Front Row in NYC

New York City Marathon, Wednesday, November 3rd-Sunday, November 7th

Running in pearls…I have been literally running non-stop, and now my entire life is all about running like never before. In the year since I have written, I have taken a job with the National Marathon, managing endurance programs, while continuing to develop the run club at lululemon. Sometime between all of that, I am still running on my own. My whole life has become running…living the dream some might say…we will find out.

This week, I was working at the New York City Marathon expo to promote the National Marathon. It was a run-celebrity infested operation…Deena, Shalene, Ritz…everywhere you turned. Everyone from every corner of the sport was there, and it was busy…

I actually had a pretty great number for the race and was very tempted to run, but after only nine weeks back from stress fracture, I decided to hold off and watch instead…besides having commited to Philly in two weeks (which won’t be a race for me, just a run), it would be a mistake to have two 26 mile runs under my belt in just a month.

Somewhere in between all of the business, I had lunch with my mom in the city, who had taken a short train ride over the river from New Jersey to see me. I had seen her the previous week for my grandmother’s funeral. I loved my grandmother so much, and was so happy that my mother had brought a double strand of pearls for me from my grandmother’s jewelry box, that I wore throughout the rest of my New York City Marathon experience.

Saturday night, I went to the pasta dinner. I had never been to an official Marathon pasta dinner before, so I was pleased to attend the New York past dinner. It was huge…large tents were set up in Central Park where the former Tavern on the Green is located. Tons of marathon runners from all over the world were in there, and I sampled the pre-race offerings and chatted with marathon runners until dinner closing, before heading off to my own dinner in SoHo.

Marathon morning!! I hurried down to the finish nice and early with my “race directors” pass. I ended up with a seat right next to the finish in the front. To have a race to be on the sidelines for, this was truly a treat. I saw Shalene Flanagen cruise to a nice second place finish, and was ecstatic to see Mary Wittenberg and Mayor Bloomberg at the finish. I was enthusiastically waiting for Haile Gebreselassie to cross the finish line, but he dropped out mid-race with knee problems, and later that evening, announced his retirement from racing…all after receiving a $400,000 appearance fee for the NYC marathon, and signing onto London in the spring.

After watching the race for a few hours, I ventured over the East Side for brunch, stopped at lululemon of course, and walked around the city, marveling at all of the marathon finishers.

New Yorkers take their marathon seriously…and this runner takes everything running seriously…from working on DC’s marathon, to the run club at lululemon, to planning out my own training…all in pearls of course….