Weekend warrior - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 on November 1, 2009

It’s opening night for the Celtics tonight.

I think this could be the best season the Celtics have had since the early 90s, when we said goodbye over several years and for several reasons to Larry Joe Bird, Chief, DJ, McHale, Reggie Lewis and Lenny Bias. There is talk of a new Big Three, which of course will be nothing but heresy unless and until the new guys hang a flag.

Back in the 80s, when Larry was the king of this city and I had a third of a front-row season ticket at the old Garden through several amazing seasons, I also had a moment of totally unintended athletic competition with Larry Joe Bird.

I was in my 30s, mind you, and had been doing a little running. Enough to compete as a weekend warrior in an occasional 10K or 5-miler and to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack. Long before Big Man Getting Smaller, I was one of those guys of whom it was sometimes said, “Moves well for a big man.” I probably went around 220 or 225 at the time.

One weekend in March, a bit before St. Paddy’s day, the Celtics organization was the primary sponsor of a road race they called the “Shamrock Classic,” making a circuit around the North End and the Waterfront. I found out that the race would include something fair uncommon in those days, in addition to the various age groups, a “Clydesdale” division for guys over 210.

The race started and finished in front of the Garden. I wasn’t fast, but I was fast enough that I figured there was a good chance that the Clydesdale trophy might have my name on it, even though there was a huge field, pumped up by Celtics marketing.

I started toward the back of the pack and and picked guys off as I went along. I can’t remember now how long the race was, or what my time was, but I did fairly well, and when I finished I got a cold beer and waited for the results print-outs to get posted on a brick wall across the street from the Garden. I thought I had a decent shot.

Finally they posted the sheet with the Clydesdale winner on it. I had just about convinced myself that another fat guy could not have beaten me.

I squinted in the sunlight to read the name of the Clydesdale winner, and I was right. Another fat guy had not beaten me.

The Clydesdale winner was a 6’9”, 239-pound guy from French Lick, Indiana, who was about 10 years younger than me. He kicked my ass.

He wore number 33, as he always did. This is also the number of pounds the Big Man Getting Smaller has lost in the past 9 weeks.

Happy Celtics Opening Day, Larry. Here’s a song for you.


I feel lucky that I somehow grew up to be somebody who appreciates sports. A fan. And I feel doubly lucky to be living in Boston throughout so much of the past 50 years. Not everyone sees any significance in what guys like Bird, Russ, Pedro, Bobby Orr, Big Papi, Yaz, Cooz, DJ, Brady, Flutie, the Splinter, Rodgers, Joanie, and El Tiante did when they strapped them on. I do. And nobody ever did more credit to any team's uniform than Larry Bird did when he stepped on the parquet as a Celtic.

Thursday's Soundtrack

This is kind of a self-improvement song. The video is Jewel's cover, yodeling and all, but here is a link to the Indigo Girls' original. Words and music by IG Emily Saliers.

Actually I think the yodeling is by Woody's granddaughter (and Arlo's daughter) Sarah Lee Guthrie. The song is "Closer to Fine." I remember the first time I played it for my daughter Kippy when she was about 11. She didn't give it a high rating. She said it sounded like a sound they'd sing around the campfire at Farm & Wilderness. No doubt.

It's been a hell of a week here in East Arlington....

Amazing week.

In a very intense and disciplined burst of energy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I put the finishing touches on a book that I have been working on, off and on, for months. It is still going through its paces in terms of final proofing, documentation, backmatter, line-editing, and cover design (see image at right), but I feel great about the book and I am looking forward to seeing it in a Kindle edition by the end of this week and in paperback later in July.

Tuesday evening I swam a mile in the pool. 72 laps. I think I have already crowed about that, but, well. A mile. I started the swimming regimen on May 19 and prior to that I had now done anty lap-swimming, or any real swimming other than sloshing around in the ocean or a pond, for over 40 years. I am still feeling great from that, and I was back in the pool Thursday for 30 laps Thursday evening.

