Maybe it’s because the year’s end is near, but I’ve been battling with the 5-year-old “I don’t wanna” version of myself on my last few runs. And so today, to get myself onto the wet streets, I turned the run into a photo expedition by giving myself the challenge of finding at least 10 good shots.

Consciously asking yourself to OPEN YOUR EYES to the world around you always yields something interesting. This morning, that something was….

The avian John Wayne of East River Park:

I’m not sure that you can tell, but that is a giant hawk perched on a fence, taking one for team New York by eating a GIANT RAT. That’s the first rat I’ve seen that was as big as the one in my apartment, so needless to say, HAWK, YOU F’N ROCK. Like John Wayne’s character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he’s the last bastion of a wild world, taking one for the team by eating giant rats while the rest of us go to Washington and launch political careers. Or something like that.

The rest of the photos from this a.m. are after the jump.


Vollmond (Full Moon) at BAM

I saw Pina Bausch at Brooklyn Academy of Music last night – Vollmond, aka Full Moon. It was a dance of romantic relationships at their most turbulent (moon-crazy), of psychic agony and sweet pleasures and emotional sturm and drang. Relationships portrayed through dance (oh God, such dance) as playful, sexy, obsessive, miserable, wonderful, manipulative, co-dependent, abusive, revelatory … but ultimately thrilling and ALIVE. And effing HOT.

Needless to say, I loved it. We all left the theatre feeling the need to dance, and I started wondering why I was spending so much time running that I could be dancing. But today on my run, which I fought like a hibernating bear, I reached a moment where I broke through and went with the music, felt the chill of the October air distributed against my skin, looked up into the sun as I turned a corner and headed into an unknown street, and realized (or remembered) that running, while it may not have quite the erotic heat of dance, does open my heart to that same adventurous, exploratory state that makes me want to ROAR.

Otherwise put, dancing and running both make me hungry, in every sense of the word. And… it’s time for lunch.

There are a whole bunch of things that I do to get myself shifted into a state of concentration for writing and editing. Right now my favorite thing is serious headphones and a Phillip Glass station via Pandora. Not only does it help me focus, it makes me feel like EVERYTHING I’M DOING HAS GREAT GRAVITY AND IMPORTANCE AND SHOULD PROBABLY BE IN AN OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE.

Thank you Phillip Glass. You also make me want to see Edward Scissorhands again.

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New runners! Would-be runners!

If you’re flirting with a running program, but resisting because you believe you’re NOT a runner, or NOT someone who’s fit and healthy – like maybe a free wheelin’ writer, or a smoker, or a lazy sack o’ whatever – take a look at Professor Carolyn Dweck’s book Mindset. Same goes for those who are trying to lose weight, or develop their creative side, or…. almost anything that involves exploring new territory.

Mindset argues that the most successful people out there share a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. People with a growth mindset believe that with hard work and persistence, they can “grow” – learn new skills, improve upon weaknesses, move into new areas of activity and intellect. “Fixies” meanwhile think they’re stuck with what they’ve got and may as well skip the work because they’re never going to get much better. And so they don’t. You may have heard this idea in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent OUTLIERS , which incorporated Dweck’s work.

Adopt a growth mindset and you’ll find it easier to “believe” that you too can be a runner. And if you believe you’re a runner, you’re more likely to act that way.

How to adopt a growth mindset? Slap yourself silly with positive self talk. Tell yourself, “I will improve,” “This will get easier – IF I do it,” “I can run as fast as anybody, with some work.”

Don’t stop at running – silence fixie mutterings to help move yourself in any direction you want to go. A fixed mindset is TERRIBLE for creative work.

Dr. Drew runs to fire up his creativity, too. From Runner’s World:

I wrote almost an entire book while I was running. I can free associate while I run, so I wrote the book Cracked almost entirely while running. Judith Regan, who was the editor and publisher of the book, sort of challenged me to come up with stories. So I went on a run and brought a tape recorder with me. You get into a different mindset when you are running. I would just tell these stories that ended up being the foundation of the book I was writing. I have more spontaneous and interesting thoughts out there, so I would dictate them and then I would transcribe them at home. But the actual story, the things I was saying, I had to run to get my mind in the right place to be that creative and spontaneously trust what was coming out of my head. I’m better at it now because I have written a bit since then, but then I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve never been in a spontaneously creative process before and the running really helped with that.

I like my method better: A series of mnemonic cues storied in a list in the back of my brain that I regurgitate onto a pad the moment I get home. It’s possible that if I carried a recorder I’d get much more written. But I really don’t like to verbalize my mental scribbles, until they’re written down. It tends to bring them down like a Jenga tower.

Note that Murakami, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, says that he rarely gets anything on his runs that would be usable in a book. I think he’s a much more intuitive, gut-level writer. That’s probably because he is GENIUS.

Has anyone read the doc’s book, Cracked? And do you have useful, actionable thoughts, revelations, or insights while running, or do you prefer to zone out?