And now the news:

The corner is beginning to take on a new shape. If you look back through this blog to the stories about Bobo's you remember that, after all the tenants had been evicted, they shuttered the building and ripped out the wiring and pipes and then tore the place down brick by brick by hand and ripping bar. That's right.

By hand and ripping bar.

And they worked fast, if you went to lunch when they were starting on the east wall of the fourth floor, the whole fourth floor might be gone before you heading back to work. Here: read it again.


The lot sat empty for six months or so before the diggers arrived. First, with backhoes and bulldozers, then with a large shovel run by a fellow with very skilled hand, a hole became a huge opening in the ground, two stories and then three, forty or fifty feet below the sidewalk. And they put up a very blue wall.

I didn't like the wall very much, but I got used to it and I started to listen to all of the guesses about what the new corner was going to be.

Some of the guesses were :

A ten story high-rise.

A twenty story high-rise.

A fifty story high-rise.

A new dorm for the School of Visual Arts. (they just build one.)

A new classroom building for Baruch College. (They had just built one. It looks like a barn.)

A twenty five story of condos or co-ops.

A bank.

Both.

The building is starting to creep up over the wall.

Stay tuned.

At the other end of envy

Twilight always affects me in an odd way. There is a feeling of warmth in the fading light, countered by a twinge of dread as the darkness begins to dominate. It's not just living in the city that does it. I think I have always felt this way at dusk, had this feeling of both peacefulness and anxiety at the same time. When I was a kid, throwing newspapers onto the neighborhood's porches, or when I was older, on my way to a night's music at Thee Coffe House, I had this very same bittersweet emotion, the ending of the day, the long night stretching on out ahead. I've wondered if it wasn't something instinctual, some deeply hidden, long gone from our consciousness, animal feeling, the kind that Cro-Magnon felt as he looked out from his shelter at the disappearing sunlight, or, even earlier, what the sons and daughters of Lucy thought while sitting in the protective lower branches of a tree in Olduvai Gorge.

Is that silly? Thinking that the emotions felt three million years ago are the same as the ones we feel today? Or are they the same. The others- anger,hatred, fear- don't appear to have changed all that much during more recent human history, and thankfully, neither has hope, nor pity, nor love. But did our brains get wired up so early and stay wired the same way ever since? Did the first man-ape to throw a stone at a bird delight in the same way when it fell as I do when, by some wonder combination of luck and windage, a basketball I've thrown actually drops through the hoop? There is another example of colliding emotions, the joy of hitting the basket combined with the complete feeling of surprise that the event has occurred.

It occurs to me as I am writing this that most of our emotions occur in competing doses of opposites. At the other end of envy there is a bit of love, at the distant side of love there is just a bit of disgust and hatred. What an odd brain we all carry around with us.

More on this later, it's all just mush right now.

The Mist, the Mare, The Bag on the Subway Steps

First, a recollection: On one of those perfect September mornings, much like this one, but this was long ago, I was riding my bike down a steep winding road somewhere North of Tahlequah and East of Highway 10. I was hoping I was on the right cut-through which would take me down to the Illinois River canoe rental places where I would find some lunch. There were rivers and pools of fallen leaves all over the roadway and I was zigging and zagging to avoid them and trying not to lose it on the turns. A stick or something jumped up and got caught in my front wheel and, though it didn't seem to be doing much harm, it was making a funny noise so at the first flat spot I pulled over to see what it was.

There was still a slight mist rising over the nearby fields, mown down hay from the looks of it, already cut and carried off to the winter barns. What it was was a piece of bark and it had jammed itself real well between one of the brake pads and the wheel rim. I started to yank on it and that's when I heard the horses. They were far off and down the hill from me, but in the clear air I could tell that there were four, or maybe five, animals making their way, clip clop, up the road. I got the bark out, picked up the front of the bike and spun the wheel to make sure it was on straight then waited to see what was coming.

There were two cowboys on horses leading two more horses. They were in no hurry. One of them was complaining to the other about something and the listening one was the one who saw me first from about one hundred feet away. I should have mentioned that I was wearing my full out-in-the-boonies bike gear, black and yellow striped helmet, brilliant yellow jersey and black with a big blue panel bike shorts. Knowing now that I looked like some kind of giant horsefly helps me understand what happened next.

