Over the next 5 months as Tara Parker-Pope prepares for the New York City Marathon on November 1st, there will be several different training methods shared along with many coaching tips and helpful hints at the NYT Well Blog.

Remember to check out my Marathon Psyching Series

I champion Nicholas Romanov’s Pose Method and Danny and Katherine Dreyer’s ChiRunning and ChiWalking. I came to many of the same conclusions regarding proper running form and style over my 30+ years of marathon and running coaching and doing psychotherapy on the walk and run.

For me the walking breaks help runners who are heel strikers delay or diminish the deleterious effects of this improper running form. Minimal awareness of good running form and style continues to be taught by a large number of marathon training programs that focus on running time or running distance.

What is minimized is the teaching of proper running form and style. So the walking breaks keeps runners from the Bataanesque death marches that deteriorate into injury increasing, bad running form over the last few training miles of long runs.

Over the last few miles, survival running increases chances of injury and reinforces bad running form. Not only can you see (head down, hunched over, tightened leg muscles, grimacing faces, cramps, bloody toes, men with bloody nipples, chaffed inner thighs) it but you can hear it (slapping feet, complaining, whining).

In 1975 when Tad Kostrubala and a group of us started the San Diego Marathon Clinic, the idea was to be on your feet for four hours from the beginning. It didn’t matter if you walked the whole time or if you walked and ran a little.

What happened over the months of weekly four-hour events of being on one’s feet and moving, was that walking became less and running more. Four hours, then, never became something to build up to. Each person knew 4 hours was just the accepted norm. When we began training to run a marathon, being on one’s feet over 4 hours was never a mental barrier. The Tarahamara Indians’ tesquinada was the model. (
Sally Byram a few years ago running her 68th marathon on her 68th birthday at the Carlsbad Marathon downed her end of the run drink: a cold beer.

What was interesting back then is that the cut off time for San Diego Marathon was 4:20 or a 10 minute mile. That meant that the finish line was shut down at 4:20.

On the other hand, from the beginning Jack Scaff and his crew at the Honolulu Marathon were there until the last person finished. Terry Cavanaugh, the head of the Toronto Cardiac Rehabilitation Center, would train his patients to run the Honolulu Marathon each December.

I wondered what all these good looking young women were doing riding their bikes next to a bunch of old plodding men and a few women. Later I found out they were nurses with telemetry and life support should any of these marathoners have an episode. I remember crying as 25 people stood on stage in their black sweats with their red broken heart emblem receiving their marathon finishing recognition.

Marathoning in 2009 has a new face. For many it is a rite of passage. Doing something that was thought impossible. Honoring a loved one by taking on the challenge of the marathon. There are as many reasons for doing a marathon as there are marathoners. There are as many inspiring stories as there are those who started and finished their marathon.

The marathon remains a marvelous metaphor for life and can be experienced, no matter the time, in 26.2 miles, aka 42 Km.

Marathons can have 200 to 30,000-plus participants. What remains an amazement to me is that no matter the size, it is always a parade of individuals doing their own individual Odyssey. No matter what one does to deflect their accomplishment by praising coaches, volunteers, training buddies, the weather, the marathon always remains an event of one. Each person ran, ran and walked, walked the marathon distance on their own with thousands of others doing it on their own.

Show up, or choose to be present. Being present allows us to access the human resources of power, presence, and communication. This is the Way of the Warrior, or Leader.

Pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Paying attention opens us to the human resources of love, gratitude, acknowledgment, and validation. This is the Way of the Healer or Caretaker.

Tell the truth without blame or judgment. Truthfulness, authenticity, and integrity are keys to developing our vision and intuition. Non-judgmental is a key element in the Way of the Visionary or Creative Problem Solver.

Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome. Openness and non-attachment help us recover the human resources of wisdom and objectivity. This is the Way of the Teacher or Counselor.

Angeles’ Reflections for May are on the Wisdom of the Superior Man.

THE WISDOM OF THE SUPERIOR PERSON

1. To have little pride and envy.
2. To have few desires and find satisfaction with simple things.
3. To lack hypocrisy and deceit.
4. To act with awareness of the consequences of one’s actions.
5. To be faithful to one’s obligations.
6. To be capable of friendship even while regarding all with
impartiality.
7. To look with pity and not anger upon those who live evilly.
8. To allow others the victory, taking onto oneself the defeat.
9. To differ from the multitude in every thought and action.
10. To keep faithfully and without pride one’s vows of chastity
and piety.

––”The Ten Signs of a Superior Man,”
paraphrased from a Tibetan text

She has shared her monthly Reflections since the turn of the century and the millenium. In these Reflections she shares monthly practices that help one in their mindfulness practice.

