It isn’t often that a non-runner asks me about my training or running, but it does happen. Usually it is to comment on the overstated health benefits of running versus a sedentary lifestyle. Other times it is to subtly suggest that perhaps all this running isn’t exactly a sane adult pastime. Occasionally, though, someone will ask out of genuine curiosity or mild admiration. Eventually, the talk turns to miles run which leads to training which leads to time. As I explain that, for someone like me, a 30 mile running week in combination with some cross-training means a major commitment…

The Penguin Chronicles :: March 1995 :: You may be a Penguin I can see the finish line, and I feel an emotional rush that transforms me from a mere mortal into a mythical creature with winged feet. Well, OK, maybe not winged feet. How about a mythical creature with webbed feet? Forget eagles and sparrows, it’s time to celebrate the power of penguins.  The runner as Penguin? No way!! Gazelles, Cheetahs, thoroughbreds. The metaphors for runners always seem to conjure up images of fleet footed creatures moving swiftly across the landscape barely casting a shadow. What those metaphors miss…

Yes, I was there. Through the most unlikely cosmic hiccup, my name was drawn in the Boston lottery. I ran the 100th not because I possessed the talent, but because I had the audacity to put my name on a postcard. Destiny, it seems, has a sense of humor. Destiny also has a taste for irony and melodrama. I found out that my name had been selected on October 10, two days after the “Fox Cities Marathon”. Two days after my wife and running partner had missed qualifying at Fox Cities, in part because of her concern for my injury….

Why runners should set their sights on their next steps, instead of where they’ve already been. It’s been said that you can never put your foot in the same river twice. Rivers are alive, flowing, and in constant motion. The river that was there a moment ago is long gone. The same is true for music, art, and movies. We never really hear the same song twice or see the same piece of art twice. What we bring to a second or third or hundredth exposure to a song or a painting is always different than the time before. We…

If you live where there are 4 real seasons then you already know that there are 4 absolutely must run days of the year. These are the cut school, skip work, and get a sitter for the kids runs. It’s the run in the cool, gentle rain in the summer, the crisp fall morning, the first winter snow. And if you live in Chicago where winter starts before Halloween, the best of those days is the first day in spring when you get to run in shorts. It’s opening day. As a boy, a group of us cut school and…

It’s not too late to be what you might have been! One of the insidious diseases that strikes at middle age, and trust me at 54 I am solidly into middle age, is one’s memory fading. I’m not talking about a serious medical condition, I’m talking about the blurring of what was with what might have been with what really is.  It’s not so much that the older I get, the better I used to be, but that the older I get, the MORE I think I COULD have been. What I used to think of as merely broken dreams…