Just so you should know, Michael Wardian, an accomplished world class runner, is right now taking on an attempt at the record for fastest known time to cross the entire Israel National Trail.

Wardian recently broke the world record running 10 marathons in ten days, of which 7 of them were also on  different continents, as part of another challenge.

The Israel National Trail is 631 miles long, or 1015 kilometers. Wardian is trying to run the entire trail in less than ten days. The average amount of time it takes to cross the trail is 45-60 days, though people are not usually running the trail.

You can track Mike's progress and keep apprised of his schedule and observations on the Fastest Known Time site along with via Mike's twitter account along with the FKT Facebook Group..

Best of luck Mike! We are rooting for you!

Bracha "Beatie" Deutsch is a phenom. Beatie is a frum mother of 5 kids living in Jerusalem, who works full time and has taken up running in recent years. She first made headlines a couple of years ago when she ran her first marathon while 7 months pregnant. After getting back to running post-birth, Deutsch ran another marathon, much faster.

Recently she became the Israeli champion for the half marathon distance, and then in the recent Tiberias Marathon became the Israeli (female) champion runner, winning the marathon with a time of 2 hours and 42 minutes (and some seconds). She has previously expressed interest in representing Israel in the Olympics, and after her victory in Tiberias, she has been added to the Olympic team. One can follow Beatie on Instagram and Facebook and see her messages of faith and inspiration, which she regularly talks about as giving her the strength and push to succeed.

Besides for being a kiddush hashem just by her actions, messages and style, Deutsch has been giving interview after interview in which she repeats her message of faith in God, being a mother first, adhering to the rules of modesty. And now she has been featured in the premier running magazine in the world - Runners World. Who would ever expect a frum woman to appear featured in such a magazine???

Kol Hakavod to Beatie Deutsch and we wait to see and follow your continued successes...

On September 11 there is a night run scheduled in Jerusalem only for women under the name JW Run (maybe it stands for Jerusalem Women Run). The run will be routed through the streets of Jerusalem neighborhoods finishing at the First Station complex with both 5 and 10km distance routes and an entire "happening" around the race.

Dr. Michael Ben Ari, Bentzi Gupstein and Advocate Itamar Ben Gvir have petitioned a lawyer, Dina Zilber, to work against this event. They say that while they themselves all support gender-specific events and sports and they each work out in gender-separate gyms and fitness centers, the lawyer herself, Dina Zilber, ruled to cancel an all-male selichos event last year that had been planned and scheduled to take place in Kikar Rabin. They quoted Zilver who ruled that a Municipality is obligated to prevent any event that is discriminatory in the public sphere and that Iryat Tel Aviv was obligated to cancel the event in Kikar Rabin due to it being discriminatory against women as the prevention of women from singing at a public event is discriminatory and hurtful to women.

They claim in their petition that being discriminatory against men should be treated with the same severity as discrimination against women. Iryat Yerushalayim must cancel this event that discriminates against men in the public sphere.

The 3 say that if their request will be ignored, they will petition the courts on the matter.
source: Kipa

This always bothered me about the fight against discrimination. With no separation of Shul and State in Israel, there is no clear line of when something is discriminatory and when it is not. If you fight against discrimination and think public events should not, or need not, be gender specific or gender-separate, eventually that can easily lead to banning the mechitza in shul, to use an extreme example. If it is illegal for the State to fund events and organizations that make discriminatory events, how can they support shuls or yeshivas or girls schools or anything that is gender-specific that has to do with the religious community.

This petition by Ben-Gvir is a good example of that. I have no problem with a separate race for women, even if I don't see the need. Also, there are mens retreats and womens retreats that happen all the time, shiurim and events for men or for women only that are often sponsored by Municipal cultural offices, and the like. Those are all at risk. I am not sure where the line should be drawn, but I see nothing wrong with events for men only or for women only - and it is up to me and everyone else to decide whether or not to participate. When is it called discrimination and when is it not is very unclear.

And with Ben Gvir's petition - does he want them to allow men to run in the race or does he want the race canceled? I know he just wants to make a point and not actually get men  to run in it or get it cancelled. Meaning, if Dina Zilber picks up the baton and fights City Hall to get the event changed, will Ben Gvir run in the race?

Chaim is head coach of our local Bet Shemesh Running Club.. a great runner and a great mensch, and even a talmid chacham!

I am amazed that ESPN made a serious report about the Jerusalem Marathon!

wow

From Runners World:

The first woman to ever win the Boston Marathon masters division was in concentration camp with Anne Frank. 

