NYRR Anniversary Run (4.8M) - Marathon Qualifier 7/9

I ran the New York Road Runners 48th Anniversary Run on June 4, 2006. It was originally supposed to be a 4.8K (48 years, 4.8K...), but I guess they couldn't figure out how to make a course that short, so they changed it a couple of weeks before the race to a 4.8M. The best part about this race is that this is my fastest 4.8 miler EVER!

Honestly, I don't recall much about this race. I woke up early, drove in, found a great parking spot, ran it at a slow and relaxed pace, hung around for some NYRR announcements, got a muffin from a local bakery and went home.



The one crazy thing that I do remember was that there was a dude in his 50s riding a Razor scooter with a fauxhawk. He was wearing a suit ala Angus Young with super-thin super-white Ralph Lauren Polo socks.



He was way too old to be dressed like that and it was just weird. It was especially weird to see this oddity in the park at 7:30 am. Why would you go out looking all flamey like that on your razor scooter at that crazy hour?! Why does a 50 year old dude have a Razor scooter?!

After the race they gave us a Hostess cupcake and an apple. NYRR has gotten a little strange with the post-race food lately. At the Wall Street run, they gave us Subway sandwiches. Not the best post-race food. I'm not complaining about the cupcake - it was good - it just doesn't seem like typical runner food.

They were also giving away NYRR apparel, so I stuck around to see if I won anything. It was funny because there were 3800 runners in the race and only about 100 stayed to see if they won. They were only giving prizes to people who were present, so they kept pulling numbers and announcing them, but the winners had already left. They must have pulled like 40 numbers for 6 prizes. Unfortunately, I didn't win.

After the prize giveaway, Mary Wittenberg, the CEO of NYRR, told us about the marathon. It sounds like it's going to be really cool. They are going to have people like Lance Armstrong and Dean Karnazes running in it. Mary also announced the first ever NYC Half Marathon. NYRR organizes a bunch of half marathons, but this will be on par with the marathon in terms of the course, media coverage, number of runners, etc. The registration opens on June 21 at noon, and they are limiting the number of runners this year to something like 10,000. They want to ramp up the size of the event over a few years. Here's a short description from the web site:

Sunday, August 27 - Make history by being part of the inaugural NYC Half-Marathon. This brand new race will start in Central Park, pass through Times Square, and continue along the waterfront to a finish in Lower Manhattan. Interest is high from runners all around the world, making this sure to be the next big thing in New York running. Apply at noon EDT on June 21.

Dean Karnazes is planning to run 50 marathons in each of the 50 United States in 50 consecutive days. His 50th marathon with be the NYC marathon. The 49th marathon is going to be the New Jersey Marathon course (as there's no marathon scheduled that day in NJ) that I did my half marathon on. You can sign up to run with Dean. Since I didn't make it into the NYC marathon, I was thinking it might be cool to run with Dean the day before in NJ. Let me know what you think. Should I start training for a marathon and run with Dean? or should I take it easy, work on losing some weight, and do a lot of cycling...? Seriously, I'm interested in what you kids think. You can read about the Dean Karnazes thing at the Endurance 50 site.

This is my 7th run with NYRR this year. I have two more to do to qualify for the 2007 marathon. I have another race this Sunday. It's the WABC Father's Day Fight Against Prostate Cancer 5 Miler. That'll be number 8.

Sorry for the short post here. Be sure to check out my last post if you haven't read it yet.

NYRR Anniversary Run (4.8M) - Bib # 3599
Central Park
New York, NY
June 4, 2006, 9:00 am
Weather: 62 deg, 75% hum, overcast

Jon August, 32
Net Time: 47:32
Gun Time: 49:36
Overall Place: 2585/3778
Age Place: 633/744
Gender Place: 1603/2018
Pace: 9:54

I'm not proud of this performance. I think I may have been feeling crappy the night before, but the real problem is my lack of motivation lately. I'm in the middle of moving and changing gears with my work, so I'm not too worried about my stalled progress. Once I get settled in a new location, if I don't get back on track then, someone will have to kick my ass. Volunteers needed.

Complete Results (Link to NYRR Site)

Next Three Races:

Sunday June 18 - 8:30am	Central Park	WABC Father's Day Fight Against Prostate Cancer (5M)
Saturday July 15 - 8:30am	Teterboro Airport	9th Annual Teterboro Airport 5K
Saturday July 22 - 8:30am	Central Park	Run for Central Park (4M)

...and I'm Just Getting Started.

