Fifth Avenue Mile

So the other week, a friend of mine asked me if I'd cover her in a race she had signed up for. She had to go to a wedding and didn't want to miss the race completely: One way to get in to the NYC Marathon is to run a certain amount of races via the Road Runners club in NYC, and if she missed this one, she'd have to make it up in another race . . .

Anyway, she was one of my inspirations for becoming a runner, and she's been very good to me, so I figured I'd do it. Why not? It was only a 1 mile run, AND, I'd be registered in her age category, which was the womens' 40 - 49 category. I figured that since I was 30, and since I've been training for Chicago, I would KICK ASS. I thought that women in my start corral would look at me and ask, "wow, what's your secret for looking so young?" and I'd get the opportunity to promote vegetarianism. But no one asked me and no one looked at me funny, AND no one ate my dust. These women were FAST. Check out how awesome they are:





Being the youngest one there (my little secret), I felt pretty competitive, and when the gun went off, I couldn't help but TAKE OFF, but I forgot to pace myself and by the time I reached the 3/4 marker, I was completely out of breath and regretting that I let my ego get the best of me (once again). Note to self: steady pace wins the race. Even though I was out of steam, I still finished strong. My time was 7:20. I'm not sure if that's good or average, but it was sort of a reality check. . . just because I was younger didn't mean I was automatically fitter. Nonethless, it was fun, and brought back memories of the Presidential Physical Fitness Tests back in the day at St. Phillip Elementary School . . .

Anyway, the Chicago Marathon is in NINE days. It's time to taper, eat a lot, rest up, and get excited. AND RAISE MONEY FOR MY CHARITY (ahem ahem, hint hint). . .

My dad is in Greece right now with my mom and some friends. They'll be checking out Marathon--the actual PLACE--soon, too.

xoxo,
Mira

22 Miles, I Love/Hate You.

So. I did it. Sort of. I mean, I ran for most of it, walked a couple of times, sprinted, powerwalked, trotted, dragged ass, hobbled. . .


On Sunday, I attempted and completed a 22-mile run in Central Park. It was not easy, it was not fun. I almost cried a couple of times, but looking back on it now, I'm not really sure why. Sure, it wasn't a soothing experience, nor would I deem it "pleasant", but it wasn't really painful. I didn't die from exhaustion. I wasn't bleeding, nor was I screaming in pain. I think after about mile 17, my brain was like, "Seriously, Mira. This is stupid. Why are you running? You're tired. Just stop, you moron." But there was no good enough reason to quit, other than just wanting to. The fact that there was no good reason to quit made me grouchy.

suck it, Pheidippides

But I started off the run feeling pretty confident and strong. I had a good music playlist on my ipod, was well-fed and hydrated. I wore wedgie-proof undies and good socks that cost $11, so I was sure they would prevent blisters. Then the sun started to pierce, and the track got crowded. And my $11 socks did not stop my feet from getting really hot, sweaty and soggy. Then there were the hills. Almost all of my runs have been in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, but on Sunday, Andrew suggested that, since this was such a long run ("you'll probably be out there for 5 hours"), I try out a new spot, one that I wasn't quite as familiar with. I thought this was a good idea. It WAS a good idea. But it was a bad idea to do the whole 22-mile battle in Central Park. Little did I know (or did he remind me) that Central Park has a LOT of uphills. Like, it seemed that there weren't a sufficient amount of downhills to match the amount of ups.

damn slopes . . . grrrrrr.

The hills kicked my ass. They made the run MUCH more difficult, made me hate it, and everything that crossed my path. And the fact that I was running uphill for my longest run made me realize quite early in the run that it was much less likely that I'd be able to conquer it. Which I pretty much didn't. I didn't own that run. It owned me. I just wanted to get it over with. I was grouchy, and felt duped. "Hey look! Another hill!" was pretty much all I said to Andrew during the 5 hours we were in the park (he was on a bike) other than a grunt here or there. It wasn't pretty.


At a certain point, say mile 12 or 13, I stopped listening to my ipod, too, because after a certain point, the music stopped motivating me and just started to annoy me. I told it to shut up.

Maybe I was talking to myself--to the thoughts running through my head of how much I hated running. Maybe I was telling my ego, my weakness, to shut up and just let me run. I had to finish, and as much as I hated that damn run, ("hey look! another hill!"), I had no good reason to give up. There was no blood, no broken bones, no heart attack, no heat stroke . . .

I'm about to vomit here.

So I finished. I'm obviously still angry at this run. Maybe when I get over it (and myself), I'll dig a little deeper into some meditations on what happened that day. But right now, it's time to recover.

Regardless, I still love running. We didn't break up. Andrew forgave my bitchiness, too. And oddly, I wasn't sore at all the next day.

