Running for Your Life: One Month Away

Poem
An Immigrant from Krygyzstan Takes her First MTA Subway Ride on the D Train, 12:25 p.m., 3/08/12

Click, clack
Click, clack
Bump, bump
Kticketa, ticketa ticketa
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Whoosh
Static, giggle, hush
Too! Tune!

Click, clack
Click, clack,
Rumble, irrumble
Too! Tune!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Mutter
Static He – he – he – he
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ka-choo!
Hong! Hong!

I might be losing it. It’s been two years that I’ve either been training for a marathon or recovering from the training for a marathon. Wednesday (March 14), I ran the equivalent of a half-marathon at a race pace (in Steamtown 2010, it was 8:08 per mile). The body is holding up (with the exception, on runs of 10 miles or more, of a cranky left knee that flares up a bit after I get home, but a half-hour of ice compress seems to put it right . . . ) but the mind? Obviously, (see above poem) there’s a case to be made that it may never be the same.

Which brings me to the subject of the post. The Boston Marathon is now one month away, Patriots’ Day April 16. On Friday (March 16), the day before St. Patty’s Day, I plan to run to Harlem and back. Over three hours, what will be the longest and last of my over-15-mile training runs before Boston. The goals – with a near-senior athlete’s gutty sense of what is still possible at 56 years of age – to run slightly better than at Steamtown in Scranton, Pa.; An 8-minute mile over 26.2 miles in order to shave 3:08 from the Steamtown 2010 time (15th among 110 finishers in my age group, 55-59 @ 3.33.08), and come in at under 3:30, which would qualify me for the 2012 running of the New York City Marathon.

That would be in November. Which would make for more marathon running; more blogging. And the mind. God knows what will happen there.

*

It’s funny how people come out when the weather warms and brightens. Limbering run (March 14) to the Christopher Street pier from my home in Brooklyn and back, the sunniest, most beautiful day since September – five months – which is average for these parts, and not a blade of grass, it seems, without a person or a dog on it.

Why running in the Hudson River Park is so varied and appealing. Shirtless men on the dog-prohibited lawn, a young woman reading a classic Vintage paperback, pooches on leash and in the Village dogrun, lots of them howling. Then in Brooklyn, the scent of the flower mart on Henry Street, a woman picking her way through them. At 1 p.m., nothing but time on her hands on a day that suddenly feels like summer.

And home. Icing the knee. And priming for the big run to Harlem. On Friday; only a month away from Boston.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running to Harlem