I am running a half marathon to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma society. I’m doing it with my friend Basia, who was diagnosed with leukemia a few months ago. This is the blog I’m keeping of my training. I’d love your support, tumblr community.
Also! In the next month or so I’ll be holding an online raffle. Past donors will be retroactively entered (every $25 will be a raffle entry) and there should be some cool prizes. Looks like some “Bored To Death” shwag, “30 Rock” stuff, Upright CItizens Brigade tickets and shirts, and some bigger and better prizes TBA.
FALL (-ing in love with New York)
I ran on Sunday through my neighborhood with Tulip. No walking this time, just 37 minutes of running. Progress! Our group Saturday runs are no longer in Prospect Park — it’s our distance run, and our distances now take us across the Brooklyn Bridge and into the city. I realized that I missed it, so today I ran around Prospect Park (3.35 miles) for my solo run and it was great. The gorgeous fall colors, the gazebo, the pond. So many beautiful distractions. I feel so lucky that I get to live here, so grateful that this training process has helped me experience autumn here more fully.
I love this time of year, but I only discovered that two years ago. That’s when I moved to New York after nearly a lifetime in Chicago and six years in Los Angeles that might as well have been a lifetime. In Chicago the transition from summer to winter is swift and brutal. You wake up one day to discover the leaves have changed, and the next week the branches are bare, as everyone braces for the cruel winter that lasts at least six months. In LA it’s always palm trees and mud slides, the Santa Ana winds being the one signifier of change — and the Santa Anas are spooky, the air feels still and thinned out, then a gust of heat that rattles everyone’s equilibrium. People walk around dazed and angry, and every once in awhile someone will talk of how the Santa Anas shake up the ions in the atmosphere, and like everyone else in LA I was comforted by pseudoscience psychobabble. It’s reassuring, like when you drop your laptop in the toilet and then you hear that mercury is in retrograde, no wonder you’re having problems with mechanical items. Or the time I wanted to punch a lady in the face for placing her sunglasses on the folding chair next to her at a crowded meeting. How dare she take up a needed chair? As I clenched my fists and hunched my shoulders, glaring four letter epitaphs into the back of her head I remembered I had started Zoloft a week earlier and it was maybe making my thoughts a touch violent. I got off the prescription that night. It took me six years to leave L.A.
As soon as I came to New York I knew I was home. When people asked me how I was doing, I’d rhapsodize about how well my dog was adjusting, how much he loved Brooklyn. Bart, a ten year old Husky/Shepard mix, loved all the people and dogs everywhere, how everyone was so friendly, all the smells on garbage day. He loved the sense of community, how he could go into the mom & pop stores with me, the change in seasons. It only took me four months to realize I was talking about myself. Except for the part about garbage day.
*photo of Prospect Park from the beautiful photography blog of jake dobkin
