Episode 5-516 – Jeff Weis – Running Against Time

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Episode 5-516 – Jeff Weis – Running Against Time

Hello my running friends.  And welcome to episode 5-516 of the RunRunLive Podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… I know it’s been a couple of months and I’ve left you hanging.  You’ve either lost interest or you’re super worried that I’ve fallen off the edge of the world.  Are you?  Have you been checking hospitals and morgues?

The word ‘Morgue’ has an interesting etymology.  Sounds French, and it is, but it’s also Latin.  (French is just a rustic form of Frankish Latin at the end of the day).  Morgue was originally a verb, Moguer, which meant to look at someone’s face to identify them.

Morgue became a place name when they had a specific building where they would house the unidentified dead, so that people could come and look at them and maybe identify them.

And it is originally from the Vulgar Latin ‘murricare’ which means ‘to make faces”.

I am not, it would seem, in a morgue.  I’m actually in a super fine place, just busy.

And since we’re old friends, you and I, I’ll share with you that I’ve had two weddings, the birth of my first grandchild, and a fair amount of eldercare added on top of my exiting slate of working, training and writing.

Today we will talk to Jeff Weis who has written a book about his endurance journey called “Running against time”.  I decided to talk with Jeff because his story is topical for us.  How do you set meaningful goals and keep at it as you age?  Something I’m interrogating in my own journey right now.

In section one, since we haven’t talked in a while, I’ll catch you up on my DNF at the Beantown marathon and how my training is going.

In Section two I’m going to talk a bit about life design and “Gravity Problems” as I manage my way through this transitional part of our journey.

Now, I suppose, I should tell you a story.

I’ve got lots of stories from the last few weeks.

Let me see… Well first I got a suspicious tick bite, (I blame climate change because the dog is just covered with them), and had to go on a full 10-day antibiotics dose.  Then my Yvonne and I drove down to DC to see our new grandbaby.

Sorry, I guess I should pause there and acknowledge the gasps and swoons of my women friends.  Yes, my youngest had a beautiful, healthy baby boy.  I am now a grandfather.

Rolling off of the 10 days of antibiotics that meted out nuclear devastation on my biome and Recovering from the weekend travel, I plunged into the ever-entertaining game called colorectal examination.  Yes, every mature adult’s dream – the colonoscopy.  A one-hour procedure that requires you to turn yourself inside out for a week.

My poor insides.  Rolling off a 10-day dose of antibiotics, into the fiber-free-7-day-white-bread-diet then into the truly apocalyptic prep.  We don’t know whether we’re coming or going, although ‘going’ may win out in the balance.

And, yes, before you ask, of course I trained through it all.

At the end of the 7-days I was so sick of that white-bread diet, which is the antithesis of my normal diet, one could call it the ‘anti-diet, well, I was so sick of tht I just decided to fast the last couple days.

So there I was, night before the colonoscopy… Hold on, let me tell the ret in a dramatic screen play…

Scene:

A pale, haggard man lies in bed trying to concentrate on a book.  He has just taken the prescribed 12(!) pills from the colon prep subscription with a volume of water and is uncomfortably waiting in expectation of the cleansing spasms and THE PHONE RINGS!

Man: Hullo?

Woman’s voice: “Mr. Russel your mom has fallen, and we need to take her to the hospital for stitches…”

Man: “Am I being pranked?”

Yeah – so I had to have my wife drive me to the emergency room to meet my Mom, who it turns out was ok, as ok as a 93 year old ever is.  Which involved a lot of side trips to the rest room.

Now that’s a story!

On with the show!

Section One – Catching you up

Interview: Jeffery Weis – Running against time

Jeff Weiss is the author of Racing Against Time, a fitness and personal transformation memoir. It tells of his mid-life adventures in extreme sports, including finishes at Ironman Arizona (twice) and the 72-mile ultramarathon Midnight Express between the ages of 57 and 61. These were the culmination of a fitness journey that began with a first 10K at the age of 48. Jeff’s story demonstrates the possibility of radical, life-altering change even during late middle age.

Jeff is also an accomplished entrepreneur, having served for more than 10 years as a C-suite executive in a start-up that recently sold for $3 billion. His adventures in the competitive and high stakes world of start-ups overlapped with his journey into extreme sports. He sees a direct link between his successes in the fitness part of his life and his professional accomplishments. Jeff believes that audacity can be cultivated as a habit. He hopes that he can help others find a way to use fitness to supercharge every aspect of their lives.

Racing Against Time is Jeff’s third book.  He is also the co-author of Fighting Back: Stan Andrews and the Birth of the Israeli Air Force (Post Hill Press/Wicked Son 2022) and I Am My Brother’s Keeper (Schiffer Military History 1998).  Jeff is featured in the 2014 Nancy Spielberg documentary “Above and Beyond” (available on Amazon Prime) about American members of the Israel Air Force in 1948, which received 22 film festival awards.

In addition to undergraduate and law degrees, Jeff holds Master’s degrees in International Law (Georgetown University Law Center) and in Biotechnology (Johns Hopkins University).   He lives in Tel Aviv.

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Links

Racing Against Time on Amazon – https://a.co/d/4s0zgly

Author Website – https://www.jeffreyweissauthor.com

Linked-In – www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-l-weiss

Section Two: Life design and Gravity problems

Outro

Ok my friends, you have aged through the process of another RunRunLive Podcast, it could be worse, Episode 5-516, pushes it’s walker towards the door.

I think we can learn a lot from Jeff’s experience.  About setting goals, about working towards those goals, and then how to extract meaning from the process, even when it might not work out as planned.

Next up for me is the Mill Cities Relay.  I told the team that I don’t really care which leg they give me.  Because it’s true.  I don’t.  I’m not the guy they automatically plug into the long leg anymore!

After that I will host the 12th running of the Groton Marathon fetial of races which is a fun-run event I organize for my club on the last Sunday in December.  I will not be running a marathon.  You can count on that!

Depending on how much weirdness is percolating I may head up to Salsbury to run the Hangover Classic and do the polar plunge in the Atlantic on New Years Day.

And. Big news, I signed up for a race called the Sun Marathon in Southern Utah on January 24th.  I’m going to do it with the other Tim, Tim from Tennessee, he’s chasing his 50 states and I just want to get away from the New England winter for a couple days.

And my friends, keep showing up.  Because, A) you never know what’s going to happen and B) you really don’t have a choice do you?

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends.

And I’ll see you out there.

Buy a book -> https://booklocker.com/books/13731.html

Amazon -> https://www.amazon.com/After-Apocalypse-Story-Pandemic-Survival/dp/0977234207

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