Lincoln Square and beyond

Asbury Park Relay Marathon

Yesterday I had the honor of joining my sister Michele and four other women to form Will Run 4 Chocolate, our Asbury Park Relay Marathon team.  (She picked the name.)  We ran 26.2 miles over eight laps through the Asbury streets and on the Boardwalk, switching team members under the unheated cover of Asbury’s Convention Hall.

The weather was horrific — cold windy rain early, followed by colder, windier conditions by midday.  I was asked to run laps 2 and 3, covering 6.7 miles total.  Michele ran Lap 1 and passed over to me.  I ran with my brother-in-law Paul for the first quarter mile or so as he was doing the full marathon at a slow pace as a “team of one”, really just training for the Philly Marathon in November, but then I took off (as much as I ever really “take off” while running) to go at my own pace.  On the plus side it was flat as a pancake, and better to run in the cold than in the heat.  My times were not terrible, running 9 minute miles.  Thank goodness I brought a dry change of clothes, as after that it was three hours of cheering on my teammates and other random runners.  One of our teammates got cramps early on, but we had a couple of 8-minute mile runners to finish up and help the overall team results.  In total we ran 4:04, which was 16th out of 31 co-ed teams and thus thoroughly, completely average.  We did collect a very cool Tillie medal at the end - my first running medal!  Paul finished up in about 4:25 — not fast, but again, really a training run for Philly, where he is hoping for sub-4:00. 

No races planned between now and the end of the year.  I’m done with NYRR qualifying races (hooray!), and thus officially “in” for NYCM2010, but may try to pick up one or two more for fun. 

The road back

It’s been nearly two months since I last posted anything here.  I’m now fine physically, though in that time I’ve ridden only about 250 miles and run 30 — which, in the general scheme of things, is very little for this point in the summer.  I had a rib contusion from the accident that bothered me for the better part of a month, and exerting myself for more than five minutes was painful.

On a more positive note, I rode 53 miles today and it felt easy.  The running ability gets lost more quickly and that will take months to recover.  And, I’m back to a more regular routine of at least three days’ exercise per week (probably should be five or six).  I’m signed up for a couple of long rides in September and I’m on Michele’s running relay team for the Asbury Marathon in October, so I can’t stop now.

Not the North Fork Century recap

It’s 1:30 pm on Sunday, and I should be on the North Fork of Long Island more than halfway toward my first-ever cycling century (that is, a 100-mile ride).  Instead I’m home from the hospital, nursing a very swollen lip and sore ribs, having crashed before I even got to the bus.

I was up at 3:45 am, with everything set out for clothes, gear, money, photocopies of my driver’s license and medical insurance card, etc.  Missy was up with me, so she wished me good luck and told me to call her when I got to the bus at 31st Street and 8th Avenue that would take us out to North Fork.  I was *dreading* the ride from the apartment to the bus, much more than the 100-mile ride itself.  All of the bars close at 4 am, and there are tons of crazy people out.  I pondered taking a cab, if I could find one that would take me and my bike, but decided to tough it out and ride the mile and a half to the entrance.  I left our apartment just after 4, and was meeting my bike group at 4:15.  Down CPW, through Columbus Circle, then on to the newly-created bike lane down Broadway.  I’d take that throguh Times Square, bear right on to 7th Avenue, then turn right on to 31st to get to the bus.

At 57th and Broadway I thought that I would be better-off in a cab.  It had rained overnight and all of the roads were slick.  Taxis were racing down Broadway, and drunks were wandering about into the street, trying to hail one.  Through Times Square I jumped on to the sidewalk for a block because it was safer.  On 7th Avenue police cars blocked the far right lane, so I was constantly looking over my shoulder to see if I had room.  When I got to Penn Station at 32nd and 7th, I was kinda relieved and decided that I could just hop on to the 31st Street sidewalk to get to 8th  I went to make the turn through a puddle and….

*SMACK*

Not sure exactly how, but my wheels gave out a bit underneath me and I hit the curb, flying off the bike and landing face-first on to the sidewalk.  I got up and thought for a second, “am I OK?”, and instantly realized that my right front tooth was bent in (though not dislodged, and not loose) and I had cut the inner part of my upper lip badly.  I then needed to sit back down as my head felt light.  Thankfully, nothing else in me seemed to be broken and I had not lost consciousness and so I went into my back pocket, pulled out my phone, and called Missy.

“Hi honey! You made it to the bus OK?”

“I fell.  I fell on my face at 31st Street and 7th Avenue.”

“Call 911, I’m coming down.”

