair,” and a 50ish picture of a laughing boy and his smiling pops, the boy’s perfectly coiffed head cropping out of the white cover sheet, the father with his scissors poised above. I imagine they’re talking about a fishing trip coming up, a spin in the convertible, the next day’s pro ball game. “Sit still,” Dad says, breaking the reverie. “That’s not still.” I take a deep breath and direct all my energy to holding my head without moving, as Dad, who never smiles when he’s concentrating on his work., buzzes off all my hair until my head is round and smooth like the red bit atop a matchstick.

Sit still. Hold still. Be still. Today, in my New York life, it seems a pipe dream, but as I listen to my healing body these days, that is what is required. Only so much healing can come through light exercise and strengthening, normal-gait walking, ice and heat compresses. Slowness is one thing, but now I’m shy to even try the exercise bicycle at the lowest possible speed. What I need is the discovery of stillness; to run deep I must cultivate the still waters in me.

Twenty minutes of stillness under a cold compress and I can fairly hear the healing take place. Or I imagine that I do. I sit with a book, David Vann’s “The Legend of a Suicide,” or the poetic wonder of fanciful dream-travel to distant lands, “Atlas of Remote Islands” by Judith Schalansky; M was intuitive and loving in her Brooklyn Public Library find, “The Runner’s Literary Companion,” edited by Garth Battista, twenty minutes hot compress:

              “If you can fill the unforgiving minute
                        With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
                             Yours is the earth and everything
                                          That’s in it.”

                                             – “If” excerpt by Rudyard Kipling

Twenty minutes on the cold compress. Repeat.

Stillness is to keep the mind free as much as to hold your head steady, although it is every bit about that. To not waver in your goal. Stillness is like a curved bridge in a Japanese garden. On each side is the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and yes, my future as a runner. But here, on the bridge, is active resting. Being still. Where I’m going to stay awhile. Watch the Koi swim in the waters beneath my injured yet healing body.

Find that curved bridge in your own life. Pause and reflect. Do what is your equivalent to mine, which is to drink deeply in the still waters of my twin passions: reading and writing. I didn’t know this until I started writing this, but I think I’ve found a path to be still, even in my busy New York life. Pause, but bear down as you proceed beyond slowness to stillness:

“How could he run so long
from death, had not
Apollo for the last time,
the very last, come near
to give him stamina and speed.”

– excerpt from Homer’s Iliad, Robert Fitzgerald, translation

Next: Running for Your Life: Beginner’s Mind

Running for Your Life: Day One

2011-04-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

“I would run through the forest until I was exhausted and could sleep; perhaps even as I ripped through ferns and over rotting logs, invisible now beneath the false second rain-forest floor, I would have some kind of vision. So I set off running. But before long, I only felt tired and stopped and turned around and walked slowly back. I had no faith in that kind of thing anymore, I realized. It worked in high school a few times even in college, but it seemed ineffectual now. So I put my clothes back on, descended past rubble and wire, concrete, brush, and stood over the wide fingerlings to twist each delicately under my heel.”

– “Legend of a Suicide,” David Vann
*

It’s been a week since the worst of it, getting better, hopefully more aware, when the blog steers into TMI, Too Much Injury. Best to put it this way, Monday (April 4), after hobbling with a cane to my second orthopedic surgeon, who while I was waiting for him in the waiting room of the New York University Medical Center, actually crooked his finger to beckon me back into a treatment room, never did call me by name, where after a perusal of my MRI results said I had a bad upper right hamstring tear with a hematoma the size of a lemon. Get some PT and strengthen up, PT will help with the pain because it’s not good for you to walk with a cane. Running? Yeah, you can run, but don’t think about racing. That tear will repair but at a certain pace you’ll feel it stretch; it’ll warn you that you can’t go as fast as you did before the injury. Blank stare.

“Is there anything else?”

“No.”

I’m in glassed-walled corridor in the hospital, gardens on both sides, sitting upon a bench on my left buttock because the right is throbbing in pain, texting, then calling poor K, my daughter, who said all the right things but I’m still trying to handle the shock, earlier in the day in tears talking to my dad in Canada, and minutes later in a cab, driven by an elderly Indian man who I don’t know if he intuited my desolation or just saw that I had a lot of trouble getting into the back seat, the cane thrown in ahead of me, clattering against the pay-glass. We didn’t talk much, and I didn’t do much texting, only once to K. When he stopped in front of the house, he spoke of some folk method that once brought healing force to the hands, and especially fingers. I have only three dollars in my wallet, so he gets in back with me because I can’t figure out how to use the debit-card machine and uses his fingers to punch in a $5 tip.

