People ask my strategy for “running for office.” So I talk about the other kind of “running” that I do all the time, for fun and glory.
I’m in a serious running club called NewRo Runners. Serious in that we have people who run very long distances or run very fast or both. They are young and old, male and female (probably a slight majority female), all different ethnic and religious persuasions from all over southern Westchester and northern Bronx, who work hard every day to attain their goals—which for me is to win every Age Group competition that I enter. In NewRo, we like to say: “Run Strong. Run Smart. Run Like a Girl!” For us, that means:
- Take care to warm up dynamically
- Go out a pace appropriate to the distance you’re running that day and not just charging off like a bull with a head of steam
- Your foot strike should be toward the middle and front of your foot, light and springy and moving straightforward, not tromp, tromp, tromping all over the place.
- Wear comfortable footwear and clothing suitable to the weather and terrain but always in bright colors so that you are seen as you make you way along the side of the road.
- And always run well to left of oncoming traffic. If you just run “down the middle of the road,” things can go horribly wrong.
Writing this reminded me of a YouTube video from a few years ago which illustrated how far we have still to go to ensure that young women understand that being and acting “like a girl” should be a badge of honor and not an insult. We NewRo Runners get it and try to spread the good word, but as you can see below, it is a message that needs reinforcing:
Meanwhile, I’m running in this campaign against a woman who is terrible on women’s and family issues. As I wrote last week, one of the first things incumbent Legislator Sheila Marcotte cut in the County budget was day-care funding for low-income working parents. She opposes a woman’s right to keep the Government out of intimate, personal health-care decisions, she voted against a women’s health clinic access bill and won’t support financial aid to those clinics.
She won’t stop County personnel from supporting deportation proceedings that break up immigrant families. She thinks the Second Amendment trumps the need to keep our children safe from gun violence.
Most tellingly, both Ms. Marcotte and her mentor, County Executive Rob Astorino, had the bad judgment to support and vote for our Misogynist-in-Chief. Here’s a re-cap of how we got to where we are now: