Tag Archives: PPTC

Chasing Boston (part 10 – the end)

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Still smiling after 22 miles - a personal record (Photo credit: Eric Brooks)

Still smiling after 22 miles – a personal record (Photo credit: Eric Brooks)

Well, I did it. I finished the New York City Marathon in 3:58:50, well under my Boston qualifying time of 4:10:00.

I’m not sure which makes me happier this morning: the fact that I’ll be joining Kathrine Switzer and a whole bunch of my friends in Boston on April 17, 2017, or the fact that I don’t need to run another marathon for almost a year and a half.

I didn’t achieve my most ambitious time goal, which is OK. Nor did I achieve my goal of negative splits. If I wanted to be hard on myself, as I often do, I’d describe the execution of my race plan as “start slow and finish slower.” If I were to cut myself some slack, I’d point out that this was the most evenly-paced marathon I’ve ever run, and that five of my fastest miles came in the second half.

I must be getting soft in my old age, because I’m inclined to cut myself some slack.

Besides – given my adventures in the medical tent at the finish line, no one could accuse me of not giving this race everything I had.

Here, then, is my race report.

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Race report – Bronx 10 Mile (September 27, 2015)

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Early Sunday morning on the D train

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.

  • This is not a goal race.
  • I have a cold.
  • Eric also has a cold, and his symptoms include violent, sleep-disrupting sneezes. All. Night. Long.
  • My right Achilles continues to piss and moan – and, on occasion, shriek like an angry banshee – when I run fast or far.
  • I’m at the end of a 65-mile week, I have 70 miles ahead of me next week, and I’m tired, dammit.
  • I drank, if not excessively, then certainly more-than-optimally the previous night. (Too tired and cold-addled to cook, Eric and I went to the Peruvian place across the street in search of restorative seafood soup. I ordered a pisco sour, because why not? We waited. I finished my drink. We waited some more. Thirty minutes passed without a single plate emerging from the kitchen. But the manager was on the case, appeasing the packed room of fidgeting customers with mini pisco sours, on the house. Yes, I know I didn’t have to take one – much less a second one – but they went down so easy, and they were free . . . )

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Chasing Boston (part 3 – July training recap)

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Screenshot (19)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 →

Chasing Boston (part 2 – marathon vices and virtues)

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Just some of my marathon vices

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 →

Race report – the Brooklyn Half (May 16, 2015)

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The scene at the Stillwell Ave station after the race.

The scene at the Stillwell Ave station after the race.

Why was I getting up at 5 am to run a race that starts within easy jogging distance of my apartment?

Because when a race has more than 26,000 entrants – making it the largest half marathon in the U.S., according to the New York Road Runners – it’s not a neighborhood event. It’s a global production requiring precision, political finesse, and the occasional tactical compromise.

Like starting at 7 am on a Saturday, so that most of the runners clear the vicinity of Grand Army Plaza before most Brooklynites are up and about.

Like requiring runners to walk through metal detectors to enter their corrals. (So what if they beeped for everyone?)

Like closing the baggage trucks at 6:10 am, so that . . . well, I’m not sure why the baggage trucks closed so early. I only know that (a) they stretched a loooooooong way down Eastern Parkway and (b) many unhappy runners clutching NYRR-issue clear plastic bags were sprinting toward their assigned trucks at 6:09:59 am. Continue reading →

My new hat

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scotland hat

Photo credit: Eric Brooks

This is a postscript to my report on the Scotland Run 10K a few weeks back. I was disappointed – nay, outraged! – to run my little heart out in Central Park and come away with nothing to show for it but the world’s ugliest cotton t-shirt, a bottle of genuine Scottish Highlands water, and a blister on my left foot. The cool hats distributed at the finish in past years were nowhere to be seen.

I whined about the lack of hats online, and I whined about the lack of hats in real life. This morning, one of my teammates in the Prospect Park Track Club (aka “the world’s finest running club”) showed up at our group run with a blue and white Scotland hat. For me.

He claimed it was too small for his head, but I hope he knows I know it was really because he’s just a generally nice guy.

The moral of the story: sometimes, if you whine enough, nice things will happen that you really don’t deserve . . . but only because there are other people in this world who choose to be nice.

I aspire to whine a little less, and be just a little nicer.

Race report: Scotland Run 10K (April 4, 2015)

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Scotland 10K shirt

All through this last hard winter, and the one before that as well, I envied other New York City runners their royal blue and white “Scotland Run” hats. They were bright, they looked warm, and they generated friendly nods and waves from other runners rocking the same hat.

So I could claim that I signed up for the Scotland Run as my first race of 2015 because I wanted to honor my Scottish ancestors. Or because I needed to overcome my fear of 10Ks (more on that in a bit). Or because it fit my schedule.

All these things are true. But the main reason I signed up for the race was because I wanted one of those hats.

Imagine my consternation last week when I picked up my race number at New York Road Runners in their spiffy Upper East Side digs and received along with it a wee packet of Walker’s shortbread, a bottle of water from the Scottish Highlands, and a cotton T-shirt of truly spectacular ugliness.

Where was the hat?

A dismayed post to my running club’s Facebook page brought words of reassurance. “They give the hats out at the end,” I was told. Words of advice, too: “you may need to stand in line, and sometimes they run out, so you need to run fast.”

Fair enough. Hats that cool should be earned. Continue reading →

The 2014 NYC Marathon: wind and grief

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4th avenue, South Slope

Fourth Ave, Brooklyn, between miles 6-7; the guy with the Puerto Rican flag was the crowd favorite. (Photo credit: Luke Redmond)

The wind was the headline story – sustained winds of 20 mph, gusting to almost twice that.  When I share stories with other runners, it’s the wind we’ll talk about. The way it pushed us sideways on the Verrazano bridge; the unnerving, rattling sound of our bibs straining against their safety pins; the hats, garbage bags and other debris whipping past us; the unexpected, energy-sapping blast when we turned west into the Bronx in mile 20.

When I think about the race in personal terms, though, it will always be “the race I ran while C was dying.” I wish I could say I thought of her with every step, but that wouldn’t be true. In the selfish way of the non-dying, I thought about a lot of things. I took in the spectators and my fellow runners, slapped a few hands, said a few words of encouragement. I looked for members of my running club. I blew a kiss to my husband. I debated when to toss my water bottle (around mile 5), my gloves (mile 12), my goofy hat (never).

Where my thoughts tended to settle on C was in the tough parts, when I used her name as a mantra to maintain my cadence (“C” – foot strike – “C” – foot strike).  And yes, I can’t write that without again confronting the fundamental selfishness of the non-dying and the non-immediately bereaved, and acknowledging the chasm it opens. We’re sad, but our lives go on – foot strike after foot strike, mile after mile, day after day, season after season. Theirs end, or have a hole ripped out of them. That selfishness may be necessary (how could we endure otherwise?), but it’s still enraging.

Here, then, is my race report. Continue reading →