After I got out of the pool I picked up my pal at her office and we went to a party. Not just any party. The 60th birthday party of a great old friend from my undergraduate days hanging out at the South House Grille, wetting our whistles with a gallon jug of Vino Fino on Saturday nights, and other pursuits. During the past couple of years I have been blessed to enjoy wonderful times re-connecting with a great group of people from those years, and spending some time with Jim has been one of those treats. Being at his 60th birthday party was special, and the beer, the lobster, and the vintage music were damned good too. And I danced -- much to the astonishment of my pal, and dance partner.

All of that -- Thursday's 30 laps and the subsequent partying -- also occurred after I completed an intense day meeting Thursday's weekly deadline for my Kindle Nation email newsletter, with over 3,000 words of fresh content.

Then on Friday -- after my mid-day nap -- my pal and I took my son Danny, who will be 11 in six weeks, to a concert. David Archuleta, KSM, and Demi Lovato. I had noticed Archuleta's name before, only because Louise Archuleta -- no relative, I assume -- was one of the community leaders with whom I was honored to work as a community organizer in Danieldale, Texas, a little over 30 years ago. (We brought picnic baskets and blankets and occupied the offices of the City of Dallas; director of parks and recreation until we wona commitment of CDBG funding for what came to be known as Danieldale ACORN Park, but that's another story.) Otherwise, these were not names with which I had been familiar. Let's just say that while we had great fun at the concert, the experience did not knock the Stones and BB King at the Garden (November 1969) from the top spot among my all-time list of favorite concerts. And I lasted as long as Danny.

Tonight my pal and I are going to babysit my 15-month-old grandson Callum, and this afternoon after making some good progress on the cover design above I went out on a beautiful day and had a great sweaty 35-minute run -- something I can only do now and then, but which I enjoyed greatly on a day when the pool was closed.

And those are just the things I can tell you about.

Negative Splits, on a Bloody Mary Morning

After I mentioned to my daughter Kip that I'd been nursing a headache this morning, I joked that "a couple of Bloody Marys and I should be good to go." And there have been mornings that I began with "the hair of the dog," as we say. I would even go so far as to say that I may remember some of them fondly.

It's just that none of them have come in the last 30 years. And that's a good thing.

I didn't drink a drop last night, which means that last night was like most nights for me. I have beer perhaps half a dozen times a month, and once in a blue moon I'll chase it with a second. But the headache that I felt when I woke up about 5:30 this morning after a solid eight hours could have done justice to many a morning from my wayward youth.

Second cup of coffee, third cup, and that bad head was still with me. Ate some breakfast, didn't matter. The time when I should have left to get to the pool for my weekday morning swimming regimen came and went. There would be another adult swim period at 5 pm, and maybe I could manage that.

Then a little after 9, as I was beginning to dip a toe reluctantly into the day's work, I remembered another long-ago antidote to a hangover. When I was 20 there were occasional weekend mornings when I would wake with a throbbing head and go out for a ten-mile run. (Or maybe it was a five-mile run that felt like ten miles). I'm sure there were mornings even back then when I could not have managed it, but when I could, it have a marvelous effect not only on how I felt immediately, but on how I felt all the rest of the day. Suggesting that endorphins may be a better antidote than the hair of any dog, even on that bit you the night before.

Anyway, I was noticing through the day yesterday, after my 24 laps in the morning, that I have been feeling very good, and more limber than usual, the past few days. The swimming is doing its job -- Big Man Getting Smaller is also, for now at least, Old Coot Feeling Younger. And so, in a bit of a nostalgic nod to those mornings when I was 20, I pulled a pair of shorts on, laced up my tennies, and headed out for a run.

I don't want to overstate this. It was a slow run, be sure of that. But the reason I have been swimming in BMGS 2.0 is that I have not been able to get run enough to get sufficient exercise, due to the various joint, bone, and muscle injuries that I acquired over the course of several decades of overdoing the running, including half a dozen marathons, plenty of training, and 6-minute miles and 38-minute 5-milers as a late-40s Clydesdale competitor.

So I ran slowly for half an hour. It felt great. From my house down to the bike trail along Spy Pond and up a few streets to Pleasant Street, and back. All running, no walking, and I was never breathing hard.

And I suspect my friend Ned may be the only reader here who will get the significance of this, but when I got to my house on the way back I had to run another 50 yards to make the "back" of the out-and-back the same time-length as the "out." That means I did "negative splits," which means that I was going faster on the way back than the way out, which means that my creaky legs and knees and ankles and hips were loosening up as I progressed.

