High-visibility race shirts
Is this a trend? The t-shirts from my last two New York Road Runners races are crossing-guard green and highway-worker orange. This has caused some grumbling among certain runners of my acquaintance, who – being New Yorkers and all – prefer black, or at least gray. But Eric heartily approves. He is, after all, the man who showed his love for me by festooning my bike with day-glo yellow tape one day as a surprise. Continue reading
I would look even colder and more miserable without the morocho.
With the abrupt change from heatstroke weather to nor’easters and possible hurricanes, my post-run treats recovery foods are changing, too. This was the summer of watermelon – pre-cut chunks from the grocery down the street, gone by the time I reached the apartment; pureed in agua fresca, the colder the better; sliced into half moons and sprinkled with spicy, salty Tajín seasoning; transformed into a salad with basil and feta.
My love of watermelon, though deep and strong, is not deep or strong enough to withstand 50 degrees with 20 mph wind gusts. There comes a day when, however regretfully, you must move on . . . preferably to hot, sweet, viscous, milky drinks that warm you both inside (when you drink them as intended) and out (when you spill them down your front because your hands are numb and shaking).
Once again, Sunset Park comes through. Continue reading
This was to be my monster training month, in which I piled on the mileage and the workouts so that, at month’s end, I could look back in satisfaction and forward with confidence.
It was, in fact, pretty monstrous. After losing ten days to my sprained ankle, I jumped back in to 50-mile weeks. That was probably definitely not the smartest thing to do, but I was feeling a lot of calendar pressure, and I have a long history of running stupid to uphold. Continue reading
Early Sunday morning on the D train
My excuses were lined up even before I stumbled onto the R train that would take me to the D that would take me to the Bronx.
What a welcome sight: damp running clothes hanging up to dry.
A monthly training recap seemed like such a good idea back in July, when I was flush with self-satisfaction at how well my training was going. What a great idea, to document my progress by posting comparisons between this year and last!
Sigh.
After two 60+ mile weeks, I managed to twist my ankle in a freak accident – on a rest day, no less. That took an almost two-week chunk out of my training schedule. I’m tempted to pretend the month didn’t happen, but in the interest of honesty and transparency (and because injuries, even stupid ones, are part of running), here’s how August panned out. Continue reading
Astute readers will notice that I’ve adjusted the title to reflect my status after last week’s blogging injury.
My foot is slightly less swollen – but considerably more colorful – than it was in the photo that accompanied the earlier post. The right side sports reddish-purple streaks against an indigo backdrop; the left side is violet-blue; and the top, around my toes, is just starting to take on a shadowy, twilit cast.
No pictures (you’re welcome), but an update on the past week follows. Continue reading
The grotesquely swollen ankle pictured here is not a running injury. It’s a blogging injury.
How prescient was I when I identified blogging, birds and booze as my greatest marathon training vices?
Pretty fucking prescient. Continue reading
If you’re not a runner, you’ll most likely find this post really boring. Go ahead and skip right over it – I won’t mind.
Fact is, you may this post boring even if you are a runner. Other people’s training logs are not exactly scintillating reading. It can be a little bit interesting to peek at the training of an elite runner, if only to marvel at their mileage and the grueling workouts they sustain. And it can be interesting, in a perverse way, to see the training of someone who’s a complete slacker. Their 20-mile weeks allow you to feel quietly superior* as you shake your head and cluck your tongue over the world of pain that awaits them.
I fall in neither category: I’m just a middle-aged woman who’d like to run Boston as an age-grouper. It doesn’t get more boring than that. Continue reading
Just some of my marathon vices
At last year’s New York City Marathon, I missed my Boston qualifying time by five minutes. Almost immediately – after that first crabwalk down the subway stairs at 72nd street, after the ice bath that reduced me to soft whimpers and the non-restful non-nap that followed, but before my first celebratory beer – I wanted a do-over. A mulligan marathon.
The heartbreaking thing about marathons is that if you screw one up, it will be months before you can try it again. (I mean “try it again” in the sense of racing one, not jogging an event to enjoy the spectacle along the course, or as a training run for an ultra – and hats off to you endurance monsters who can do things like that, because I certainly couldn’t.) If you’re an older runner, like me, you’ll need a month, minimum, to recover from your last race. Another month to get back to some semblance of your running routine. Another three months or so to ramp your training back up.
Add to that the logistics of finding a race aligned with your training calendar (not to mention the rest of your life) and, well, you will have plenty of time to ponder your marathon training vices. In my case, that means birds, booze and blogging. Continue reading
Once upon a time, I didn’t care about running the Boston Marathon.
I had my reasons. There was my New York chauvinism (even back then, when I lived in Detroit): the New York City Marathon is just a better race, I declared, before I’d run either one. There was my desire to seem quirky and iconoclastic, gleefully puncturing the assumption that I had run, or at least aspired to run, Boston (“Boston? Nah, for some reason I’ve never been interested. What I really want to run is the Around the Bay 30K in Hamilton, Ontario. Did you know that race is actually older than Boston?”). There was my aversion to training hard through the Michigan winter. And, I’m ashamed to admit, there was snobbery. Weren’t those vaunted Boston qualifying standards a little, well, soft?
In my not-so-youthful arrogance, with two Boston-qualifying races to my name, I figured that if I ever changed my mind, I could always shuffle my way to another BQ. The standards just get easier with age, after all, and I had plenty of time.
Then came my cancer year. Continue reading
Not another Brooklyn blog 