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Well: A Marathon Run in the Slow Lane
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
After a 10-kilometer road race this summer, a friend apologized for missing me at the finish line. The truth was, she hadn’t lost me in the crowd. She just didn’t wait long enough.
I’m a slow runner. A really slow runner. In that field of 625, I finished in 619th place.
There was a time when I was embarrassed by my painfully slow pace, but not anymore. Since I began training for a marathon this spring, I’ve discovered that the view is a lot more interesting in the back of the pack.
During a five-mile run in Central Park last spring, I paced alongside a double amputee who was using crutches and a single metal leg to propel himself along the course.
At the 13.1-mile Philadelphia Distance Run this fall, I spent a good part of the race alongside an athlete who jumped rope the entire way. Later, I trotted with two women wearing pink feather boas. There was also a “joggler,” someone who juggles and runs at the same time. Nearby was 81-year-old Robert Welsh of Wallingford, Pa. (He won his age group.)
My shirt that day read, “Slow Is the New Fast.”
This weekend, I was again at the back of the pack of the estimated 43,000 who participated in the New York City Marathon, and I was thrilled to be there. About five months ago, I declared that I was going to transform myself from couch potato to runner and complete a fall marathon. I trained using a combination of running and walking, a method espoused by the Olympian distance runner Jeff Galloway and now used by hundreds of thousands of runners around the country.
During my marathon, I ran next to a man wearing an Eiffel Tower costume. Several women raising money for breast cancer drew cheers from the crowds for running in their decorated bras. I also spent time alongside several members of the Achilles Track Club, for athletes with disabilities.
My marathon included four stops to hug my daughter along the route, a quick jaunt into a deli in Queens to buy a banana, and countless high fives with kids along the course. I also spent about three miles talking and walking with Maureen Donohue, 68, of Long Island, who began running at age 56 and was taking part in her 10th marathon. To train, she run-walks a five mile course near her home, takes a coffee break and heads back out again for five more miles. I found her inspiring, and so did the crowd. As we passed by, onlookers shouted, “Go, Mo, go!”
Despite their pace, back-of-the-packers still struggle with leg cramps, blisters and back spasms, and so did I. I finished my first marathon in 6 hours 58 minutes 19 seconds. I know faster marathoners are bothered by so-called plodders. A recent front-page article in my own newspaper quoted a number of marathoners to that effect, saying we had ruined the race’s mystique.
It’s true that marathons around the country are getting slower, as more charity runners and run-walkers take part. In 1980 the average marathon time was about three and a half hours for men and about four hours for women, according to Running USA. Today, the averages are 4:16 for men and 4:43 for women. About 20 percent of the participants in the New York City Marathon take longer than five hours to finish.
But the legendary gold medalist Frank Shorter says the criticisms of slow runners are “snobbery.” “You never hear that from elite runners,” he told me. “Elite runners admire other people’s performance. I find it much better to welcome slow runners to the club than to vote them out.”
Greg Meyer, who in 1983 was the last American man to win the Boston Marathon, says that when he hears such complaints from average marathoners, he replies, “If it wasn’t for the run-walkers, you wouldn’t be finishing in front of anybody.”
The main benefit of the run-walk method is that it eases your body into exercise, makes marathon training less grueling and gives muscles time to recover, reducing the risk of injury. Walk breaks are an ideal way for new runners and older, less fit and overweight people to take part in a sport that would otherwise be off limits.
The downside is that just as you are out on the marathon course about 50 percent longer than the average runner, your training time is much longer, too — four and five hours a weekend for long runs.
About 10 days before the marathon, I began to doubt my ability to finish the race. A flulike illness had sidelined me for a few weeks, and I’d missed some important training runs. I questioned whether it would be worth the effort to straggle over the finish line long after most of the runners had left.
But then, during an easy run on a trail near my house, I spotted another slow runner ahead of me. It took a moment before I realized his off-kilter gait was due to the fact that he was running on a Cheetah foot, an artificial limb that uses a flexible blade for the foot. He was young and fit, and I wanted to know his story, but didn’t stop him to ask. Instead I just watched his rhythmic run, and felt my own worries about race day fade away. It didn’t matter how fast I finished, just that I was out there, enjoying the view from the back of the pack.