I know better than to think I could do this every day. The swimming is still the key. There are no final victories, especially at my age. But there are little tiny victories along the way, and I take great satisfaction in them.

The Beaver, Johnny Weissmuller, and Me

We all share this birthday.

In honor of Tarzan (aka Johnny Weissmuller, June 2, 1904 – January 20, 1984) I got up and hit the pool shortly after 7 am for 22 laps. Felt great, and my 59th birthday seemed like all the more reason to stick with my routine.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself and try to project what I am going to do in honor of the Beaver, aka Jerry Mathers, but I'll find something. After all, I'm a big fan.

Swimming is really working out for me, I'm here to say after two weeks. I'm getting a good workout in 5 days a week, and I have not experienced a single moment of pain. Even back when I was running marathons and training 40+ miles a week in the mid-90s, I invariably finished each day's workout wondering if I was going to be able to work out the next day, or if nagging injuries would keep me from it.

And as a good exercise routine almost always does, it seems to be helping me to rest, to eat in a generally healthy and moderate way, and even to focus more in a more effective and satisfying way on the rest of my life. So I'm being a little bit of a cheerleader for "my program," here, but that's just another part of making it work.

What a terrific birthday I am having, and it's been going on since Saturday! The people who care about me have been taking very sweet care of me, and I am even enjoying this rather remarkable Facebook phenomenon of experiencing lots o' love from long-time friends as well as FB Friends of a more recent variety.

Some of you have known me since the time when that photograph on the left was snapped of me running cross-country at Mount Hermon back in the Fall of 1967. (I don't know who took the photo, but thanks to Keith McCasland for scanning it from the '68 yearbook and emailing it to me). Anyway, that's the guy I am looking for now, my inner 17-year-old, when I jump in the pool each morning these days. I don't have any illusions of being 17 again, but I am feeling more confident each day that this year I am beginning today, my 60th year, will be a year in which I feel younger each day. It's all up to me ... and, in a way, up to Tarzan and the Beaver.

Thanks for checking in, and thanks to many of you for your birthday wishes!

Romance Leads to Regimen Leads to Results

Among the thoughts I was thinking as I swam 18 laps at the pool this morning after the scale told me ever so sweetly that I was down another pound since Sunday's weekly weigh-in:

From the Fall of 1966 to the late Spring of 1968 (with the aid of a full scholarship which I am too hung up on class issues not to mention here), I attended Mount Hermon, a boys' boarding school set amidst astonishing beauty on the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. A few year later, happily for its inmates, it was joined with an affiliated girls' boarding school across the river and has been known ever since as Northfield Mount Hermon, or NMH. But while it was just MH, its institutional notion of inter-gender social interaction centered around Saturday night dating events between the school and an extremely active traffic in sometimes perfumed letters between zip codes 01354 and 01360.

While I may not be an expert on normal, I can tell you that this structure of deprivation and brief, intense interaction (and yes, I can assure you that it was intense) was not normal for 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls.

I bring it up now not to launch into any amateur anthropology about teen dating, but because for me it introduces an important discussion about how we motivate ourselves to achieve or maintain higher levels of physical fitness.

Toward the end of my junior year I met an interesting, edgy, pretty girl from Flushing named Meredith. Merry and I dated perhaps a dozen times before school broke for the summer, and while I doubt that either of us would have said we were "in love," I for one had certainly achieved a happy state of limmerance. (It would be ungallant for me to speculate as to what Merry has achieved, but she did write to me and speak to me on the phone, and there were kisses).

That summer I had a great job as a fledgling sports writer covering the Cape Cod Baseball League, and I rented a room in Hyannis just a few hundred yards from an old, not very well kept cinder oval track. Although I was working well over 40 hours a week, nearly every day that summer I went to the track with my stop watch for intense, solo track workouts in which I tried to repeat as many 70-second quarter-mile laps as I could each day without any real sense of how to use rest days or even jogging recovery laps. I had no coach, and I would just run until I couldn't run any more.

