Musings from the road: 60 days! before the Boston Marathon.
Here’s a snippet of a post from last year at this time. Mid-February:
“My right leg, still tender, if I didn’t know better I’d be thinking blood clot, the pain is so sharp at times, but I’ve done my bit, stretched and strengthened like never before, and as I head out again – six-miler, easy pace, fifty/fifty-five minutes – right away feel the inner-thigh muscle tighten, not easing as it always does, it’s the cold, I tell myself as I slow down, listen to my body, as the running mavens say, and the muscle holds in its tightness; a drummer knowing the tone of the bass drum is off, the tension too tight, but not so that I can’t get through the set. I need this gig. It's Week One, and the show, if there is going to be the show in April, must go on.”
Well, it didn’t go on. A month later during the third week in March that lame hammy would tear massively, so much so that I almost blacked out. Here’s a taste:
“I have to get up and buy a little heating pad before going to work. Instead settle for Aleve and Tiger Balm pain-relieving patches. I know I started this post with different intentions. But I have to face facts. When I pealed off the first of the Tiger Balm patches a band of muscle was not just tight but as hard as a rock. I usually post on Tuesday, but today this is going up on Monday. Tomorrow, I’ll have a strong sense of knowing where I will stand. Or if I can stand, for that matter.”
I could barely stand. In fact, I had to give up on the idea of Boston 2011. And stop training for the spring. I didn’t get back out on the road until June. And then at half-speed, without any sense that I would be able to train for Boston 2012.
Now, I definitely feel like I'm back. The past two Wednesdays I ran 17 miles and 20.6 miles, respectively. Not a Boston Marathon hilly route, rather a relatively flat one along the Hudson River, from my home in Brooklyn, the toughest hills: Gowanus-to-Brooklyn Heights, the Brooklyn side span of the Brooklyn Bridge en route to Manhattan. But I’ve been hard-training on the treadmill, with speed and high degrees of incline. Also stretching a lot, and working the weight machines. I don’t feel the-muscle tightening I did last year, or the forefoot pain that during traing last year, I though would never ease.
Here’s a taste of the long ones:
The Tow Pound in the middle-30s along the Hudson River Park, a super-size pier, this day (Feb. 8) a squad car near the exit is several car lengths away from the intersection, but he has the light, and I gingerly enter the space with an eye toward him and make some gesture with my hand, a half-stop, half-friendly greeting, and I am no sooner out of the box when the driver guns the cruiser and roars into southbound traffic on the West Side Highway, fishtailing his way to the next traffic light with tires squealing. Near the Tow Pound exit is a ghost bike attached to a signpost, a memorial to a cyclist whose life was taken there.
The work site scaffolding under the Brooklyn Bridge, from here workers are busy making repairs with heavy machinery, tarped away from civilian sight . . . Am thinking of Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever,” his crack knowledge of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, scene from the park bench in Bay Ridge, with the socially climbing Stephanie.
Feb. 8, on my long run, I turn back after climbing the overpass at 46th Street, for the Intrepid Museum (thus the INTREPID ROUTE title), and on Feb. 15, I leg it out to Pier I, just north of the dilapidated New York Center Railroad 69th Street Transfer Bridge, which, when it was in operation, made it possible for railcars to float across the Hudson River to the Weekawken Yards in New Jersey. Repairs were being conducted, with help from a moored barge of the fortuitous title, Hughes 105. (105 is my wife’s and my lucky number . . .)
Southbound, 1 World Trade Center is not visible until you turn the corner at the main entrance to Chelsea Piers at 23rd Street.
Is it just me, but when I see 1 WTC from the Manhattan-bound Brooklyn Bridge its location looks far more distant and insignificant than the Twin Towers used to look like from the bridge, almost as if 1 WTC is being built in New Jersey.
Which brings to mind the thought that Hudson River adjacent Jersey City’s current growth has everything to do with dark tourism, the multibillion-dollar trend that could soon vie with the financial sector as regional growth generator, with New York, past, present and future, the most popular target for headline-seeking terrorist cells. For more on dark tourism, check out this article in one of my fave magazines, Miller-McCune: http://bit.ly/ndMCW7.
Running for Your Life: A Pause That Refreshes
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