Fathers Gain Respect From Experts (and Mothers)
By LAURIE TARKAN, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.
But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.
“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”
As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).
Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.
“In the last 20 years, everyone’s been talking about how important it is for fathers to be involved,” said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. “But now the idea is that the better the couple gets along, the better it is for the child.”
Her research, part of a project based at Princeton and called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, found that when couples scored high on positive relationship traits like willingness to compromise, expressing affection or love for their partner, encouraging or helping partners to do things that were important to them, and having an absence of insults and criticism, the father was significantly more likely to be engaged with his children.
Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.
“The walls in family resource centers are pink, there are women’s magazines in the waiting room, the mother’s name is on the files, and the home visitor asks for the mother if the father answers the door,” said Philip A. Cowan, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who along with his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, has conducted decades of research on families. “It’s like fathers are not there.”
In recent years, several fathers’ rights organizations have offered father-only parenting programs and groups, and studies have shown that these help men become more responsive and engaged with their children.
But a new randomized, controlled study conducted by the Pruetts and the Cowans found that the families did even better if mothers were brought into the picture.
In the study, low-income couples were randomly placed into a father-mother group, a father-only group and a control group of couples. The controls were given one information session; the other two groups met for 16 weeks at family resource centers in California, discussing various parental issues.
In both of those groups, the researchers found, the fathers not only spent more time with their children than the controls did but were also more active in the daily tasks of child-rearing. They became more emotionally involved with their children, and the children were much less aggressive, hyperactive, depressed or socially withdrawn than children of fathers in the control group.
But notably, the families in the couples group did best. They had less parental stress and more marital happiness than the other parents studied, suggesting that the critical difference was not greater involvement by the fathers in child-rearing but greater emotional support between couples.
“The study emphasizes the importance of couples’ figuring parenting out together and accepting the different ways of parenting,” Dr. Kline Pruett said.
Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.
Dr. Kyle Pruett added: “Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what’s going on outside their mother’s arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world.” To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving.
The study was financed by the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, which is looking for ways to involve fathers more at the state’s many family resource centers. Experts say improving the way fathers are treated in many settings, public and private, is an important public health goal.
For example, they say, pictures of families on the walls of clinics and public agencies should have fathers in them. All correspondence should be addressed to both mother and father. Staff members should be welcoming to men. Steps like these promote early and lasting involvement by fathers.
“We want people to think about how positive father engagement in this co-parenting model would work in their foster care agency, local health clinic, pediatric office, adoption agency or school,” Dr. Kyle Pruett said. “That’s where an awful lot of the barriers are.”
At home, the experts recommend that couples keep talking about parenting issues and do their best to appreciate each other’s strengths. A recurring argument among couples is that each partner thinks he or she knows what is right; a mother may accuse the father of allowing too much television, while a father may tell a mother she isn’t strict enough with discipline.
“Instead, they should be saying, ‘How can each of us be the kind of parent that we are?’ ” Dr. Philip Cowan said. “I don’t think it’s abuse for a dad to sit with that little kid watching TV.”
These experts agree that parents should not focus solely on the children.
“Parents work all day, and feel as if they need to give every other minute to the kids,” Dr. Cowan said, “but if they don’t take care of the relationship between them, they’re not taking care of the whole story.”
In the Mediterranean, Killer Tsunamis From an Ancient Eruption
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
The massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea more than 3,000 years ago produced killer waves that raced across hundreds of miles of the Eastern Mediterranean to inundate the area that is now Israel and probably other coastal sites, a team of scientists has found.
The team, writing in the October issue of Geology, said the new evidence suggested that giant tsunamis from the catastrophic eruption hit “coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral.” Tsunamis are giant waves that can crash into shore, rearrange the seabed, inundate vast areas of land and carry terrestrial material out to sea.
The region at the time was home to rising civilizations in Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Phoenicia and Turkey.
For decades, scholars have suggested that the giant eruption, just 70 miles from Crete, might have brought about the mysterious collapse of Minoan civilization at the peak of its glory. The remnants of Thera’s eruption today make up a circular archipelago of volcanic Greek isles known as Santorini.
