I've found the key to keeping my joints happy in the summer is to ice immediately after every run and possibly every night as prophylaxis. I'm starting to think I need to get two more ice packs so that with four in total I can ice both knees and both ankle/foot simultaneously. I am, quite thankfully, acclimating to summer heat. This morning I was able to run without any sensation of suffocation or burning from the inside out. Not that I'm fully comfortable, but its just better. Now if only running with ice packs on my knees were realistic for tendon function and wouldn't cause me to run like a penguin....
This past weekend's run was again over the George Washington Bridge and onto the Palisades Road, totaling 20 miles in about 2 hours 50 minutes. The fun is that you are always either climbing or descending, and while this may sound counter intuitive to some it actually makes my legs much happier. Running on flat road bums out my mind and my body. Hence why I rarely stay on flat land, usually for very rehab oriented runs that I have not needed in quite some time *knock on wood*. Last year I ran the Brooklyn 1/2 Marathon, which included a little over two laps in Prospect Park followed by a straight shot south on Ocean Parkway with a quick finish on the Coney Island boardwalk. The portion on Ocean Parkway is 5.5-ish miles of nearly flat road with a minimum of 3 lanes in each direction and trees/houses/etc very far back set from the road. The thing feels like a friggin highway leading to nowhere, and heat waves radiating from the road are the only block to seeing the next mile marker sign awaiting you dead straight ahead. Can you tell I was thrilled? Hence why I wasn't all that troubled with debating running it again this year versus running Bear Mountain. Give me two and a half times the distance but on a much more interesting and technical course any day. Granted retrospection alters your memory of events, but my mind places equal mental taxation to each of the Brooklyn 13.1 miles and the Bear Mountain 31 miles. Goes to show what flat roads do to me.
This weekend was extremely social. I had friends over on Friday night who I hadn't seen in some time. I needed to exchange stories, and I got exactly that and then some. Sadie decided to show off for some of the guys. In the background you can hear fellow students discussing their affils, Al Green offering sound scape, and some attempts to cheer on Sadie (like the fella in the background). She was at it for a good minute before I got my camera out.
Saturday marked the arrival of Tim (my brother), Jenny (sister-in-law), and their friends Morgan and Jaime. I met them in the Upper West Side near their hotel for lunch that ended up with more of a brunch menu. I'm so anti-fabulous about the city these days that I forgot that my missing breakfast that morning would be fulfilled by restaurants' brunch menus that last as long as through four in the afternoon. They went for a walk, I ran some errands on the way home, including a chat about possible non-chafing gear from my friend Mike who works at Patagonia UWS and who joined me for RAGBRAI and other cycling adventures in previous years. That was a bust, but a few other errands were successful on the way home.
A few hours later the group joined me at my apartment to hang out, see where I lived and to meet the kittehs, who put on a good show of synchronous yodeling once it came to feeding time. When asked where they'd like to find dinner, no one cared until I mentioned that Nathan's job is located in Hell's Kitchen. Tim found the neighborhood name quaint, so south we headed. Once resurfaced at 59th street we turned south to scope out restaurants on the way to say hi to Nathan. Then we parked ourselves at El Centro, and Nathan met us once off work.
Sunday started with my aforementioned long run, after which I quickly iced, showered, and joined the group at the NYC Pride March. I mentioned that marriage equality was on the cusp between approval or failure. Last Friday the bill was approved at something like 11 or 11:30pm. Meant it was an extra exuberant celebration this weekend to finish off Pride Week. Governor Cuomo, who introduced the bill in the first place, marched along with Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. I am impressed that Cuomo got the legislature to actually act on things this time around.
But I hear the Senate republican, who have the majority and thus decide what bills come to the floor, decided to vote on a state vegetable before attending to the equality of marriage bill. Was this to produce more grand effect, or was this a version of stalling while the needed votes were still sought? Likely something much less meaningful. Regardless, the newly designated state vegetable: corn! Nice. So much for distinction from all those other states that are covered in corn. I hear there is a lot of corn upstate between the stereotyped apple orchards, but I still don't find that impressive. To have corn as your vegetable then you have to LOVE corn. Take Iowa, where corn festivals are serious and frequent endeavors. Then again, the runner up was an onion.
Back to Tim and Jenny's visit. I was grateful for the consensus of simply hanging out with no grand plans. The parade was a hoot, but we happily left once the crowds got the best of us. It started at noon, I met the group at 1, by 1:30 people needed to sit and rest away from the crowd. We attempted a pizza joint Tim dutifully found via his smartphone that had good ratings, though unbeknownst to us (or the web) it was closed and vacated. So we walked around the corner and took the first place we found, a thin crust pizza joint. How thin? Well, thinner than just about any cracker I've had before. They offered a "nine-grain organic crust" for $2 extra per large pizza. But if the crust is such that eating an entire pizza would accumulate the quantity of one normal slice's worth of crust, how much nutritional benefit would you actual yield from a few slices of the multigrain?
I think the crowd wore us down much more than expected. When I met up with them, they actually had crossed to the east side of the street before heading south to the parade, so that meant after eating and being done with the crowd we had to either traverse one of few streets allowing cross-throughs in sardine/cattle run form or we had to walk nearly a mile north just to then head west and south again to Morgan and Jaime's bus home. We opted to traverse. After surviving the 15 minutes that required we went for ice cream at the Ben & Jerry's near the needed bus stop and a quick stopover at a drug store. Back to Philly for Morgan and Jaime, back uptown for me, Tim and Jenny. We said our goodbyes on the subway, as I had a pile of paperwork awaiting me that I so dutifully sidelined in lieu of family time. Nicely, the weekend left me feeling refreshed when waking up on Monday morning.
Now it is Wednesday. I survived my birthday on Monday, managed to keep it relatively quiet (by preference). This morning Nathan left for a vacation to see family upstate. After putting seeing him off to his bus I walked a different route to work and ran into a friend of a friend who I have a knack of running into every 4 months nearly to the date. After work I walked a little extra rather than getting on the nearest train, and ran into a former co-worker I hadn't seen since September of last year who was attending an acting workshop in midtown. Sometimes NYC is not as big as it seems, but that does not preclude its intensity....
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