NYC Half marathon . . . DONE!!!

QUICK POINTS:

• NYC Half Marathon, sponsored by the New York Road Runners (NYRR). 
• My next crazy athletic challenge

NYC Half Marathon

This past Sunday, I had the wonderful opportunity to run the 13.1 miles through the immense borough of Manhattan. *Side note: I think that the island only is about 2 miles at its widest part.*  This race took us runners through Central Park, Times Square, West Side Highway, and the Financial District (FiDi). This blog entry will be mostly a photo blog.  I was a little sadden that I did not achieve my goal of running this half in one hour and 45 minutes; BUUUUUUUUTTTTT, I did achieve a personal best (PB). I think the fartleking on the West Side Highway, really improved my time. I am a little annoyed that I had to use a portapotty during the race because it cost me about 3.5-4 minutes.

Next Atheltic Challenge:

After training for an athletic feat for months, one can get slightly depressed once you have completed your event. You know, because you do not have anything to look forward two. To circumvent this issue, I really think that I will train for the Rock n Roll Marathon in Montreal this upcoming September.

Looks fun, huh?

Montreal has become one of my favorite cities and I think that it will be super cool to run 26.2 miles through this city. After running the NYC marathon in 2013, i wanted to run a marathon in another U.S. city and in another country. I had signed up for the San Francisco marathon but I screwed up my back really bad and did not run it. Hopefully, the same will not happen as I prepare for the marathon in Montreal. Fingers crossed. Next step is to find a decent sub 4-hour marathon training plan and COMMIT, COMMIT, COMITY to it.

NYC Half Marathon Training Run (???/45)

The East side gets no love.  

4 mi; 8'21'' min/mi; 146 ave bpm; 5, 149 steps; 428 calories.  

After class on Wednesday, I decided to do a quick run up the East River greenway into Harlem. What a  bad idea because the greenway is closed (once again) at 79 street, so my run became a back and forth run. I hate changing my running plans at the last minute.  

The route ... Sorta  

The rant 

This supposed greenway has been "in progress" since I moved to NYC -BACK in 2002!!!  The West side has its nice greenway with beautiful sights into New Jersey and various activities and parks. Where is ours (although I now live in Brooklyn, I will always be an east sider at heart)? I firgure by now, 2016, there would have been a continuous greenway that would go around the entire island of Manhattan. This probably happen in 3019, if the island of Manhattan is not underwater by that time. But, I guess you gotta make lemonade out of lemons. 

What a beautiful site, huh?

Roosevelt Island ( "the little apple in the big apple"), the East River and the Queensborough Bridge. Hey, you can see my old apartment building from here. 

This was a quick update because the mobile app did not save the previous draft, and I did not feel like rewriting the entire post.  

NYC HALF MARATHON TRAINING RUN 13 OUT OF 45

Distance: 4.51; Time: 39:51; Pace: 8:51 (slow warm up included), Ave BPM: 145; Number of steps: 6, 116

Like people know, interval training is very important to any type of raining (running, cycling, swimming) program. My sub 2-hour (but we want to do better than that right?) half marathon plan incorporates one interval run out of the weekly three runs. Luckily for me, I live near Saratoga Park in Brooklyn and it has a loop that is a little under 0.25 miles (the closest thing to a track). It is great because most of my running trackers (Runtadtic and my Fitbit surge) only measures 0.5 mi intervals.

However, this week had been kind of cold and I do not run in temperatures lest than 30F (I do not like to wear multiple layers of clothing to run), so I had to do my interval training on a treadmill. *Insert frownie face here* The following shows my intervals:

• 0.5 mi warm up
• 0.25 mi fast and 0.25 recovery 8 times
• 0.5 cool down
• Where any speed above 8.0 and between 6.0-6.5 were considered "fast" and "recovery", respectively.

Although treadmill running is not a perfect replacement for running (we will not get into the reasons here), I did enjoy doing my intervals and I do feel that I am getting faster. However, we shall see about my speed in the next race.

*Reminder: Register for another race.

Training Run #8/NYRR Midnight Run

Distance: 4.1 mi; Time: 32:28; Pace: 7:55 min/mi; Average BPM: 144

For this New Years Eve, I wanted to do something  a little different rather than getting drunk before midnight, so I decided to participate in the New York Road Runners (NYRR) NYE Midnight Run. Fortunately for me, my cold did not prevent me from running the race. 

Even though I have lived in NYC for about 13 years, I did not know that Central Park would be so active on NYE with a firework display and random activities to do at the NYRR's festival, like face painting (if you had the ability to wait in a line for over an hour). On a whole, the midnight run was pretty fun, especially with the fireworks display kicking off the race. Since this was a "fun" unscored run, the organizers used a honor system for corral assignment. This was not a good idea because humans have a tendency to think they are better than what they really are (call it wishful thinking). It was quite clear that people were placing themselves in incorrect corrals such as the 8:00 min/mi corral. During the race, it took about 1.5 miles for the race to be decongested and my first mile split was horrible (8' 43'' for the first mile). Well. . . horrible for doing a training run to complete a 1:45 half marathon.

Of course after the race, with a not so quick trip back to Brooklyn, it felt good to "after party" until 7:00am. Actually, it was more efficient to bring in the New Year this way because by the time I made it home, ate, showered, and changed,  most of the drunks were on their way home and many of the bars were not THAT crowed. Plus, cab and uber fares were kind of low. Maybe running this race (if I am in New York) will becoming a yearly tradition for me.