Today was a special day on holiday, it was my birthday! And it was great to be in NYC for a change. By the time I had realised the New York marathon was on whilst we were here, it was far too late to get a place. However, I was able to find another event, which was a half marathon in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
Kathyrn did an amazing job to get up and
ready for 7am. Although the subway does run 24 hours a day, sometimes at the
weekend the trains can be a bit infrequent. We had also learnt that they do
sometime leave ahead of schedule too. We allowed an hour to get there, but actually
the trains were fine and we arrived before 8am.
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| Subway station by the park |
We had a short walk from the subway stop to
find the park. Registration was a short walk from entering the park. There were
banners and volunteers about to show us where to go. It was pretty cold, although
not freezing. Unfortunately the sun was not shining which didn’t help.
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| Trying to find the start of the run |
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| The Greek Pavillion used for event HQ |
I grabbed my race number and a tshirt.
There was a little bit of hanging around until the start. I did a warm up and
waited with Kathryn. At about 9am we were ushered toward the start line. It
took a while to get started, I chatted briefly to a few others on the start
line. Most people were aiming for about an hour and a half, except one young
lad who was aiming for a NYC marathon qualifying time of 1 hour 21 minutes.
We finally were off and a small group of
three or four of us went off, the young lad shot off in front. The course was 4
laps of the park. We were following a type of service road inside the perimeter
of the park. It had a lane for pedestrians, cyclists and motor vehicles. There
were quite a few other people about but it wasn’t too bad to overtake and run
around them.
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| Coming around to start the final lap |
The sun came out briefly, I thought I might
overheat in my leggings and base layer, but actually it wasn’t too bad. There
was a gradual incline over one quarter of the lap, half of it was flat, and the
other quarter downhill. It was fairly easy to pace the laps pasted by very
quickly.
On the final lap, I was alongside another
guy running. He dropped me with about a mile to go. Earlier, we had passed all
the people who went off the front and so I was thinking we must have been at
the front. I rounded the final corner and headed towards the finish. After I
crossed the line, I spoke to the guy in front, who said he’d come second.
Sure enough, I had somehow managed to come
third. I ran a time of 1 hour, 24 minutes and 17 seconds. About 30 seconds
slower than my PB earlier this year in Leeds. In Leeds that was good enough for
70th place, a sign it wasn’t really a competitive field. However, I
got a plaque for coming third so I was happy.
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| On the podium for the top 3 finishers |
After the presentation, we walked over to
another zoo in the park. It was tiny this one but worth a visit as we had come
across for the race. We accidentally walked to the run side of the zoo to
enter, so we had to walk even further to get in!
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| Brooklyn Zoo |
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| Brooklyn Zoo |
Once in, we were able to find a café and
have a quick coffee to warm up. They had about three small indoor exhibits and
two outdoor ones. We were still trying to warm up a bit so we tried not to
spend too long outdoors. Unfortunately the porcupine and red pandas were both
not to be seen!
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| Kathryn warming up with coffee |
After we had seen everything, we had to
walk all the way back across the park to the nearest subway station. It was
still a bit sunny, and there were loads of people in the park. It took us about
20 minutes to walk to width of the park. We were very lucky again and managed
to get a subway straight back.
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| Walking back through the park |
We popped into the apartment again so I
could shower and change. We then headed back out for a late lunch, about 3pm to
the Hole in the Wall café. I had some scrambled eggs and Kathryn had a
mushroomy thing.
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| Scrambled eggs |
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| Kathryn's lunch |
The last thing we needed to do was sort my birthday cake out!
(Very important). We had decided to go back to the place we got a cake from earlier this week. It was over by the World Trade Centre. It didn’t take too long to walk over there. We had a slow walk back. I had a snooze because I was feeling quite tired now.
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| Home cooked pizza |
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| Birthday cake |
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