NYC Runners for Obama

Ok, this year I have helped create a new running team for people who will be running the 2008 New York City Marathon, or people who live in New York who may be running other fall marathons, or any Obama fan who simply likes to run. It is called NYC Runners for Obama, and you can join the team by going here and signing up. You will have to create a "my barackobama" account if you don't have one alredy:

NYC Runners for Obama

In the past I have run to raise money for children's running programs here in New York, but I have been focusing on trying to help Barack Obama get elected President of the United States, so I figured I would combine my running with that activity instead. The children's running programs were necessary because the public school budgets in New York often did not have enough funds for physical education classes. As a result, kids became obese, which leads to all kinds of health problems later in life, such as heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Let's see if Barack Obama is aware of this problem:



In case you couldn't see the video, he knows what time it is. He alluded to funds going towards testing, referring to the No Child Left Behind Act, which forces schools to produce students who can score well on English & Mathematics tests in order to receive federal funds, which results in other programs such as science, music, art and PE to fall by the wayside.

So to sum up the purposes of the team:

1. To give Obama supporters a chance to run with and meet other Obama supporters.

2. To help spread the word about Barack Obama, which we will accomplish by wearing running shirts with our Obama team logo emblazoned on them during races.

Pretty simple, no fundraising obligation, just another way to volunteer and keep in shape at the same time.

We will run in Central Park every Tuesday & Thursday evening, and do a long weekend run on one of the weekend days between now (July 8th) and October 30th - the New York City Marathon will be held on November 2nd, and election day is November 4th.

To see a video of my former running team, The Team for Kids, and what it can look like when you get about 1,000 people wearing the same shirt at a race, watch this (it is only one of 4 videos from that year, it was pretty much an unrelenting stream of runners, 1 out of every 37 in the field, at the world's largest spectator sport, which this year will be 2 days before election day):

2006 Team for Kids New York City Marathon

The Brooklyn Half - Oops I Did it Again

Ok, this one was not really an oops, as was the case when I overslept for Grete's Gallop. I actually woke up and decided not to go. I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, didn't get to bed until 3:15 a.m. after a night out on the town, and I would have had to leave my house at 5:30 a.m. to catch the bus to Brooklyn. That is par for the course for me, and I would have done the race anyway, but I actually had not been training at all of late. I actually have not run since the last half marathon (Bronx) in February. This was because I have been busy with work and starting my new business.

So as I was debating whether to go, I figured if I went the following would have happened:
1. I would have posted a sub-par time
2. I would have been sore for the rest of the day plus two more days

And I'm sure there were other excellent reasons but that was enough to make me go back to sleep.

I did accomplish one thing that morning. When my alarm went off I called Nathan to wake him up. He thanked me because just before I called he had turned off his alarm and went back to sleep. So he made it to the race with my help and turned in a stellar time, 1:30:20.

My accounting job will die down in the next two days with the passing of the tax deadline, and I will get back to training. My next big event is a sprint triathlon in Pennsylvania. My swimming has improved dramatically as I have joined a gym and been going regularly. Now I just have to buy one of those pesky things you use between the swim and the run, what are they called again?

Al Gordon 4 Miler

Ran another race yesterday morning, this time a 4 miler. I broke 7 minute miles (6:57), which is decent, but nowhere near my PR for that distance. I was 485 out of 2,260 men (beating 78.5% of the men - it was a men only race, the women went off separately an hour later). I was actually home and headed back into my warm bed at 8:50, 10 minutes before the ladies heard the horn starting their race. It was still very congested the first mile of the race. Afterwards I was exhausted, didn't wake up until 5:30 (a 7.5 hour nap!)

Bronx Half Marathon Race Report

It was cold out there today, 19 degrees F at the start of the race. I got picked up at 6:32 a.m. (ouch!) by my teammate Peter and his friends Steve and Allison. My prerace meal was 60% of a bottle of blue Gatorade (sometimes referred to as "Smurf juice") and a carmel flavored Powerade gel. Mmmmmmm.

I adopted a different strategy this time after my bad experience at the Manhattan half 2 weeks ago. In that race I ran a 7:15 pace the first 10 miles, but then crashed and burned the last 5k. I decided to start out slower and try to avoid struggling at the end. Oddly enough the results were nearly the same. My net time in Manhattan was 1:39:19, today I managed a 138:59. So that was a slight 20 second improvement, plus I felt a lot better at the end.

That feeling didn't last long as I had to wait for the others to finish, although not too long, only 9 minutes. I had 2 cups of "hot" chocolate, which was actually piping hot for the first 15 seconds or so, but cooled off quite quickly when subjected to the chilly air. Allison noticed I was shivering as we were standing around drinking the kind of warm cocoa and we all headed back to the car.

I tried to memorize some splits, here they are: one was 52:30, so that must have been 7 miles. So that was 7:30 exactly, which was my plan. Mile 10 was about 1:13, so I ran those 3 miles in 21:30 or a 7:10 pace, mile 11 read 1:21 or so, so I slowed to an 8 minute mile for that one (we were going up the hill that was a downhill for mile 8). And finally 17 minutes for the last 2.1, an 8:05 pace. My overall pace was 7:33.

Megan Update

Here are 2 photos that I received today of Megan, the daughter of Jill, one of our teammates from last year's marathon training season. Jill had to stop preparing for the race in early September when Megan was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

Many of us upon hearing about her story decided to try and keep Megan in our thoughts and prayers. But being the kind of people we are, we didn't stop there. Maggie Schwarz supplied team members with bibs with Megan's photo to wear during the marathon. Eugene Koenig and I went to the kids' race the weekend following the marathon and shot a little video that we sent along to Megan to inspire her to get better (the video is on most of the DVD's that I sent out in December, but not the first batch, since it wasn't done yet). It featured a lot of the kids giving encouraging wishes to Megan on camera.

In addition, as part of Adam's Thanksgiving program, I took one of the $200 grants he graciously supplied and used it for Megan. I bought 3 CD's of Disney music, which I gave to Megan (after copying a couple of the tunes to my computer to use in the video - shhhhh, don't tell Disney!) I used the rest of the money to buy her video games for the X-Box 360 which Megan had won at a holiday raffle (ok, so the raffle may have been fixed). I had read that kids undergoing chemotherapy often find playing video games helpful to take their minds off the pain & discomfort. Plus I'm a boy and I like shopping for video games, more than say, clothes or dolls. :-)

So I put the 3 video games, the 3 CD's, the kids DVD, a marathon DVD, and a shirt from the kids' race into a FedEx box and shipped it out on Thursday night December 21st, so Megan would have everything by Christmas. And the above photos are of Megan playing one of the games while home from school on a rare "snow day" in North Carolina.

Thanks once again to Coach Adam for donating the money for the gifts, and for creating the kind of community where teammates go out of their way to help one another out whenever possible.