“Feel better,” he says, as gather my cane, slowly step out on the curb and close the door.

“Thank you, sir.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, as I stoop to look toward the driver’s seat. “In your mind,” he says, a healed finger touching his temple.

*

Thanks to smelly Tiger Balm patches on my upper thigh, an Ace bandage stretched over the worst of the tear, some kind of voodoo PT stretch-bandage that bridges my calf and lower thigh and stays on even in the shower, I’ve gone from not been able to tie my right shoe and cane-hobbling around Park Slope to three-quarters speed Manhattan walking without pain, only at rare times do I feel it, and although my new PT specialist B tells me I should stick with the mildest of stretches and wait a week before trying too much I’m today (April 6), nine days from holy terror pain begging to feel like Larry again, wondering if it’s not adrenaline as much as repair, the speed at which I seem to be healing, but I’m ready, or feel ready, to take on near-full of domestic tasks, if not only five percent of athletic ones.

Emboldened perhaps by the Indian elder, B’s magic stretch-tape, but – in full disclosure – the fact that by virtue of my 3:33:08 marathon in Steamtown 10-10-10, I am still eligible to reapply for Boston 2012, and the entry requirements have changed, I’m almost 12 minutes below my age group, Qualifying Time of 3:45 (It changes to 3:40 for Boston 2013), which means I’m to reapply on Sept. 14, 2011, which if I’m realistic will be a sensible date to slowly bring myself back up to the strength and hopefully even greater flexibility than I was before the March 28 injury (when I discussed the possibility of running in Boston next year, Dr. K, my primary care physician, said given my “perseverance” that she didn’t think there was any reason not to resume training for Boston in the fall; I told her that I’d imagine my wife M would have an entirely different adjective in mind .¤.¤. ), and set my sights on the finish line in Boston, not with any personal records in mind, but if they come for this new body then fine, but they are not uppermost in my mind. If the body calls out for rest, I will rest. Athletes far more accomplished than me have set themselves smart, sensible goals. Finally, I’d like to think, and please tell me in your comments if you sense I’m straying, I’m back to basics, where I started in the early days of this blog: Running, Reading and Writing. Racing doesn’t apply.

Next: Running for Your Life: Discovery of Stillness

Running For Your Life: What’s Next

2011-03-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Do some dates bear little circles? Halos. Our actual birthdays, of course, not remembered, that is in your Birthday Suit, but who’s to say what the future holds, cosmologists today http://econ.st/e9mfDl examining data so that their profession is no longer sci-fi but real, the latest information backing arguments that the universe is forever expanding, that the Big Bang may not have been the first, and if so, then isn’t it possible that another Big Bang could occur, Creationists be damned, where’s the wonder in that?

There are infinite lessons to be drawn from religious stories, I am reminded by Mike Tully’s flower-nectar metaphor http://bit.ly/i3L7fs, what is the science of infinity, http://amzn.to/dBEUwq, a must-read by David Foster Wallace, (don’t let a single link go untouched here because I’m getting back to my point, I promise, it’s just that I’m excited).

I’ve circled April 16 one of those haloed days – perhaps one day in the future the human brain will be able to remember our actual day of birth – that for me are hallowed, such as: M’s birthday, May 14, K’s birthday, Jan. 23; My own birthday, Oct. 5; the Pittsburgh Penguins first Stanley Cup, May 25; M and my wedding day, Aug. 20; Pittsburgh Marathon, May 2; Steamtown, Scranton, Pa., Oct. 10, and now April 16, the Boston Marathon, 2012, like I said in More Pain Inc. on Monday (March 28). I’m determined to run it. But not this year .¤.¤.

