On Monday afternoons it’s always a challenge to get the kids to focus. The first Monday is May is especially rough. The school as a whole is beginning its final sprint to graduation in less than four weeks, and kids are struggling with too many commitments, too little sleep, and the ever-present anxiety that one botched quiz will drop an A to an A-, or an A- to a B+, or — the thought is almost too horrible to contemplate — a B to a C+. On any other weekend, they might have had enough down time to recover a bit, but Saturday night was the school formal — and after all the preparations, the event itself, and sleeping in on Sunday, all of a sudden it’s Monday and where did the weekend go, anyway?
So at the start of practice I’ll gather everyone for announcements, try to shush the side conversations, ask for the attention of kids who have a million other worries besides Track at that moment, and begin talking — about the Penn Relays. Continue reading
On Sunday morning, on a gorgeous spring day of bright sun and an emerald blush of new leaves on ancient trees, a crowd of two hundred aged runners took to the streets of Dedham, Massachusetts to race in the venerable James Joyce Ramble and contest this year’s USATF National Masters 10K Road Race Championship. I say “aged” at least partly in jest. The masters championship was open to anyone 40 or over, and 40 years old seems very young to me, indeed. Continue reading
These days, we no longer puzzle over the question of why runners run. That used to seem like an important philosophical question, but nowadays we’re awash in evidence that regular exercise keeps us healthy in mind and body, and that running in particular conveys a myriad of benefits from better mental functioning to greater longevity. Oh sure, there are those who point out the dangers of extreme devotion to sport, and maybe in the end they’ll be right that “serious” runners who persist in high-mileage, high-intensity running over a number of years are prone to negative outcomes compared with those who are more moderate. But overall, there’s a broad recognition that running is a pretty good deal, and a respectable and healthy choice for many. Continue reading
A few days ago, a friend asked me for suggestions on where to go to watch the Boston Marathon. It was an innocent question, and I wished I had had a simple, straightforward answer. But the question threw me instead into a tailspin of doubt and second-guessing. For each possible viewing location, I easily came up with half a dozen drawbacks, and in the end probably made it sound like there’s no good place to watch the race.
Which is nonsense. The problem isn’t that there aren’t good vantage points, the problem is that there are too many, or, to put it another way, there’s just too much race to watch. Continue reading
(Image: Scatter plot of BAA Marathon finish times by Bib number. Source: marathoninvestigation.com)
To say I have mixed feelings about modern Internet sleuthing to find Marathon cheaters is to put it mildly. On the one hand, there’s something absolutely fascinating about watching “The Internet” sift through race splits from timing mats, official race photos and videos, qualifying times, public data from GPS tracking services, and social media posts to slowly develop the incontrovertible evidence that someone didn’t run the time and distance they claimed. It’s fascinating in the same way an accident or fire is fascinating: at first you just want to see what the fuss is about, but soon you find you can’t turn away. On the other hand, is it healthy to be so obsessed with other people’s misbehavior? Of course it’s wrong to cheat, and we all want to see justice done, but is it right to feel so good when the result is that a fellow human being’s name and reputation are shamed so thoroughly in the new public square? Continue reading
Over the past few years, I’ve faced many training sessions and quite a few race days when I thought I couldn’t be more unprepared for the rigors ahead. Whether it was injury, lack of training, unwise choices leading up to the race, or mental distraction, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to wrestle with that insistent voice in my head asking “What the hell are you doing here?” And yet, with every passing season, I find that it’s possible to be even LESS prepared, and I marvel that the lackluster readiness I felt in those previous races looks in retrospect like robust fitness compared to my current state of near total breakdown. Continue reading
In Spring, hundreds of flowers;
In Autumn, a harvest moon;
In the summer, a refreshing breeze;
In winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.
– Mumon
The eternal question is: when it’s nasty outside do you pull on another layer or two and venture out into the storm or wait for conditions to improve? As a rule, serious runners are creatures of near-obsessive habit and usually choose venturing out. They might curse the weather, especially in the first moments when they have to leave warm and dry shelter behind, but unless it’s a REALLY bad day, within a few miles most runners will have forgotten that not running was even a choice. Less serious runners — and, I presume, normal people — have no trouble skipping a scheduled run and making cocoa instead. At least, that’s my fantasy. I’m not sure why, but when it’s especially crappy outside and I’m heading out into it, I take a masochist’s pleasure in imagining how much happier other people must be staying home.