Sylvia Weiner has rarely missed a day of running in the last 50 years. She’s up early, and soon out the door to meet several friends for a 5- to 7-mile jaunt. “We go slow and talk about everything but politics,” she says. “I never take a morning off unless it’s literally impossible for me to run.”
Impressive toughness for an 84-year-old who splits her time between Montreal and Miami. But it's just a small part of Weiner’s amazing life story.
Forty years ago, in 1975, when the Boston Marathon first recognized men and women master’s division winners, Weiner claimed the female title in 3:21:38. She was 44 at the time, standing 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighing 98 pounds.
Three decades before Boston, the Polish-born Weiner survived several years in three German concentration camps. In one, she was imprisoned with the famous Dutch diarist Anne Frank. Weiner was there the day Frank died. 

the annual Bet Shemesh 5km race to benefit the Benjamin Library is scheduled for Tuesday evening December 2, 2014 at 6:30pm (18:30) starting at the plaza of Neimi Mall.

Head on over to register! it is a great, and fun, event.

video from the 2013 race..

Australian runner Pat Farmar, who ran from the North Pole to the South Pole a couple years ago, has been running through the Middle East to promote peace, showing that obstacles can be overcome.

Throughout his run, many runners would join him for sections at different points of his route. Last week a number of runners from the Bet Shemesh Running Club ran with him on his section near Tel Aviv. On other sections he ran with Israeli Jewish and Arab runners.

When Farmar was approaching Ramallah, word got to the Palestinians that a number of Israelis were running with Farmar. They sent word that they would not allow him to run through unless he stopped the Israelis from participating. His Israeli escorts were politely asked to withdraw.
source: INN

This is a private initiative, not something from the Israeli government or even from a private Israeli who might be suspected of having nefarious objectives.. a private foreign individual could not promote peace in the Palestinian territories because he was including Jews. He was only allowed in to promote peace when he agreed to ban Jews from being a part of it.

The Palestinians have the secret recipe for peace. No Jews.

Go, Erika!

Nehalim is a religious moshav southeast of Petach Tikva.

Nehalim is introducing a new race to be held on Yom Ha'atzmaut morning, giving enough time for people to finish and get to their Yom Ha'Atzmaut barbecues.

They write on their registration page for the race that in recent years there has been increasing interest in running, and it has also come to the religious community that has its own needs from such a sport. They say there is a need for a race that will be customized for religious people who want to run seriously while adhering to a religious lifestyle.

So, they have designed a race, to take place on Yom Ha'Atzmaut morning, through the moshav and its fields. The race will be unique in the sense that it will basically be two entirely separate races - one for men and another for women - each with a separate starting time and the running course will remain separate for the duration of the race.

The race is a competitive 5km race with an optional (at no additional cost) 2km at the end that is called "FunRun", whatever that means.

The race has drawn criticism on the various forums on the Internet as being primitive, discriminatory, sexist and the like. Personally, I see nothing wrong with it. I see races advertised even in the US as womens-only races. Despite saying this race is unique in having separate starting times, plenty of other races, generally hosted by other religious moshavs and yishuvs, have done this as well. If this is what is required for some people to feel comfortable to go out and run, to improve their health and enjoy the outdoors, I see nothing wrong with it. Just because it is done for religious reasons does not automatically make it bad.

Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat is training for the Jerusalem Marathon, and that includes running even when it is raining out... Barkat often runs from his house to City Hall, and today he did so with a group of runners from Intel Jerusalem....

with 20,000 other people, that is... in the Tel Aviv Nike 10km race last night!

Ehud Olmert ran the 10km... will he also run the longer race to PM?

I am impressed with his time of 55 minutes.. That is about my speed for 10km, give or take a few minutes and depending on the course and the elements..

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This is an interesting concept someone came up with. The new Jerusalem light-rail has come under criticism for being extremely slow. One person, a local Jerusalem resident, decided he would test how slow it actually is. he decided to race the train.

This fellow, Michael Spivack, is an amateur athlete. According to the article, this means that he runs 5 minutes per kilometer or slower. To compete with the train, he had to run at about 5 minutes per km. The run was a total of 13.8km, or 8.5 miles.

Spivack won the race, coming to the end of the route 4 minutes before the train.

To be fair, the train still has to stop at various stops and let passengers off and on, which slows it down, both in speed between stops but also at the stops.

I guess this means they need to work on the system to speed up those trains.

or else it means the people of Jerusalem might as well start running or jogging, because many of them will be able to get to their locations quicker that way than by using public transportation. And they will get healthier in the process!

I do know that I run considerably slower than 5 minutes per kilometer. if I had tried this the train would have run me over. it might be a good training session though, as the train bearing down on you might make you run faster. Do it often enough and you have found a great method of increasing your speed.