As they got closer the listening cowboy made a sign to me to stay still. "No problem." I said softly and nodded my head 'Howdy" to the other one. "This one's a little jumpy." he said, "and I don't think she's seen anything like you before." He took a little rein in, "Whoa. Whoa." I stayed put as well as I could, but when the lead horse got to about twenty feet away she saw me. Her eyes got huge and her front legs flew out, straight as pipes and struck the pavement hard in a full jarring stop. The cowboy pulled back on the reins, but the mare shied backwards into the other horses before he settled her down. There was a lot of shushing and whoaing, but things were back to normal in a few seconds. Just a case of the jitters over something you don't expect to see.

So, this morning I run five miles in Central Park and take the subway down to Broadway and 23rd. It's just a short jog from there to my gym. I am just slogging along the big broad sidewalk on my way towards Park Avenue when I see the bag. It's a big bag, a duffel bag, and it's sitting right next to the entrance of the Number Six Lexington Line Subway Station. Many thoughts pass through one's head.

Oh, somebody is hauling their stuff down into the subway and this is the last remaining bag. (No one comes out to claim it as I get nearer.)

Oh, some poor homeless guy has walked off and left this huge bag.

(No, it is as clean as can be, nice and new)

Oh, maybe it's a bomb.

I really said that. My brain whirred momentarily, there was a sound like a piece of bark getting stuck in a wheel and I jammed both my feet into the pavement in a full stop and then staggered back a few feet. I shook my head and looked at the bag. Was that a wire sticking out of those papers? I did a side-stepping move worthy of any step aerobics workout tape and then traipsed backward, keeping one eye on the bag and the other on the approaching curb. And there, holy cow, just when you need one, a cop on the corner.

"I got weirded out by that bag"

"Yeah. Something happened. We are looking into it."

"There's a wire."

"Yeah, my partner checked it out. It's clothes. Coat hangers."

"You guys do not get paid enough."

And so the trembling mare headed up the roadway having survived a bad fright over nothing and the trembling slogger crossed the street and took a nice long steam where he remembered the mist and the mare and that long ago September morn.

Running with the Bulls

The Health and Fitness Games Four Mile for Men was yesterday morning and it was a glorious day. I don't use that term often, but yesterday was about as perfect a day, running or otherwise as you could have. The temperature was 71 degrees and no wind. I had to go into work after the race so I lugged my fanny pack with my change of clothes over to the baggage area and then proceeded to stretch.

I've been really worried lately about my right knee. It's never really recovered from the Half Marathon, meaning that it's been a little tight. There has been some pain, but mostly stiffness that never seemed to go away. So about a week ago I started looking up all the remedies for knees and the Internet came through big time. I found a number of stretches that I had forgotten and got a good routine to do before and after running. Ice is good. Quad Stretch is good. Side Stretch is very good.

Anyway on the morning of the race, no tenseness, at least not in the right knee, but the rest of me was a bundle of nerves wondering if at the three mile mark something would blow up.

This race was just for men. (Twelve women ran with us. Beats me why, maybe they wanted to do two races that morning, good for them.) The testosterone level was evident in at least two ways: 1) everyone pushed up a mile per minute or so in the starting place. The ten minute milers were all up in the six minute mile slot. Even the starter was laughing about how many runners were near the start in the five minutes per mile. He said "You know, guys, that is supposed to mean that you can do all four miles at a five minute pace, not just one." I was happily situated in the ten minute slot. I had "The End of the World as We know It" for a start song and I kept telling myself that I just wanted to well, not kill the course record.

Well, 2) unlike races with men and women, this all men's race was all business. Women like to talk to each other and to men as they run. I will be churning along at as fast as I can go and three women will pass me all chatting about just returning from the Jersey Shore. Nothing like that happened in this race.

From the moment the horn sounded it was run, buddy, run. My split for the first mile with the music blasting was just at NINE minutes. Please recall that this is the same guy who was doing 11:55s just two weeks ago. I ignored the water stops, they are always a mess by the time I get there and everytime I spoke to my right knee it said it was just dandy.

