Running for Your Life: After the Half

It took me 2:05:36 to finish, if you’re counting, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really, and if there is any secret to a long life (40-plus years!) of running, I put it down to that. For most of those years, I haven’t kept track.

Sure, in 2010, I shocked myself with running a marathon – twice as long as what I did on Saturday (Oct. 7) – in 3:33:08, and started to think different. About my time, that is.

I started to train harder and improve, with hopes of doing better. Why not? Beat yesterday, as the kids say! It seemed back then that a faster personal record wasn’t out of the question. That a 3:33 marathon time was good enough to qualify for Boston, which I ran in 2012, despite a near-running threatening hamstring pull in 2011.

Ah, but three injuries later – return of The Neuroma, knee collapse and faceplant – and finally I’m back to where I was when I started running in the mid-1970s. Listening and looking and going inward.

In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday, a waterside route out and under the head-spinning Verrazano Bridge, I watched a stray cormorant skimming the rippling current, followed the fairy dance of a wayward solo Monarch, tilted as if at windmills, running toward the trees on the horizon, and after, the fishermen casting their lines into the ocean waters, pausing to glance as we pass, puzzle-pusses, etched by the collective insanity of four hundred lightly clad souls huffing and puffing, beet-red in the punishing heat and humidity, so much like Hurricane Sandy weather that I can’t help but think it is on these men’s minds such a horror it would have been here almost five years ago to the day when that superstorm struck.

This then is the clean and well-lighted aftermath of the half. The ego eased with my second wind. When the run is pure, “time” and the pressure of time, of “beating yesterday,” simply vanishes like the morning mist above the Verrazano.

Next: Running for Your Life: Read, Read, Read