BS Mayor Moshe Abutbol congratulating 87 year old Murray Kleiman on his run.

Abutbol cheering and congratulating the male winners in whatever category this was

Abutbol moved over and put Balaish between him and the female trophy winners

I snapped this shot right before he realized whom he was standing next to and moved over. I thought it was a funny shot just because of how careful he was to not be near the women most of the time.

I was out running this morning on Highway 375.

While I have been running fairly consistently recently, I have not been running much. It has gotten down to a regular once a week, with the occasional, but rare, twice a week.

Being that it is not training season for anything, and because of my schedule I cannot run with the group very often, I have to either go out alone, or find a running partner.

Going alone is something I do, but not often anymore. It is hard to push myself to go out alone, especially in the summer heat. Finding a running partner is tough because most of the runners I know are much faster and stronger runners than I am. I have a guy I go running with, but because of our schedules that usually only works out once a week - Friday morning.

Somehow, we worked out a rare mid-week early morning run for today.

The weather was beautiful, as the terrible heat wave broke yesterday afternoon. This mornign it was cool and the skies were cloudy so we didnt have a strong sun beating down on us.

We drove out to Tzomet Ha'Eila, to get a change of pace. It gets a bit monotonous running the same route over and over again. So we started our run at Tzomet Ha'Eila, and planned to run between 10 and 12km.

We ran down highway 375 towards the satellites. The highway is busy with trucks at 5:30 in the morning, and they fly by at high speeds. At least the shoulder of the road is a decent size...

The run was great, with great weather. When we got to the 5km mark, we decided to extend it a bit before we turn around and run back. We turned off on the road towards Gush Etzion and some local moshavim. We got to the entrance of Moshav Avi'Ezer and turned around.

That road has a nice incline, so we got to strain ourselves on that a bit, and to enjoy the downhill respite on the way back.

Coming back, we concluded our run at exactly 12km.

The hills were beautiful backdropped with the bluish gray cloudy skies. Everything felt very historical, as this is the area where King David fought the Philistines 3200 years ago. Sometimes I can go out on a run and not really notice my surroundings, as I am concentrating on the run. But on a day like today I really noticed the surroundings - the fresh manure piled in the fields waiting to be spread, the browning fields as the summer heat progresses, the beautiful mountains and hills. It really is a beautiful area and a joy to be out running in such beauty.

I didn't realize jogging was such a dangerous sport. Maybe it is time to find a safer sport for exercise....

Chief Inspector Scott Small says a 30-foot-long branch fell on the woman from 50 feet above. He says she was killed instantly.

Police say it's possible the unidentified woman didn't hear the branch breaking because she was wearing a portable music player, which was still playing when they arrived.

Last week, a Manhattan computer engineer walking to work through Central Park was hit on the head by a 100-pound rotted tree branch. His mother said over the weekend he was getting better.

If there is one Birkat HaChama event I regret not participating in... it is this.



A group of runners from the Bet Shemesh Running Club went running Wednesday morning, with a reporter from the LA Times doing a story on an unusual Birkat HaChama. They went running into the fields and hills behind Yishi and made the bracha celebrating the return of the sun to its point of creation.

"You're supposed to look at the sun and notice it but then look to the side," he instructed, gesturing into a cloudless sky. "We're not worshiping the sun. We're worshiping its creator."

With that, the Beit Shemesh Running Club began its Birkat Hachamah, or blessing of the sun, a joyous ritual of early morning praying, singing, clapping and dancing replicated Wednesday by observant Jews at outdoor venues across Israel and the world.

The club's six-minute observance was coupled with an eight-mile run along dirt trails in the Judean hills around Beit Shemesh, one of Israel's premier hiking and biking spots. The city's name, Hebrew for "house of sun," is assumed to have been inspired by sun god worship during the early Canaanite period, about 3000 BC.

I had asked about the event, and Chaim Wizman, the club's founder and coach, had invited me to take part. As a competitive long-distance runner, I couldn't resist. And as an American Gentile, I welcomed the chance to share this passion, and my attraction to milestones, with Israeli Jews.

Besides, a trail-running religious event seemed a newsworthy example of how times have changed since the last blessing of the sun, on April 8, 1981.

Thanks to the Internet and alarm over global warming, what was once a relatively simple and arcane celebration associated with black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews has become more widespread, and infused with environmental and New Age messages.

"What is it we're celebrating, essentially?" Wizman asked during the run. "We're celebrating the pristine state of nature at the moment of Creation, right? The world was created that way, you know, and we blew it. Now, the objective of mankind, in the Torah's view, is to re-achieve that pristine state."