I then called 911, told the dispatcher where I was, and then saw two of my bike club people, Mike and Felicia, riding down 31st.  I called out for Mike by name, and they stopped to check in on me.  The cops arrived, then Missy arrived by taxi, and then the ambulance.  My 100-mile bike ride day was over at 1.5 miles logged.  Mike and Felicia went off to catch the bus, Missy took the bike via taxi back to the apartment, and I took the ambulance over to New York Hospital at 68th and Lenox.

I ended up being at the hospital from about 5:15 until 9.  I have four or five stiches on my inside upper lip, a tetanus shot, a prescription for Percoset, and I have to go back tomorrow to have their dental group (which is closed on Sunday) look more closely at the bent tooth.  The only other injuries were a couple of jammed fingers on my left hand, none broken, and a very small surface gash on my right knee.  After sitting around for a couple of hours I noticed that my right side rib cage also started to feel very sore, and it remains so now, nearly ten hours later.  I don’t think I broke a rib but we’ll see how that feels tonight and tomorrow.  I exchanged IMs with Felicia just to let her and the others know that I was fine, and she responded that at 8:30 am they were still waiting for the weather in Greenport to clear up.  Hopefully, they got going and are well on their way.

In retrospect it was my tiredness, laziness and general idiocy that caused me to fall.  Our SIG leader Paul would tell me that that’s what I get for cutting corners in wet road conditions, and he’d be right. I fear that they might not be able to save the tooth tomorrow and I’ll need a replacement, or that the surgery needed to get it back into shape is more extensive than just nudging it back into place.  It’s hard to eat because my bite is off, and I feel like my tooth is a foreign object in my mouth.  The lip will heal on its own in a few days but for now I look like I lost a fight.  And, most depressing to me, my first century ride is now likely put off to September.  On the plus side, it certainly could have been worse (like hit by a car or broken an arm or leg), and New York Hospital is a better place to be treated than St. Luke’s Roosevelt.  And who knows, maybe I’ll end up with braces and my teeth bleached, and the whole thing will be some ego-boosting cosmetic improvement.  We’ll see what the oral surgeon says tomorrow.

NYRR Japan Day 4-mile race

Two lessons learned this weekend:

1. If there’s an announcement that the President and First Lady are coming into New York City to see a Broadway show, and your spouse says, “hey, tickets are still available, let’s go!”, ignore her.  It was an absolute madhouse in Times Square last night — security to get on to 44th Street to get to the Belasco was crazy, the show started an hour late, no one was allowed to even walk outside at intermission, and as it turned out the First Couple were in the back of the orchestra while we were in the mezzanine so we couldn’t see them anyway.  And bus traffic up 6th Avenue was still being re-routed when the show let out at 11:30 at night, so we didn’t get home until after midnight.  The show was good but very involved, and I didn’t have the mental stamina to keep up with it that late.

2. If there’s a race that starts at 8 am on a Sunday at the north end of Central Park, and you’re dependent on public transportation to get there, leave home at least a half-hour earlier than you think you need.

A whole bunch of races this year have begun from 67th Street on the East Side at 9 am.  I’ve been spoiled.  Today I had to face the insanity of the re-routed weekend subway schedule, which left me waiting in the catacombs of the Columbus Circle subway station for 20 minutes for an uptown “A” train (which replaced the “C” this weekend as the local - the “D” was still express - apparently the “B” doesn’t run?  Christ, the subways on the weekends are just awful).  Originally my plan was to take the bus up Central Park West, but no buses were in sight when I got outside so I took what I thought would be the more reliable route, the subway.  I didn’t have a watch but I passed the CNN clock on the way there, so I knew I got down into the subway at about 7:25 - 7:30.  After about ten minutes I asked someone what time it was, and she said “7:30”.  I then could read someone else’s watch who was sitting and waiting, and his watch said “7:40”.  When the A train finally arrived, the guy sitting across from me had a watch the size of a medium-build schnauzer,  which clearly said “7:50”.  Really, I had no friggin’ clue what time it was, so the 59 -> 72 -> 81 -> 89 -> 96 -> 103 crawl up Central Park West made me anxious.  There were maybe three or four other runner-looking-type people on the train, too, so at least there would be other stragglers.

When we arrived at 103rd Street I bolted out the exit, and sprinted across CPW and into the Park.  Past the Pond, up the hill, got myself kinda out of breath, and I found… a whole bunch of other runners still warming up on the West Drive, away from the start.  Clearly it wasn’t that late.  However, when I got to the baggage area the marshals were telling everyone to hurry up to the start, that we had four minutes.  At that point I walked over, caught my breath, took my spot with the green-bib people, and the “race”* was on.  Loved the women in traditional Japanese costume playing klezmer at the start!  I was waiting for some cheesy 80s pump-you-up music, and the music over the loudspeakers was clearly a “WTF” sort of thing, but when when I passed through the start and saw the women on stage I appreciated the novelty of it.

