I missed writing about a whole week's worth of runs. Oops. Things have been busy here in NYC. Things I have done apart from running: been to the Ghostbuster building, stocked up on semi-useless kitchen items at Zabar's (because you know you need a shrimp deveiner), seen 'Master Class' and 'Book of Mormon,' watched one hundred million people run in Central Park (only a slight exaggeration), ate Montreal smoked meat, and started to discover a whole new part of New York that they call 'Brooklyn.' This trip marks the first one when I have spent any time in Brooklyn, making this exciting. Admittedly, I did not actually feel like I was in NYC until I spent time in Manhattan; I sort of felt like I had discovered some kind of neat, new city that just happened to be near New York and was connected by subway. Sad, but true.
Here is a quick summary of the past week's runs, all of which were completed, even if I forgot to blog about them:
Tuesday: 5 miles. For various reasons, I had to move my runs around this week, the most important of which was the fact that I planned to run (or maybe walk) a 5K on Sunday. So I opted to do 5-5-10-rest-6-5K instead of the normal schedule, which usually starts with the smallest number of miles. This was tiring, but I got through everything. For my very first run in this place they call 'Brooklyn,' I went down to the East River waterfront and ran there. The city of New York deserves some kind of prize for the quantity and placement of their water fountains. Although I got off to a late start, it was only a bit hot, and not killer 'I am going to die' hot. I survived. Parts of this run were slightly annoying, though, because there was a lot of waiting at lights and such. These are the hazards of actually running in a city, though, and that's okay.
Wednesday: 5 miles. Thanks to great advice from a friend, I had already decided to run my long run in Prospect Park. I decided to give it a test before the actual long run in case there were unexpected surprises--I learned a lot from my challenging long run in San Francisco last fall. Prospect Park is great for running. There is a handy loop with some pretty good scenery, numerous water fountains, and only one downside, which is a rather long hill right near the end of the loop. But this one challenge is conquerable, even if it is kind of annoying. The loop is, by my estimation, around 3 miles, which means that for long runs you wind up circling around it several times. However, it is not a boring 3 miles, which is important (as I also discovered while marathon training last year).
Thursday: 10 miles. 10 miles means that we are almost at the end of the long runs. Only one more to go (plus the actual race). Cool! I came up with what I thought was an ingenious plan to run slightly less than 3 loops around Prospect Park, engineered by getting off at a different subway stop. For some reason, I thought that the loop was 3.5 miles. It's actually 3. However, backtracking is not so bad there because there is oodles of space for running. Other than that, I got going too quickly at times, which came back to haunt me during the uphills. Overall, though, I thought that it went quite well. I had a designated place where I stopped each loop to get water, which I think is a good idea. It cooled off and was less humid, which just added to the fantastic-ness of this run. And most importantly, now it is over!
Friday: I slept in and boy, did I need it. There is a reason that we usually do long runs on Sundays: so that we can rest afterward!
Saturday: 6 miles. I ran to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which is that place featured in Brooklyn-set movies that has the scenic view of lower Manhattan (you know it from Annie Hall and Moonstruck...and if you don't, you should really see both of those movies). They aren't kidding about the Heights: I did wind up walking after a futile attempt to run up the hill on the way back. A bit too much for me. Other than that, the run went very well. I even managed to get out before 8am, which is nothing short of a miracle for me.
Sunday: Keith A. Ferguson 5K. This run takes place across the Brooklyn Bridge. It isn't the best run to try and PR since it's kind of narrow, but it did provide some great scenery on both sides. I did this event with someone else and we opted to walk. Truth be told, my legs were pretty tired, so I was okay with that. We ran the end, by which I mean I was kind of a bad person and left my companion behind. Bad. But we both finished and got t-shirts. The whole event was very enjoyable and brought a lot of different participants, even if it was Florida-level humid (not Florida-level hot, thankfully). I got super sweaty just from my run at the end.
If you plan to do this event and can conveniently take the R train, might I suggest that you do so. The registration was directly outside of the exit (so the west side of city hall). Super easy.
That was the week! Tomorrow I am going to do 7 miles and take advantage of this reasonable weather while I still can. Wednesday, it is back to Florida.
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