The course was perfect for a fast time because we started by climbing Cat Hill and then made the loop around to finish at 68th Street which except for a short hill up to the reservoir is a downhill finish.

So I crossed the line at 37:15 net time which is a PR for me (at least since I started running again last year) 9:18 pace.

Um. Wow for me. Even starting way in the back still finished ahead of about half of my age group and three hundred or so men will still huffing their way around the course while I was going to get my goodie bag from Fitness Magazine.

And the good news is that I have hardly any tenseness in the knee. Remarkable what actually following a training regime will do for you.

I am Interviewed By the Police

Checking the weather radar before you leave home is always a good thing to do. We had a big storm blow through last Saturday night and when went to bed the radar was a solid green mass of rain across the whole area, but when I punched it up at 4:45am, everything was clear. So I was a little surprised when I reached the park's Merchant Gate by how dark it was. There was a layer of fog oozing through the trees and the roadway was pitch black.

The streetlights were out. It was just after 5:30am and I did see one runner go by as I came down the sidewalk towards the road, but he had disappeared by the time I reached the curb. "What the hell." I said and pressed the start button on my watch. I headed up the hill, eastward, towards the Seventh Avenue exit and the Boathouse. The signal lights were working so I got to run first in green light and then in red. I know your eyes are supposed to see better at night in red light, at least that's what they taught us in Escape and Evasion School -USAFSS, another story for another time, but I have to report here that it was much easier to see in the green light or the brief yellows.

The storm had knocked all kinds of sticks and branches onto the road and there were deep puddles to avoid or splash through along with trying to peer through the murk to see if anyone else, besides the previous runner, was nuts enough to do this this early. Sure enough right after the Fifth Avenue exit, I saw two women and a man running towards me. They must have been as put off by the dark as I was because they actually said "Good morning." that never happens unless I happen to say something first. There was a large tree branch down just past that point blocking the sidewalk on the left side of the road. There was already Caution Tape strung across it so someone in authority must have already seen it.

I got to the Boathouse just before six am and it was then that I remembered- it was a holiday weekend- no one was going to open the restrooms until later. (The Boathouse has the cleanest restrooms in the Park.) This was going to be a problem because I needed an open restroom. Sooner rather then later. I had a number of choices, none of which I really liked: 1) run back to 59th Street and see if the icky public johns were unlocked and chance being in there with three homeless guys washing up, 2) run over to Fifth Avenue and catch a cab down to the all-night Cosmo Diner at 888 8th Avenue. (Yes. I have had to do that before.) or 3) jog up to the Precinct Station at the Reservoir and see if they would let me use the men's. I had never done that before but it was fairly close, about a mile and half.

The only problem was I didn't know how to get to the Precinct. I know that sounds strange, but you can see the building from the Bridal Path but it's across one of the roadways that cut through the park and there are no signs directing you how to reach it. So after I got to the Reservoir, I had to find a way to get down to the Bridal Path and then find the Police Parking lot and then find the path from the parking lot to the roadway, all without having an embarrassing emergency.

And it was still very dark, but somehow entryways appeared in the murk and I climbed down a little stairway to the road, crossed over and made it to the door. It was open.

The two cops behind the counter looked up as I came in.
"Hi," I said, "I wonder if I could use your men's room."
"Sure thing." replied the one closer to me, "Down the hall on the right."
"Thanks so much." I said,"Man, it's really dark in the park this morning."
"Oh?" The cop looked right at me. "Tell me more."

There are two groups of people I love to have conversations with, reporters and cops. Why? Because they ask you questions and then really listen to your answers. Hardly anyone else does that. A customer asks how to hang a lamp on a plaster ceiling and then, as you answer, lets his eyes glaze over. A friend asks you what you did over the weekend and before you get the first sentence out starts fiddling with the lid on the ketchup bottle. But when a cop says "Tell me more." He wants to know. AND you, you know this, you cannot hand him a line of horsehocky, you have to give him what you really know. It used to thrill me when the editor of the Tulsa World would ask me "What's new?" My mind would spin trying to think of something which was actually new.