Capitol Hill Classic 10K

Just catching up here... I ran the Capitol Hill Classic 10K on Sunday May 21st. I planned to be in DC to see a band I heard on the radio. Unfortunately, I bought tickets for a different band that I didn't really want to see. I was listening to Sirius 28, Faction and I heard a song that I now know is called "Tear You Apart". Right after the song, the DJ was talking about how "Angels and Airwaves" was a new band formed by some people from other popular bands and that they were going on tour to introduce their first album. Without really doing much more research, I looked up "Angels and Airwaves" and saw that they were going to be in DC. I like visiting my friends in northern Virginia, so I figured it would be cool to check out a new band and go hang with the Virginians. Well, it turns out "Tear You Apart" is by a band called "She Wants Revenge" and "Angels and Airwaves" is a band for teenage girls. Before I realized this, I asked Dave (of VA) when we were going to do another running race together and we agreed this would be a good weekend to hang out.

Let me back up for a second. I had been doing the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google. It was 24 days of puzzles set up as a promotion for the movie by the same name. If you finished all 24 days of puzzles and were one of the first 10,000 people to finish the puzzle on the last day, you got a replica "Cryptex" and you were a finalist who could compete against the other finalists for the Grand Prize of (I think) a trip to New York, London, Paris and Milan. I was keeping up with the puzzles and on the last day I left lunch early to go solve the last puzzle. It took me 16 minutes, but I still made it into the final round. The final round began on Friday, May 19th at 1pm and closed on Sunday, May 21st at 1pm. The winner of the grand prize was the person who completed the final round in the shortest amount of time... not the person who finished it first. So, not knowing what the final puzzle was going to be, I decided I needed to go see The Da Vinci Code movie in case there were questions relating to the movie in the puzzle.

On the 19th, I headed down to Virginia and ended up in traffic. I didn't have a lot of options for going to see the movie because it opened that day and Audrey and Dave were having a BBQ the next night and then, on Sunday, we had our race and 1pm Sunday was the deadline to finish the puzzle. I got down to their house around 9 or 10 and for some reason I thought it would be cool to go see the movie that night with Dave. We went to some fancy movie theater with video games projected on the floor and all sorts of other shit. We go into the theater and find a seat near this girl. And every time I say something to Dave, the girl shushes me. I just ignored her. She's probably thinking who's this rif-raf from NJ making all this noise in our fancy fucking movie theater. What a bunch of snobby fucks, those Virginians.

Anyway, I pretty much fell asleep like 10 minutes into the movie and every once in a while Dave would elbow me and go "Jon!?" It was weird though. I felt like I had seen the movie before. I'm not a big reader, so I don't think I read the book or anything like that. It was strange. The parts I saw seemed good.

Luckily, the puzzle had nothing to do with the movie. There was a Sudoku type puzzle which I threw into a Sudoku solver, and a few other puzzles I'd seen before and got hints off the Web to solve. I think I finished it in less than 20 minutes which apparently is pretty fast. I emailed a few people who were blogging about their attempts at the puzzle and they said it took them hours. I'm not saying I'm smart or anything because it took me less than 20 minutes, because I totally cheated. Although, I have to say that one of my greatest skills is being resourceful. I have a knack for figuring out how to get something done and usually with as little effort as possible. For that, I sometimes get paid The Big Bucks (tm).

On Saturday, I did two Factory Interactive installs for a US Postal employee. He was cool. He had a Terminix guy over giving him a quote on spraying for termites and stuff and we were joking about the Terminix guy's beat up old jalopy. My customer apparently talked the guy down like $800. He knew what it should cost and the Terminix guy saw the Lexus and figured he could rip my customer off. It didn't happen. I put XM in his RX and then XM in his Prius and then we drank a couple of beers and I was on my way.

Back at Dave and Audrey's house we had a big BBQ meal with Sheila and Brice and Dave's sister, Alyssa, and Dave's mom. Dave warned me that it would be weird hanging around with his family and that I should probably go stay with Sheila and Brice that night. Dave's mom is nice and means well, but Dave was right and I took off with Sheila and Brice after falling asleep in the living room a couple of times.

The next morning, Dave picked me up at like 6:30 or some shit and we headed into The District (tm). We stopped for some coffee and Dave flirted with the baristas saying shit like "If this was my muffin and I offered it to you, would you pinch my butt?" We listened to a Dane Cook CD and kept on truckin'. DC is interesting with it's many layers of security. There's Capitol Police all over guarding parking lots that are blocked by uni-directional collapsing ramps.

Anyway, we parked and went to register. I needed to use the bathroom, so I went down to the "Boys" room in the basement of the school where the registration was. I waited in line for like 10 minutes before I got a stall. I needed to drop a deuce, but when I got into the stall, (shielded by a shower curtain, by the way) I was like "No Fucking Way!" I think I may have even said that out loud. The toilet was LITERALLY 10" off the ground. The seat was like an inch off the water. There was no way I could function on this thing. My cash and prizes would be bathing in toilet water. While I was waiting in line, someone said something like "remember in Return of the Jedi when they were with the Ewoks and they said a short crapper is better than no crapper at all". First of all, I don't remember any dialog in Return of the Jedi about "crappers," and second of all, that statement is just not true. I would rather hold it than risk having crap and toilet water all over me while I run 6 miles. So I aborted the mission and went outside to find Dave and Bridget.

