running

Facing Up To It

August 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: Man was meant to run.” –Percy Cerutty. I am swimming upstream. Come the end of Summer, cool air, touch of Fall, the beginning of the end of things in this cycle, time to take stock, stock up, buy school supplies, bring on the next chapter. With age, my age, comes nostalgia and excitement sometimes in equal doses. Once I was sailing on Lake Superior when the mast broke a long way from shore. We drifted for hours, panicked a little, got it back together, caught a break with a shift in the wind and finally got back to shore the help of neighbor who had seen us drifting away. It had been Summer, lazy, easy and sweet when we set out and Fall, chill, gray and foreboding, the few hours later when we returned to shore. Yeah, we were meant to run, we are also meant to ‘get out there and do it” by whatever means available, every single day, age and weight and troubles notwithstanding, on account of the river waits for no salmon and time waits for no man.

Waddayagonnado

August 23, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as our running—and nothing quite so savage, and so wild.” –Bernd Heinrich. It is no longer a matter of how fast or how far or how fast over how far for me. It used to be that way. It had to be that way. Now the “gentle deep and irrational” along with the “so savage and so wild” is mostly to be found in the writing, in the shooting, in getting to the high places, the hard places, the dark ledges on the trail and seeing “beyond the shadows”, in wrasslin’ to be free of yesterday and tomorrow… Hello Mr. Day, I’m comin’ for ya and I can tell you this, I need a goddam break from another day of shrug, what the hell, wadddayagonnado. You get my drift?

Early Morning False Alarm

July 9, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

In the distance, while lacing up before 5:00 “Come out with your hands up, you are surrounded!” this down the street on a what was otherwise a very quiet summer morning. I remember those mornings from another time-more like the end of another long bad night. I ran by, recognized a couple of the uniforms from some local races, nodded and got my miles. It was a very hard way to live. When I looked back the lights were still flashing and several lives were heading south. After my run my neighbor asked me what all the fuss had been about; I pointed down the road and said “It took us years to learn that the “shit” could kill you, I guess it’s their turn now.” He nodded, sipped his coffee, hit his smoke and went back inside. I don’t know where he had been when I had been where those kids are now, but he had been somewhere and the memory wasn’t easy. I was glad in that moment that I didn’t have his day.

Moondance by Van Morrison had been playing on the ‘Pod while I was running. When this song/album came out I was working a cement crew in a sewer treatment plant being built in Toronto. My girlfriend and later, wife and mother to my kids, used to get up and make lunch for me. In the early summer morning we would eat breakfast, usually maple syrup bacon and eggs and toast and coffee on the french paned glassed in back porch of our beautiful, soon to be replaced by a huge apartment complex, brick house with a view of downtown. What ever could go wrong with that? It was simpler then and maybe it was easier but inevitably it changed. Now the apartments remain, the wife is ex, the children are grown and lovely…the music and the memories are still plenty good. I can almost taste that bacon and really, there is no need to explain why I was smiling when I finished my run.

They Weren’t There Again Today

May 25, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

“Well, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in/And you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain…” Bob Dylan said that. Apparently it is a Bob Dylan kinda day. Mostly I take pictures of people running; mostly I do it on the trails and in the high country. Sometimes I go to the high sage desert or some flat land mirage. But sometimes all I can see are the people who are not there. The empty seats and the overgrown grass, the listing fences and rolling clouds speak to me of spring time goin’ summer somewhere else, the next generation of the ‘boys of summer’ finding another “field of dreams” on which to slide toward old age. A dyin’ stadium is filled with ghosts and some mornings they are my only companions on the early morning run into the sunrise. I stop sometimes and listen close. I pretend to hear the hot dog vendors and smell the popcorn but mostly I just keep runnin’ because the ghosts aren’t out there, are they, and they aren’t waitin’ around. It ain’t sad and Lord knows it ain’t lonely come sunrise out here, it’s just another day on the road to wherever it is I am goin’.

Tarmac Meditations-My New Year’s Resolutions 2011

December 31, 2010 By longrun 2 Comments

Under the heading of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” what are your New Year’s resolutions for 2011 for the runners in the crowd, the writers, and the peeps with dreams and schemes and other such that might bring them closer to the light in which they believe…post them in the comment section below or keep them to yourself BUT all the best of everything and may this year be a year in which you get closer to to the light of that in which you believe for you and those you love.

Here are mine:

1. turn 65 years old

2. lose 65 lbs

3. run a 65 mile run in my 65th year

4. make a plan, follow the plan consistently, listen to the coaches

5. get to the start line of every event

6. keep a consistent journal of the journey: pretraining, training, and running.

7. write the book, take the pictures

8. Remember, everyday, to be grateful for the gift of being alive and to express it…

9. in an act of kindness for which no thank you is needed.

10. take a step, take another step, breathe, repeat.