* - It’s deceiving to call these events “races”.  A “race” assumes that this is a competition where people have a chance to win, which it is for maybe 3% of the runners due to all of the age categories and whatnot.  This was not a race; it was an organized, timed run with prizes.  Yesterday’s Brooklyn Half took most of the serious city-based runners out of today’s run, and at best the other 97% who have zero chance at a prize are competing against ourselves.  And honestly, today, I wasn’t even doing that — I was dog tired after a 64-mile bike ride up to Rockland yesterday, followed by my Very Special, Very Late Evening With Barack And Michelle (TM), so this was purely an exhibition-level effort. Think NFL pre-season, week 4.  I tried harder during the Wall Street Run, and that was maybe a step above “jailbreak” in organization.

I did enjoy taking on the same basic Central Park course from a different perspective (getting the rolling hills over with in Mile 1, Missy cheering me on at the midway point instead of the finish, Cat Hill in Mile 3), but my total time of 34:42 (8:40/mile pace) is a digression from my last couple of NYRR runs.  I’m not terribly concerned, though, as I know that my general runs are getting longer and the combination of running and biking is continually improving my health and stamina.  I picked up my pace for only maybe the last third of a mile, on the small incline back to the 102nd Street transverse, and finished feeling a little bit winded but not overwhelmed.  My calves are still sore from the biking, though.

The only other notable thing was the humidity.  I sweat a lot this morning, and I’m not looking forward to running in the heat in the middle of the summer.  Never been a fan of carrying anything on a run, especially not a bottle of water, so we’ll see how that goes as we get deeper into June and July.

So the next few weeks will finish off Phase 1 of my marathon adventure.  I’m a cycling ride marshal (yay!) at next week’s Mini 10-K to fulfill my volunteer requirement, followed by a participant in the Father’s Day 5 miler, taking me to the coveted 2009 “9+1” for NYCM2010 automatic qualification.  I’ll dedicate most of my summer exercise time more to biking to running, if only because I enjoy it more (by a lot).  Then the real marathon work begins: half-marathon by April, and the full in November.  Can’t say I’m looking forward to it but I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk away easily from this challenge.

Hangin’ with Barack and Michelle

Tomorrow night we are going to see August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, pretty much exclusively because the Obamas are scheduled to attend and it was still available on TDF after reading the story about it.  Let’s hope there is no national crisis tomorrow that keeps them from making the trip.

MS “Coast The Coast” Ride, 5/16/09 Report (Part 2)

Part 1 can be found here.

So after lunch, things were different.  I said goodbye to Mom & Rich, took a musette bag from them with a change of clothes for the bus ride back, and headed off with Al and Dave.  There were maybe a hundred riders or more still eating lunch when we left at about 1 pm, and there was no real rush by anyone to get moving, so it was obvious that the ride was going to be a lot quieter than it had been in the morning.  The afternoon was through southern Ocean County pine barrens — not a bad thing but not exciting, either.  We went through the residential roads of Forked River for a few miles, but eventually we found ourselves on Route 9 South, which is a terrible road for biking.

Then came the wind.

The wind was relentless, directly out of the south, probably about 15 mph.  The sun had come out, and that stretch of road is just open field with no tree cover and no protection from the elements.  The ride from the southern tip of Forked River past the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant and in to Waretown was just awful.  I led most of the way and struggled with every stroke of the pedals.  Lunch didn’t really help either, as it gave my body a chance to tense up.  When we turned on to Wells Mill Road and toward the next rest stop, both of my thighs were throbbing.  There were many low-rolling hills, nothing massive but just enough to make me work.  The Vo-Tech School stop at the 63 mile mark was necessary to stretch and re-group, and also take an Advil for my aching thighs. The weirdest thing was that there was nobody other than the volunteers at this stop — it was like a Route 66 desert outpost.  I knew it would be quieter on the roads after lunch but it was so quiet and so out of the way that for a brief delusional second I wondered if I was still on the right course.  As Al and I were getting ready to leave, Dave arrived and said he needed a longer break, and we’d just meet him at Pinelands.

The last 22 miles of the ride were also due south, straight into the wind.  Al and I stuck together most of the time, but with more rolling hills and the wind in our face the entire time, my breezy 20 mph pace along the shore had gone down under 15, and at a couple of points I was close to 12 mph.  At 12 mph I would not make the 4 pm bus.  We got through it, and even passed a couple of people who were also struggling, though when we got to Barnegat (mile 70.5) the American flags outside of Lucille’s Country Cooking were flapping hard in the exact opposite direction of where we were going.