Wizman speaks with the authority of an ordained rabbi. Like most of his teammates, he belongs to the modern Orthodox stream of Judaism, religiously observant but more accommodating to secular influences. The team admits women, and a few joined Wednesday's run.

For this band of mostly middle-aged runners, hitting the trail affirms a spiritual connection to nature and the land of Israel, to which many of them have immigrated. They deemed it an ideal way to mark Wednesday's celebration, which happened to coincide with the eve of Passover. Similar themes cropped up at other sun-blessing venues in Israel, including an arts, music and "healing" festival in the northern town of Safed.

...

By contrast the scene in Beit Shemesh was idyllic.

The running course meandered past fields of wildflowers, vineyards, fruit orchards, an olive grove planted eight centuries ago, a honey farm stocked with beehives, Crusader-era ruins, and biblical battlefields where the Israelites fought the Philistines. We also passed a heavily guarded military installation and what my hosts suspect is a nuclear missile silo.

There was no danger of getting lost. Among the group was Lt. Col. Ophir Dor, who designs global positioning systems for the Israeli military.

Along the way, we shared reflections on our own lives: what had changed over the last 28 years and what we envisioned for the year 2037.

"Guys, just think how old you're going to be next time this happens," Wizman told us early in the run.

"In 28 years, hopefully I'm speaking Hebrew," said Rich Levitas, a 49-year-old American-born Web designer who is struggling with the language a decade after moving here.

"Let's not get carried away," a fellow runner quipped.

"And also in 28 years, maybe I can finally break three hours in the marathon," added Levitas, whose best time for the 26.2-mile race is 3 hours, 4 minutes.

Rael Strous and Johnny Burg were 10th-graders from South Africa in 1981 when their tour group insisted on joining the sun blessing at the Western Wall on its final morning in Israel. The group raced to the airport afterward, barely making the flight home.

Years later, Strous and Burg found themselves living in the same neighborhood of Beit Shemesh, working as a psychiatrist and a lawyer, respectively.

Yitz Corn, a 43-year-old information technology consultant, reflected on the intergenerational passage of life and his father's death a few years ago at age 76. He said he had taken up running shortly afterward, with the hope of living longer, and had since lost 60 pounds.

"My son is 14," he said. "Hopefully I'll be there for him at the next Birkat Hachamah, when he'll be almost 43."

Like most everyone blessing the sun this time, Strous is aware that the ancient calculation of its 28-year cycle has been proved inexact. But to him, it's close enough to justify the tradition.

"You long for something that comes every so often, a phenomenon of belonging together at a cosmic level," he said during our charge up the hill. "That kind of event challenges us to grow, to feel part of something bigger. That's the essence of it: being part of something greater than yourself."

At the time, when it was being planned, I thought perhaps it would display a lack of reverence for the seriousness, and the rarity, of the moment. That along with the logistics of having my wife and kids present to mark the moment with me for our memories in 28 years by the next one (when everyone tries to remember where they were the last time it happened), just made it seem too unrealistic.

Different people made it meaningful in different ways. There is no one way to serve God in a meaningful way.

For a multitude of reasons, since I ran the marathon, my running has been very sporadic. I have run no more than once per week, and have gone a number of weeks in a row without running at all. Even when I did run, most of the runs were in the range of 12km.

It makes sense to me. I never considered myself a real "runner". I ran because I had a goal. I achieved my goal, and then my motivation to continue running tanked. So I let all sorts of schedule conflicts get in the way and stop me from running on my scheduled running days.

The truth is that even though I am not a real runner, and have not really developed a "love" of the sport, it has a lot of benefits that make me want to continue, for now, at least on some level. Playing baseball and basketball for the past 10 years never helped me lose as much weight as I lost running for four months.

So I am trying to make the time to run, when I can.

I went running this past Friday. I ran with a friend, and we ran 12.6km at a reasonable pace - much slower than what my average was during marathon training.

I must say that I was completely wiped by the end of the run (though I still played in my regular Friday basketball game a couple hours later). Not only that, but two days later and I am still sore from the run.

That is pathetic. 2 months ago, 12km runs were my bread and butter. They were the basic staple of my week. They were the short runs. I could run then 18km - 21km without blinking an eye - no soreness, no feeling wiped out, etc. Only if I ran above 24km or so did I start to feel like I was really working (unless the run included a lot of uphill running).

Clearly, the drop off is much quicker than I anticipated.

Thinking about that made me also think about the drop off in other aspects of life - if you don't keep up with something, you lose it.

That is true in every aspect of your life. In your studies - if you do not review what you have learned, you will forget it. If you do not keep up with your relationships, they will move on and your friendship and love will wither and disappear. If you do not keep up with your skills, they will disappear.