Tag: NYC Marathon

I got up at 4:00 am when my alarm went off.  The Husband woke up too and spoke encouraging words as I climbed out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom and the running clothes I’d set out last night.

I put on water to boil for coffee but then decided against it and drank some Accelerade and took a couple aspirin.  I looked out the window to see if it was raining.  It wasn’t.  I was worried about riding the air conditioned subway for an hour but I left the apartment with just my Galloway t-shirt over my running tank top and bra.

I was on the subway platform by 5:00am.  There was no train in sight as I ate the two banana’s I’d brought dipping them in the mixture of peanut butter and honey I’d put in a baggie.

When I saw flashlights and lanterns swinging along the tracks I worried that the trains weren’t running at all which meant I could miss the run entirely if I wasn’t at the designated start at the East 72nd Street and 5th Avenue entrance to Central Park by 6:00 am.

When the workmen appeared and climbed up onto the platform off the track I asked if the trains were even running, he answered in a Russian-sounding accent; “Every half hour.”  I waited till 5:30, but I made it to West 72nd by 6:00 am, the wrong side of the park.  But, I had a paper copy of the e-mail with the directions for the run so I started running across the park and caught up with my pace group who were running towards me.  I ran and talked with a lawyer who has a teenaged daughter.  We got ahead and out of sight of the others but it was fine because we were talking.  At the aid station when we met up with the others one of them told us to slow down since we were only 5 miles in and still had so much running to do.  We ran along the East River and over the bridge to Randall’s Island and around (using the bathroom in the tennis center where kids in tennis clothes with bags of rackets were lined up to sign up for a tournament or something.  We ran back across the bridge (some of us stopped to take pictures) and once again to the aid station at Carl Schurz Park.  After a snack and a drink we were off again but I needed to stop at the public bathroom in the park and when I came out I lost my group.  I ran along the river until it seemed the walkway ended and I crossed the street but then that sidewalk came to an end and I was on the wrong side of FDR Drive.  I kept going, but on surface streets,  I turned on 63rd and ran to 5th Ave at Central park and up to 72nd and entered the park to do the lower loop again to get up to 17 miles, but  the finish line for a 10K.  It was Boomer’s Cystic Fibrosis Run to Breathe, I passed a teenager with a race number pinned to her shirt, sitting on a barrier taking loud hoarse gasping breathes but not using an asthma inhaler.  I wondered if she had cystic fibrosis. There but for the Grace of God…  Symptoms of my childhood illnesses led doctors to consider a cystic fibrosis diagnosis for me when I was a baby.  I had something else, asthmatic bronchitis that landed me in the hospital with pneumonia five times.

Runners run because they can.  If you’re reading this blog, please donate to my NYC Marathon fundraiser for the McBurney Y’s Strong Kid’s Campaign in my sidebar <—-!!!

Since I couldn’t follow the intended loop I took another trail and ended up wandering through The Ramble.  When I came out I found a road to follow down and around and back up to East 72nd and 5th Avenue where the mornings run had started.

By 11:00 am I was going down the stairs into a subway station and instead of going home to an ice bath I met up with The Husband and My Kid (a fan of the reality show Toddlers & Tiaras) who were in the theater at LIU to watch our neighbor participate in her first (and, according to her father, hopefully her only) children’s “glitz” children’s beauty contest, Darling Divas Candyland Pageant –but that’s another post.