*

The man in the paper surgical gown in Room 9, Methodist Hospital emergency ward, is asked to get out his ID. He hands the ID to the woman, but she says no, just give me the wallet. Puzzled, the man complies, and in a wink she snatches a bundle of cash, about $400 in all, and leaves the room, not something the patient – in shock as I am in Room 8, sitting waiting for my horse-sized muscle relaxant to kill the pain, just told my diagnosis, although I had to wonder seeing it later that night, a nasty bruise the size of a cantaloupe, that it’s not what you fear, Mr. O’Connor, a rupture, or even a bad tear of the right-leg hamstring but a muscle spasm, the Mother of All Mother Spasms, because not since my blood clot (that was ruled out because the pain was not deep in the leg) almost ten years ago I’d never been in such pain on Monday (March 28), hailing a cab from work in Midtown to my neighborhood hospital, which was K’s idea, reaching her via cellphone, telling me as I lay near-crying, miserable and in the pain of a battleground wound, as comfortable as I can be in those damnable bucket seats in the yellow cab minivan, not even able to adjust my weight forward so that I can shout out the interminably banal infotainment mini TV screen, this tape-loop giving in inordinate attention to a shameless pornographic Guess Jeans spot and an infantile talk show guest, the false gusto of the host, as if the formerly homeless guest’s line that the $700 he earned from a breakthrough movie shoot was enough for him to live in his car for the next twelve years is the funniest thing he has ever heard. From Midtown to Brooklyn, I lose track of how many times the tape repeats, the volume rising, a thirty-minute drive, and now the cabbie is circling the hospital looking for the Emergency entrance, while I’m a lunatic pressing the TV screen, the pain and sadness settling in, that I’ve really f#%#* myself this time, the pain is torture enough, but that insufferable mini TV a final straw, that is until weak and barely a wit about me because of the pain, shock and worry about how I can even remotely manage to swing myself out of the car and into a waiting wheelchair, I hand the cabbie two twenties for a $30 fare and he turns to go, but I manage to say, Five back, please. He’s annoyed, but I stuff the fiver in my wallet and soon am being wheeled into the hospital.

There are no security cameras in the clinic rooms, only in the corridors, due to patient confidentiality rules, which makes the attending doctor think the theft was an inside job. The woman, my emergency doctor says, was wearing a hospital ID bracelet but the name she gave at registration could very well be an alias. Some regular patients who come to emergency for treatment use more than one alias, the doctors says. One staffer is feeling horrible about not saying something to the woman patient in the bracelet, uncharacteristically holding a fistful of dollars and hurrying toward an exit. Yeah, the doctor says, the police are going to the address that the patient-thief gave them.

“Does this happen all the time?” I ask.

The doctor raises an eyebrow. She is thin and pretty, wearing a purple knit hat that looks like it could house a guinea pig.

“No,” she says. “This is my first time.”

*

I saw orthopedic specialist Dr. M, an endurance runner and triathlete this morning (March 31.) I’m in the waiting room for an hour, the clinic room for half an hour, and in the good doctor’s company for 15 minutes, tops. Dr. M is lean and strong-looking, mid-career Richard Chamberlain. He takes one look at the deep-purple and blue bruises on my right leg and says I won’t be running in Boston this year. That’s not a spasm, it’s a muscle tear. So many feelings wash over me, but, surprisingly, relief’s the line leader. We’ll put you on PT regime, he says. Your hamstrings are weak, you need to strengthen them.

“But I’ve been running for 35 years without a problem.”

He smiles, and says I’d be a good candidate for his strengthening program this spring, but right now the muscle needs to rest, to heal. You’ll be doing gentle physical therapy and strengthening, and we’ll check you out in a month.

I change out of the clinic’s gym shorts into my work clothes, am directed to the phalanx of payment people, gather up my referral and business card for Finish Line Physical Therapy, “Taking You There One Stride at a Time,” pay for the medical service and set up for my next appointment with Dr. M, April 28. That’s twelve days short of a year, or 353 days, to Boston 2012.

Next: Running for Your Life: New goals

Running for Your Life: More Pain Inc.

2011-03-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

Enough with the public despair already. So unseemly. I haven’t bought my e-bus tickets yet, but I’m bound and determined to make it to Boston, come what may. Exactly three weeks today (March 28), I picture myself in the Boston Marathon April 18, 10:20 a.m. start, the White Wave by name, which brings to mind a line from “Ghostwritten,” the debut novel of ace novelist David Mitchell:

