Various and sundry reasons for running

I came within 90 seconds of a Boston-qualifying time of 3:34:59 at the inaugural Central Park Marathon last year. Didn't really mean to; it was a February race a few weeks into my last semester of grad school, so I didn't have much of a plan and ran mostly by feel. (Which apparently is a reliable way to PR – who knew.) Afterward I stumbled around looking for my half-marathoning friends who'd stashed themselves on a hill with a flask -- it was the bleak midwinter, after all -- to cheer. Sure enough, they pounced on me soon thereafter and off we all limped to a glorious and egg-filled celebration.

So the 2^nd Central Park Marathon is coming up this weekend and I've been thinking about the last one as well as other happy running memories. The kind that don't really consist of any real story but only an image, a feeling, and a warm fuzzy. Thus, in no particular order and for no particular reason, I give you...

• A tiny 1-2 mile loop near Fireside Inn in Northern Michigan (which was so strenuous I would have to cool off in the lake), around 2001ish
• 23 miles around the same lake in September 2013
• 16 miles in The Hague, which took me past my old workplace at the ICTY, into the wilds of Meijendel which sounds like it should be located in Middle Earth, and back via the eternally-romantic Scheveningen and finally to the same route I used to run while I lived there. This was the first time I encountered the quote, “The cure for everything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.”
• A tipsy couple miles up the Brooklyn Bridge in the dead of night (following another tipsy 8 or 10), while learning about various nuances of Jewish history
• Summer Streets up Park Ave in NYC with two very lovely friends, and talking one of them up a wee hill though she'd already chalked up two marathons while I still couldn't get over running a half
• Running along a desolate, November-y Ocean Parkway to an even more desolate Coney Island boardwalk with another very lovely friend while debating the merits of various Russian spas
• My adorable 4-mile running route in San Diego, from my Hillcrest cottage along 6^th Ave to Laurel Street, through Balboa Park, and home
• Repeating a decent chunk of that route over law school graduation with a good friend and the person I was in love with, and watching the latter break away sometimes to chase squirrels
• Seeing that same person six times during the Brooklyn Marathon, because that's how many loops of Prospect Park I had to run
• Doing one of my first solo 10-milers in Boston along the Charles River, and thinking how much I still didn't feel like a "real runner"
• A 6-mile out-and-back in Michigan during Christmas 2013, which took me to a nearby lighthouse in the snow.  Here's what that was like:  
  
  
• A 7.5-miler through downtown Philly and along the river, on which I totally played "Eye of the Tiger"
• Another run in The Hague – the 10K City-Pier-City loop, which was my first large race and the longest distance I'd run to date. I think there was a half-marathon going on the same day, and I was astonished that anyone could ever do one of those.
• 8 or 10 miles along a river in Wisconsin, while my nephew and his friend kept me company on bikes
• A 10-mile early morning run in Anaheim last year, followed by a vegan deli trip and beautiful wedding which made me seriously reconsider my decision to leave California
• Running through a pre-dawn German town, “running” up a mountain, catching the sunrise over the Rhine, then heading back to meet my parents and gorge on eggs and bread and cheese
• The repeated runs along the Bosphorus, trying (unsuccessfully, in the end) to amp up my volume over six weeks sufficiently to complete the 20~ miles from Istanbul to the Black Sea, and fueling on dried figs, absurdly blue water, glimpses of jellyfish, and daydreams of baklava
• The horribleness of every step past mile 16 of NYC 2013, and the really cool feeling when I got my results and saw every mile was faster than the last one.

I'm not wearing a watch for the Central Park marathon this weekend either, and maybe I'll run it under four hours and maybe I won't, but... eh. I can parlay months of sub-freezing training into 26.2 damn miles, and that's the only point.