"I'll be right back." I said to the cops, "I've really got to go."

When I came out they were waiting at the desk. I went over with them, practically yard by yard, what sections of the lights were out and which ones I thought I remembered being on (the Boathouse was all lit up, just nobody there.), I told them about the big tree branch and one of the cops said, yeah, he's seen that about 3AM. I said maybe that was part of the cause of the light being out. He said he was going to make a circuit of the park in about twenty minutes and he would check it all out. I said something about there not being too many others out on the roadway, the other cop said something about how it was dangerous to be in the park so early, I said I would be careful, that I didn't want to make any extra work for them. They smiled. I like cops.

I headed out along the Bridal Path to the Bridge. This is the one I call the Stretching Bridge because most of the day it;s covered with bent and bending bodies, runners of every shape making their limbs into semi-natural shapes. It's one of several that reach over the Bridal Path to one of the walking paths in the park. I got to the roadway again just as the rest of the fog was lifting. The rest of the run was uneventful except that after I had cut through the 102nd Street cutoff and was headed South again, one of the cops went by in the cruiser. He gave me a little wave. "Oh, good,"I thought, "Now he knows I'm not just a nut."

Wait a minute, my brain replied, seeing you still out here probably confirms to him that you are a nut. "Shut up." I said and pushed past the Delacorte Theatre where there were about three hundred people asleep in the ticket line. I'll have to do a piece on them sometime. That day was the last performance of Mother Courage and her Children, an interesting choice of play in these times in this city.

The gazelles stayed silent.

New York City,
Wednesday 5:12AM,
The A Train,
Third Car from the End.

When I get on I see her huddled next to the windows of the car with four or five black plastic bags stuffed with her belongings around her legs, stacked up next to and underneath the orange and yellow seat. The space next to her is empty and she is deeply sleeping. She is old. It is usually hard to tell just how old any homeless person is, but this one is old. Deep lines map out her face which has the look and color of an apple left out in the sun for too many days. The rest of her looks burned up, almost cooked, the flesh on her arms, the skin on her neck, the back of her hands. Her feet are wrapped in layers of cloth with a pair of huge men's white athletic socks covering part of them. She is clutching a blue canvas backpack, the kind a grandmother buys for a first grader, it has flowers on it and a picture of Winnie the Pooh.

We, the six other early morning travelers, are settled into our seats, scattered throughout the car, hooked up to Ipods or staring at the box scores in the New York Daily News. The train rumbles towards 59th Street making one local stop after another on the way.

At about 135th Street, I wasn't paying attention to exactly when, a man entered our car from the one in front of us. He was tall, over six feet two, and wearing a filthy pair of jeans and what used to be a red tee-shirt. He began by making his please-help-me-get-a-little-breakfast-speech. Every panhandler has his pitch, some of them change over time, some of them stay the same forever. There was a guy on the 1/9 line who had ''been mugged by three men three months ago." and just needed something for that day to get him back on his feet. I heard him tell that tale over and over for about three years. Same three guys, same three months ago. There is still a guy who works the A train during rush hour on his knees. His thing is to beg pitifully and he is really good at at it. He does a lot of praying for everybody, that they get home safe, that their families will be alright. He holds a can with some coins in it and rattles it as he moves through the crowded car like a penitent at Padua. Some panhandlers sing, mostly Motown tunes with the occasional "Amazing Grace" thrown in to set the right tone. They are, for the most part, universally ignored. Both riders and panhandlers know that it's illegal to beg on the trains and most people just want to be left alone, still the game goes on.

This newcomer to our car was of the announce and then make eye contact school of begging. That is where you tell your story once aloud and then proceed to each person, one by one, hand or can out. It's got to be hard, and hard on you, you start to think, to be so low, but that's only because the story has gotten to you a little this morning. You start to wonder if you still have those two quarters in your pocket, you start to think, ah, what the hell, but then something happened with this guy.

