Marathon training – now up to 38-plus miles per week – tests your mind as well as your body. On my runs through Brooklyn and Manhattan, especially on the one day a week that I put on extra miles (this week I’m up to 14 miles per long run; I plan to bump that up a mile or so every week for the next eight weeks before Boston), I see the darnedest things:
On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.
In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.
A blue rectangular road sign on Henry Street, Brooklyn, with arrow pointing straight ahead for the East River Ferry. Yet the sign can be seen by only pedestrians because Henry Street goes one way and the one-sided sign wasn’t posted in the direction of car traffic.
Cherchez le son: the ear-drilling car traffic from the adjoining highway from Hicks Street, chat from the urbane streets of Brooklyn Heights, ear-drilling car buzz again, this time aboard the Brooklyn Bridge pathway, hubbub of City Hall Park, the Ground Zero work zone, and serene quiet of the Hudson River Park, cries of gulls, wind whipping through urban trees recently planted, leaves freeze-dried so that they rustle like prairie corn. Repeat.
Ground zero construction workers, cement trucks, traffic cones, a veritable work site in a city (country?) that has no other work sites. Where no one is building nuttin’. Workers, truck drivers show a dim regard at best for crowds of tourists, Wall Streeters and TriBeCa tribalists. My first run around here I was very nearly run over by a cement mixer being driven like a taxi, honking as it went around a corner in which we runners, peds, and nannies pushing strollers had right of way at the intersection of Greenwich and Murray.
Skateboard park, the temperature is hovering around freezing but sunny and breezy, midday on a school day unless the hoodlums are off, say a week after Martin Luther King, who knows, the not-small park on the Hudson jammed like Geography never is – and for an hour a circle of young men at Stuyvesant High in lower Manhattan are playing some weird game with balls in gauze stockings, whizzing them around in orbits over their heads and not taking any notes, so don’t tell me it’s physics, a poor country’s cyclotron.
Yellow-clad kamikaze cyclist boar-hogging up the steepest part of the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian/cyclist pathway. Screaming something in my ear as I run past a clutch of tourists, veer only a little bit into the cyclist lane that he's barreling along, brushing me as he passes. Not an epithet, guessing a version of "ON YOUR LEFT!", and whoosh he’s gone down the incline ahead, and I’m dead sure as I watch that he’ll mow down a sizable female tourist who's looking out over the East River and in so doing has strayed into the middle of the cycling lane; he doesn’t slow, if anything speeds up, shouting loudly; hell, the poor girl's eyes look like a deer's in the headlights, she could have been badly injured in the collision but at the last second she zips out of the way to avoid it. I can’t hear what the yellow-clad kamikaze yelled, but I’d bet the house it wasn’t on your left.
Next: Running for Your Life: Chasing the February Blahs
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