“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”
*

Last week for the first time I can remember since my second blood clot in July 2001, I’ve not run a single step. For the record, not since Sunday, March 20, when I was damn sure I’d muscle-tore my way right out of eighteen months of prep-training, two marathons, Pittsburgh in May, and Scranton, Pa.’s Steamtown in October, a bear for M to live with, certain that there was no way in hell that I’d be thinking today, eight days later that I’d be planning in three weeks time to be running on this screwed-up leg. Sure that this too, who was I kidding, as Kafka said to Max Brod – and you really must check out “Who Owns Kafka?”, March 3, 2001, in the London Review of Books, I don’t know if this URL requires a subscription to read, but worth the effort to find it, if not, http://bit.ly/f9e7dB – “There is hope, but not for us,” remembering the Ides of March 2008, the year when I’d last trained for a marathon, twenty-one years after my previous one, when on February 12th, M wrenched her ankle badly on the ice at Prospect Park skating rink, only to return with me, and tumble down the top step of our brownstone home and pulverize her ankle bone so badly that for the better part of the next two months she was in a wheelchair, eight weeks of non-weight bearing, and for months I was for all intents and purposes a part-time nurse, and praising God often enough during that time that M is a terrifically strong woman, my wife, as her leg healed in such a way that even the surgeon couldn’t be more impressed, and finally I went back to marathon-dreaming, the next year a bust, but in May 2010, registered and ran Pittsburgh and in October, and this bears repeating, in three weeks, because I’m bloodyminded but also because I’ve been blessed by support from family and friends, and yeah this isn’t a one-way road, the final one hundred meters ahead of me, in Steamtown I can hardly believe it when I see my time, imagine my daughter cheering me on, when all is said and done, we runners at the finish line, one after another after another running for longer than three hours straight through tears and pain, cheered on across the miles by complete strangers, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to describe, my colleague and daughter-namesake K, hooked now after running the Manhattan Half this month through Times Square, before banner-waving tourists and family members aware of where she will be at the 11-mile mark thanks to the magic of technology, a chip that she wears, alone yet held in a way that merits the addiction, the getting hooked, because there is a lot to be said for the simple joys of the solitary pursuit of learning to listen to your body, the muscles, the joints, to know the difference between aches and mild pain the cusp of injury, kick myself still for not listening closely enough, how I wrote about feeling a muscle tighten akin to an overstrung drum – or guitar – just kept going despite the fact that it doesn’t loosen, soften, was crying out, telling you to listen, you’re at the edge of breaking, snap, snap, snap, three strings of a 12-string and dumb me thinking, okay, I’ll just play through. And not just this set. But the next and the next so that now, with Boston on the horizon, I sit on a sore inner thigh muscle, and getting sorer, aggressively strengthening and stretching for eight days but this morning a collosal backslide, wishing here at the coffee shop as I write that I had a heating pad to keep the swelling down, pissed off that I missed the step going down the basement Walgreens to pick up the Epsom Salts for tonight, for both after the PT session, and earlier, at 8 a.m., I put in my first cardio, Elliptical, still haven’t run, couldn’t begin to think that my right leg could stand the pounding of a mile run, much less a marathon, still I go 41 minutes, a reasonable tension, two-mile climb and 724 calories spent, a big sweat and no leg pain, then on to PT and deep is the muscle work but damn, I slip on the steps and now the butt is sore. Dead sore. My PT specialist today says she often treats runners in October who’ve injured themselves, some with limited mobility, at half-strength and in pain, “But you can’t tell them a thing,” she says. “They run no matter what I say,” then, I imagine her thinking, in the marathon itself they really tear up their muscles, and are in for subsequent costly treatment, months of it, just to get back to where they were in the summer. “That’s not how you see my condition, is it?” “No,” she says, “it’s not. But you have to work at it.”

Right. And now I have to get up and buy a little heating pad before going to work. Instead settle for Aleve and Tiger Balm pain relieving patches. I know I started this post with different intentions. But I have to face facts. When I pealed off the first of the Tiger Balm patches a band of muscle was not just tight, but as hard as a rock. I usually post on Tuesday, but today this is going up on Monday. Tomorrow, I'll have a strong sense of knowing where I will stand. Or if I can stand, for that matter.

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Next?

Running for Your Life: Lost Track

2011-03-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

Injury. Sharp pain in the fat of my inner thigh. Pushing myself to where I thought I needed to be with less than a month to go until Boston, and now this. Now if Boston is going to happen, I’ll need some help.
Definitely not running this week. Yesterday (March 19) I did an elliptical session and it went well, no complications of pain. What is the value of talking about our own pain for others? Suffice to say that I can’t rink this condition whatever it is, am not at a place where I can rest it, but yet this is something that only rest will yield what it needs, to heal so that I can do and continue to do, what this is really all about anyway, strip away the hubris, the counting: both of miles and strides and calories per hour – the highlighted readouts on the elliptical, which doesn’t do much for hammies, more for the quadriceps, mine now plenty strong, perhaps overstrong, which the Web says, will lead to a sprain of the right-leg hammy, which is tender under me as I write this down, less than four weeks from Boston, and until I hear from a doctor (March 22), I’m going to assume that this year won’t happen, Boston 2011; I’m still qualified for Boston 2012, and I’ll train a lot smarter for that, puts me in line for another year of blogs too. Here, will tap memory and experience, road food for the mind, but more of the practical, as M says, our bodies are less indestructible as we age. When we’re young, we’re fierce, free to be our own superheroes, now, with this injury, the one that didn’t go away, never had a chance to heal in February, and I have to face facts: Boston is a twenty-six-mile course, I will be on my own, busing there and busing back. I cannot afford to land in hospital, barely sixty percent finish, and I have completed now three out of five marathons, the ones that I didn’t I was injured, the first with shin splints, when I was experiencing terrible pain beyond ten miles, the second when I was not in top shape, crashed a the wall, twenty miles. There is no glory in injury, in following a path to certain injury, one that could play a role in a decision to stop running, to stop this course that I’m on, my heart beating like I’m on a twenty-miler, this is my toughest challenge, because I suspect as soon as I make that appointment with the doctor that Boston, the Boston Marathon dream for April, is gone. No doctor or physical therapist will advise me to continue training in this state, much less run twenty-six miles on a sore hammy. No matter how many pills, or surgical wraps, if I were to stop now, let it heal, with warmth and compresses and massage and acupuncture, fill in with anti-inflammatories, but no, better to forget it. What I say after the first month of league play has eliminated from contention my current favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates: There is always next year.