Thera is thought to have erupted between 1630 and 1550 B.C., or the Late Bronze Age, a time when many human cultures made tools and weapons of bronze. Scholars say the tsunamis and dense clouds of volcanic ash from the eruption had cultural repercussions that rippled across the Eastern Mediterranean for decades, even centuries. The fall of Minoan civilization is usually dated to around 1450 B.C. Geologists judge the eruption as far more violent than the 1883 eruption of the volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which killed more than 36,000.
The five tsunami researchers came from Haifa University, in Israel; Hunter College, in New York City; McMaster University, in Canada; and the University of Hawaii.
The team did its excavations off Caesarea, Israel, a coastal town dating from Roman and Byzantine days. The coastal region was only sparsely settled at the time of the Thera eruption, with no identifiable city.
The team sank a half-dozen tubes into the offshore seabed and pulled up sediment cores for analysis. It looked for standard signs of tsunami upheaval, including pumice (the volcanic rock that solidifies from frothy lava), distinctive patterns of microfossils, cultural materials from human dwellings and well-rounded beach pebbles that seldom appear in deeper waters.
Writing in Geology, a journal published by the Geological Society of America, the team reported finding evidence of three tsunamis — two historically documented ones dating to A.D. 115 and 551, and one from the time of the Thera eruption.
The Thera tsunamis, the team wrote, left a signature layer in the seabed of well-rounded pebbles, distinctive patterns of mollusks and characteristic inclusions in rocky fragments all oriented in the same direction.
The disturbed layer, up to 16 inches wide, came from a few feet below the seabed in waters up to 65 feet deep.
“These findings,” the team wrote, “constitute the most comprehensive evidence to date that the tsunami event precipitated by the eruption of Santorini reached the maximum extent of the Eastern Mediterranean.”
The team added that, if the giant waves were big enough to reach Israel, “then presumably other Late Bronze Age coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral will likely have been affected as well.”
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
After a 10-kilometer road race this summer, a friend apologized for missing me at the finish line. The truth was, she hadn’t lost me in the crowd. She just didn’t wait long enough.
I’m a slow runner. A really slow runner. In that field of 625, I finished in 619th place.
There was a time when I was embarrassed by my painfully slow pace, but not anymore. Since I began training for a marathon this spring, I’ve discovered that the view is a lot more interesting in the back of the pack.
During a five-mile run in Central Park last spring, I paced alongside a double amputee who was using crutches and a single metal leg to propel himself along the course.
At the 13.1-mile Philadelphia Distance Run this fall, I spent a good part of the race alongside an athlete who jumped rope the entire way. Later, I trotted with two women wearing pink feather boas. There was also a “joggler,” someone who juggles and runs at the same time. Nearby was 81-year-old Robert Welsh of Wallingford, Pa. (He won his age group.)
My shirt that day read, “Slow Is the New Fast.”
This weekend, I was again at the back of the pack of the estimated 43,000 who participated in the New York City Marathon, and I was thrilled to be there. About five months ago, I declared that I was going to transform myself from couch potato to runner and complete a fall marathon. I trained using a combination of running and walking, a method espoused by the Olympian distance runner Jeff Galloway and now used by hundreds of thousands of runners around the country.
During my marathon, I ran next to a man wearing an Eiffel Tower costume. Several women raising money for breast cancer drew cheers from the crowds for running in their decorated bras. I also spent time alongside several members of the Achilles Track Club, for athletes with disabilities.
My marathon included four stops to hug my daughter along the route, a quick jaunt into a deli in Queens to buy a banana, and countless high fives with kids along the course. I also spent about three miles talking and walking with Maureen Donohue, 68, of Long Island, who began running at age 56 and was taking part in her 10th marathon. To train, she run-walks a five mile course near her home, takes a coffee break and heads back out again for five more miles. I found her inspiring, and so did the crowd. As we passed by, onlookers shouted, “Go, Mo, go!”
Despite their pace, back-of-the-packers still struggle with leg cramps, blisters and back spasms, and so did I. I finished my first marathon in 6 hours 58 minutes 19 seconds. I know faster marathoners are bothered by so-called plodders. A recent front-page article in my own newspaper quoted a number of marathoners to that effect, saying we had ruined the race’s mystique.
