Oh my goodness, hello! I said I was going to try to send a newsletter once a week but I quickly fell out of that cadence. Let’s try this again!
I ran the New York City Half-Marathon a few weeks ago as a tune-up to Boston. It was a very pleasant race, I must say. I ran with a pace group until mile 11, when I took my last Maurten gel and booked it to the finish, breaking my goal time of 1:34 by one second.
I employed some new mental strategies to keep going when I was so very tempted to pull over and find the nearest subway home. One of them was to just look up, especially when going up hills. Have you ever noticed how often you look at your feet while running? I do it all the time! Following the cues of my pace group leader, I kept my eyes glued to the sights ahead of me—the Manhattan Bridge, the United Nations building, Times Square.
Another strategy was to imagine the group of runners surrounding me as a train. We were a unit moving through space and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t slow down or get off without making a scene. I kept repeating “you’re on the train and you can’t get off” to myself as we were running the gradual uphill from 42nd street and the East River to Times Square.
If you’re looking for an ambitious running goal, I recommend running a half-marathon, either to just complete the distance or to hit a specific time. Marathons are great but they take over your life in every way—physically, mentally, socially. Half-marathons, on the other hand, necessitate a fair amount of training but don’t require you to organize your life around your long runs. I think I’ll focus my energy on the half-marathon after I run Boston in a few weeks…maybe. I can’t resist the physical challenge of a marathon but my body (particularly my knee at the present moment) is screaming at me to chill out.
Before I leave you: BAKED GOODS! My last day of work was last Thursday and I treated myself to my favorite baked good of all time, a crumb cake (from Zabar’s though the photo above is the crumb cake I had for breakfast on my wedding day at Bovella’s in New Jersey). I also satisfied a chocolate craving last week by making these cocoa brownies from Bon Appétit—I halved the sugar and added buckwheat flour to beef it up—not sure if that is recommended culinary-wise but they tasted great to me.
Thanks for reading! If you have any runners or run-curious people in your life, why not forward this to them?!
Elaheh