Wednesday Wrap-Up: We Back
Last weekend, I finally — FINALLY — got to log some miles with my very best running friend.
This is Claire. We take germs very seriously.
Throughout my time on the island, Claire (and Jenn) and I would run almost every Tuesday “together,” for a grand total of five miles or less, but none of our Strava routes were the same as we were virtually running our own courses in Wilmington, North Carolina, New Rochelle, New York, and Cape Cod.
So when I informed Claire of my returning home, we made a plan to run long-ish together in our Central Park backyard the weekend after my two-week quarantine was up.
We planned our route according to the Metro North Harlem 125th Station timetable, finding each other on Park Avenue before hitting a full loop of the park — something I haven’t done since I’ve been home.
To sum up, it was hot thanks to this heat wave we are very much still in, and we gave ourselves air high fives at the top of Harlem Hill — which was tricky because we actually wanted to give a solid real life high five, but, whatever — and I was hungover, which was very reminiscent of our 20s when we would hit the Friday happy hour very hard, wake up early Saturday morning, and knock out a solid 20 miles prior to 10 a.m. (My how things have certainly changed.)
Regardless, it was a sheer delight to be reunited with someone you’ve logged countless miles with, spending hours talking about God knows what (or whom), and pushing each other when the going gets tough. Throughout the past decade I’ve been doing the long-distance running game, Claire has been one of my biggest supporters (in more ways than one), and this weekend gave me a tiny boost I didn’t know I desperately needed.
So where the fuck am I going with this?
Mondays are particularly tough for me, tough enough where I turn off all my phone notifications and generally stay quiet and away from humans in general. So I spent the majority of Monday morning rereading Claire and I’s blog posts from the past, laughing at the time we signed up for a marathon/ultra marathon in the mountains of Ireland (what a gas!), when we spectated the New York City Ironman that should have truly been called Ironman New Jersey, and the time Claire hosed off my shorts during the Wineglass Marathon.
Man, those were the days.
And now we are seemingly in a holding pattern with no light at the end of the tunnel in sight and no future races on the docket.
And yet, for a lot of us, we’re still partaking in the Saturday morning long run (in masks), and still performing a random set of 800s or a ladder workout on a Wednesday (in masks), and for what? (For Strava, apparently, when we all went nuts this past weekend when Garmin got hacked. IF IT’S NOT ON STRAVA DOES IT EVEN COUNT AS A WORKOUT?!)
But again, we have no fall marathons in 2020. And probably no spring marathons in 2021. I would actually love to revisit Hell of the West in Connemara, and I’m sure Claire wouldn’t mind eating complete shit on the Golden Gate Bridge during the San Francisco Marathon. (It was fiiiiine.)
So I’ve decided, in an effort to do something productive with the start of my week and make some kind of sense of this nonsensical time, I’m revisiting the aforementioned blog posts of Yore via a weekly recap.
All smells were blamed on the East River.
Total Mileage for the Week: 50.1. I honestly have zero idea the last time I hit 50 miles in a training week — not even for Eugene Marathon training in spring of 2019 — but I’ll take it. I knew I was going to be somewhere in the 40s prior to my run with Claire on Saturday, but then afternoon beverages with BH pushed me over the edge to partake in another run that I said would “be my recovery” on Sunday. That wasn’t the case. I not only ran long, again, but then got a text that was to put me in Inwood much earlier than expected, and so I ran from Nolita back to the Upper East Side.
It should also be said that I am absolutely petrified of taking public transportation at the moment, and so for that I walk everywhere. Literally — I walked to my gynecologist on Thursday which is located on 14th and 8th, a solid four miles from my apartment on the Upper East Side. I’m fairly certain my total distance that day — both walking and running — came out to be somewhere around 13 miles, which probably added to the pain come Sunday morning. Bonus miles for Covid times, I guess.
Notable Meals Out for the Week: To celebrate the end of my two-week quarantine, Caitlin and I made a reservation at one of our favorite restaurants, Atoboy, on Thursday night. And let me tell you, it was just as good as I remembered it to be. Maybe even more so, because they’re really nailing the social distancing game with their partitions, and everything being constantly sanitized — the staff won’t even touch your utensils, or your menu, or anything else, once you have. No precaution goes unturned. And, oh, did we eat: summer zucchini with doenjang chickpea; mussels and carrot salad with bronze fennel; endive and agretti salad with burrata; duck breast with grilled pluots (!!), potatoes, and gochujang; pan-seared mackerel in red curry; and, of course, the special rice, because if you don’t get it, who are you and why are you dining at Atoboy? To top it off, I saw all the familiar faces of the Ato-fam, including co-owner and general manager extraordinaire, Ellia Park. We caught up and gave each other virtual hugs, and it was, again, a hint of what life used to look like, and sent me into a state of euphoria that lit me up on my walk home.
And on Sunday, after some misinformation, we ended our run game not at Court Street Grocers, but at Black Seed Bagels in Nolita. I haven’t had a New York City bagel since January at the very earliest, and I can safely say this was a welcome back hug in food form. I went simple: everything bagel with plain cream cheese and tomato — toasted, natch — and called it a day.
As for this week, I took Monday off for very, very necessary reasons. And even though we’re still in this heat wave, we’re already in planning stages for Saturday’s long run with an end destination of a restaurant that we have all been wanting to grab takeout from.
Things are slowly — very, at a snail’s pace — forming into whatever my new norm might look like. So I’ll continue to take this mile by mile, one day at a time.