He seemed a little high, a little cracked up, wound up a little too tight. He started to take a little too long looking at everybody, standing in front of everybody, leaning in, one at a time, staring at each person, hand out, waiting. This guy is big, he's got some kind of bruise by his left eye and a tenseness in his face. It began to feel less like panhandling and more like a shakedown, more like something might happen if somebody doesn't cough up soon. He gives the sleeping woman a glance and moves down the aisle. Nobody makes a move, everyone gets very interested in the article they are reading in the paper, on the page in their book. I just shake my head 'no' when he comes towards my seat, but he still comes, he still waits for me to raise my eyes to him. I don't.

He storms off down the car to the door to the next one and slams through it. A feeling of release, of escape from something, fills the air. The guy across from me turns the pages of his paper and noisily raises it out in front of him then folds it in half in a swift motion that looks almost defiant. The train stops at 125th and some more people get on, a couple of the six get off. I smile to myself and try to find my place in the recorded book I am listening to, it's Emperors and Idiots, about the Yankees and the Red Sox and the author fills minute after minute with long ago forgotten men and their achievements on the green, green grass. Home runs abound, so do bobbled grounders and pitchers with worn out arms, I have to listen to another re-telling of where some Boston fan was when Bucky Dent came to bat.

Suddenly the car door slams and the guy is back. He doesn't look at any of us as he walks through the car. He gets to the far door and stops. He stands there for a couple of seconds and I think he's revving himself up to make his get-some-breakfast speech again, but he doesn't. What he does do is sidle back down the car until he is even with the sleeping woman then, softly softly softly, he settles into the seat next to her.

For a half a second I am thinking he must know her, that he recognized her from somewhere, that he's watching over her, but then the reality side of my brain wakes up and says 'Bullshit. He's going to steal her bag.'

Did you ever watch one of those nature films where the cheetah is trying to run down one of the gazelles? Once the chase begins, the cheetah only looks at that gazelle, at his prey, and the other gazelles, the ones who are not being chased, head off in all directions, looking in all directions except where the one who is being chased is being chased, so it was on this early morning train car.

He kept his eyes on her, he knew that no one else would say anything, he knew us, he knew me that well, he knew we would sit there, the unpersued gazelles, as he moved his hands down around the bag. Seconds went by, a whole minute, he was patient, moving not inch by inch, but in tiny slices of distance.

"Hey, what you doing?" the old woman yelled. "Hey, hey, what the fuck you doing.!??" The guy leaped up and cracked his skull on the overhead handrail, he yelped, "I'm not doing nothing, I'm not doing nothing." He backed down the car holding the top of his head. The old woman was standing now, looking right at him, fists out in front of her. "I wasn't doing nothing." the guy said again. "Shut up, you no good."shouted the woman, "I've seen you now. I've seen you. And now you've made an enemy." The woman took a step around her bags, she put one foot out in the aisle, the big guy was backing away down the car. " Now, sometime I will see you sleeping and I'll take every thing you got." She laughed, "You've got an enemy now. Heh."

The gazelles stayed silent.

The guy slammed his way out of the car at the next stop and the woman, already curled up in her seat, seemed just two breaths away from being fast asleep again. Everything settled down.

I listened to about three sentences of my book before shutting the thing off. The shame of it all began to well up over me. What a brave crew we were, what a valiant soul am I. What a bunch of whimpish bovine creatures we all were. We would have sat right there and watched him swipe that woman's bag. We shouldn't be allowed to ride in the same car with her, we don't have half of her courage. If the same thing had happened to anyone else on that train, do you think they could just roll over and go back to sleep? They'd be shaking and weeping and stunned, not her, she was back to snoozing, in seconds at peace with her world.

The train roared into my stop at Fifty-Ninth Street and I was up and out and halfway up the stairs to the park before the whole shame rolled over me. I would have done nothing, I would have been frozen by my fear of getting a shive in the chest from the wired up junkie with a grudge.

There isn't a herd of gazelles who would have me and now I was going to run a circle around the park. I put the music on my headset on as loud as I could take it, it wasn't loud enough.

The First New York City Half Marathon was last Sunday. It was long and wet and fun.

5:30am. As I approached the entrance to the park I saw a small group of women runners waiting to enter but the path was partially blocked by a large, very unsteady, drunk who was taking a very long pee against the side of the entryway. I lead the way past. It is my last lead of the day. The next thing to do is find the baggage trucks which will take one small clear plastic bag to the finish. Mine has in it a wind breaker and a spare shirt.

