Flab is in, I’ve noticed. Consider, if you will, Tyson Fury, the world’s best boxer, who wuz robbed, if you can call a split decision robbery, last winter after out-pointing the champ, Deontay Wilder, sufficiently to dethrone him. The guy looks to be in as much shape as your average Suffolk County Transit driver, although his outlier status might have less to do with the fact that he’s a 6-foot-9 white Brit than with his pointy Woody Woodpecker nose, which appears never to have been broken.
Better yet, how about Andy Ruiz, that tub of tattooed lard who in June shocked a chiseled Anthony Joshua to become the new holder of a confounding alphabet soup of heavyweight titles, his every blow freighted with that much more of a load? Sports fans, here’s an Everyman who makes the Mets’ once-beloved 280-pound pitcher Bartolo (Big Sexy) Colon look like the male lead of the Bolshoi Ballet.
Excess flesh is cool. More to the point, it’s effective. I saw this “up close and personal,” as Roone Arledge and the boys at ABC Sports used to call it, with all the jiggling midriffs and thighs that left me eating dust in 10K and 8K road races here this summer. Despite the excess baggage, they simply got it done, pounding to the finish line as my pace slowed and my face reddened — with exertion, I might add in my partial defense, not really embarrassment.
There are show horses, and then there are workhorses. My point here is that I fear I’ve come to resemble the former. At 52 and tipping the scales at my high school weight just under 170, I look more like a runner than perform like one. I’ve been hitting the streets to the tune of two to four miles with thudding regularity for years now, without noticeable improvement — that 10K, for example, in 57 minutes, the 8K in 43, almost exactly the same as the year before. It’s as if you’re stuck on this karmic seesaw, your advancing middle age perfectly counteracting your efforts to exercise.
But all is not lost. I come with good news to leaven the bad. For if the word “slovenly” can ever be applied to a distance runner, it can be to me, as I’ve successfully dispensed with all pretense of stretching or preparation. “Warm up en route,” as my father, who ran a 4:39 mile at Suffern High in the 1950s, used to say — that is, not at all.
Remember the Raiders’ grizzled QB Ken Stabler? “Just give him a cup of coffee, and he’s ready.” That’s me. A cooldown after? Nah, what’s done is done. Those cautious days off between runs? Don’t bother, keep rolling, if you let up, something will catch up with you.
The result has been pleasantly counterintuitive, a remarkable absence of affliction: No sore knees, no sensitive heels, no aching hips, all of which hit me at one point or another in my relative youth, by which I mean back before I manfully sired three children.
One of whom, by the way, Penelope, is a fine high school runner. We went together the other day past the silent estates of North Haven, the “together” part lasting about 20 yards before she showed me the nubby undersides of her size-9 Asics. It was good; I treated it like a wind sprint, and then got right back to plodding.
She’s about as thin as a pair of shears, too. Hey, to each her own.