Lifestyle

On a recent Saturday morning, my dad and I walked our dogs to the local basketball court to see what a persistent “thump-thump” noise coming from that direction was all about. Instead of basketball players, we found a fitness “boot camp,” where a gaggle of people in bright, tight clothing did squats and lunges and burpees in different stations, all to the same beat.

“People are weird,” I said.

It’s not exactly that we’re weird, Daniel E. Lieberman argues in “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.” Instead, it’s the way we exercise that’s odd. “We never evolved to exercise,” Lieberman writes, and I suppose he would think that fitness boot camp was no weirder than my five-mile run earlier that morning, or my dad’s use of a Fitbit to track his steps. None of this is natural to human beings, and exercise is a constant game of trying to catch up to lives we were never really meant to lead.

This year for Halloween, I will be dressing up my cattle dog mix called Annie Oakley Tater Tot as Captain America. Last year, I put her in a bandana and cowboy hat and said she was her namesake. My first dog, who passed away last year, had been a queen, a mermaid, a dinosaur, and Superman. She didn’t much like being dressed in costumes, but the pictures were cute, and got all those likes on Facebook and Instagram.

When I moved into a 1920s stand-alone shotgun style house in southern New Jersey earlier this year, I suspected it would cost a lot more to cool and heat than the rowhouse I had previously owned, because the “charm” and “character” that come with old houses often mean they leak like a sieve.

So when fall arrived, I decided to take the necessary steps to winterize the house. The first: a home-energy audit, in which contractors and utility companies come into your house and tell you everything that’s wrong with it when it comes to energy efficiency.

Are you making a resolution for 2018? Warning: More than half of all resolutions fail, but this year, they don’t have to be yours. Here’s how to identify the right resolution to improve your life, create a plan on how to reach it, and become part of the small group of people that successfully achieve their goal.

One night last month, while I was in the midst of moving out of the house where I had lived for nearly a decade, I found myself trying to make dinner with two pans, one fork and one knife — the only things I had not yet packed that were useful.

To distract myself from this sorry state, I turned on an episode of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and saw a father and son suddenly thrown into moving mode. A house flipper had knocked on their door and offered them cash to get out ASAP. But they were shown calmly putting random items into boxes that didn’t look as if they had been salvaged from a grocery or liquor store — as were most of my boxes — after which they stopped to have a leisurely heart-to-heart talk.

“That’s not how this works,” I yelled at my iPad, which was on top of the TV tray where I would eat while sitting on a paint-splattered folding chair, since I had just sold my dining-room set on Craigslist.

When it comes to running, the status symbol of late can be completed in less time than it takes to warm up. “The mile is a distance short enough that you can put yourself on the edge from the start and push what your body can do,” says Ben Bruce, 31, an Adidas athlete who can cover that span in four minutes flat.

Single-mile road races are gaining momentum among time-crunched would-be athletes who want to see significant fitness returns without slogging through months of training: Recent research found that men who did sprint intervals burned fat 75 percent faster than their non-sprinting brethren. It’s no surprise that the number of mile races nationwide, like this month’s prestigious Fifth Avenue Mile—where Bruce set his personal best—has doubled in the past decade, according to the organization Running USA.

“The dances” happened every summer in Allenhurst, New Jersey. The floor of an ocean-side restaurant — just “the restaurant” — would be cleared, and chairs lined up on both sides of the dance floor. Boys wore suit jackets; girls were in dresses with white gloves. Boys were required to cross the dance floor and ask, formally, “May I have this dance?”

When Geoff DiMasi talks about his childhood summers in that speck of a town at the Jersey Shore, he recalls the beach, and the boardwalk in nearby Asbury Park. But those dances, gone now, invoke the strongest memories. “It was so weird and bizarre, but a tradition in Allenhurst,” he says: a blue-blood tradition in a working-class town.

He hasn’t been back since Hurricane Sandy, which burst through the windows of the restaurant and flooded the place, most recently called Mr. C’s, in October 2012. It’s too painful. “Sandy knocked that that restaurant out of generations of memories,” he says.

Newer, smaller events are popping up as antidotes to races that have gotten so big and popular that they’ve had to implement registration lotteries, charge higher fees and corral tens of thousands of runners in waves through the starting gate. The alternative events harken back to the days when race registration wasn’t in and of itself a competitive sport.

Before runners cross the start line of the New Jersey Marathon, they hear two things: the bugle call to tell us to get to our post, followed by the ripping chords of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

When I got to the starting line earlier this month, I knew that my 18 weeks of training would come down to the next five hours. That training? Some would say unconventional, even controversial. I used “Hansons Marathon Method: A Renegade Path to Your Fastest Marathon.”

As a runner you know that a program that incorporates various distances, paces, and surfaces helps you perform your best. What you may not realize is that the same holds true with the company you keep—or don’t keep—on the run. Whether you’d rather gab away the miles with pals or be alone in your own thoughts, runners who are strictly social butterflies or lone rangers are at a disadvantage.

The son of Dutch and Irish immigrants, Charles Whitecar Miskelly was a South Jersey shipbuilder who died in 1963 at age 83. He was also a writer, one who shut himself up in his home office and banged out stories on a typewriter he repaired with a fishing line. He wrote historical novels and short stories about the towns around him, as well as beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking poetry.

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My butt, unfortunately, is dead.

“Dead butt syndrome,” the sports medicine doctor said to me after making me go through a series of circus-act contortions that involved swiveling my hip in all directions. His voice was very serious, his tone stern. I wondered if I should start making funeral arrangements for my rear, maybe a New Orleans-style blowout parade?

Hold the tuba. My butt’s not really dead. It can’t be revived with defibrillator paddles, but it can be fixed.

Mary Bly had a secret. A Shakespearean scholar with degrees from Yale and Oxford, Bly was working toward tenure at Fordham University. But when she wasn’t teaching students the ways of the Bard, Bly slipped into her other skin, penning romance novels under the name Eloisa James.