6:00 AM Ten thousand runners divided by 1000 porta-potties still makes for very long lines. Luckily not everyone needs to go at the same time and the runners have figured out long ago what the formalities shall be. They do not line up in front of each individual portapottie, they spread out at mysteriously even intervals, about ten pots each, then as each door opens the first in line steps briskly forward. It all moves very well.

6:10 All the pre-race items have been taken care of and now it is 50 minutes before the start. I go up to the reservoir to watch the ducks. They are spread out just like those sets of decoys hunters use. Row upon winding row, and they drift slowly, almost patiently, towards the center of the water. Without any visible signal, each duck maintains the same spacing as the flotilla moves. There is not a sound from the water, only the distance slamming of porta-pottie doors.

6:20 AM I decide I should stretch. I stretch. I take off my left shoe and adjust my sock. I stretch some more. I take off my left sox turn it inside out and then rightside out and put it back on my foot. I re-tie both shoes. I stretch. I take off my shoes and put the sock from my right foot on my left and the sock from the left foot on my right. I am not nervous. I stretch.

6:30Am We are all supposed to be in our starting corrals by 6:30. None of the real runners make any attempt to do so. I am with the rookies in the middle of the 10 mins per mile corral with this guy.

Larry the Lighthouse

Yes. Larry was running with us this morning and he was lit.

I went to jog a little. I fixed my shoe again. I go up to look at the ducks again but they are gone.

6:45am
Suddenly there is very loud symphonic music playing and a woman's voice screaming out commands on how to stretch and no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to any of it. Even Larry is being ignored as the runners begin to crowd into the start areas 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 min mile. I know I am giving away the end of the story, but I think the reason I ended up finishing behind 8700 runners is that 9750 were in front of me to start, maybe if I started in front of a few thousand more I'd finish higher. Maybe.

7:00 We're off. It takes eight and half minutes for me to get to the start line, but we all have these cool yellow chips on our shoes that the computer reads and gives you the actual time it took for you to go from the start to the finish.

One thing that happens to me when I'm running is all my senses get huge.
I hear parts of conversations from ten yards away: "...backers want to pay eight dollars an hour... ." "How much?" "Eight dollars an hour plus they get a meal, but I told them there is no way... ." "No kidding!" "....the hotel is ... ."

I can smell the grass and the leaves, there is a rusty smell to trees that are changing colors, down near the carriage rides the aroma of wet horse manure was particularly deep this morning.

And I start to see every little thing on the road. Now, part of that is self-preservation when you are in the middle of twenty thousand swinging elbows, but I'm talking about acorns.

Acorns (God's Little Ballbearings) have begun to appear everywhere on the paths and roadways of Central Park and if you think my 199 pound foot can crush such things like an egg, which is what I thought, you'd be just a surprised as I was to find out that some of them have the mass and tensile strength of diamonds. They roll very well as your foot strikes them, but never straight ahead, always on a left or right vector, the better to pull the ligaments of your knee down over your socks.

So your brain, my brain, all the ten thousand brains start watching out for acorns and while you are doing this you are watching out for the four girls who are running in lockstep and blocking the middle of the road, the fellow who keeps grabbing at his shorts as if they had something alive in them and of course, Larry the Lighthouse.

So there you are, music blasting in your ears - ("Its the End of the Word as We Know It by REM- great running song,) the smells are all around, (huge perfume on the huge blond and there is just a hint of salt water coming from the Hudson) the real water tastes wonderful, so refreshing and you are avoiding both Larry and the acorns when you begin to see the other hazards on the roadway. Not just the water puddles and the cracks in the pavement.

About four miles into any race, people start to drop stuff. Extra water bottles, lip balms (those will take you for a ride), lots of hair scrunchies and the occasional, I kid you not, hair brush. Who runs with a hair brush? I've seen three or four so far and, unless the volunteers are placing them on the pavement, some runners want to look their extra best for someone at the end of the run. To say nothing of barrettes, if acorns are the ball bearing of nature, barrettes are the teeny skis of death. Step on one and you are likely to do a full split at high speed.