It’s true that marathons around the country are getting slower, as more charity runners and run-walkers take part. In 1980 the average marathon time was about three and a half hours for men and about four hours for women, according to Running USA. Today, the averages are 4:16 for men and 4:43 for women. About 20 percent of the participants in the New York City Marathon take longer than five hours to finish.
But the legendary gold medalist Frank Shorter says the criticisms of slow runners are “snobbery.” “You never hear that from elite runners,” he told me. “Elite runners admire other people’s performance. I find it much better to welcome slow runners to the club than to vote them out.”
Greg Meyer, who in 1983 was the last American man to win the Boston Marathon, says that when he hears such complaints from average marathoners, he replies, “If it wasn’t for the run-walkers, you wouldn’t be finishing in front of anybody.”
The main benefit of the run-walk method is that it eases your body into exercise, makes marathon training less grueling and gives muscles time to recover, reducing the risk of injury. Walk breaks are an ideal way for new runners and older, less fit and overweight people to take part in a sport that would otherwise be off limits.
The downside is that just as you are out on the marathon course about 50 percent longer than the average runner, your training time is much longer, too — four and five hours a weekend for long runs.
About 10 days before the marathon, I began to doubt my ability to finish the race. A flulike illness had sidelined me for a few weeks, and I’d missed some important training runs. I questioned whether it would be worth the effort to straggle over the finish line long after most of the runners had left.
But then, during an easy run on a trail near my house, I spotted another slow runner ahead of me. It took a moment before I realized his off-kilter gait was due to the fact that he was running on a Cheetah foot, an artificial limb that uses a flexible blade for the foot. He was young and fit, and I wanted to know his story, but didn’t stop him to ask. Instead I just watched his rhythmic run, and felt my own worries about race day fade away. It didn’t matter how fast I finished, just that I was out there, enjoying the view from the back of the pack.
Fathers Gain Respect From Experts (and Mothers)
By LAURIE TARKAN, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.
But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.
“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”
As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).
Yet a mother’s support of the father turns out to be a critical factor in his involvement with their children, experts say — even when a couple is divorced.
“In the last 20 years, everyone’s been talking about how important it is for fathers to be involved,” said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. “But now the idea is that the better the couple gets along, the better it is for the child.”
Her research, part of a project based at Princeton and called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, found that when couples scored high on positive relationship traits like willingness to compromise, expressing affection or love for their partner, encouraging or helping partners to do things that were important to them, and having an absence of insults and criticism, the father was significantly more likely to be engaged with his children.
Uninvolved fathers have long been accused of lacking motivation. But research shows that many societal obstacles conspire against them. Even as more fathers are changing diapers, dropping the children off at school and coaching soccer, they are often pushed aside in ways large and small.
“The walls in family resource centers are pink, there are women’s magazines in the waiting room, the mother’s name is on the files, and the home visitor asks for the mother if the father answers the door,” said Philip A. Cowan, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who along with his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, has conducted decades of research on families. “It’s like fathers are not there.”
In recent years, several fathers’ rights organizations have offered father-only parenting programs and groups, and studies have shown that these help men become more responsive and engaged with their children.
But a new randomized, controlled study conducted by the Pruetts and the Cowans found that the families did even better if mothers were brought into the picture.
In the study, low-income couples were randomly placed into a father-mother group, a father-only group and a control group of couples. The controls were given one information session; the other two groups met for 16 weeks at family resource centers in California, discussing various parental issues.
In both of those groups, the researchers found, the fathers not only spent more time with their children than the controls did but were also more active in the daily tasks of child-rearing. They became more emotionally involved with their children, and the children were much less aggressive, hyperactive, depressed or socially withdrawn than children of fathers in the control group.
But notably, the families in the couples group did best. They had less parental stress and more marital happiness than the other parents studied, suggesting that the critical difference was not greater involvement by the fathers in child-rearing but greater emotional support between couples.
“The study emphasizes the importance of couples’ figuring parenting out together and accepting the different ways of parenting,” Dr. Kline Pruett said.
Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.