*

Here’s what happened: I stopped listening to myself, trusting the voice that I had in the beginning of this blog. The one that has defined my life to this point. Ego gets in the way of Zen, that every other day plan that had until these past few months, held sway, thirty-five years the dominant voice, now like Icarus, I’m flying too close to the sun, and thankfully I am not so injured that I will today abandon my plans to run next month in Boston, but I see it clearly, through M’s help because we talked about it at length this morning (March 21), if I allow myself to be self-critical, to be truthful as I re-examine these posts, more than sixty of them since I began this trek after the Pittsburgh Marathon, that I’ve lost track of who I am. I’ve for months now been counting the miles, not the minutes, in the beginning content to know that I was running, which was enough, not how fast, or how far, but that I was a peace in my pace, allowing other parts of myself room to breath. Near-obsessed with my times, my standing in my age group, at 55, not just a runner but an elite-quality marathoner, who’s to say that 33:33:08 will be my fastest time, perhaps if I just push myself a little harder, not rest when my body is telling me to do so, go out and push through the soreness, the pain, because what’s eight minutes in 26.2 miles, just 14 seconds a mile, doable, imagine a 3:25 Boston at my age, with that an automatic entry to my first New York City Marathon, in 2012, at that time, a 57-year-old man, eight years from retirement age, and I’m running faster than I ever have in my life. .¤.¤. Icarus flying directly into the sun, if only like the David Foster Wallace story in The New Yorker http://nyr.kr/eETeNN I were so limber as that boy fated to press his lips to every part of his body and I could kick myself in the ass I would do it, kick myself with my bad leg, the blood-clotted one that is not injured, a thoroughly painful one before I go back to writing this down, and with a heavy heart plan my next three weeks of care and healing, doctor’s visits, PT, acupuncture, gentle-stretching, cross-training on a spaghetti-gear stationary bike, join the gym, get help on the hamstring-curl machine, then and only then will I know if I should go through with Boston. If it means there’s a strong chance I will injure the hammy badly during the race, or even rupture it so that a week after Boston I won’t be able to run like I always have, I won’t do it. It could be this was the message all along. You’ve lost track, Larry. Time to heal. And, yeah, run for your life.

*

I’d like to think I’ll bounce back with my next post soon. But I don’t know. I’m pretty bummed. I’m thinking a little break will do me good. I’m in uncharted territory. And that doesn’t feel so good. It doesn’t feel good at all.

Running for Your Life: Thurb Time

2011-03-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Thurber, K’s dog, is a handful, a glorious mutt that in the beginning presented as part-bloodhound, part-coonhound, part-red bone, nothing but a hounddog with a coat the color of burnt toast and a dog’s head for the Pyramids, now nine months old, the puppy is long – six feet from tip to toe, excluding tail – and not a great deal taller, think greyhound or vizsla, the mind muddies the answer to the simple question, “He’s beautiful; what is he?”