Both Memorial Days are moments indelibly imprinted on my soul because of deep feelings and emotions occasioned by the experiences. In the former by being present most every step of the way and the latter with the overwhelming awareness of a cost of 58,159 lives memorialized on that granite wall. And written between the lines the “3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, and 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians” who also died.

Here is a sharing from Joan Chittister, Order of St. Benedict, on her reflections of this Memorial Day from her Ideas In Passing:

Memorial Day Thoughts
“The scene is burned into my mind to this very day. At the foot of the casket of my twenty-year-old cousin, an only child, killed in Vietnam just weeks before his military discharge, my gentle uncle recited again and again for all to hear his one consolation: his good boy, he said, “had at least died a hero.” I thought of the burning villages and displaced children and raped girls and defenseless dead farmers left behind in other graves in another place that day and, with nothing heroic in sight, went silent and looked away. I knew that young soldiers were victims too.

*****

I have never been able to forget the sight of the mass graves in Russia. They held the bones of 20 million young soldiers who died in World War II defending the country in their own backyards. In city after city the mounds covered the landscape, raised like huge welts on the national body as far as the eye could see. It was an entire generation of Russian manhood gone. I remember, too, the looks of horror on the faces of Russian women left behind in that war when they pleaded with our small, pathetically unrenowned delegation, “Peace, please.” They have been haunting memories. Most of all, these graves, these faces, have acted as filter for every story of war I have ever read since: Bosnia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Iraq, South Africa, the entire litany of political sin, all the deaths, all the pleas for peace.

*****

At the first Iraqi-American dialogue convened by the Women’s Global Peace Initiative in New York on March 29 (2006), the differences were plain. The women’s first agenda did not concentrate on who did what or who profited or lost by the doing of it. “Take the oil. We don’t care about the oil,” one woman cried across the room. “We never got any value from it anyway,” she went on. “Never mind yesterday,” another woman said in answer to the Sunni-Shi’ite tensions. “Forget who did what to whom. We must turn the page now. We must rebuild the country.”

“And what is the first thing that must be done to rebuild the country?” we asked them. I sat with my hands over the keyboard, sure that the list would be long and varied. I was wrong. To a woman, the call was clear: “Take care of our children.”

— from There Is a Season (Orbis) and Joan Chittister: In Her Own Words (Liguori)

Today we will have a small back-yard cookout. Time with family, the gateway to another summer. It is my 73rd. And a time to stop, to think past the hurried pace and economic wound-licking. To give a quiet “thanks” for the commitment, duty, honor and sacrifice of the men and women who gave up their future summers fighting in our wars.

I look back over the history of our country, and its conflicts, and there have been so many – too many – both wars, and young Americans who did not come home. I have returned to where I served, been to The Wall and Gettysburg and Arlington, counted each of the 400 stars (symbols of 1000) at the WWII memorial, looked into the haunted eyes at the Korean War memorial and up at the bronze of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. All in pursuit of finishing unfinished business. It didn’t. It did not release the lingering sadness.

That I can share feelings on another Memorial Day, the writer instead of being written about, is the luck of the draw. I never forget that. I “Googled” 1st Lt. Roslyn Schulte, USAF, St. Louis Chair Bob Schulte’s daughter, lost in Afghanistan earlier this week. I printed and cut out a small picture of Roslyn, and placed it near those of my 24-year-old son and 17-year-old grandson. That makes Roslyn part of our Memorial Day, the Schulte’s in my thoughts and prayers.

Stop for a moment. Look around. You are here. All those with you today are here. Worth pausing to give thanks, to remember…..

MANSIONS OF THE LORD

written by Randall Wallace
set to the music of Nick Glennie-Smith.

To fallen soldiers let us sing,
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing,

Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord.

No more bleeding, no more fight,
No prayers pleading through the night,

Just divine embrace, eternal light
In the Mansions of the Lord.

Where no mothers cry and no children weep,
We will stand and guard though the angels sleep,

Oh through the ages safely keep
The Mansions of the Lord.