What else? Arm bands, knee bands and sweat bands, flags - people are very big about waving flags at the start of a race lotion, also balloons, sun visors and I saw one shoe wallet (empty) and one sock. There was also a Blue Chase Cash/Check Card at mile Ten that I saw being given to one of the volunteers.

But the final problem of this morning was paint. Crosswalk paint. Nice, shiny white paint. Easy to see and, when wet, slicker than deer guts on a doorknob. I thought for awhile it was just me who had to tippee-toe across each section of crosswalk down the West Side Highway, but later I heard some people talking about how they almost took a dive with only two miles to go.

I did well. About a minute slower than my goal of 2:20 and seven minutes faster than I had done it in practice. My splits were weird.

5k
36:49

10K
1:13:58

15K
1:47:31

Slow as can be. 11:55 per mile. The First five I was chock-a-block with people and the second five was mostly uphill and the third five it was pouring rain, so 11:55 per mile.... like a turtle, not fast, steady.

But hold on...

my time was 2:21:18 meaning that I covered the last 3.8 miles in 30:45 in a pace of (hang on to your hats) 8:00 mins per mile. That is, for me, flying. And yes, the course was flat to slightly downhill but still,,,,, .

They handed out popsicles at the end of the race, popsicles and Gator-Aid. I don't like Gator-Aid and I hadn't had a popsicle since 1964. They were delicious. They were Raspberry on the outside and some kind of orange-lemony inside and Strawberry with an unidentified but delicious taste. Mango?

I got my baggage bag and put on my nice dry shirt and my windbreaker. I enjoyed the subway ride home very much.

Races coming up

Short four miler next Saturday, then one, possibly two, half marathons in October, (Jesus, he's getting serious) and then two races in November to qualify for next year's marathon and a couple in December for good measure.

Thank you. No, no, thank YOU

I got a great thank you note the other day, the kind that makes you want to send a thank you for the thank you. It was short, elegant, sweet but not sentimental. It gave me a kind of rush. Perhaps that is why I am now about six days overdue in sending a thank you note to my weekend hosts. I want to send the very best thank you because it was a very good weekend.

We were out in the countryside of Western Connecticut. Wide open fields of mown hay and woods lay all around the house, while we cooked and ate and drank and talked and laughed and ate some more. At dawn both mornings I went jogging down the two lane road, hooting a halloo at the gaping milk cows and listening to the songs of the early birds. I don’t know how the owners, who were not with us, get any work done. I spent hours on the porch looking at the yellow-headed birds and the clouds and trying to see if those deer in the distance were bucks or does. It gave me a very odd, very simple, pleasure to catch sight of a jet making a contrail and to sit and do nothing but watch it draw the single line across the sky. When one made a little turn to the West, just a little turn, I was so startled I almost dropped my buttered bagel.

So ‘thank you very much for inviting us’ doesn’t seem to fit the situation fully enough, yet I did like the simplicity of the note I got. (Sigh) Maybe tomorrow.

Meanswhile, I read where Bremer said that the one thing George wanted to get from the Iraqis was some kind of token of appreciation for all he had done for the country, a kind of national thank you for coming over note. I am pretty sure my hosts will get theirs before he gets his.

Wake-ups

Because it's been so hot, at least for New York City- 95 degrees fries brains around here, I've been going to the park earlier and earlier. The A train gets me to 59th Street at just about the time you can see your hand in front of your face 5:25am. There are always bikers and runners in the park before me. The cops are always there too. The police go around to the various benches near the entrance and do wake-ups for the people sleeping there. Everyone knows the routine. Cops yell "Hey", sleeping person lifts head and says nothing. Cops move on to the next bench. It's like watching someone do an odd version of the Stations of the Cross or maybe seeing some tourists in a hurry at the Met. I watched a group of people go through the Monet section in about five minutes once. They moved in front of each painting, there was a moment of reflection, some murmured comments and then they moved to the next and the next and the next. I turned around to look at one of the statues and when I glanced their way again, they were gone.

