But I still have 94 monkeys to go

NYRR must be really hard up for volunteers if they are offering guaranteed NYC Half 2014 entry if you volunteer at the race this year. Anyone who can’t go to R’n’R DC for whatever reason should come staff up with me. As a bonus, start your St. Patrick’s Day festivities alarmingly earlier than all your friends!

This morning I volunteered at the Run With Champions 5K at Metlife Stadium where the Giants play. I offer the following notes:

• Even when you mean it sincerely, “Nice job” feels sarcastic to the people at the back of the pack in a race. So I started telling jokes instead.
• I will be muchmore careful with where I toss my cup now that I have had the experience of picking used paper cups off the searing hot roadway. I regretted my littering a lot in the time it took me to pick up, oh, 100 cups (so 2.5% of all the litter produced at that ONE water stop). Humility!
• During volunteer orientation I heard the following puzzling guideline: “There are gonna be people out there who shouldn’t be running… you know, maybe 30, 40 pounds overweight… just let them.” Yeah, you know the real reason you should let them run? Because it is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Oh, it made me so mad.
• It’s too bad my cell phone is dead, otherwise I would have posted a million photos, including one of the statue in front of the stadium of “Peanuts”’ Lucy holding a football. In this analogy, are the opposing teams Charlie Brown? Because that is GENIUS. 
• So yeah, I did a little sight-seeing between the end of my course marshal shift and the free bus back to Manhattan. I report that the field at Metlife, when you’re standing on it, is much smaller than it looks on TV. Almost comically so. Watching games, it feels like it can take a team forever to gain yardage, but a little kid can run down the field no problem. We also processed through the Giants’ locker room, which was impossibly clean and devoid of any gear that we could have snooped through but was full of signs for theFootballGiants, in case anyone visiting thought s/he accidentally wandered to San Francisco. 
• I love volunteering!

Who here is working on their 9+1 in order to enter the NYC Marathon in 2012? I am and I know some of you are, but I wanted to put it out there.

(If none of this makes sense to you just scroll on by. No big secret!)

This morning I ran the NYRR Coogan’s Salsa, Blues and Shamrocks 5K in upper Manhattan. The weather was much worse than last year’s (60, sunny vs. 50, pouring) but on the bright side, the course was much less crowded! At least, I didn’t find that I was weaving quite as much. 

Since I just got out of Self-Imposed Injury Bay and haven’t been speed training, my only goal was to PR over my last 5K in October. I started off a little fast but I was feeling good, taking the hills as they came. 

Around the 2.4-mile mark I was starting to get a stitch and regretting going out at a pace I couldn’t maintain. I watched a guy pass me with what looked like his 8- or 9-year-old son in tow. Oh, super, a prodigy. Then the guy began to talk: 

I know you’re hurtin’, buddy, but this is the time to give it all you’ve got. We can still finish under 30…

Uh… WE CAN??

…but you’re going to have to push. You’re going to get a huge PR. You’re doing a great job.

So let’s just say my own massive, massive PR — 2:35 from October, 5:18 from the same course last year — was 49% all the slogging on the treadmill between October and now, all those crap 2.5- and 3-milers after work when I really didn’t want to; 

25% meeting up with a running group before and after the race; 

1% my iPod armband magically keeping my player from shorting, despite the rain; 

And 25% some guy I’ll never see again, but who caused me to dig in and finish clutching my side and SUB-30.

I didn’t know I had it in me. Well, neither did that kid I guess. Whoever you are… thank you is not enough. 

Speaking as someone who loves “True Life,” that would be the most boring episode ever. “Uh, so I’m thinking about buying a skort right now…”

I am doing the 9+1 guaranteed entry program for the 2012 NYC Marathon (read about it here). I don’t think it will be too hard as I did 13 races last year, 7 of which were NYRR. I plan to get strategic and knock off the majority of my races before it gets too hot, then take care of my volunteer credit over the summer.

Between last weekend and this weekend I will have knocked 2 off. Otherwise I’m fairly sure I’m doing the Al Gordon 4-miler and Coogan’s (SO. FUN.), and I would like to do the Fifth Avenue Mile again even though it’s kind of pricey per minute. The Dash’n’Splash in July also has me intrigued.

I don’t know whether I will actually be psychologically prepared to run a marathon in 2012, but it is a year and a half away, so.

If you read this far, I just learned why the NYRR’s all-women’s 10K in June is called the Mini 10K from Kathrine Switzer’s autobiography. Local race organizers back in the ’70s originally wanted to stage an all-women’s marathon in Central Park, but women in the sports world (like Switzer) knew there weren’t that many female marathoners, and the popular conception still held that women couldn’t run marathons without having their uteruses (uteri?) fall out. So originally it was called a “Mini Marathon” — one lap of Central Park (6 miles), instead of four and change. Now it’s called a Mini 10K which makes no sense because it is a legitimate 10K, it’s not .62 miles or some nonsense. Micro-history lesson over.