I did an 8-mile run this morning, and have a 7-mile run scheduled for tomorrow. My parents are stopping by on their way to Greece, and they'll be visiting the actual city of Marathon, where this damn race began. For the story of how the marathon is said to have started, click HERE

The marathon is in 16 days! Time to taper down, rest up, eat a lot and start getting excited to have pretty feet again some day.

This Ain't Kansas, Toto

none shall pass.

I didn't complete my 5 mile run on Thursday and I have a good excuse: there was a tornado in Brooklyn.

I've always wondered if it was possible for a tornado to go through a big city like Manhattan, or Brooklyn--what a juxtaposition that would be: skyscraper. wind funnel. And on Thursday, it happened. Sort of.

"I was in the kitchen, doing the dishes . . . "



Here's our recap: The dogs and I were on our way to Prospect Park. The news had mentioned the possibility of showers, or even a thunderstorm. I brought my raincoat. But halfway there, the sky grew dark. Lightning started to strike rapidly, like every 50 seconds. Maybe (my dog) went what we call "dogatonic" (like catatonic) after she heard thunder, so we went back home. Seconds after I closed the front door, the windows in our apartment started shaking. The sky outside was greenish black. It was fascinating and a little scary, and the three of us--Maybe, Huckleberry and yours truly--took to the hallway for shelter. As tree branches swirled around outside, we crouched in the hallway, cross-legged with our heads between our legs, just like I learned in my Midwestern elementary school tornado drills.

Check out this crazy video that was shot just around the corner from our apartment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3bYbYZ-ryc&feature=player_embedded

That night, after the storm, Andrew, the dogs and I went to Prospect Park to investigate the damage. It was pretty insane! Here are some pictures that I took on Friday morning during the dogs' park squirrel patrol:

Maybe poses to demonstrate the scale comparison (for length, not girth.)




Huck and Maybe check for squirrel fatalities.

In an hour or so, I'm off to do my longest run yet, and I'm very intimidated: 22 MILES!!!!

My dad will be running his 22 today as well, back home along the Michigan cornfields. I'll be running mine in Central Park, for a change of scenery. I'm not sure how to brace myself for this, other than to JUST DO IT. Wish me luck!

P.S. SOS!!!! I'm still only 31% of the way into my fundraiser. For the love of dog, PLEASE HELP! If you could be so kind to spread the word of my fundraiser (or donate!) and the charity I'm running for (they're called Ready for Rescue)--send it to friends, family, post on facebook, twitter, ANYTHING--I'd be much obliged. And THANK YOU to everyone who has sponsored me: you're helping neglected animals get the love and care they deserve! Here's the most recent rescue in need of a home:

This dog Murphy was taken to my vet's my his owner to be euthanized because she just didn't have enough time for him. He was sweet, they couldn't do it so we are now looking for a foster or forever home. I took him on a walk today and he is indeed a very nice dog. He's a neutered 5 year old Weimaraner mix. Please let ...me know if you would like to help him.

What's Your Moment?

Now that I've got your attention . . .


Question: Can a single decision, happenstance, accident, call, conversation, or even email change the rest of your life?

Um, yes way.

And the very cool people at Smith Magazine, makers of the "Six-Word Memoirs", have embarked on a new project called “The Moment." It's a collection of stories, testimonials, etc. of how a single moment changed a life in a profound way, and YOU are invited to participate!

Your Moment might be a split-second decision, something you witnessed, a message sent or received, a literal or mental discovery. Moments can be serious or silly, as short as a tweet, as long as 700 words, told via a single image or illustration, series of photos, or a scanned letter or post-it note. A selection of some of these Moments will appear as a book in 2011. I know you have a Moment. And the folks at Smith know you have a Moment, and we all know that it's an important Moment, and are asking that you take part in this poignant project.

Submit your Moment here or via email, Facebook, or Twitter (#mymoment).

So. What’s a Moment? It can be almost anything, as long as it’s true, personal, and changed your life in some way.

• Text Moments, as little as 50 and as much as 700 words. Most of the text moments will be short essays, but they can also be Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, IMs, or text messages sent or received.
• A postcard or letter, sent or received—or some other form of communication that provided inspiration, or altered your life.
• A photograph, a single shot, or series.
• An illustration or comic, a single panel, or series.
• Something different altogether—we look forward to being surprised by your creativity!

Sample Moments

• Cheryl Della Pietra, now a copyeditor and mother, picked up the phone at 3am to find it was Hunter S. Thompson calling. She had one moment to accept his offer to be her assistant, provided she could leave the next morning. Read more about her Moment.
• Adriano Morae almost pulled a knife on his schizophrenic brother. Instead, as his six-panel illustration details, he put the knife down and decided it was time to leave Brazil and start over in the United States.
• Piper Kerman, a VP of a communications firm and bestselling memoirist, ended up in the middle of an international drug ring, for which she would later serve a year in prison, because she had one conversation, with one woman, one night.
• Karol Nielsen saw a New York Times photo essay on families going to war, sparking her own memory about her father being sent to Vietnam when she was six months old. Her “Moment” is a poem about her father in a series of tweets.

