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