These are the things I think about when it’s early spring in New England. Winter can be hard (not THIS winter), but at least you’re braced for it. Spring, on the other hand, is wildly unpredictable, as the past week has reminded us, and trying to prepare for all the weather you’ll see is like planning a birthday party for a dozen three-year-olds. There will be surprises, not all of them good, and someone will always be crying by the end.
Over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate a few semi-predictable milestones amidst the unpredictable daily highs and lows. For example, there’s “First Outdoor Track Workout” Day at the end of March, which meets the dictionary definition of “rude awakening.” For one thing, it requires us to throw on far too many layers to feel anything like speedy; second, it requires us to throw OUT all our notions about pace that we’ve developed over the winter running on lightning-quick indoor tracks. Our first outdoor workout of the year was last Tuesday, and we were buffeted by winds gusting 20-30mph. I say we, but I was so far off the back most of the time that there was no shelter in the pack for me, not that a scrawny cohort of skinny runners would offer much shelter, anyway.
Then on Saturday night/Sunday morning, snow arrived in an angry squall that battered the Forsythia and other early flowers that had believed the hype about an early spring. Sunday was also the day that a lot of marathoners had penciled in for their last long run before Patriot’s Day, and we know how runners — marathon runners especially — hate to deviate form the plan. I was stuck at home that morning, but I was copied on a few emails that morning between my running buddies, as they confirmed plans for a long run right in the middle of the storm. There was the first tentative query: “Are we still on?” and the expected reply “Why wouldn’t we be?” and then the negotiating about how to meet if the Battle Road Visitors Center was closed. The run went off as scheduled, with my friends running various distances, from 16 to 20 miles, and posing at the end for some Japanese tourists who wanted to take pictures of the crazy runners in the snow.
I ran much later that day and by then the sun was out, birds were singing in the trees, and no one bothered taking my picture. Lucky me, I guess, although I had a vague sense of having missed out on something.
On Monday the snow was back with a vengeance, dropping five inches on Concord, where I slipped and slid through my afternoon run, barely able to feel my hands. Unlike Sunday, this storm was followed by biting cold. If there were any birds in the trees, they were muttering curses and wondering whether they had made a terrible mistake migrating so early.
But what are you going to do? Run on a treadmill? Well, yeah, that’s an option. I happened to be at School Monday afternoon (although all athletics practices were canceled), and I saw many kids who wanted to go for runs. Some ventured out and were back in 10 minutes saying it was too a) cold, b) slippery, c) insane to run outside. Others ran 4-5 miles, returning with icicles hanging from their hats. Others put their earbuds in and hopped on one of the treadmills in the Fitness Center. One way or another, the show must go on.
On Tuesday, the snow was over but the large cold air mass had just settled in, so it was another chilly day forcing choices on stubborn runners. Outdoors for another frigid track workout? Thankfully, no. After some begging, our little band secured permission to head indoors for one (last?) workout at BU in the climate controlled and snow-free confines of the indoor track there. Surely by next week, we’ll have spring again? Does enjoying the indoor track make us wimps?
Soon enough there will be other seasonal milestones. Following the first outdoor workout, and the unexpected (but predictable!) early April freeze, we’ll experience the oven-like temperatures of the first really sweltering day (for my friends’ sake, please let it not fall on Patriots Day…), and then the three days of rain that always spoils the emergence of the lilacs, and then summer, thunderstorms, humidity, drought, a plague of locusts. All useless things, really. Because in the end, there’s really only one question and one possible answer:
Are we still on?
Why wouldn’t we be?
I have to admit right at the start that the title I chose for this post is intentionally simplistic. Even among non-scientists like me, it’s generally understood that the old notion that there are single genes responsible for complex physical characteristics, capabilities, or behaviors is badly misguided. Instead, even relatively easy-to-measure traits like height are the product of complex interactions between many genes, and are also influenced by environment and individual experience (think “training”) that results in the expression or suppression of certain genes. Continue reading
On Saturday I helped some friends move from their small apartment in Watertown, Mass. to a much more spacious apartment in Acton. Although the old apartment, located on the first floor of a two-story house near Watertown Square, appeared compact from the outside, it had the astonishing ability to bring forth multiple truckloads of stuff. In fact, even before Saturday, several sizable loads of boxes had been extracted, and after Saturday there would still be lots left to transport, but that hardly seemed possible given how much tonnage we moved on Saturday afternoon. The effect of bringing bulky items out of the house was a little bit like liberating an endless series of clowns from a Volkswagen, only in this case it was pieces of Ikea furniture, not clowns. Continue reading
the runner eclectic 