THE PENGUIN CHRONICLES :: JUNE 1995 :: DOING YOUR BEST Doing one’s best–sounds like an easy enough concept. “Just do your best, that will be fine,” we are told by teachers and parents. But we quickly discover that doing one’s personal best is not enough. If you were like me, you found out at an early age that simply doing YOUR best wasn’t fine. At least it wasn’t fine if there was someone else who’s best was better than yours. If someone else could say their alphabet or color inside the lines or sing a melody or hit a ball…

This morning, like most mornings when I’m home, I made my way downstairs to get a cup of coffee. I know that the computer was a great invention, and there have probably been other significant inventions in my lifetime, but for my money the BEST invention is the automatic coffee maker. Waking up to the smell of coffee already brewed is magical. But I digress. As I looked out onto the deck there was frost on the railing. Real frost. Honest to goodness frost. FROST. When you live in Chicago, or any location that has four actual seasons, that first…

I wasn’t always as slow as I am now. I used to be much slower! I wasn’t always a Penguin. I wasn’t always as slow as I am now. I used to be much slower! It took 40 years to become so overweight and out of shape that running a mile and running a marathon were equally unthinkable. For most of those 40 years, I looked at runners as if they were some mutant sub-species of the human race. I looked not with awe nor with envy as runners in my neighborhood trudged through rain, heat, cold and wind. I…

I’ve known Thom Gilligan, the driving force behind Marathon Tours and Travel [Marathon Tours] since I first went with him to Antarctica in 2001. Since then, I’ve traveled with him as a part of his staff 6 times. Thom is an old-school, hide-bound, Greater Boston Track Club singlet, nylon shorts runner. There’s no doubt that the drive that has made his company so successful was there – and is still there – in his running. We were chatting at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon Expo this past weekend when he said that, if you didn’t know better, you would…

Note the date. November of 2000. I talk about having run 20 marathons. I’ve run 45 now and I still feel the same way. November 2000 Prized Possessions The monuments to my childhood were all over my parent’s house: a plaster cast of my hand, the Valentine’s card I made. My home is filled with similar monuments to my son’s childhood: a wreath made of rotini pasta that hangs on the door every Christmas, the rock on which felt feet, head, and tail are glued in a shape that looks–if you have imagination–very much like a turtle. They are prized…

It happens to all of us. Sometimes it’s instantaneous. Sometimes it’s a slow change that we barely notice. Sometimes there’s a reason. Sometime’s it doesn’t make sense at all. But, it happens. Our motivation, our MoJo, is just gone. In the nearly 20 years that I’ve been writing about running and walking and living a healthy, active, lifestyle this is probably what I am asked about the most: what to do when what used to be easy is now impossible. How do you find the joy that is now gone. It’s not easy, but I do have a few tips….

Survival of the slowest We. The few, the proud, the plodding. Steven Pinker, in “The Language Instinct“, suggests that if language didn’t exist, people would be so driven to communicate that they would create a language. So strong is our instinct toward communication that there are almost no recorded instances of groups of people who have not developed a means of talking to one another. Surely our ancestors had a running instinct as well. It’s hard to imagine a community of humans that would not have included runners. Some, though, then as now, were just a little slower than others….

I was standing at the finish line of the RnR Providence Half Marathon this past Sunday, doing my best to congratulate those coming to the line when I looked up, and, about 50 yards from the finish line there was a guy holding an inflatable mermaid over the fence. My curiosity got the best of me and I walked down to see what was going on. It was, simply, a guy with a 3-foot tall inflatable mermaid. When I asked him what he was doing he said he was just trying to get people to High-Five the Mermaid. That’s all….

Venturing off-road leads to simple yet profound discoveries. I’ve never been much of a trail runner. Okay, I’ve never been much of a road runner either, but that’s not the point. As one whose feet never get more than an inch off the ground, I worry about bumps in the sidewalk. So it’s hard to imagine encountering branches, roots and rocks. But I finally gave in. With all the hoopla about the pleasures of trail running, I thought I should at least see what the fuss was about. And to my surprise, I discovered a fun, new running environment. It…