"The Hills Are Alive...."

Ok, perhaps the hills were not as bad as the Austrian Alps, but it felt that way at times today. Consequently nobody broke into song at the end of today's little 20 mile jaunt to New Jersey and back to Manhattan. Ok, hang on, the snow in the mountains is reminding me I need to put ice on my legs. I am contemplating taking a Ghetto Ice Bath TM, which is an ice bath for those of us too poor to have a bathtub. I will put two bags of ice and water into a trash can lined with Hefty bags and put my legs in there and that will do the trick. That way I can bring it into my room and continue writing this entry while my legs soak / freeze. I will be back...

Ok the legs are in the trash can which is half filled with water. Not too bad, although the water is not too cold. Now it's time to add 2 bags of ice. Hang on a second....

Hmmm, bag number 1 deployed, this is kind of starting to suck. Not too psyched about adding bag # 2 to the mix, since # 1 dropped the temperature of the water about 12 degrees in 5 seconds. Ok, time to be a man, un momento por favor...



Aaaaaararrrrrrggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

There will be a momentary delay...

Ok, we have a few kinks to work out in the Ghetto Ice Bath TM, namely the tendency for your feet to freeze out of proportion to your legs. When I had a bathtub I used to lie in there, add water, and then take a block ice and press it against the affected area (last year, my hip). With the Notorious G.I.B., your feet are immersed in the ice as well, and they don't like that too much.

In case your wondering how long I was immersed in there, it wasn't very long once ice bag # 2 was introduced. Perhaps that was a mistake? Anyway, it was 2 minutes or less. :-( Ok, I'm going to plunge them back in now and time it, we'll see how long I can last.

Wow, 24 seconds! That was lame. Is it possible that my ice is colder than 32 degrees? Did I accidentally buy dry ice? It feels wet. Hmmmm.

Ok, so I won't be marketing the G.I.B. to running stores, but I think it actually would come in handy for interrogating prisoners. Seriously, 24 seconds was all I could tolerate and, although I'm no Navy Seal, I can handle pain fairly well. Note to self: bring cyanide capsules with me if we ever go to war against a country with a lot of ice.

Garden State

We began our run on 165th Street and Riverside Drive and ran over the George Washington Bridge into The Garden State. New Jersey gets a bad rap as being polluted, but the park where we went running along the Hudson River was quite beautiful. And hilly. Did I mention there were a lot of hills?

My goal is to qualify for Boston, so I joined a splinter faction of th 8:00 group and we decided to run faster than the rest of them. The 8:00's were going to do 8:15's so we planned on doing 7:45. The first mile we went too fast I thought, although my watch (which I never wear) said it was 8 minutes plus. I felt we were going 7:20ish, so either my watch, or me, or the mile marker was wrong.

After that we slowed down to a more normal pace. I started lagging behind once we hit the big hills in Jersey, and 3 of the guys I ran with went ahead, leaving me and a guy named Brenn behind. I was ok with hanging back, as we were told to save energy to race the last 3 miles, so that's what I did.

Once I got to the half way point, having seen the 3 speedsters coming back towards me after the turn around, I decided to increase my pace and see if I could catch them. I caught up with Coach Pete who wasn't feeling it, but the other two did not falter and I never caught them. I ran with Pete until Mile 16.5 or so and then took off, a little in advance of where the 3 mile "race" was supposed to start. I'm sure I sped up overall over the last 3 compared to the first 17, which felt nice, but I wasn't entirely sure of the split.

I finished in 2:50:06, an 8:31 pace. I wanted to go about a minute per mile faster, so this seems to put an end to the Boston qualifying prospects, unless the differences from the marathon are enough to explain the disparity. The hills were the main thing that slowed me down, and they are much larger than the ones we will encounter on the NYC Marathon course. I was running with a water bottle, something I won't do on race day (a water station every mile). It was pretty hot and humid today, conditions not likely to exist on Marathon day. So perhaps if you add all of these things up and consider that I still felt well at the end, I might have an outside chance.

All of a sudden I cannot keep my eyes open for some reason, going to take a nap. More later...