Larry

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“Masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their information and their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which. They simply pursue their vision of excellence at whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them they are always doing both.” – James A. Michener (passed on by fellow Chairs Ozzie Gontang and Peggy Beadle)

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Lawrence M. Cassidy
Master Chair

VISTAGE INTERNATIONAL, INC.
The World’s Leading Chief Executive Organization
* Better Leaders * Better Decisions * Better Results

Thich Nhat Hanh spoke on Simple Mindfulness on this first day of a 7 day retreat here in San Diego at Deer Park in Escondido: “Colors of Compassion Retreat – Healing Our Families, Building True Communities”

(He) gives instruction in the basic mindfulness practices of sitting meditation, walking meditation, and awareness of the present moment. Buddhist mindfulness techniques can help to bring the mind back to the body so that you are fully present here and now. For sitting meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh describes simple practices of awareness that increase a sense of well being and release tension in the body. He offers walking meditation as a practice that can help you to live deeply every moment of your life, free from the prison of the past and of the future. He gives instruction, too, in addressing pain and anger in your heart and developing a deeper awareness of and appreciation for everyday moments of life: cooking, cleaning, driving, and working in such a way that you feel peaceful, mindful,and happy.

You can listen to his most recent dharma talks at Plum Village

My member candidate saw that there is an excellent opportunity within one of his other partnerships that would benefit Spriggs; partnering company for a minimal investment. On the upside it would increase revenues and cash flow for her company. On the downside,  they would own a property that might take 5 or 6 years before they would see the return on their investment.

He saw her as resistant.  Some of his team members because of Spriggs’ resistance were picturing her as the enemy and used words to emphasize that position: against us; fighting; in it for themselves; going to do us in. She had become the problem. She was standing in the way.

As the member candidate and I talked over breakfast at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines on this rainy San Diego morning, I said:  The problem named is the problem solved. From all you’ve told me, this woman is the problem.  He agreed, that she was the problem.  I asked:  Is she the real problem? Yes!, he replied, a bit irritated that I wasn’t getting it.  She holding us back from getting the money that we need to go forward.

So, if she said she wished she could help but was unable to assist and you didn’t see her as the problem; what would the problem be then?  He thought for a few moments, stirring his coffee.  Well, if she’s out of the picture, it would be a capital investment issue.

Interesting, he said with a smile.  So if she’s not the problem, and it’s a capital investment problem; who problem is it?, he said thinking to himself aloud.   Bigger smile.  He looked at me saying in a questioning tone: The problem named is the problem solved.

We talked a few more minutes.  He got up to leave and I said I was staying a few more minutes at the table to make a call.  As I finished my call I saw that he had left the Vistage application form I had given him under the receipt folder. Damn, now I’ll have to mail it to him or stop by on Monday to give it to him.

As I walked out, I  noticed that the rain had stopped and it was sunny overhead and more dark clouds rolling in.  Moving down the sidewalk toward my car, I see his car turning toward me from the automated ticket kiosk.  I smile, knowing I can give him the application and I’ve saved myself a trip.

He rolls the window down, realizes that he forgot the application as I hand it to him. He smiles: I just talked to my office and my vice president of development said: We’re having another Spriggs’ problem. I told him: No, we’re having a capital investment problem.  He laughs, says: See you Tuesday and drives away.

Cool.  It’s drizzling and still sunny overhead as I walk to my car.  I thank Pat Murray for giving me that gift many years ago:  The problem named is the problem solved. If you want to solve the right problem be sure you name it correctly. Off to Kathy across the street at  Anaphore.

This video is seen through the lens of a cell phone.

Mankind Is No Island

As Thich Nhat Hanh would share:

“When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.”

Back in San Diego, last night I watched the musical rendition of Studs Terkel’s book: Working. Another reminder of recognizing and honoring all people who do the work they do: the receptionist, the housewife, the iron worker, the flight attendant, cleaning lady, the mill worker, UPS delivery man, trucker.

As Coach Gene Stallings would put it: It’s about the little people. The people we don’t recognize. The people we take for granted. Often they are in front of us and they are invisible.

The Little Prince’s” It is with the heart that one see rightly; for what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The people behind what you sit on as your read this. The person who put together the chair you sit on. The person who upholstered it. The person who bent the steel to create the frame. The people who forged the steel. The helmsman who delivered the iron ore to the railhead. The crane operator scooping the ore into ore cars. The miner drilling out the coal for the blast furnace. The housewife who prepared his lunch. The woman who planted the rice seedlings.

In the musical, the people behind the scenes are visible or audible. At the beginning a voice (counts down, directs the lights, the fades, the screen coming down, the projector on, music) becomes audible that we the audience never hear reveals the complexity behind what is visible. During some scene changes, the wardrobe people come out with change of clothes, off with the wig, on with the hat, off with the moustache, on with the sweater…and their gone…and a vital middle aged man in 30 seconds morphs into a retiree. The guitarist in the orchestra behind a meshed backdrop, walk down to the front of the stage and sings.

I cheered extra loud as all the people behind the scenes took their bows.

Namaste.