08.20.09
I, Runner Robot
Running through Times Square. 2009 NYC Half Marathon
08.17.09
I ran all night and day, I couldn’t get away
NYC Half Marathon 2009 Start
I competed in my first big competitive race yesterday morning, running and finishing the NYC 1/2 Marathon. The fact that I can say and not be lying that I finished the race while still actually running is something. I’d planned on finishing it that way and felt I’d finish it that way up until about mile 9 when my thoughts started to betray me and the idea of just stopping and walking it piped up. By mile 11, I’d had it and it was only the voice of a good friend who coached and mentored me in the ways of running that put me through. But I finished in 2:10 or just over 10 minutes a mile with each successive mile actually improving in time or what I now know as a negative split. The heat and humidity wasn’t anything I was used to running in and it beat me down brutally until there wasn’t much left to drag across the finish line.
The course itself was something pretty spectacular. It was 13.1 miles that looped around Central Park and then spit us out on 7th Avenue where we ran down to Times Square, the entire avenue blocked and lined with spectators, bands, the gay cheerleaders, cops and firemen. That was a shining moment where you can’t help but get a huge kick of adrenaline and I did…but then we turned the corner and ran down 42nd Street through Disneyland and out onto the West Side Highway. To look down that sun-spotted stretch and know that there were four looming miles knocked the wind out of me but I pressed on as did the 14,000 people running along with me.
My email to people who’ve asked today how the race went included two milestone events that were paramount to me in this race: “I finished” and “I didn’t poop myself”. The second one seems to take people by surprise and I’ve thrown off more then a few people from ever running by explaining that shitting oneself during a race isn’t unheard of. Jubilee Chris, Voice of the Lord, Hand of Light, and Power Tool of the Good Carpenter, also ran with me and regaled me with tales of how the front-runners in the race, those of whom each second in the run matters, often wait until just before the start and then pee, having deferred to their mental conditioning being the priority rather than a potty break. I would like to have said I scoped out said puddles of urine when I finally got up to the starting line but by that time I was already at the 5:00 minute mark and I wanted to make sure my fancy-schmancy shoe timer RFID thingy made as close as contact to the starting mat so my times would register so I missed the pools of urine.
Overall, I’m happy to say I ran it, clapped for and whistled at the cute gay cheerleaders, got to run through Times Square like a returning champion, and finished the race. I can’t imagine feeling the way I did and knowing that I was only half-way through if this had been the full marathon so it got me re-thinking that whole idea. I imagine I’ll do it again next year and know for sure I’m going to keep up training and working out and that’s the win for me: not letting how absolutely brutalized and beat down I felt at the end ruin the feel I get from running.
08.09.09
Make the SAGE frolic, and the serious smile.
Jeff and I attended and helped host one of the local fundraisers for SAGE (Service and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) last night. To be honest, I didn’t quite understand what “hosting” meant since we weren’t having it at our house but came to find out about half-way through the party that hosting meant we were supposed to give out our “list” being a list of names of contacts to help add to the head count. We didn’t know know anyone that wasn’t already invited or at the party so we kind of sucked on the hosting bit but it was a good party and I’m a member of SAGE now…at 39…which trumps getting the first AARP magazine at 50. So there is that.
But the funny part of the evening was when a friend who was also hosting came up to me after the speech part of the party and said, “It’s all well and good to be here trying to raise money for a good cause but I couldn’t stop looking at your nipples the whole time I was standing up there speaking.”
Apparently my nipples are now so constantly erect that unless I wear an under-shirt or put Band-aids® on them, I look like I’m standing in an Arctic wind during frost-bite season. In the pro column, It’s a ice-breaker.
08.05.09
From the files of “remember when…”
Now that it’s hot and humid and the dog days of August have set in….remember when I was back in Ohio in April this past year during some freak-ass snow storm? Yeah.
Also, apparently I had facial hair (and I’m assuming chest hair) which Jeff has since required I keep shorn.
08.03.09
The dying back of a garden
My garden is dying. It is true, even in the first of what I assume will be the dog-days of August when the fruits of gardening labor should be apparent, mine are not. The garden suffers thusly:
The cucumbers have refused to grow and vine up the trellises I’ve so carefully built and strung for them. While we’ve gotten a few cukes off of them, the yield versus the number of plants I put out is a pittance. There will be no 2009 Aunt Kitty Pickles this year, I’m afraid.
The tomatoes are limp-wristed, pale, spindly, and wither at the slightest glance. Even if I walk past them and try to look from the corner of my eye, they droop and will drop a leaf as if to say, “ooooooooh” and throw the back of a hand up to their forehead in some pre-fainting theater. It should have been obvious that so few blooms equal even less fruit.
The only other vegetable of note are the peppers which I say using the word “stunted” would be aggressive. They are almost knee high when they should be at my waist and while they appear to be a robust verdant shade, I’m wondering if there is even enough juice coursing through their leaves to hold them up against gravity. No worries about needing support cages for these poor things.
My theories about what has happened to my sad, pale plot of dirt comes down to several plausible and probably somewhat connected reasons:
The cold, wet summer of our discontent. This year in upstate New York, zones 4A-5, has been one of the coolest and wettest won record. As a human being of a certain make up and constitution, I’ve found having no 90-degree days and a moderate and tolerable level of humidity to be a surprising delight. Am am not of a beach constitution, do not like to sweat, and cannot find it in my brain (nor my Ohio-born and raised genes) to entertain an afternoon siesta, languishing through the heat and humidity of the day. I find it perfectly hellish and it flattens me into a whiny, complainer that I hate to be around. Also, I’m driven inside and usually end up baking something which heats up the kitchen and provides food which I’m now paying a lot of money to a very nice trainer to tell me not to eat. All that being said, I believe the heat and humidity is exactly what a garden is used too. Sure it might like a good steady rain throughout the week and especially through July and August but there needs to be some sun and heat and this year, there hasn’t been a lot of it.
Have I expended the very limits of my soil’s nutrients? Every year, I enrich the soil of my raised plots with aged compost. I do have limited areas for rotation which I’ve worried somewhat about but there is little I can do with limited space. That being said, adding hundreds of pounds of rich compost to each individual bed should more than make up for heavy feeders…or so the though goes around in my head. But now I’m not sure and will spend most of August research soil refurbishing techniques to try and figure out what I need to do this fall and next spring to zap the beds back to life.
Bees. They’re dying…I send a little money to different places to find out why and hope to turn it around but I can’t say that a dearth of bees in my back yard isn’t distressing me. Even the Lamb’s Ear are typically covered like an undulating carpet of pollen-brushed little buggers but this year, it goes untended.
A Loss of Vision and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike previous years, my heart just wasn’t in the right place for the garden this year. There was no obsessing over seed catalogues and laying awake at night to dream of a dense, moist garden that kindly wound it’s vines around my ankles as I walked through whispering, “This is good, this is good.” There was only desperation as the early spring became late spring and I realized I was going to be working through all summer and fall and would only have short weekends to care and love my garden. Can anything grow without attention? I hurriedly put out a few things but nothing that really made my heart sing or want to spend afternoons weeding and turning over leaves to pick off bugs and whatnot. And now the cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini, and tomatoes are all dying of powdery mildew and fungus that is rotting them from the inside out.
So I stand on the outside of the fence looking inwards to the neglected beds and think better thoughts for next year. Perhaps a planting of winter wheat to help the soil and the addition of some other natural concoctions that will amend and give back what things might need. And more importantly, I’m going to find the vision again I had for the garden and do a little more and better planning next go around to keep it fresh and alive.