I was pursuing a regimen with two purposes:

• I was working to get my time for running a mile as far under 5 minutes as possible, so as to insure I would be a worthy contributor to the varsity cross-country and track teams at Mount Hermon during my senior year; and
• I was doing all of this to please Merry, to impress her, to attract her, and perhaps even to make her want to smile at me and kiss me.
  

Now, as it happened, Merry could not have cared less about cross-country, track, or my time for the mile. She may have found some appeal in the temporary "sixpack" and muscles that were natural concomitants of the athletic accomplishments for which I was training, but I wouldn't put too fine a point on that. Long story short, her parents did not approve of the age difference between us, or perhaps of me, and they succeeded in putting the kibosh on our romance, as parents sometimes do, often with good cause.

But that didn't matter. The point is that romance led to regimen led to results. My attraction to Merry, and my desire to attract her, played a powerful role in my capacity to get to the track on a daily basis and do what I thought I needed to do there.

What I was doing at 17, although I was far from figuring it out then or in several other times since when I have acted on similar motivations, was tapping into forces older than our species itself. I won't try to offer any finer explanation here, but it would be foolish not to realize the power of these forces or to let them assist us when they are available. My life in this my last week as a 58-year-old -- and specifically the fact that I am what is called "single" -- is not all a walk through an open field. But to the extent that it has put me in a position to experience limmerance again -- and to say any more here, about that, would to get ahead of myself -- is nicely beneficial and even motivating to the ongoing efforts of BMGS 2.0.

I didn't plan it this way. But I'm happy to have it working for me.

The Yardbirds said it all, of course:

Yardbirds - For Your Love
Lyrics

(Graham Gouldman)
For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
I'd give you everything and more, and that's for sure.
For your love.
I'd bring you diamond rings and things right to your door.
For your love.

To thrill you with delight,
I'll give you diamonds bright.
There'll be things that will excite,
To make you dream of me at night.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.

For your love, for your love,
I would give the stars above.
For your love, for your love,
I would give you all I could.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
I'd give the moon if it were mine to give.
For your love.
I'd give the stars and the sun 'fore I live.
For your love.

To thrill you with delight,
I'll give you diamonds bright.
There'll be things that will excite,
To make you dream of me at night.

For your love.
For your love.
For your love.
For your love.

You Getting Up in the Morning, or, in This Case, Me

I'll start with a few basics today:

• Calorie intake yesterday was about 2,000, including a healthy chicken fajita salad with iced team and only moderate chip-picking with my friend and ex-bro-in-law Pete at Jose's for lunch and a two-stop dinner (cottage cheese with apple sauce and Kashi at 6 and a vegan tofu-kielbasa quesadilla when I finished my weekly Kindle Nation newsletter at midnight). (Yes, I occasionally eat at midnight, but I try not to do it without a plan. More on that later).
• The scale is moving in the right direction, down from 257 to 256.2 today. (Yes, I have a scale that measures tenths and I do weigh myself every day. More on that later).
• Probably most important of these three items, in the long run -- I was back in the pool at 7:15 am and moved up from 12 laps to 14 laps, or 300 yards, with a slightly higher and thus more intensive ratio of breaststroke to backstroke.
  

The swimming feels great. It is taxing, and of course since I am already swimming more than I have swam, swimmed, or swum in over 25 years I notice that I am breathing heavily at the end of each two-lap segment. I take a little 60-to-90-second break between each segment and then start flailing my arms again. Each day, for now, I will try to add two laps to what i did the day before. We'll see how that goes.

I wondered if I would just be bored to death by the likelihood that I couldn't do enough to feel like I had done anything, but 12 laps and 14 laps on the first two days isn't a bad start. Those who've read my Boston Sports by the Numbers blog will not be surprised to learn that in my marathoning and coaching days I used to have a lot of fun paying attention to times, workout stats, interval clockings, and the like. Certainly swimming couldn't offer me that kind of juice. Then I noticed two guys in the lanes to my right this morning, consulting a printout after each segment and telling each other things like "dolphin down, butterfly back" and "19 strokes down, 15 back." So I started to realize that there might even be a future for a guy like me in the pool. They were doing 88 laps this morning, 1100 yards. I know 88 laps is a lot more than 14 laps, but somehow it didn't seem impossibly far away, today.