The Moment book will be out in Fall 2011 from Harper Perennial, the publisher that made the Six-Word Memoir Project [http://sixwordmemoirs.com] a bestselling franchise. Previous SMITH books have featured contributions from Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Silverman, Malcolm Gladwell, Mario Batali, Gay Talese, Aimee Mann, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jane Goodall, Tony Kushner, Chelsea Handler, and the late Frank McCourt and Harvey Pekar, among many others.

Everyone has a Moment. What’s yours?

P.S. To read my entry, which is, of course, about running, please click here. Don't forget to leave a comment and/or pass the story along.

Making Like Terry Gross

This past weekend, Andrew and I made like Terry Gross* and got some Fresh Air by visiting Asheville, North Carolina. * If you don't get this reference, click HERE.



I'd heard a lot of good things about Asheville, which piqued my curiosity. I read a lot of praises about the place, like, a LOT of praises, like the best praises that a small city could ever hope for. Things like how it was one of the top 7 places to live in the USA (according to Forbes), or how it's one of America's Top Art Destinations (American Style Mag). AARP called Asheville one of the "Best Places to Reinvent Your Life"and Rolling Stone proclaimed it was the "New Freak Capitol of the U.S." Asheville pops up as "The Happiest City for Women" on Self Magazine's radar, PETA named it the most vegetarian-friendly small city in the US, Outside Magazine named it one of the "Best Outside Towns", and the author of The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner, cited it as one of the happiest places in the good ol' U S of A.

All this goodness made me suspicious.

I'm a skeptic and a cynic, as well as a recovering misanthrope. Have you seen the movie Coraline? It's story about how things that seem to good to be true usually just aren't true. I don't want to sew any buttons on my eyes, I just want to be happy, and be in a place where I can walk barefoot to get my mail. A place where trees are more prevalent than garbage dumpsters and bodegas. A place where, in the summertime, the sidewalks don't smell like urine.

We flew into Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday around 7 p.m, rented a car and drove on a highway that had been adopted and sponsored by--get this--the Church of Wicca. When we pulled in to the downtown area of Asheville sometime around 9:30 p.m., we decided to go on a mission to find some ice cream. Instead, we were immediately greeted by a drum circle. That's when I immediately broke up out hives. Don't get me wrong--I like drum circles. I like drums. I don't consider myself a conservative person, either. I'm not afraid of music--I am a musician. And I like communication through music, and I like rhythm. But there are drum circles, and there are drum circles. And the only hypnotic trance that this drum circle offered was the dizziness caused by the overwhelming cloud of patchouli and American Spirit cigarette smoke.

Woy Yoy? Oh boy.

This is around the time that I announced that Asheville just wasn't for me, and quickly took to the role of the cynical commentator as Andrew and I looked for an ice cream shop. There were street musicians on every corner with no shoes on who took breaks from their didgeridoos to send text messages from their cellphones. There were a lot of white people. There was a restaurant called the Mellow Mushroom. This was what Rolling Stone considered creds for a Freak Capitol?

"I'm not trying to form any opinions just yet," Andrew said after several minutes of sitting in silence, eating ice cream on a bench. I didn't want to either, but I just couldn't help it. I had read Ryszard Kapuściński's The Emperor. Twice. I was curious if these young Caucasian rastas were aware of Haile Selassie's corruption, or cruelty. Did they know about the Wollo Famine?
I was starting to miss my pee-pee smelling street in Brooklyn.

We went back to our room at the Red Roof in, which didn't have a red roof, by the way, and went to bed.

To my chagrin, the next morning, they were gone. It was as if the sun, as it rose from behind the Blueridge Mountains, had melted the hippies. Instead, the sidewalks were less crowded but dotted with a random mix of fresh-faced people--very friendly people. In daylight, I could see what the town really looked like--bookstores upon bookstores, interesting art deco architecture, flowers and trees and clean sidewalks, yes, some tourist shops with dreamcatchers and tie-dyed t-shirts, but also lots of restaurants and nearly all locally-owned stores. All set against the background of the Blueridge Mountains. I liked it. I liked how everyone was relaxed and friendly. I liked the crispy mountain air, and the freshness of it. We went to have some breakfast at the Early Girl Eatery. We met up with husband and wife Kevin McIlvoy and Christine Hale, both authors from Warren Wilson's MFA program (which was voted the #1 low-residency MFA program in the USA by Poets & Writer's Magazine). They described their life in Asheville--how they write at home, have a flower garden, live at a slower pace, take dance lessons to perfect "The Carolina Shag"--as something like bliss. Their genuine happiness was palpable. It reminded me of what is important, and things like why I became a writer in the first place: not because I have something to prove to the world, but because I wanted to describe the world, and because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely. It was just after breakfast and right as we were driving up a mountain for a morning hike in Craggy Gardens that I started to digest my pancakes, started to let my guard down, and started to fall in love with Asheville.



