I know I had set up to write about Running to Harlem. Well, outside of reporting that I did it. (Not only did I run toward Harlem, as in the 125th Street entrance off the Henry Hudson Parkway, but I made it there!) And then turned around and ran back to our Brooklyn home, with only one stop to refill my water bottle at a rest area just south of the 79th Street Boat Basin, the only watering hole I could find that day along the Hudson River Park. (I was carrying a strap-affixed fist-size bottle that I'd bought earlier that day; I also wore a Velcro-compression strap on my left knee to keep my patella from wandering.) The conditions were perfect, thank goodness; cool and misty. A cyclist gave me an encouraging smile when I was striding north near the cruise ship berths in the 40s. And if it is the first and last time I run to Harlem, I will always have the slender beauty of the flowering fruit trees along the river that Friday afternoon (March 16), about ten blocks below my turnaround spot, where remarkably I had the place to myself.
Imagine my surprise when I got home and it was three hours and thirty-seven minutes after I’d started. I didn’t know when I began, but I must have gone more than 26.2 miles, more than the length of a marathon. And, yeah, my dogs were sore. But not blistered. And otherwise I felt OK!
With less than a month to go before the marathon, I’ve begun my taper. Maybe if I were in my thirties, I’d go a touch longer with my forty mile per week, fifty mile per week regime. But that’s over. From now until mid-April (the 16th, to be exact), I plan to do as much cross-training and strengthening as running. And never more than a half-marathon per.
I’ve been assigned my bib number. It’s 14-2-91. Oddly or no, I always assign significances to my marathon bib numbers. It will be a long three hours-plus on April 16; a lot of time to think:
14: I’m thinking of one of my earliest memories. I am in my pyjamas (CANADIAN!) sitting in front of a black and white TV. Maple Leaf rookie Davey Keon has skied the puck from center ice and it bounces crazily in front of an opposing goaltender so much so that the netminder misplays it and Keon scores! His number was 14.
14 is also M’s birthday!
2: At this age, I swallowed with my obliging sister’s help so many chewable aspirins that I very nearly died on the operating table while a hospital team worked to pump my stomach.
91: The age when I will have been running during eight consecutive decades.
OK, I can live with this bib number.
You can’t see the woodpeckers in the treetops, on the hillside above the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, but they are going to town on the bark hollow to such an extent that it sounds like they’re ginning up their jackhammer impressions.
Strange, but the Fifth Avenue flowering pear trees are in peak bloom. Before a tree-shattering storm, a day after 9/11, we had a beauty of a flowering pear in front of our house in Brooklyn. M’s Mom was amazed by the blooms a year and a half before on April 1, 2000, the day of K’s Bat Mitzvah. It was so rare to see the tree in such ecstatic bloom at that time of year that we thought it had to be a message from above on our family’s special day.
Now twelve years later, on March 21, 2012, all the flowering pears in the neighborhood are ablaze. And it’s only the first day of spring.
Next: Running for Your Life: Not the Zombie Version
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