Still, he loves to run. K and J had been in Washington two full months before they were back for a proper visit with Thurb in tow. (Or the way T rolls, J and K in tow.) More than two full months since I shed my tears when my regular running companion padded off to a new life in DC, and now I’ve got serious miles to get in, Thursday (St. Paddy’s), a minimum fifteen, I’ve promised myself, out across the Brooklyn Bridge, not since the run-up to Steamtown, mid-September, six months ago, and I’ll be back along the Hudson, and as much as I’d like Thurb alongside, he’s, like I said, a handful, and will yank me into crowds, even on my own I’m at risk of turning one of these weak ankles and I’m down in a heap, Boston-dream done, so Thurb won’t be staying this time for a Brooklyn visit, here for just three short days, Saturday night through Monday afternoon, and Sunday I put in a long run on my own, but early Monday Thurb, M and I are in the park, off-leash hours where he steals every stray ball and runs like a maniac, mostly away from us despite the cut-turkey treats we’d thought to pack, knowing Pyramid-head is one bolt away from fleeing because he’s born to run, and to see the way he is among these terriers and shepherds and stay-at-home bitty dogs, running hell bent for leather, pure pleasure, and somehow, a miracle every time we trick him into coming back to us, we re-leash him and walk on home, an hour later I harness him up for our run, the first since late December, and it is like old times, Thurb falls into an easy gait and more than once I feel the sensation of flying when for not long but gloriously we match each other’s pace, and it is about this time, when we are on the hill-climb near the entrance/exit at Grand Army Plaza that a cyclist I recognize as a fellow hound-runner yells:

“Thurber’s back!”

“Yes, but only for today,” I say.

“Today is okay!” he says, as he waves and cycles on.

*

Back in late September, I met Z, the rogue urban forester. I was walking baby Thurb, and RUF Z had landed on the block, think scene from “Men In Black,” clever and outre, creative, so far from everyday, the tree wrecking crew circle him like he’s Kevin Costner, “Dancing With Wolves,” memory clogged with movie references, and RUF Z’s near-manic energy, brought to the ’hood to take down a thirty-footer, weakened in the tornado – winds of March so many, so scary that I wonder what’s ahead, a few weeks ago there’s a tornado-like blow and a retaining wall of cement blocks and brick and plaster collapses not far from home, crushing three cars in the TD Bank parking lot, often as not with families inside th cars, waiting for the depositor or the cash-getter to return but this day blessedly free of people so no one dies, but now no place is feeling safe, a sanctuary in the extreme weather, not your supersized SUV, or Mini with the Thule carrier-top; RUF Z, jumpy with nerves, in a minute I learn his life story, Irish-Jew, petting the Pyramid-head of Thurb, saying he’s the owner of five successive bloodhounds, “No other breed will do, yeah, they like to run away, but you get a fifty-foot rope for a pair of shower flip-flops (?!) and show him whose boss.” (Amped-up now, hair every which way, eyes buggy at 10 in the morning.) “Who is the alpha? If it is him, then you are f$#@&. Like my 18-year-old, a math and science genius, but can’t get his act together, so he’s in the Navy, not the Marines, better in the Navy (because of the Seals, I don’t know), getting himself in trouble, at this time in his life, only natural, and maybe the Navy will be just right because he’s at the stage when he’s dumb, fun and full of c%#.” Thurb is pulling on the leash, soon in the dog run, stones in the soft of his puppy foot pads, but now I’m looking up, RUF Z in the hydraulic bucket, chainsaw whirring, chewing live bark, boyhood dentist-sound, limbs and trunk parts twenty times the weight of RUF Z, lowered to the ground by the crew, each holding lines like seaman, RUF Z yelling, “How long?” No answer, and he’s back at it, sawing, a drinking game, and in a flash the arbor, one of the biggest trees around, is gone, this part of the sky invisible, light blocked and softened, for twenty years and now, literally, a new day. “HOW LONG?!” “Forty-five minutes,” the crew elder cries. RUF Z raises the saw over his head, slaps his forehead with the flat of his free hand. “He was gunning for forty,” the crew elder says.

*

Payoff: First big run (St. Paddy’s) since 3:33:08 Steamtown, kicking the harshest winter in a hundred, the lame hammy, killer Pain in the Four Foot, and I’m finally good: out the door, across the Gowanus, the Brooklyn Bridge to the Hudson and 34th Street and back, thirty-five years after the hospital and I’m on the ultimate home stretch, two hours-fifteen at 8:30 per mile, about 16 miles. And sure there are aches and pains, but I feel great, and a month from now I will be boarding the bus for Boston. Thanks so much for coming along.

Next: Running for Your Life: Slow Health

Running for Your Life: M and The Bluebird

2011-03-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn Mood: Another dreary Thursday, a woman exits the subway as I’m entering, she still with the forehead-smudge of Ash Wednesday.