To make a long story short, we had a great trip. We hiked on mountains, had breakfast with some friends who now have a baby boy as well as some chickens in their backyard (the baby boy does not live with the chickens). We went trail running, which kicked my ass. We "trotted" through about 10 1/2 miles of trail just off the Blue Ridge Highway, which is quite different from running around the Prospect Park loop. You can't really zone out; you have to be alert 100 percent of the time because there are roots to jump over, rocks to balance on, branches to dodge, streams to leap over, injuries to avoid. It's hard to be alert and present and focused for such a long time. It's hard to continuously stay focused and pay attention to yourself and to the path that is RIGHT in front of you, hard not to try to look further down to see what to expect. It's challenging, and just as challenging as it is to figured out WHERE you want to SETTLE DOWN. . . what you want your life to be, which, really, only requires you to do one or two things: 1. be present. 2. be genuine.

post-run popcorn

Along this theme of choices, I started reading the novel Freedom by Jonathon Franzen--it's very good--and am going to start reading Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen simultaneously. (I haven't started just yet.) Apparently Born to Run is amazing; Andrew read it in one day and is smitten with it. The book also inspired him to purchase those aqua socks-looking shoes to run in, which look ridiculous and are terribly unsexy and draw lots of surprised looks from civilians.



But Andy swears by them. And swears that I MUST read Born to Run because it's going to change my whole perspective on running and training. So I got that going for me . . .



We in arrived in Brooklyn late last night, and despite the fact that I can't turn my neck or head in any direction (somehow I pulled a muscle on the airplane), I'm feeling extremely refreshed and optimistic. I'm exited about the fact that there is a place out there that we could live in that is close to nature AND has a vibrant downtown that is veggie friendly, is outdoorsy, is creative, is dog-friendly, vegetarian-friendly, and has an excellent literary scene. (I am, though, concerned about how I will handle not living near the ocean, or if the rest of North Carolina is segregated and too conservative for my tolerance.) One question I always ask myself when considering where I want as a home base is "will this place be safe when the zombies come?" What I mean is, will this be a good place to be when the sh*t goes down? Quite possibly.

Anyway, lots of fun was had, and I'm going to post some more pictures of our trip below.
























This weekend: 22 miles. The longest run yet. I see more toenails being lost in my future.

P.S. A story about why I run is going to be published in an anthology next year! The Moment book will be out in Fall 2011 from Harper Perennial, the publisher that made the Six-Word Memoir Project a bestselling franchise. Previous Smith books have featured contributions from Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarah Silverman, Malcolm Gladwell, Mario Batali, Gay Talese, Aimee Mann, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jane Goodall, Tony Kushner, Chelsea Handler, and the late Frank McCourt and Harvey Pekar, among many others. You can participate and share your story, too! Check out Smith Magazine's story projects by clicking here: http://www.smithmag.net/

Wow.

A quick post: anyone ever hear of Ultra Marathons? They're 100 MILES.

Meet Tony. My entire marathon will be like his warm-up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SUZ5xB_Skk

And this little girl is running a 50-mile ultra-marathon. Um, she's 13 years old!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtv0PY9GOhs

My Toenail Fell Off

Some things I can't believe:

1. That the marathon is only 37 days away.

2. That I'm capable of running 20 miles. (I learned this last Saturday)

3. That toenails actually do fall off after long runs . . . mine just did!



So last Saturday, I ran my first 20-mile stint! (I can't believe it, either.) It wasn't so bad, but it wasn't so easy. Naturally, when you are unable to lift your feet off the ground and the only way to be mobile is to shuffle, your brain tells your body to just stop running. But I couldn't--this happened at mile 19.5. . . I was so close!

Perky before 20!

The whole run took about 4 1/2 hours. I learned some very important things: EAT A LOT. Like a car, a body cannot run without being properly fuel. Also, pace yourself. . . steady pace wins the race. Also, wear shoes that are at least one size bigger than what your normal shoe size is--feet swell! And they sweat, so it's vital to wear socks that wick. Not socks that suck.

Not so perky now, are we?

When we got home, I couldn't sit still but I couldn't really move, either. It took me about 3 days to fully recover. And then my toenail fell off! Also, I've also been waking up around 3 a.m. every night and raiding the freezer for more ice cream. I can't help it!

I used to have pretty feet. Really.

The next 20-mile run is on Labor Day. . . wish me luck! I'll write a more detailed post about it on the day after . . .