They had one thing at Lucille’s that I most wanted to see: salt!  Lucille’s had actual potato chips, not the crime against humanity that are the cinnamon-and-sugar pita chip bags that every other rest stop had.  I was craving salt as my body was sweating for hours, and there was nothing at lunch or any of the other rest stops that was satisfying me (though I really, really liked these things, which are probably terrible for me but tasted great).  So I downed a bag of chips, and Al and I were off for the final 15 miles.  There was one other random guy at the rest stop who I invited to join us for the last leg of the journey, and he was happy to have a couple of teammates for what was sure to be the hardest leg.  It was seven miles on one road through the pine barrens, straight south over hills, followed by about six miles on a few different roads in the woods, to the finish.  The time was 2:40 pm.  I had asked the Lucille’s volunteer when the first cyclists arrived, and she said that someone went flying by at about ten minutes past 11.  That’s 70.5 miles over 3 hours 10 minutes, or a 22.5 mph pace from Long Branch to Barnegat, assuming no rest stops (unlikely), and including several stop signs and traffic lights.  That’s just evil.

Here’s where my moral dilemma began: I’m not a fan of unannounced bike drafting, because I think it’s unsafe and a leeching move.  But I was also feeling very tired after fighting the wind non-stop for the past 90 minutes, so…  Al led out of the rest stop for maybe a mile, then I took over for about two miles, but we caught up with a group of three riders who had formed a mini-paceline and I just latched right on.  I should have yelled out that I was there, and I absolutely should have volunteered my services to lead the group, but I didn’t and neither did the two guys with me.  We rode at the back of the group into the wind for at least four miles, and when we got to the next intersection one of them turned around said, “we’re pulling an entire wagon train here!”  I felt guilty, Al did not.  Next time I’ll take my turn pulling, I swear.  Meanwhile, the guy who latched on to us at the rest stop said nothing, just disappeared, so that’s there as well.  To each his own, perhaps.

From there it was not especially hard as the trees blocked the wind, though I still had some pain in my thighs and general fatigue from being out on the bike for seven hours.  A dozen or so people were on the front lawn of the high school, and they aplauded when I rode past, maybe 10 seconds behind Al, who clearly had more in the tank than I did at that point — so much for blowing out my teammates on the straightaways in Lavallette.  It was 3:35 pm, and I was going to make the 4 pm bus (hooray!).  I changed out of my dirty, soaked bike clothes and into the loose-fitting running clothes in the musette bag that I was carrying since Cedar Creek.  I tried in vain to find a decent bite to eat, took two water bottles, and headed back out to find the bus.  I saw in the gym that they had a big setup for the overnighters — lots of cots and blankets and whatnot.  They were also running a regular school bus shuttle to Tuckerton Seaport for dinner, and several dozen bikes were lined up inside the school even though very few riders mulled about.  ‘Cause if you know anything about Tuckerton, it’s a great place to spend a Saturday night. ;-)

Al wanted to ride an extra 15 miles to log his first-ever century (which was an MS-sponsored addition to the 85-mile ride with a clearly-marked path), but I needed to get back to NYC so I told him that I was done.  I went to use the bathroom inside the high school and when I came out he was nowhere to be seen, so I assumed he went off to ride.  As I walked my bike to the Academy bus to go back, he ran up behind me and said that he skipped out on the extra 15.  Then out of seemingly nowhere, Dave arrived as well with maybe 5 minutes to spare — he had done the last 15 miles totally solo, which must have been brutal.  For a guy who was riding on an older bike without clips, that effort to make it in for the early bus was abolutely amazing.  There were maybe 20 other people on the bus total.  I was back in NYC by 6:45, well in time for the concert.  (Note to Missy: the concert was good if not my favorite genre, a bit long given that I was tired, sorry for not commenting on it earlier, Merry Christmas!)

All in all, I’d say it was a very good day.  No injuries, no flats, no mechanical problems, and a new PR on single-day bike distance.  I was left with a pair of sunburned forearms, a t-shirt, a deep and lasting love for KIND almond and apricot bars (by far the best food at any of the rest stops), and a deep hatred of the Route 9 stretch that runs past Oyster Creek (which is something I had already).  And we raised over $1,000 to fight MS, which is probably better than anything else that happened all day.  I took today off from any serious exercise but I’ll be back at it by Tuesday, weather permitting.

Thanks all for reading this far, and again, sincerest thanks to everyone who gave money to me, Al, and Dave so that we could do this!