Cool Running

This was one of those ideas that doesn't arrive as planned. How few do, but still... .

The idea was to go to the track at 137th Street because the streets were icy. At least, that was my excuse was for not going all the way down to Central Park.

And I wanted to re-calibrate my Garmin, that's my new toy, uh, training tool.



um

It's a watch,
it's a timer,
it's a speedometer,
it's a pace keeper,
it's a heart monitor
AND it takes all the data it gets from the sensor on your shoe and the band around your chest and puts it on your computer.

But of course, the track was frozen solid. Really solid.
I did a lap like the guy above on the inside rail on the crusty snow.
Parts of it on tippy toe.
That should be accurate.


It was so cold that no one in their right mind would be...hey...here is someone who REALLY likes to paint.

I watched him for a moment getting set up. There would be three hard parts I think: 1) keeping the easel from flying off with the geese into the river below, 2) keeping the paint from freezing on the pallet before it froze on the canvas and 3) using your bare hands to draw anything like a fine line.

I did meet a couple of people, the guy running in the picture is actually a personal trainer who was waiting for his client to show up. (Best of luck with that, I said.) And a woman runner who wanted to know more about the Garmin after I mentioned I was there to calibrate the thing. "Does it measure distance?" she asked. "Down to the hundredth of a mile, " I replied, "and it will tell how many steps you took to get there." I love stats.

While I took off to do my lap I saw them head North up the river. I thought about just packing it in but ... if they could do it..... so I headed North too, thinking I would just run the three miles or so home. The path was icy and covered with water at points but mostly clear. They passed me coming back at about a mile and half and yelled that it wasn't any worse ahead. I chugged up the hill at the George Washington Bridge. The path in the woods was a solid sheet of ice and snow making the going very tough uphill. (At one point the chart shows a dead stop, but I was moving the whole time, I just had to dig the edges of my sneakers into the crust. I met a biker on a road bike, think very skinny tires in that icy stuff, coming down. He was walking his bike astraddle. I told him that after the big water at the bottom of the hill, he'd be okay. Cold, but okay.

The re calibrated thingy says it is exactly three miles to the house from the bottom of the stairs to the track. A good thing to remember for next Spring.