*

I’m reading “Classics and Commercials,” a collection of essays and reviews by Edmund Wilson writing about “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake,” by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, which shoots me to the “J” literary section, where books by James Joyce include a sample of “Finnegans.” The wonder of “Finnegans” is its pun upon pun upon pun, and I think to tell M that in the vein of Padgett Powell’s “The Interrogative Mood,” M, an inveterate word player, should start a file for a creative novel, “The Punster Mood,” as we wait for our Wisconsin cab driver, Starvin’ Marvin, who we reached by doing detective work at the taxi waiting zone; M had left her bag with her journal notes from India, laptop and Kindle in Marvin’s cab, but we were able to reach him and he’ll be back soon with the bag, too early for me because I was a little sad that I wasn’t going to have more time to browse in the best airport bookstore in the country, Renaissance Books, at the Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee.

*

Word of warning: Saturday night (March 12) M and I went to a Wisconsin multiplex, and saw “The Adjustment Bureau or Free Will Hunting” . . . Dogmatic, turgidly written claptrap that fails beyond the comic book caricature of third-rate art, the only redeeming bit being that the day before, en route to Mitchell Airport from LaGuardia, while M and I were queuing up at some ungodly hour, I whispered into her ear that the guy ahead of us looked like John Slattery (Roger from “Mad Men”) after a bender, and lo and behold it WAS John Slattery, who, surprise!, was one of the Adjustment Bureau fedora-heads in that abominable stinker.

*

“I’m just going to go.”
“Go already.”
M has shut down the car in Brown Deer Park. When we turned in to the park entrance, I was a little nervous given the February-like snow cover that the parking lots would be closed and that we wouldn’t be able to exercise. It’s a long time before the busy period, only the hardcore out, even on this blue-sky beauty (March 11) so I was glad to see the clear lot, “There’s parking up ahead,” I say, not what M wants to hear, Milwaukee is her town, she’s in charge and that was a takeaway in her eyes, and one that sours our moods as I lope away, unstretched, for my daily run because until the week before Boston (April 18), I need to get some miles in, a minimum forty miler this week and shooting for sixty next, the big one, I think, as I trot out for my planned, two-loop four-miler of Brown Deer Park, a bird paradise of soccer fields and lakes, a golf course and enough picnic areas to keep the Sierra Club-types of this northern Milwaukee suburb in egg salad and cheese dip heaven. Go Packers! M not giving me a little wave as we cross paths, me on the road and she in the parking lot, getting her walking gear together, comings and goings so important to us, but this going, not so good.
The truth is many times are like this. In running, I mean. My body protests. Do you, it is saying, always need to run? I mean, really? Stop and talk this out. Tomorrow, you can chalk up an hour on the hotel treadmill, more than seven miles, a plus-1,000-calorie burner. That will suit, no? but I’m out, the first hundred yards, the muscles near-locked, the hammy twinging. Four miles and I won’t even break a sweat, pavement’s uneven, just what you need in this indifferent mood, take your mind off what you’re doing and you’re over on a weak ankle, sprained with the big miles coming up, on Sunday or Monday, a run with Thurb, K’s dog who’s back for a brief visit.
A snow field and a still-up volleyball net. In the slanting afternoon sun looking like a lake in a Nordic myth – Odin, that’s one of the names they’re thinking will suit my great-nephew to come. Finally, not jog-shuffling but running, more liquid than solid.
I’m once around and starting the second loop. No M. Maybe she walked toward the river and lake, got off the park road. At the end of one entrance-exit is The Thirsty Fox, and I make a mental note to come back, but not during Packers! season, or March Madness. I could run beyond the level railway crossing, a forlorn-looking place that if M got a look at it, she’d be gone.
I hear it first. Not a cardinal cheep, then a blue flash. Near a low branch, something I first think is a pine cone. But I slow and see that it’s a bird, and the sun catches its breast and shines golden, and round head and back feathers of blue. American bluebird. I’d seen them here before, but it’s still winter, I never thought I’d see one today. I run in spot for a beat and she flies off and so do I, up on my toes, around two bends, as warm as I’ve been since this morning, and I see M ahead, highlights in her hair, and blue-sky fleece, feigns not hearing my approach, as I touch her gently on the back, she turns with a smile, and I say, “I just saw your kindred spirit, dear.”