Dr. Kyle Pruett added: “Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what’s going on outside their mother’s arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world.” To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving.
The study was financed by the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, which is looking for ways to involve fathers more at the state’s many family resource centers. Experts say improving the way fathers are treated in many settings, public and private, is an important public health goal.
For example, they say, pictures of families on the walls of clinics and public agencies should have fathers in them. All correspondence should be addressed to both mother and father. Staff members should be welcoming to men. Steps like these promote early and lasting involvement by fathers.
“We want people to think about how positive father engagement in this co-parenting model would work in their foster care agency, local health clinic, pediatric office, adoption agency or school,” Dr. Kyle Pruett said. “That’s where an awful lot of the barriers are.”
At home, the experts recommend that couples keep talking about parenting issues and do their best to appreciate each other’s strengths. A recurring argument among couples is that each partner thinks he or she knows what is right; a mother may accuse the father of allowing too much television, while a father may tell a mother she isn’t strict enough with discipline.
“Instead, they should be saying, ‘How can each of us be the kind of parent that we are?’ ” Dr. Philip Cowan said. “I don’t think it’s abuse for a dad to sit with that little kid watching TV.”
These experts agree that parents should not focus solely on the children.
“Parents work all day, and feel as if they need to give every other minute to the kids,” Dr. Cowan said, “but if they don’t take care of the relationship between them, they’re not taking care of the whole story.”
In the Mediterranean, Killer Tsunamis From an Ancient Eruption
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, November 3, 2009
The massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea more than 3,000 years ago produced killer waves that raced across hundreds of miles of the Eastern Mediterranean to inundate the area that is now Israel and probably other coastal sites, a team of scientists has found.
The team, writing in the October issue of Geology, said the new evidence suggested that giant tsunamis from the catastrophic eruption hit “coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral.” Tsunamis are giant waves that can crash into shore, rearrange the seabed, inundate vast areas of land and carry terrestrial material out to sea.
The region at the time was home to rising civilizations in Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Phoenicia and Turkey.
For decades, scholars have suggested that the giant eruption, just 70 miles from Crete, might have brought about the mysterious collapse of Minoan civilization at the peak of its glory. The remnants of Thera’s eruption today make up a circular archipelago of volcanic Greek isles known as Santorini.
Thera is thought to have erupted between 1630 and 1550 B.C., or the Late Bronze Age, a time when many human cultures made tools and weapons of bronze. Scholars say the tsunamis and dense clouds of volcanic ash from the eruption had cultural repercussions that rippled across the Eastern Mediterranean for decades, even centuries. The fall of Minoan civilization is usually dated to around 1450 B.C. Geologists judge the eruption as far more violent than the 1883 eruption of the volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which killed more than 36,000.
The five tsunami researchers came from Haifa University, in Israel; Hunter College, in New York City; McMaster University, in Canada; and the University of Hawaii.
The team did its excavations off Caesarea, Israel, a coastal town dating from Roman and Byzantine days. The coastal region was only sparsely settled at the time of the Thera eruption, with no identifiable city.
The team sank a half-dozen tubes into the offshore seabed and pulled up sediment cores for analysis. It looked for standard signs of tsunami upheaval, including pumice (the volcanic rock that solidifies from frothy lava), distinctive patterns of microfossils, cultural materials from human dwellings and well-rounded beach pebbles that seldom appear in deeper waters.
Writing in Geology, a journal published by the Geological Society of America, the team reported finding evidence of three tsunamis — two historically documented ones dating to A.D. 115 and 551, and one from the time of the Thera eruption.
The Thera tsunamis, the team wrote, left a signature layer in the seabed of well-rounded pebbles, distinctive patterns of mollusks and characteristic inclusions in rocky fragments all oriented in the same direction.
The disturbed layer, up to 16 inches wide, came from a few feet below the seabed in waters up to 65 feet deep.
“These findings,” the team wrote, “constitute the most comprehensive evidence to date that the tsunami event precipitated by the eruption of Santorini reached the maximum extent of the Eastern Mediterranean.”
The team added that, if the giant waves were big enough to reach Israel, “then presumably other Late Bronze Age coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral will likely have been affected as well.”
