I know it has been a couple of weeks since I updated this blog, and yes, I have been running and I've also been busy with various events and meeting for an organization on which I sit on the board. Our goal during the summer is to raise money so that we can fund various scholarships and programming for the Chautauqua Institution in the season. The weather has also been very weird as I have alluded to in my blogs. Unlike most summers where we see temperatures in the high 80s often along with humidity, it hasn't been very warm at all, but it has certainly been wet, wet, wet. Lot's of rain and high humidity with temps only in the high 60s/low 70s. Makes for interesting training as I keep assuming the heat has to come back, after all it was here in June, and it hasn't arrived yet. I did look; however, and it is in the 90s in Oregon which might bode very interesting for Hood to Coast at month's end. I have been running and although the mileage is not too high, what I'm doing along with the gym work and all the walking you do here has kept me in pretty good shape as I head into the heavy miles for NYC marathon training.
Case in point - I ran our local Old First Night Run on Saturday morning which is a 2.7 mile run/walk around the perimeter of the institution. The course is deceptively harder than you really want to run for a short race as you climb a pretty nasty hill in the first mile (at 1/2 mile, you are only half way up) and you never really come down until late in the 2nd mile and then you take the more gradual path down. The course finishes with a crazy right hand then left hand turn which has you run down a gravel path before turning to the finish. I felt very good running this year and took it pretty consistent and (what felt like) easy up the first hill, so I was very happy to see a final time of 20:04 on the clock. That equates to a 7:14 pace and my mile splits were done as negative splits. I also finished first in my AG and was first Masters woman. I was surprised by the speed as I didn't think I had it in me. Of course, I can still tell you that my final gear is gone even though my cadence for the race was 183!
http://www.runhigh.com/2014RESULTS/R080214BC.html
Even more exciting is that this race has gone high tech with actual chip timing and internet results! A first!
Now to the Central Park 5. Most of you may be familiar with this story and it has always had a certain resonance with me as the victim who was attacked graduated Wellesley a year before I did. She was a runner even then, although not a competitive one, and I knew her because of that. Ken Burns is here this week and he and his daughter have put together a movie outlining the injustice - the five boys who were convicted were not guilty at all, and after they spent several years in jail, the real rapist and killer, who was in jail for life, admitted to the crime. He had actually attacked a women three days before the incident in the park and he subsequently attacked and killed a pregnant woman after the incident. Somehow the police and others never seemed to put the events together even though there was really no evidence pointing to the five boys (they were 14-16, and the 16 yr old is developmentally disabled). This is one of those cases that always hit home because I knew the victim, because she was running at night in the park, and because it proved that not everyone who is incarcerated in indeed guilty. It makes me think again about the death penalty and back to whether or not everyone on death row should be there. I think I'm still a proponent in cases like that of the Boston bomber, but boy, it all makes one really think. The case is one that has always made me extra cautious as a female running alone especially as I have done a lot of travelling in my earlier career.
Tricia's story also makes me realize that I am really just an ordinary person surrounded by rather extraordinary ones. It makes me think of my running buddy, Mike, who has undergone a lot of unnecessary strife and suffering in his life only to turn out to be one of the best Dads, husbands, and friends that I know.
http://www.mikepistorino.com/
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