Running for Your Life: Week Five

Running for Your Life: What’s Hidden

2011-03-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

Today (March 8), a month and ten days until Boston. Forty days and forty nights. My friend and fellow blogger, Mike Tully, http://bit.ly/hRtDDq works with me on Sundays at the New York Post where we prepare the Monday Business section, but spiritually and otherwise, he is the philosopher/coach. Recently, he’s scored successes in speaking engagements thanks to his years of experience with young athletes and as a reporter covering sports for UPI; he turns events into stories, into lessons that through hard work and word of mouth have led to a growing following among organizations looking for a committed voice like his that can make a difference for coaches looking for that extra edge, the margin between winning and losing, yes, and not just the game but the attitude, which Coach Tully will tell you is hidden, why it’s the special talent, humility in hard work for a chance at greatness cannot come without that something extra, the X factor that coaches and philosophers and therapists call out, the killer instinct because in games as in life there are times when even the most humble among us must fight, struggle, strike, hit so that our hard work is vindicated; these are your just deserts, what you have worked for, and what will fill your life with joy.
*

Running suits me because much is hidden and solitude is my field of play. Often when M and I travel we see male and female athletes – basketball players from the US, soccer ones from away. They line the rows of airliners, each looking a lot like the other, impossible, at least for me, to tell who are the stars, the subs, the grunts, but they all definitely belong, marked difference to the non-athletes, something in their muscle tone, the way they walk, the sparkle in their eyes; they are predominantly young after all, but even back in the day when I interviewed the grinders and the power forwards and the stay-at-home defensemen of the Boston Bruins for a radio documentary I was doing on the retirement of Bobby Orr, these men, elite athletes, were hardly hidden, through my young man’s eyes like Greek gods. I look back now and remember how I was filled with awe, struck dumb, feeling foolish with my school-issue microphone, in their smiling, robust-to-bursting presence, marked as different to you and me as if the Lord’s hand had marked them with ash as I said a little Lenten prayer, the good Anglican church boy I was at the time.

A months later I saw an image of myself in a plate-glass façade in Ottawa, a couple of years since the hospital horror, my pulmonary embolism and leg blood clots, and while in the beginning I saw running as little more than medicinal, a pastime that kept the blood rushing through my veins, the first year, 1976, shuffling like an old man, not even aware of my pace, or if I was I’ve blacked it out now, but that evening I saw myself out of the corner of my eye, reflected in the dying light, while across the road stood a kid with a skateboard under his arm, who had stopped to watch as I was legging it home. Maybe only curious, but in my mind’s eye I think admiring, imagining perhaps this run is worth paying attention to. I’m not going fast but with authority, or something close enough to it to capture an audience of one, and for the first time I think, hey, maybe I’m a runner. For once I’m not hidden, my field not just one of solitude, and when I race in marathons now – Boston, my third in less than a year – and complete strangers call out, “Nice pace!” “You’re looking great, keep it up!” “Congratulations, man!” I often return to that time in Ottawa when I first saw myself as a runner, as someone who was hidden but at times found, and with no small joy, appreciated for what I’ve worked hard to do.

*

Yesterday (Ash Wednesday) it’s prophylactic Aleve (2) and plans for water at the Picnic House, Prospect Park, Brooklyn. At best, going for a ten-miler, more than a month now since anything of that length and I’m more than a little unsure, pushing spring in my Expos T, a gift from K, and skin-tight shorts for hamstring support. Along Sixth Avenue, all is well, the wind whips from the harbor, wintering Lady Liberty hailing me in the distance, arms red-tail red in the icy wind, at the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery I’ve the light but a funeral procession and gi-normous flora display, St. Paddy’s Day float-size, wends its way through, running on the spot, thinking there’s still plots to be had, imagine that; the Quaker Parrots are out, loud, but this time I see a few of them, ruffled feathers near their Con Ed substation nests, this winter day the cold a piker; pace is fine, even fast as I climb 36th Street, the perimeter of G-W, from a certain point it’s a verdant valley of the dead, more England than here especially on this gray day, a Jackie Gleason depot bus pauses, its driver waves me on, waiting to turn in to the entrance, then a white school bus idles, asphalt jungle of smashed glass, shreds and whole car bumpers, empty plastic bags, trash of all types, “Red Hook Commercial Driving School,” and on the back, in Cyrillic, I recognize from a bygone Russian conversation class, “We Speak Russian,” in the zone now, around G-W and up through the wind tunnel alongside the Prospect Expressway, darling snake-shape park of benches and paving stones, Det. Joseph Mayrose by name, to the top of Windsor Terrace, where I live and breathe, the Ash Wednesday church bells toll, Our Lady’s Field, and notice for the first time across the road, a stained-glass doorway, a century-old sign “BOYS” of the parish school, and soon I’m in the park, drinking water at the Picnic House, once around the loop, and surprised at the end, judging from the pace as I look up at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Clock Tower that I’ve been out 1:35, with no pain, that’s about 11.5 miles to start the day, happy as a clam.

Next: Running for Your Life: Week Four