When I got out of the pool, showered, dressed, shot a couple of baskets at the outdoor hoop and walked to my car at 7:50 am, I felt terrific, maybe better than a heavyset 58-year-old guy has any right to feel before 8 o'clock in the morning. I had an impromptu breakfast with a pal and was doing productive work at my desk before 10.

Over breakfast, my pal and I talked about getting up in the morning. You'd think we would have it down by now. I've done it 21,535 times, and my pal has done it hundreds of times more than me. But my impression is that there is a constant need to re-train ourselves.

When my kids had to be at school at a certain hour, or I had to be at work at a certain hour, or both, it was relatively easy even if it was not always fun. But even then, there is a lot of difference between, say, rolling out of bed just in time to shower and get to work by punch-in time, and getting out of bed on my own time, early, with a plan to do one or two simple things aimed at getting my day and me off to a good start.

Meditation, swimming, running, coffee and a book on the deck, a walk around the neighborhood -- it can be any of a number of things, but for me and most others to whom I have spoken about such things, spontaneity is the enemy of success in such endeavors. Our brains are powerful, and most of us, when in bed, like to stay in bed.

When I have been most successful at using my mornings to get my day off to a great start, the key to success has been to make a plan -- "get up at 6:45 am and be in the pool by 7:15," for instance -- and allow myself no negotiation, or even any thinking, until I am inexorably on the path I have planned. In my own case, I actually pretend that I am being operated externally by remote control. (In my 12-step program, we call that "turning one's will over to a higher power.")

Maybe I am dumbing myself down, but the payoff is huge.

In my next post I'll try to come back to those "more on that laters" about midnight meals and daily weigh-ins.

Have a great day. I will.

(Thanks for the beautiful picture of the sleeping polar bear to my brothers and sisters at http://www.firstpeople.us!)

Fresh Pond - 9.21.2007

By the time I got to the gym today it was over 80 with brilliant sun, just too beautiful a day to stay inside and work out on machines. My new gym is less than half a mile from Fresh Pond, so I got into my gym rat stuff and jogged over there to run the 2.5 mile loop around the pond.

I have run that loop over a hundred times. Every Saturday morning, 52 weeks a year, there is an old-school neighborhood footrace there, a classic event that has no entry fee, no prizes, no sponsors, no numbered bibs and no freeloaders (since everyone is a freeloader). If you think it is hyperbole for me to call it a classic event, I’ll just mention here that several times a year, in addition to its several dozen regulars, it attracts world-class Olympic distance runners. Numerous Olympic medal winners have run there. For several years Lynn Jennings was a semi-regular there, driving down from her home in New Hampshire several times a year trying to break 12:00 in the 2.5 miler. (My memory is fuzzy here, but I think she did not make it, that her best was 12:04).

My own personal best in the Fresh Pond Road Race was 17:02, on May 17, 1997. I remember the date because it happens to be the date on which I last got married. My best man and I ran it, and it was one of the few occasions where I ever kicked Stewart’s ass at any sport. I was in very good shape then. So was Annie, the woman I married that day. She’s still running marathons, and I am proud that she is, even though we are no longer together. As for me, I blew out my ankle two months later trying to keep a commitment I had made to my daughter Moriah to run a road race with her. Oh well, sometimes we make promises with our hearts, and our bodies just can’t keep them. I was on crutches the next day and have never been quite the same.

But it was nice to run the loop today for the first time in years. It was beautiful out, and I was feeling a lot of benefit from what I have accomplished, and chronicled here, over the past 3 weeks. My time was 36:05, a little off my personal best. But I ran the whole way, and it was the perfect workout for today.

Afterward I showered and took a quick Jacuzzi at the gym. I usually stay out of the Jacuzzi for hygiene reasons, but I needed it today. Then I got on the scale. I won’t dignify what the scale said by repeating it here. It was a hot day. I’ll just say that, as much as I might be charmed if the scale sweet-talked me into thinking my weight loss was already in the low twenties, the real message is that I have about 5 pounds of re-hydrating to do.

1 comments:

thoughtz said...

I lived on Huron Ave in Cambridge for a while. I loved it there. What a wonderful thing Harvard Square must be this time of year with the students back and things rockin'!
Donna

September 21, 2007 7:54 PM