Hey fam,
Yikes, it’s been a while! I drafted a few newsletters in the month since we last spoke but then I’d start making dinner or go on TikTok and forget to finish what I started. But today is day one of a long-awaited vacation, and before I go to the airport I thought I’d crank out a good ol’ newsie.
I’ve run four races in the last month. Two of them were bad, two of them were great. That’s the way it goes!
I ran a 10k the last week of August and a half-marathon on Labor Day. The 10k was in Central Park and I dropped out halfway because—this is the extremely abridged version of events—I had an anxiety attack. I was in a similar mental state for the half-marathon, and I wanted to drop out of that but I was in an unknown city (New Haven) and didn’t have my cellphone on me. The most rational option was to follow the runners ahead of me to the finish line, from where I could navigate back to my hotel room. In retrospect, I had a pretty good time given it was 93% humidity and I walked for a few minutes.
The other two races were the Fifth Avenue Mile, a 20-block race on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the Bronx 10 Mile, which starts and ends near Yankee Stadium. There was some ~drama~ with the Bronx 10 miler because the course was marked wrong and ended up being 10.13 miles. Running nerds all over Strava and Reddit and Instagram caused an uproar and finally New York Road Runners issued an official apology yesterday. They won’t adjust our times though, so not everyone is appeased. I don’t really care, tbh, it just means I ran faster than I thought I did.
In WORLD running news, this coming weekend is the Berlin Marathon, the fastest of the major world marathons. Eliud Kipchoge, uncontestedly the fastest marathoner alive, will try to break his own world record of 2:01:39. Keira D’Amato, who holds the American female record, will also try to break her personal best of 2:19:12. Keep your eyes peeled—this is the type of running news that makes it to the New York Times sports section, guys.
Anyway folks, I’m off to PARIS. I love Paris!!! I’m ostensibly running a race there too. It’s a long boring story but basically you need to have a “medical certificate” signed by your doctor to run races in France, and I didn’t know I needed one until a few days ago. My doctor wouldn’t sign it unless I got a physical, but she didn’t have availability for one until December. I went to Urgent Care but they wouldn’t fill it out either. So, we’ll see what happens. Will Monsieur le Directeur let me sign a waiver instead? On verra!
Catch you on the other side,
Elaheh