The cops move into the park about the same time I do. They roust the people under the trees near the public johns (which are locked up tight at that hour. I don't know when they open but I have taught myself not to need to go before the morning run.) I grab a sip of water from the fountain, start my music, start my watch and head out. I re-mapped a three mile route the other day because I was getting bored with always going up around the little horseshoe. It is a good run, starts uphill and passes the lake and Cleopatra's Needle is the two mile mark.



But even that can get old, so I figured out on a map that if I ran one and half laps around the lower loop and then headed for Fifth Ave I would get exactly three miles.
Except that it turns out I was trying to kill myself. The lower loop, if you head North is uphill all the way to the Fifth Ave Exit, so I was making myself run up two really long uphills and then finishing with a teeny downhill to the zoo.

Which is why you should always map things out on site and by sight rather than on paper. That was my wake-up.

Finishing Uphill (Rain Coming in Fast)

If you are going to run a long way in July you have to start early in the day. So, at 6:oo AM, I started out from 59th street and the Merchant's Gate. At that hour there are still many homeless, mostly men, still stretched out sleeping under the trees. My plan was to run just up to 72nd Street, then jog over to the river and run up the river to the George Washington Bridge and from there another mile or so to home.

I like running in places I've never been before and, though I had seen lots of people running and biking on the RiverPark trail, I had never been on it North of 79th Street. Luckily for me, one can scout out such things now online. You go to USATF Routes and punch up the map, the satellite or both. So you can see the little ziggy detour in the middle 90's and figure out how the hell to get around in the Fairway (125th Street) area.

The other problem was water. I knew I could get water at several spots but I didn't have a clue exactly where the fountains would be, so I decided to carry a bottle with me. I am learning to travel light which means that on long runs like this one (more than eight miles) I don't carry my phone, my Palm or my wallet, just my housekeys and my Metrocard.

The one thing that didn't occur to me until I hit the river was the road home would be uphill the whole way. "That's why the river flows to the sea" the sarcastic portion of my brain reminded the duller parts, "We are going uphill for the next hour or so. (Grit teeth)

Meanwhile, off to my left, there was a large cloud formation. It was still a ways out, but I've seen enough thunderstorm fronts on the plains of the West to recognize that this was a big one. But I was already committed (or maybe I should BE committed.) so I kept on slogging along. Keeping one eye out for water fountains and the other on the looming stormclouds.

At about 96th Street, I got a break. There was another runner who looked as paunchy as me and who was running at about the same speed, if it can be called speed. Lurching along together we wordlessly challenged the other fat guy to a duel. I flipped from the book I was listening to over to the faster songs and, after we had traded the lead a couple of times, he seemed to fade and I bounced along through the one-hundreds and the one-tens. I got about a quarter mile lead on him and settled in for the long haul to the bridge.

One thing about the George Washington Bridge: from 72nd Street, it looks close. It looks close but not much closer at 96th Street, it's just there. There the whole time you are running, it just never seems to get any nearer. I was thinking about that when I heard the footsteps, I glanced behind me and there was the other fat guy moving at full steam. Apparently he thought we were only racing to 125th Street which was coming up soon. He thundered by me and sprinted to the compass that is embedded there in the sidewalk.

"Thanks for the lift, " I said as I approached, " but I'm on my way to bridge." He shook his head and both his hands and laughed. I hope I run into him again.

From there to about 138th Street, it's dicey. You run pass warehouses and big men pushing huge handtrucks of everything from Avian Water to Canned Cream Corn. There is traffic and honking and forklifts working the backends of semis. Then after making a short left/right you are on a fenced in narrow passage between some railroad tracks on your right and more warehouse on your left. There is also an elevated State Park right there, but the stairs up to it from the river look like they stay locked a lot.

Past there and you are home free. Except that now the real hill begins. The storm was coming in fast, the first big fat drops splatted here and there around me and I wondered just how much more wet I could get. I soak myself completely while running.
The hill under the bridge is very steep, all the bikers either walk up or stand on their pedals to get up, then it turns across a bridge over the railroad and heads up again. They don't call it Washington Heights for nothing.

I must be living right. The rain held off just long enough, just, for me to make the four corners at 181st, Bennett, 184th and Overlook Terrace. As I stuck the key in the building's front door the thunder rolled.