A Race to Remember: Touring Manhattan, the NYC Half Marathon!

Central Park, Times Square, West Side Highway, Battery Tunnel, Wall Street!

On 17 March, I was one of the lucky lotto-winning runners who was invited to participate in the NYC Half! It was an epic race tour through parts of Manhattan that are normally restricted to cars and sidewalks. But this time, I got to run straight down the middle of the streets!

Unlike the Manhattan Half, which was twice around the park, I wanted to do well on this one. I wanted to PR. I wanted to beat my record (which, coincidentally, was the Manhattan Half time). And I needed this to happen because I had been doing everything right. I trained. I even signed up for the gym for bad weather wimp out days. I ate homemade tomato sauce with my whole wheat carbs. I drank a ton of water the night before. AND it was going to be flat…after the park loop. No way was I going to settle on the same time as last time!

My Second Half Marathon Ever

My 2nd Half Marathon was not as daunting as the first, but it was a doozy!

Happy Winter!

Since moving to Manhattan, I have not had the ‘luxury’ – if you will – of a CHEAP gym. Back in Brooklyn, good ole’ Dolphins was always an option. At less than $200 A YEAR, you really can’t make too many excuses not to go run on those cold, icy days. But here it’s a whole different ball game. I believe on discount, it’s about $60 per month plus an exorbitant starting up fee. Needless to say, I am not a member of said-expensive-gym, and therefore there have been more than a handful of skipped runs due to weather and lack of masochistic tendencies.

Subway with mate

But then I had this Manhattan Half coming up at the end of January. I signed up for it last year too but bad weather declared it a “fun” run and everyone got credit for it whether they ran it or not so I skipped it, taking the credit and going to taiko practice without being a useless lump. Anyway, this  year I was determined to run it because A. Living close to the park, there is no excuse, B. It was on a Sunday thus no taiko practice afterwards, and C. I needed to run! The prep plan went swimmingly, I ate my pasta, drank a lot of water, had some fresh baked cookies a la Fernando, and went to bed early. I woke up antsy and with energy. I drank my mate, grabbed a 5-Hour Energy and a GU, and we took the subway to the start line since

Horsies in the corral

Fernando’s leg is still bust and hey, I wasn’t too keen on running 2 extra miles prior to the 13.1.

At the start, I did a short 4-5 minute warm up. I was wearing my new awesome (and a tad expensive for someone as cheap as me) running jacket so I wasn’t too cold. My hands and face were frozen but I was ok. I couldn’t wait to get going. I squeezed into the front of my corral just before they “closed” it and made late runners go to the back. There were a lot of ‘late’ runners, probably because the advice on NYRR’s Facebook page was to “wait till the last minute to get into the corral” to avoid getting frostbit.  @_@  The race marshals even tried to shoo away Fernando for taking pics.