I described the toilets to Dave and I guess he thought I was exaggerating, because he went in to use them. He said he got the job done, but I can't imagine it went smoothly.

So, we lined up at the start and just like a Virginia race, it was all screwy. There was only one sign that delineated the various levels of running skill. It was basically 7 minute miles and everyone else. Then, just as random as the positioning of signs, the race started. I tried to keep up with Dave and Bridget, but it just wasn't going to happen. I didn't think it would.

We went down some neighborhood streets and then around the back of RFK Stadium and then back through some residential areas. I don't really remember much of it except when we turned and headed directly towards the Capitol building. That was pretty cool. It's really a majestic building. And, it never occurred to me, but the Capitol Building is on "Capitol Hill," because it's ON A HILL!! I don't know why I never realized that. That's one of those things you think you understand your whole life and then when you're 32, you realize you've got it completely wrong.

You know, I used to think, as a kid, that any time you were in a bar, there was going to be a brawl of some sort (if there wasn't one already). Maybe it's because my parents never drank when I was growing up and we certainly never went near a bar. The only exposure I ever had to what goes on in a bar was probably from shows like Starsky and Hutch, and there WAS always a brawl in the bars in those shows. I don't think I realized that people don't get beat up in bars on a regular basis until I was like 25. I still get a little nervous when I go to a bar. Anyway, this has nothing to do with the Capitol Hill thing, but I thought it might be a good time to share that.

So, yeah, the Capitol building is on a significant hill. I guess that's surprising to me because I always picture large cities as being completely flat. I guess NYC has hills too, but I can't picture them. The only city I think of when I think of hills and cities is San Francisco. Running down the hill on one side of the US Capitol was nice after about 5 miles, but when we got to the bottom and I realized people were running up the other side, I was totally bummed. I wasn't really pushing very hard during most of the race, because I haven't been running regularly and I just don't have the lungs for it right now, but I must still have a little bit of running juice in my blood, because I charged up that hill pretty good.

I seem to have really large leg muscles. The most obvious indication of my large leg muscles are my scary muscular calves. I have big calves, but they're not just fat calves, I have extremely muscular calves. When I flex them on a curb or something, they become chiseled and look like steaks on the back of my leg. I can do pretty much the entire stack of weights in the gym on the calf machine. And, when I was training with Yaniv on the bicycle, I was pretty good at charging up hills, so I think my quads are a little larger than average. This is probably the result of me carrying extra weight my whole life. This should actually help me lose weight because they say leg muscles are HUGE fat burning furnaces. It also probably means I should be doing some other kind of exercise instead of running.... maybe cycling?

So I push myself through the finish line and go find Dave, Audrey, Noah and Bridget in the park nearby. Despite my lack of training and my overall bad attitude lately towards exercise, this was my best 10K performance. Granted, I've only done one other real 10K (you can't count the Rotary Resolution because the Virginians fucked it up), but hey, it's improvement!

Capitol Hill Classic 10K - Bib # 1182
Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
May 21, 2006, 8:30 am

Net Time: 59:25
Gun Time: 60:42
Overall Place: Unvailable (Too complicated for Virginians)
Age Place: 177/233
Gender Place: 911/1152
Pace: 9:34

Complete Results

That's 10 seconds/mile faster than the Cherry Blossom 10K in Newark!

...and I'm Just Getting Started.

Not in.

I started checking the entrant database at 10:30am to see if maybe they were loading the data early, but they hadn't. At 10:57am, the site was loading fine, but the results were still unavailable. At 11:00am on the dot, the marathon web site crashed. Overloaded with hits, it would just not load.

Finally at 11:34am I was able to get a peek into the entrant database. I didn't get selected. I know at least 3 other people who entered the lottery and none of us got selected. It looks like I'm gonna be cycling.

NYRR Lottery for 2006

I'm in the middle of posting about my Capitol Hill Classic 10K and then I'll need to post something about the NYRR 48th Anniversary Run, but I just wanted to mention that I find out if I'm running in the 2006 NYC Marathon today at 11am (less that 3 hours from now). If I don't make it in, I'll probably spend a lot more time riding my bicycle for the rest of the year. If I do make it in, I'll need to get off my as-of-late very lazy ass.

In any case, I have just 2 runs with NYRR left to qualify for the 2007 NYC Marathon.